I’m primarily (as always) talking Java, here. This post has a larger purpose but I’m not there yet. If all goes according to plan this post will make sense with some others to follow. At the moment it probably doesn’t make much sense. If that’s your thing, read on. You may be interested in the prior post in this series.
What is portability?
“Portable” just means capable of being carried. If you can pick it up and put it down, it’s portable. If you can take it from one “place” to another, it’s portable. My knapsack is portable. My piano is not, at least by me alone. Nor, really, is my crushing sense of self-doubt, but that’s another story.
Unless you’re just waving your hands, in computers and software when you’re talking about portability you have to talk about where the carrying is happening. Usually the word “across” or “between” is involved: A program might be portable across operating systems; a framework extension might be portable across different implementations of the framework; and so on.
In computers and software, we also usually add concepts of functionality and immutability to this. An application or a binary or a script is portable across computers or environments if, when you pick it up from one computer or environment and put it down on or into another computer or environment without changing it, it still works or can work. A pure Java application is portable across operating systems (or should be) because assuming you have java lying about at the destination you can pick up your CatsLOL.class file from a Windows computer and put it down on a Linux computer and run it in the same way without changing it. A binary resulting from a compiled and linked C program may not be (and usually is not) portable from one operating system to another.
A software component (like a library or a jar file or an individual Java class that is not a program) is also portable, even if you’re not switching operating systems or languages. You can pick a component up and put it (or a copy of it) down in multiple applications and incorporate it that way. In some sense you have “carried” it from wherever it was to several different destinations without changing it. This can happen even if you leave it in place: dynamic loading of libraries and classes is kind of a form of carrying, if you look at it right; the program doing the dynamic loading imports the library or class, thus notionally carrying it from one place to its own address space. “Reusability” is another (awful) word for this, along with other real winners like “composability”.
There are other sorts of more abstract things (let’s restrict ourselves to the software industry) that can be carried from one “place” to another and used without modification. If I leave one employer and go to another, I take my brain (hopefully) and experience with me, or at least the parts that are not signed away to the former employer somewhere. Publicly available stuff I learned from books, videos, websites, reference manuals and even certain source code may be portable from one work environment to another and I may be able to get up to speed more quickly as a result.
Things can be more or less portable. Sometimes something is 100% portable provided that the new environment it is being carried to is juuuuuuust right. If it is, then you put the thing down, it plugs into the new environment and runs exactly the same way as it did in the old environment. A pure Java program is a good example of this. A Java program that relies on a native library, by contrast, may find in the new environment that the environment-specific native library it needs for that environment is missing. If that library is put in the right place, then everything works. Another Java-centric example is: a Java framework extension or participant may be more or less portable depending on which features of the framework it uses or extends and how likely those features are to exist across the environments the Java framework extension or participant might be ported to. Then, even more abstractly, my knowledge of the JAX-RS API is fully portable from one job to another to the extent that the new job mandates proper use of the JAX-RS API. My knowledge of C++, on the other hand, probably isn’t very portable from one job to another because C++ permits lots of flavors and styles and maybe the old job and new job feature completely different styles of C++ programming. Also I’m joking about my knowledge of C++. So is everyone else.
To talk about software portability, particularly application portability, you often have to talk about platforms and platform implementations, because often what you’re really saying is that a given application is portable across a given platform’s multiple implementations. So then: an application is fully portable across platform implementations to the extent that there is more than one implementation of that platform and it doesn’t matter which platform implementation you pick to run it. Pick it up from one platform implementation; put it down in another: did it run? It’s portable! Congratulations! I probably didn’t write it.
So is a Jakarta EE application fully portable? It can be. If your application follows the platform specification, then you know it will (at least theoretically) run on platform implementations A and B in exactly the same way. If it uses features from one platform implementation, then you cannot necessarily pick it up from platform implementation A and run it unchanged in platform B, because platform B might not have those features.
Is a CDI SE application fully portable? This is sort of a nonsensical question, because CDI SE is not really a platform, but a framework. Regarding application portability, therefore, the answer is no. Now, certainly a CDI SE component (an extension, a bean, etc.) can be portable between CDI SE implementations and can be reused in various CDI SE applications: it can be picked up and carried from one CDI SE program and repackaged into another CDI SE program. If it uses Weld APIs, though, for example, then it is not fully portable across CDI SE implementations (like OpenWebBeans).
Is a Spring application fully portable? Yes and no. A Spring application packaged as a fat jar is just a Java program, so yes, you can port it from one Java environment to another, but given Java’s program portability promises this is almost tautological. Or, if you like: there aren’t two implementations of the Spring platform. From that perspective, therefore, a Spring application isn’t portable because there’s nothing to port it to. A Spring program packaged as a .war file, on the other hand, could conceivably be fully portable across Jakarta EE platform implementations provided that it carries all of its baggage with it (i.e. a Jakarta EE server will almost certainly not have any Spring libraries preinstalled). At this point, though, it just collapses into being a Jakarta EE application, so see above.
Is a DropWizard application portable? No. There’s nothing to port it to. There aren’t two implementations of a hypothetical DropWizard platform.
Is a Java application portable? Well, yes, but trivially so, and at a different sort of level. You can indeed run a Java program on different operating systems, and Java is a platform, so therefore a Java program is portable across operating systems. But given that we’re talking about portability across platforms, this foundational level of portability isn’t very interesting for this article.
Is a MicroProfile application portable? No, because there is no such thing as a MicroProfile platform, so there’s nothing to port it to. There are things that use MicroProfile APIs and even implement them but there’s no standard way to make some kind of hypothetical MicroProfile application and somehow run it in all of them.
Is an arbitrary binary portable? No; we’ve already covered that above.
If I make a binary using GraalVM’s native image facility, is the resulting binary portable? No, for the same reasons.
Is a Quarkus application portable? No; it’s just a binary. There’s nothing to port it to.
Is a Helidon SE application portable? No; it’s just a Java program that uses some libraries. There’s nothing to port it to.
Is a Helidon MP application portable? No; it too is just a Java program that uses some libraries, some of which happen to be partially specified. There’s nothing to port it to.
Is an OpenLiberty application portable? To the extent that it is a Jakarta EE application, yes; to the extent that it is not, no.
Is a Payara application portable? Same answer: to the extent that it is a Jakarta EE application, yes; to the extent that it is not, no.
Is an Oracle WebLogic Server application portable? Same answer.
OK, there are a lot of “no”s above. That’s not to say component and knowledge portability isn’t in play across the board. Some arbitrary examples:
- A CDI component can be portable between CDI SE-, Helidon MP-, MicroProfile- and Jakarta EE-based applications
- A Spring component can be portable between Spring applications
- A JAX-RS resource class can be portable between DropWizard, Helidon MP, MicroProfile- and Jakarta EE-based applications
- A component that uses
org.eclipse.microprofile.config.Configis portable to any library or application that has MicroProfile Config available to it
…and so on.
More to come that may tie back to this article.
Blame Laird 