Zsejki Sorin Miklós wrote: > I have absolutely no experience with such things, but I'm wondering how > was this done with Tomcat, for example. They have the servlet API built > from their source code, and the javadoc seems to be word by word > identical to the specification. Is the servlet specification provided > under different terms than the J2SE documentation?
No. It's pretty much the same 'look but don't touch' thing. Like any other contributor to Apache, the employees from servlet spec participating companies are free to publish their own stuff under their own licenses. So the official specs are released by whoever releases them (Sun? JCP? no idea ...) under a license granting fewer freedoms, than the ASLv2, for example. The concidence that the official specs are identical to the comments in Tomcat's source code, is nothing more than that: a fortunate coincidence, facilitated by the way JavaDoc encourages implementation comments to be kept close to the source code, and easily extracted out of it, and by the willingness of people developing the spec to develop it in concert with the development of the reference implementation. Conceptually, a specification and a reference implementation's comments are two pairs of shoes, and they do not have to be the same thing. In practice, I assume that they often enough are, as I'd doubt that formal methods have made huge inroads into J2SE specification development yet, unfortunately. cheers, dalibor topic
