Skip to content

IP Crash Course For Entrepreneurs

This past Wednesday, I went to an interesting talk sponsored by Silicon Flatirons (an organization worth knowing about). Jason Haislmaier gave the talk, and the subject was intellectual property (IP); it was titled ‘Intellectual Property “Crash Course” for Entrepreneurs’ and was packed! I got there 10 minutes late (parking on the CU campus is no fun at all) and sat in the back on a heater. Good thing the fire department didn’t come by, as I’m sure we were over capacity. (Incidentally, I heard about this via the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup mailing list but it was also on the Colorado Startups Events calendar.)

Jason said the presentation and possibly a recording of it would be available, but I was unable to find it by looking around his blog or the Silicon Flatirons site. I took some notes, but his presentation, if and when it becomes available, will be a great introduction to what entrepreneurs need to know about IP. (Note that all mistakes herein are mine, and I am most definitely not a lawyer. Consult your friendly attorney for serious advice. I marked things I thought I remembered with a ‘?’.)

There are 4 kinds of IP: patents, which are ideas or inventions, trademarks, which are about branding, copyright, which deals with creative expression, and trade secrets, which is know how. The overall emphasis on his talk was that you may not need protection from one or any of these forms of property, but that you, as an entrepreneur should be aware of all of them and make a conscious choice to pursue or not to pursue them. Which makes a lot of sense to me! (Incidentally, he repeatedly mentioned that the US was different in IP than the rest of the world, in a lot of ways, so if you plan to do business internationally, you should definitely think about that sooner rather than later.)

Trade secrets are pretty much anything–data, methods, software, etc. The protection is dependent on keeping them secret. Jason was working with a $10-20 million company that had only one patent; its valuation was almost entirely based on trade secrets. NDAs and employment contracts are the front line of trade secrets. He emphasized that you need to read NDAs and think about how they affect you and your relationship with the NDA signer. In particular, you can’t expect a signer to forget everything they’ve learned after a relationship ends, but you can expect them to return all the tangible forms of information. NDAs should have remedies (injunctions). If the other side won’t sign an NDA, that’s fine, just don’t tell them anything that you wouldn’t want to see posted on the Internet.

Copyright is protection for an original work or authorship in a tangible form from which the work can be perceived, not an idea. Apparently, there was a famous case (Feist) which basically outlined the limits of copyright–anything more creative than the White Pages qualifies for copyright protection. There are five rights, which I didn’t note because I thought the presentation would be up. Copyright can be unregistered (just about anything–these notes and this blog post are unregistered copyright) or registered. Registering costs something, but means you can sue folks. Under the DMCA, the copyright owner no longer has to show infringement–the possibility of infringement is enough (?). There are safe harbors though, one of which is the service provider harbor(?). You have to register with the Library of Congress and take things down if notified, but if you are providing any service with user generated content, you should pursue this safe harbor.

Trademarks (or service marks) are about branding. They’re easier to file for than patents. Use in commerce generates rights. He had a great slide showing the protection levels of trademarks from the fantastic (Kodak, Exxon) to the arbitrary (Apple) to the suggestive to the descriptive (World Poker Tour) to the generic (aspirin, escalator). The more the trademark describes what it represents, the less protectable it is, and trademarks can be lost (as escalator was).

Patents–the big one! Patents are the right to excludes others from making, using and selling a new, useful and non-obvious invention. There are a number of reasons to patent–defensive, offensive, ego, source of revenue (a secondary market is developing for patents. Offensive patents are getting riskier recently (courts are narrowing down patent infringement). But, investors are starting to ask why patents weren’t filed, and “we didn’t think to do so” is a poor answer. The answer to the question “Is it patentable?” for almost any value of “it” is yes, but you need to think about why–the better question is “How relevant and valuable will a patent be for the business?”. Lack of knowledge or independent development is not a defense against patent infringement.

