RE: Possible dumb question: ASCII, EBCDIC, or Unicode?

>So, by choosing ASCII as the platform default encoding, the iSeries JVM
>writers have made it easy to interface with sockets, for example, but more
>difficult to use native iSeries files with the java.io package.  This same
>problem occurs with Readers and Writers which assume an ASCII default
>encoding.  Hopefully, most people are using either the JDBC driver or the
>Toolbox classes to deal with iSeries native files.

This depends.  This trade-off goes beyond sockets.

Some files in the native IFS system _are_ in ASCII, depending on how they
got there.

Consider sources of IFS files such as FTP or exported directories that go
outward to NFS and SMB.  Files in such directories are all likely to be
ASCII coded files and they should be marked as such by IFS if they are
stored locally.  Many Java applications coming on to OS/400 will be
entirely based on ASCII-encoded IFS-bound files to the extent they use
"flat files" at all.

Thus, the choices made by my colleagues in the Java team work very well
overall, at least in terms of my own work with Java on the platform.  I
seldom need the toolbox classes for run-of-the-mill flat files.  Code I
write elsewhere (e.g. Windows, Linux) ports very painlessly since any flat
files that come with them start life as ASCII and end up in IFS in ASCII
also, one way or another.


Larry W. Loen  -   Senior Linux, Java, and iSeries Performance Analyst
                          Dept HP4, Rochester MN