[Info-vax] Java portability and VMS

[hb]

On Feb 18, 4:24 am, Wendell <wendel... at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Of course, it always takes special care to write Java programs to be
> platform-independent, but this sounds like any significant application
> would require special porting to run on VMS. Is that true?

If you look at this from another viewpoint you have to admit that Java
itself is not portable. Java runs only on one platform: the JVM, the
Java Virtual Machine. (It seems that Java versions aren't upward
compatible, but that is a different thing.) It's the JVM features you
are interested in.
Here that is, how good the JVM support is on VMS. For example, whether
the JVM's expectations on a filesystem were mapped to the ODS2/5 file
system and vice versa. Or whether the JVM's system calls, for example
fork, could be implemented on VMS. And, hopefully mentioned in the
cited article, how many resources the JVM on VMS needs: there can be
annoying problems caused by limited quotas. And finally, all these
adjustments to VMS may use even more resources, than you expect,
resulting in slow or unexpected performance even on big, fast VMS
systems.

Hello world type of programs do not use many JVM features. So they
should work without a problem. But in general you don't know, what is
really needed, when you start with a bunch of Java classes.