All in all, it was a lot of ground to cover. Jason did a good job making things very applicable to the audience he was talking to. It kinda sucks that you have to think about such things, when all you want to do is develop killer software. (Brian made an offhand comment about patents and long running servlets almost 4 years ago, incidentally.) As Jason said in closing, if you don’t have an intellectual property strategy, your competitors will give you one (and, I inferred, you probably won’t like that one very much).

Consulting New Tech Meetup Technology Technology and Society | moore |

GWT Talk at the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup tonight

I presented on the Google Web Toolkit at the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup tonight (presentation and useful links). It was a rush, as presentations always are. However, the adrenaline was compounded by two factors: the length of the presentation and the composition of the audience.

To present something as large in scope as GWT in 5 minutes was difficult. Though I’d been to 3 previous meetups, I didn’t have a good feel for the technical knowledge of the audience, so I aimed to keep the presentation high level. (The audience, on this particular night, was about 50/50 split between coders and non coders, as determined by a show of hands. However, almost everyone knew the acronym AJAX and what it meant.) This lack of knowledge compounded the difficulty, but I still feel I got across some of the benefits of GWT.

I’ll be writing more about what I learned about GWT in preparing for this, but I wanted to answer 3 questions posed to me that I didn’t have off the cuff answers for tonight.

1. Who is using GWT?

I looked and couldn’t find a good list. This list is the best I could do, along with this GWT Groups post. I find it rather astonishing that there’s not a better list out there, as the above list was missing some big ones (Timepedia’s Chronoscope, the Lombardi Blueprint system) as well as my own client: Colorado HomeFinder.

2. How much time does the compilation process add?

I guessed on this tonight but guessed too high. I said it was on the order of 30 seconds to a minute. On my laptop (2 cpu/2 ghz/2 gb of ram box) GWT compilation takes ~7 seconds to build incrementally (from ant, which appears to add ~2 seconds to all of these numbers) and ~21 seconds to build after all classes and artifacts have been deleted. This is for 7400 lines of code.

3. How does GWT compare to other frameworks like Dojo and YUI?

I punted on this one when perhaps I should not have. From what I can tell, GWT attacks adding dynamic behavior to web pages in a fundamentally different way. Dojo and YUI (from what I know of them) are about adding behavior to existing widgets on a page. GWT is about adding objects to a page, which may or may not be attached to existing widgets. I’ll not say more, as I don’t have the experience with other toolkits to speak authoritatively.

Also, here’s an AJAX toolkit comparison that I found.
[tags]gwt presentations, unanswered questions[/tags]

GWT Java New Tech Meetup | moore |

BatchUpdateException using Hibernate and MySQL5

I ran into a crazy error last week. One of my clients was upgrading from MySQL4 to MySQL5. The application in question was using Hibernate 3.2. Here’s the table structure, and the hibernate bean definition. See if you can spot the issue:

mysql> desc stat;
+--------------+-------------+------+-----+---------------------+-------+
| Field        | Type        | Null | Key | Default             | Extra |
+--------------+-------------+------+-----+---------------------+-------+
| stat_date    | date        |      | PRI | 0000-00-00          |       |
| stat_type    | varchar(50) |      | PRI |                     |       |
| stat_count   | int(11)     | YES  |     | NULL                |       |
| last_updated | datetime    |      |     | 0000-00-00 00:00:00 |       |
+--------------+-------------+------+-----+---------------------+-------+
4 rows in set (0.00 sec)

<class name="com.foo.common.data.Statistic" table="stat" lazy="false">
<cache usage="read-write"/>
<composite-id name="statisticId" class="com.foo.common.data.StatisticId">
<key-property name="date" type="java.util.Date" column="stat_date"/>
<key-property name="type" column="stat_type"/>
</composite-id>
<property name="count" column="stat_count"/>
<property name="lastUpdated" type="java.util.Date" column="last_updated" />
</class>

The exception stack trace I was seeing was something like this:

2007-12-31 14:15:09,888 ERROR [Thread-14] def.AbstractFlushingEventListener (AbstractFlushingEventListener.java:301)

