Oracle Fights EpicRealm Patents

An anonymous reader writes "Oracle is now fighting EpicRealm's web patents after Safelite settled with EpicRealm, then asked Oracle to pay, as per their software license agreement. EpicRealm's patents are vague and 'describe a technique where a web site updates only part of a website instead of having to rebuild the entire page. That may look a lot like DHTML, but apparently it isn't the same.'"

EU software patents now back from the Pet Sematary

[Anonymous Coward]

The Commission seems to have made its favorite dead cat return from the grave (where Parliament overwhelmingly sent it just months ago) this week:
See recent links to key articles [slashdot.org] on Slashdot, as well as the latest attempts to spin the issue uncovered [futurezone.orf.at] (alleging double jeu - albeit in "Austrian" only, so far).

EU software patents now back from the Pet Sematary

[Anonymous Coward]

By "Pet Sematary" did you mean...?

You'll have to complain to Stephen King (and Hollywood) [amazon.com] for repeated deliberate misspelling.
Fear not, English teachers: IMDb says there's even an orthographically correct movie release [imdb.com] (presumably still not quite suitable for classroom viewing though).

Patent is about web servers and page servers

[PianoComp81]

I found the patent that EpicRealm holds. It was filed in 1999.
EpicRealm patent [uspto.gov]

Basically, the patent is about the web server receiving a request, and handing the request off to a page server. The page server finishes the request and responds to the client while the web server continues to handle other requests.

This sounds very similar to many web applications in use today (J2EE, ASP.net, etc.). There are usually a few processes running with J2EE (the one I'm most familiar with). One handles the HTTP requests and then hands it off to another process to dynamically create the web page. The second processes send the generated page back to the HTTP processes, which sends it to the client. In the meantime, the HTTP process could have been handling other HTTP requests.

Re:Patent is about web servers and page servers

[cswiger2005]

Actually, the real prior art is "WebRex", written initially by Linus Upson, who also was one of the authors of EOF.

Steve Jobs wasn't initially interested in web-based stuff, so Linus left NeXT and joined ITS with Ted Shelton, Drew Treiger, and me who finished up Linus' demo into a saleable product. Then Steve changed his mind, and decided to reimplement Linus' ideas as WebObjects 1.0-- very bad things happened with regard to EOF licensing (which went from $699 or $750 or so per licensed copy to $25,000)...and poof when ITS' market, since WebRex depended on EOF to do the app-to-database layer.

Still, every so often, some patent troll tries to sue Apache or JBoss or Tomcat or some other likely target, but, since WebRex dates back to late 1994 for development and Apr 1995 or so as a publicly available product, it predates all of the claims that I'm aware of.