Why Java is the Future for OpenVMS

Support for Java in OpenVMS has increased over the years, and now Java for OpenVMS on Integrity is part of the basic system, and includes Java JDK 6.0 and JRE 6.0.

Installing the Secure Web Server (SWS) – based on Apache – you also get Tomcat and Perl for free.

As long as OpenVMS remains viable, I personally expect both Perl and Java to flourish on this platform. Especially, when not using Perl for typical administration tasks, I expect that Java will be available for more powerful duties.

I would even expect to be able to put things like Stripes, Spring, or even Scala and Lift onto OpenVMS. With the portability of Java, one could potentially just copy over class files, Java archives, or even web application archives and expect things to (mostly) work.

The support for both Perl and Java on OpenVMS makes for an exciting time – and Tomcat to boot.

Share your experiences with Java on OpenVMS…

Tomcat Missing Java Standard Tag Libraries (JSTL) in Debian and Ubuntu

If you load Apache Tomcat onto your Ubuntu system, you’ll find that JSTL is missing. Trying the provided JSTL examples will thus result in failure, as will any normal operations that require the standard tag libraries.

This is mainly because of one reason: JSTL is considered to be part of J2EE – which in this case means that JSTL comes with Glassfish (or by translation, Apache Geronimo).

Originally, JSTL was a “built-in” feature of the Glassfish packages in Debian and Ubuntu; however, because of the desirability of having JSTL in Tomcat and other containers, JSTL is now available separately.

The package is glassfish-javaee and contains three JAR files which contain JSTL. The best thing to do is to run this command (whether Debian or Ubuntu):

apt-get install glassfish-javaee

This will install the packages and all dependencies – though if you’ve Tomcat already, there probably won’t be any dependencies required.

I experienced this with Tomcat 6, but Tomcat 5 is probably affected as well.