Articles About Java

17September

Introduction to the Gmail API

By George Edwards

One of the most difficult questions when creating a new product is how to ensure that the product has a chance to attract a large user base. The good news is that the big players in the technology market such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter let developers create applications that can access the existing user data through publicly available APIs. This means, for example, that every Twitter user is a prospective customer for a well-developed Twitter application.

One of the recent and still underutilized arrivals to the public API space is the Gmail API, which provides RESTful access to a user’s Inbox messages, Inbox configuration, message labels, and the ability to draft and send messages on a user’s behalf. With this toolkit, it would be possible to implement a full web-client that replicates all of Gmail functionality anew. This is not the purpose of the API, however, and the more interesting use cases should come from innovative new features:

creative Inbox visualizations;
helping people reduce email clutter (consider trying Unroll.me if you haven’t already);
providing personalized analytics tools (who do you communicate with the most?);
extracting important event details;
putting reminders directly into an Inbox;
and many others.

In this article, I will walk you through the steps required to start building your own application on top of the Gmail API. I will explain how these steps work when developing a Web application built on top of a Java-based web server (with parts of the code snippets taken from the official API documentation). Keep in mind that I am using this example just for convenience — the API works similarly for other programming languages (C++, Python, JavaScript) as well as for desktop and mobile applications.

Accessing the Gmail API

The high-level process for accessing the Gmail API is depicted in […]

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8February

Quandary Peak Assists in Nokia v. HTC Patent Litigation

By Quandary Peak Research

Nokia’s recent settlement with HTC over smartphone patents was widely reported in the media on Friday, resulting in the dismissal of all pending patent litigation worldwide between the two companies. Industry observers widely cited the outcome as an important step for Nokia in its effort to generate royalties from its patent portfolio.

Right up until the settlement was finalized, several of our software experts here at Quandary Peak were working earnestly with the attorneys at Desmarais LLP on behalf of Nokia. Nenad Medvidovic, George Edwards, and Brad Ulrich were all down in the trenches, performing the painstaking work of documenting the technical evidence related to the patents-in-suit in the matters before the International Trade Commission and the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware. The patents disclosed inventions related to receiving push messages, downloading and installing apps over the network, video compression and encoding, protecting sensitive device configuration data, Bluetooth connectivity, calendar data management, and other technologies. The analysis by Quandary Peak included C++ source code review and Java source code review.

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9October

FoxNews.com Article Quotes Software Expert George Edwards

By Quandary Peak Research

A FoxNews.com story on computer glitches in the HealthCare.gov website features several quotes by Quandary Peak software expert George Edwards. The article adds to a recent flurry of reports chronicling bugs in the new federal insurance marketplace. Dr. Edwards explained the inherent challenges faced by engineers in building the site, and noted that it’s impossible to tell at this stage how serious the defects are.

“I wouldn’t rule out the possibility” of ongoing problems with the website, Edwards is quoted as saying. If flaws exist in the site’s core architecture, they could take some time to fix.

Edwards also pointed out how the site’s engineers were, in some sense, given an impossible task. For example, the October 1 unveiling of the site was driven by public policy, rather than technical, considerations.

The full article is available here on the FoxNews.com website.

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17September

Edwards Tapped to Testify on GPS, Navigation, and Mapping Patents

By Quandary Peak Research

Dr. George Edwards, Quandary Peak’s resident guru of location-based mobile services, has been asked to testify as an expert witness in a lawsuit alleging infringement of a patent for “Method and System for Providing an Image Vector-Based Traffic Information.” The case, Porto Technology, Co., Ltd. et al. v. Cellco Partnership d/b/a Verizon Wireless, was filed Sept. 20, 2012 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Claim 1 of the patent at issue in the case, US Patent 6,233,518, discloses a method of providing an image-based traffic information in a region having at least one time-variant real entity. The method includes forming a traffic state map, transmitting the traffic state map to a user device, and displaying an image in accordance with the traffic state map on a screen of the user device. The patent was filed in 1999 by Heung-Soo Lee and was granted in 2001.

Edwards was engaged by plaintiff’s counsel Fox Rothschild, LLP, a national law firm with over five hundred attorneys. Edwards expects to draw on his knowledge, skills, and training in a variety of mobile platforms, including Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone, Qualcomm Brew, Palm Web OS, and RIM BlackBerry OS. Edwards’ conclusions will be based on a technical analysis of C++ and Java source code.

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31August

Android’s Stagefright Media Player Architecture

By Ivo Krka

A significant portion of today’s mobile devices run on top of Android OS. One of the reasons for the widespread adoption of Android is its open source nature. While this allows any programmer to look beyond the basic API (referred to as the Application Framework), understanding and modifying the lower layers of the Android stack is difficult. This becomes apparent as soon as you download the huge 12 GB of Android’s source code. In addition, while the Application Framework’s Java code is accompanied with detailed comments, the remainder of the code base is not thoroughly documented (if at all). To make things worse, the undocumented part of the code base is more complex, uses intricate IPC mechanisms, and switches between programming languages.