- Could not synchronize database state with session
org.hibernate.exception.ConstraintViolationException: Could not execute JDBC batch update
at org.hibernate.exception.SQLStateConverter.convert(SQLStateConverter.java:71)
at org.hibernate.exception.JDBCExceptionHelper.convert(JDBCExceptionHelper.java:43)
at org.hibernate.jdbc.AbstractBatcher.executeBatch(AbstractBatcher.java:249)
at org.hibernate.engine.ActionQueue.executeActions(ActionQueue.java:235)
at org.hibernate.engine.ActionQueue.executeActions(ActionQueue.java:139)
at org.hibernate.event.def.AbstractFlushingEventListener.performExecutions(AbstractFlushingEventListener.java:298)
at org.hibernate.event.def.DefaultFlushEventListener.onFlush(DefaultFlushEventListener.java:27)
....
Caused by: java.sql.BatchUpdateException: Duplicate key or integrity constraint
violation message from server: "Duplicate entry '2007-12-31-stattype' for key 1"
at com.mysql.jdbc.PreparedStatement.executeBatch(PreparedStatement.java:1492)
at com.mchange.v2.c3p0.impl.NewProxyPreparedStatement.executeBatch(NewProxyPreparedStatement.java:1723)
at org.hibernate.jdbc.BatchingBatcher.doExecuteBatch(BatchingBatcher.java:48)
at org.hibernate.jdbc.AbstractBatcher.executeBatch(AbstractBatcher.java:242)
... 57 more

I ended up turning on the mysql logging (the log setting in the my.ini file, which logs all sql statements mysql makes) to see what was happening.

Basically, I was looking to see if an entry in the stat table existed; if it did, increment and update, if it did not, insert. And the insert was always happening, so the entry was not found--it did exist because mysql threw the 'integrity constraint' exception.

The cause of the issue was the date type of stat_date and the fact that I incorrectly mapped it to java.util.Date. It really should have been mapped to java.sql.Date. How this worked in mysql4 is beyond me, but it did. Changing the hibernate dialect to mysql5 had no impact.

[tags]mysql upgrade,hibernate[/tags]

Databases Java MySQL | moore |

GWT Mini Pattern: Cache ‘static’ data

Using the Java marshalling API makes remote calls from GWT to a Java server quick and easy. However, each of those calls introduces performance and complexity issues. Performance, because browsers tend to limit the number of remote network calls per server. From the HTTP 1.1 RFC: “A single-user client SHOULD NOT maintain more than 2 connections with any server or proxy.” This means that if you have more than two components making network calls, the calls will queue up (and that ignores image downloads and other network connections). The complexity arises from the non linear nature of asynchronous network calls. This can lead to a program structure that is not easily understood without careful reading (‘first, we find the user, then, after that we branch, and if we have a valid user, we find their saved bookmarks from the server…’).

If you have an amount of static content that doesn’t often change from user to user, use a RequestBuilder to retrieve the data from the server. Whatever software generates the data should set headers such that the page is cached for a fair while (either via the Cache Control header or the Expires header). The first time the request is made, the browser ends up making a network request–all the way to the server. After that, the browser will return the resource from its cache, using fewer network resources and returning the data more quickly. Using this approach also makes data available across components and pages. I almost always use JSON to represent such rarely changing data, because GWT can parse that easily, though you could use some other data format as well.

Using the browser as your caching system is not free: you pay for the creating of the network call (XMLHttpRequest, etc) and the reparse of the JSON. But you aren’t going over the network, and it’s relatively transparent to all the clients. The alternative, however, of creating your own caching system, is often more daunting–especially if you want to share data across page requests. I’m not aware of any caching systems (such as ehcache) that are GWT compatible at the moment (and they’d have their own costs in terms of javascript download size). Google Gears does provide something compatible, but is not transparent to the user (Gears requires installation).

