I really feel like there is an educational opportunity for the HN community about patents. We frequently have these articles where the title of the patent is copy pasted into a submission to generate the largest amount of hysteria possible. Then the HN community completely ignores the fact that a) the titles are misleading and b) the titles are meaningless in terms of patent protection.<p>Based on the claims, they are patenting a system for updating client side web server applications. The system attaches source code information to JavaScript object in order to be able to determine the version of source code that generated the objects. The system attempts to provide a way for web applications to update client side code in a browser using the source code the objects were derived from as a way to continue operation without restart.<p>Now, I'm not saying that is novel. What I'm saying is that there are a lot of presumptions that happen before people even get to the claims. Typically, I encourage people to read the claims first, then work their way back through the rest of the application. Without knowing the claims, there is no way to know what they think is protectable.<p>This isn't a justification of the system. I think (software) patents and the patent system are incredibly broken. Thats not a reason to be unfamiliar with the systems. Know your enemy.
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THIS IS NOT A PATENT. This is what's known as a pre-grant publication. This application has been filed, but it has not yet been examined. Chances are quite low that it will issue as a patent in its current form.<p>Yes, the claims are broad... but this is just a published app, not a patent.
This is almost exactly what I'm currently coding in a side project in order to dynamically load different parts of a game when necessary instead of front-loading it all at once.<p>This is just another example of an obvious method to solve a problem that any developer will come up with as soon as they need to solve that problem.
Prior art:
<a href="https://trigger.io/reload/" rel="nofollow">https://trigger.io/reload/</a>
<a href="https://build.phonegap.com/docs/hydration" rel="nofollow">https://build.phonegap.com/docs/hydration</a><p>Plus every app that has ever had to solve this problem. There is nothing non-obvious in this patent.
This is not novel. This is not innovative. It is a relatively obvious method for dynamic code loading over the web that any intermediate programmer could have arrived at independently.
IBM folks never aware of Erlang hot code replacement. <a href="https://www.google.co.in/search?q=erlang+hot+code+replacement&oq=erlang+hot+code+replacement&sugexp=chrome,mod=11&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.co.in/search?q=erlang+hot+code+replacemen...</a>