It turns out, that the Morfik patent on JST is not granted yet, it is only an application. What a pity…

Anyway, FREAKFACE has a good writeup and ReadWriteWeb did have a balanced discussion, too.

./ just reported that the USPTO granted Morfik a patent for JST (JavaScript Synthesis Technology). The patent covers the synthesis of JavaScript virtually from any high-level language, including “Ada, C, C++, C#, COBOL, ColdFusion, Common Lisp, Delphi, Fortran,
Java, Object Pascal, SmallTalk, Visual Basic, and Visual Basic.NET“.

It will be interesting to see how this will affect GWT and some other similar toolkits. The Morfik technology behind the patent is in development for quite some time (since around 2000, AFAIK), but many will try to find “prior art”, a lot of them unfortunately without reading the patent itself.

I will be doing an in-depth technical review of the patent (as soon as I get a legitimate copy) from a Morfik developer perspective, so stay tuned…