In this article, I present the architecture of the media playback infrastructure (with Stagefright as the underlying media player). My goal is to help you, an interested reader, get a grasp of how things work behind the curtains, and to help you more easily identify the part of the code base you may want to tweak or optimize. Some useful online resources already outline certain bits and pieces of the media player architecture (1 2), but the slideshow format of these descriptions omits a number of important details.

Overall Structure

The architecture of the media player infrastructure, from the end-user apps to the media codecs that perform the algorithmic magic, is layered with many levels of indirection. The following diagram depicts the high-level architecture described below.

At the topmost layer of the architecture are the user apps that leverage media playback functionality, such as playing audio streams, ringtones, or video clips. These apps use the components from the Application Framework that implement the high-level interfaces for accessing and manipulating media content. Below this layer, things get more complicated […]

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7August

Code Review of Android and Windows Devices Completed

By Quandary Peak Research

Software consultants at Quandary Peak recently completed an lengthy, in-depth source code review of twenty-nine mobile devices running the Android, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone 7 operating systems. The consultants, George Edwards and Brad Ulrich, drew on their many years of experience in smartphone application development and mobile systems research to document the structure and behavior of the software components at issue. Both Brad and George have worked on a number of cases as an Android expert witness.

The extensive analysis effort was conducted on behalf of Desmarais LLP in connection with a patent infringement matter, MobileMedia Ideas LLC v. HTC Corporation and HTC America Inc. The case initially involved eleven patents for smartphone technology related to voice dialing, call handling, contacts management, media playback and streaming, and image processing. The patents asserted by MMI were U.S. Patents 5,490,170, 5,841,979, 5,915,239, 5,977,887, 6,043,760, 6,049,796, 6,070,068, 6,253,075, 6,427,078, 6,871,048, and 7,349,012.

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8July

Quandary Peak Experts Analyze Android Camera Architecture

By Quandary Peak Research

George Edwards and Nenad Medvidovic, two software experts affiliated with Quandary Peak Research, recently completed a comprehensive examination of the camera software architecture of over a dozen Android devices. The two also analyzed a handful of mobile phones powered by Qualcomm’s Brew platform. The inspection and analysis of C++ and Java source code was an immense task and was central to the technical arguments in the case.

George and Neno performed the source code review, which extended over a period of several months, on behalf of Chinese mobile device manufacturer ZTE, and ZTE’s counsel, Goodwin Procter. ZTE, along with Huawei, Pantech, and HTC, is under investigation by the International Trade Commission (ITC) as a result of patent infringement allegations filed by FlashPoint Technology. Neno was deposed as an Android expert witness and testified at the trial.

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1July

Utilizing a Source Code Analyst in Software Patent Infringement Suits: Finding and Selecting the Right Analyst

By Brad Ulrich

Welcome to the first segment in this series articles on Utilizing a Source Code Analyst in Software Patent Infringement Suits. In my role as both a source code analyst and software expert witness, I have worked closely with top IP firms and Fortune 500 companies to uncover critical source code evidence in software dispute and patent infringement cases. In this series, I discuss the essential steps required for an attorney to engage and best-utilize a source code analyst in a patent infringement case – covering various pitfalls and offering solutions to common problems along the way.

We approach the series in chronological order, starting with basic topics such as: benefits of hiring a source code analyst, what to look for in an analyst, and how to go about finding a good analyst for your case. Future articles will delve further into other key areas including: essential steps in engaging an analyst, proper preparation for a code review, documenting findings for your case, essential communication with your analyst, and how to prepare optimal code cites for expert reports.

Let’s get started!

Benefits of Hiring a Source Code Analyst for Litigation

There are several good reasons to engage a dedicated analyst for review of source code in a patent infringement case. I will cover a few of these briefly here, but for an in-depth discussion of why you should consider hiring a dedicated code analyst in addition to a testifying expert, see the article: Selecting the Right Software Expert in Patent Disputes.

A dedicated software analyst provides a set of skills that is often quite different from a testifying expert. A good source code analyst is particularly trained and skilled at writing and reviewing code in the language (i.e., Java, C++, PHP, etc.) […]

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26June

Quandary Peak Performs Code Review in Patent Infringement Case

By Quandary Peak Research

Brad Ulrich, a software expert with Quandary Peak Research, is performing source code review and analysis in a patent infringement matter brought against a large financial institution in the Eastern District of Virginia. The software involved utilizes SMS-based communication to a Java EE web platform to provide mobile banking services. Mr. Ulrich, who will be working on behalf of the complainant, will apply his expertise in financial systems and software patents to locate and document relevant portions of the allegedly infringing application.

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