Dalibor Topic wrote:
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.
No, it's not a fortunate coincidence. The seed for the Apache Jakarta
project were Tomcat, Ant and the Servlet API, that were donated (with
ability to relicense) to the ASF and then the ASF decided to relicense
them under the Apache License.
Therefore the fact that the javadocs are identical is a feature, not a bug.
--
Stefano.