[tags]caching, gwt, leverage the browser[/tags]

GWT GWT Mini Patterns | moore |

GWT Mini Pattern: Configuration Reader

I’ve written about configuration options to GWT widgets before. Basically, the idea is that you have some configuration that lets the widget change behavior without redeploying or compiling code. In fact, nontechnical users (like designers) can change configuration, if it’s documented. These are the ways I know to specify configuration:

Meta tags

In the page:

<meta content="bar" name="foo" id="foo" />

Updated 4/1/2008, to have id in the meta tag attbute.

In your code:

String var = DOM.getElementProperty(DOM.getElementById("foo"), "content");

You can also request only Boolean and Int:

String var = DOM.getElementPropertyInt(DOM.getElementById("foo"), "content");

This is simple, all browsers ignore these tags, and you can place them anywhere in a page and get them read. However, attributes can only contain strings.

Hidden spans

In the page:

<span id="foo" style="display: none">bar</span>

In your code:

String var = DOM.getInnerHTML(DOM.getElementById("foo"));

This is a good choice if you want configuration to be more structured than what a tag attribute can provide--you can parse the 'var' string further.

Javascript using jsni

<script type="text/javascript">
var ID = 'bar';
</script>

And in your code:

private native String getIDAsString()/*-{
if ($wnd.ID == undefined) {
return "";
} else {
return $wnd.ID;
}
}-*/;

private Integer getID() {
Integer id = new Integer(-1);
try {
id = Integer.valueOf(getIDAsString());
} catch (NumberFormatException ignore) {}
return id;
}

Integer foo = getID();

This method is great when you have variables that are used by other javascript components that you'd like to leverage for your GWT component, or if you have a really complex configuration that is multiple levels in structure.

Javascript using dictionary

(As outlined here and here.)
In the page:

<script type="text/javascript">
var dictionary = {
foo: "bar"
};
</script>

In your code:

Dictionary theme = Dictionary.getDictionary("dictionary");
String bar = theme.get("foo");

This is good for simple hash datastructures. I haven't tried it, but from the documentation, it doesn't look like it supports anything past String key value pairs, and your module must inherit from com.google.gwt.i18n.I18N.

Regardless of your configuration method, I've found myself using a ConfigReader to isolate this logic. It looks something like this:

public class ConfigReader{

private final boolean opt1;
private final String opt2;

public ConfigReader(){
// init opt1 and opt2 using one of the four methods above.
}

public boolean isOpt1() {
return opt1;
}

public String getOpt2() {
return opt2;
}
}
GWT GWT Mini Patterns | moore |

Thunderbird Plugins: Lightning

If you live in your email and you use Thunderbird, I’d recommend taking a look at Lightning.  It’s a calendaring plugin to Thunderbird.  It has changed the way I schedule my life–I used to have a mishmash of emails, paper calenders, todo lists  on the back of envelopes and memories that coordinated my life.  Now I just have one place that I go to.  You can have calendars on remote servers, using HTTP (readonly), webDAV or ftp, multiple calendars, and reminders.  It’s still beta software (version 0.7) and under active development, so, of course, buyer beware, but I’ve found it to be quite useful.  If you want to follow future progress, visit the Mozilla Calendar Weblog.

Thunderbird | moore |

GWT Mini Pattern: Use a span to enable

Since I last checked, you aren’t able to have more than one GWT module on a page.  However, each widget is independent, so it makes a lot of sense to package them up as separate modules.  Then, you have one module that inherits from all of the other ones, and therefore all the widget code gets executed.  Except, sometimes it makes sense for a widget to be on one page and not another.  The easies way I have found to do this is to use a span tag with a unique id to mark a page for a component.  Sometimes the span tag is where the component places itself–other times it just serves as a
marker for a component which manipulates the DOM in other ways.

The code often looks like this:

RootPanel rp = RootPanel.get(SPAN_ID);
if (rp != null) {

MyComponent obj = new MyComponent();
rp.add(obj);
}

Now, if we’re on a page that this component does not make sense on, it never gets intialized, no network calls are made, etc.

One issue is that if you want to have the component in more than one place on the page, you need to handle that with special cases.  You can simply use the same id twice, because it is bad form to have more than one element with the same id on a single page–ids are supposed to be globally unique on a page.  If you could use a special tag, that’d be nice, but GWT does not support getElementsByTagName.

GWT GWT Mini Patterns | moore |

GWT Mini Patterns Introduction

GWT can be used to create applications and widgets. I’ve done both, but the feeling I get from reading the newsgroups is that a lot of people are using using GWT to build network applications rather than smaller chunks of functionality. So, I’m going to write a number of posts about GWT component patterns.

First off, what’s a GWT component? In my mind, it is a small bit of functionality that is better run on the client than on the server. It can have server interaction. It does not occupy the entire screen, and has to integrate into an existing HTML based application. Components are relatively self contained and can be dropped in multiple places across a website, or across different websites.

The patterns in this category are not that complicated. They just seemed to be popping up in my code more than once and I thought it’d be nice to document them. Check back here for more as I write them.

[tags]patterns,google web toolkit[/tags]

GWT GWT Mini Patterns | moore |

Using ‘tasks’ in Eclipse

Update, 11/13/2009:  If you are looking for help with tasks using Mylyn (integrated into later versions of eclipse), you don’t want this post.  Instead, you’ll want to read and watch the resources here.  This post is all about simple text based code markers, not Mylyn’s implementation.

In Eclipse (version 3.2–one revision behind the current latest), I use a feature called ‘Tasks’. Using this feature, I can, anywhere in a file managed by Eclipse, put in a tag like ‘XXX’ and write a note to myself. It’s very handy because when I’m developing, I’ll often think of a problem or situation that I’d like my code to handle, but not have time to deal with it just then. I could add it to a bug tracker, or an excel spreadsheet, or write it down, but I find adding it to the source code works just as well. Then, I can use the ‘Tasks’ view in Eclipse to gather all of these notes at a later time, and deal with them one by one. I add it using this type of comment (for java–if I add the task in an XML file, I use XML comments):

//XXX need to revisit this class.

The way you include the tasks view in the java perspective is: go to the java perspective, then choose ‘Window’ from the menubar, then ‘Show View’ then ‘Tasks’. According to the help, Tasks are usually only shown in the ‘Resources’ perspective.

My one gripe with tasks is that it seems to be easy to create them, but darn hard to delete them. You can add new task tags via this path: ‘Window’ / ‘Preferences’ / ‘Web and XML’ / ‘Task Tags’, and use the ‘clean and redetect task tags’ button. This does appear to pick up new tasks (or tasks marked with tags that you’ve added), but doesn’t seem to remove tasks that are no longer marked in the source code (whether they are no longer marked because you removed them from the source code, or because you removed that task [TODO] tag from the list of task tag).

If you add a task via the mouse, you can remove it by right clicking on the checkbox. However, that doesn’t remove the task comment from the source file. Also, if you add a task via a comment, you cannot mark it done in the ‘Task’ view.

What I’d like is some synchronicity between the source file and the view. If I add a task in the source file, it should show up in the ‘Task’ view. If I then delete that line from the source file, I’d like the view to reflect that. If I mark it as completed in the view, then choose ‘Delete Completed tasks’ from the context menu, the line in the source file should be removed as well.

Am I missing something here? Am I using tasks incorrectly?

I looked through the Eclipse help, on google, and in the Eclipse newsgroups but did not find anything that helped. No mention of this issue in the release notes for version 3.3. Browsing around the buglist didn’t turn up anything that applied to what I want to do (via a quick scan).

I’ll probably file a bug sometime soon, but should really review all the entered bugs to see if someone else has my issue. In the meantime, I’ll just bleat a bit here.

[tags]eclipse,tasks view[/tags]

IDEs Programming | moore |