Kartik Prakash

• May 24th, 2006

 

Portability and platform independent refers to the ability of a program to run on any machine without having the supporting language on that system.It is not at all necessary to have that language in which the program is developed on the system on which that program is running.

For Example: programs developed in java are stand alone and platform independent it is not essential to have jdk installed on the system to run the program developed in java.

C.R.Venkatesh

• May 30th, 2006

 

Portability focuses on adaptation of software in various OS, by recompiling the source to make the binary compatible with the target OS and not necessarily modifying the source. If the source code strictly follows POSIX standard less likely one end up modifying it.

Platform independence focuses on ability of software to run on VIRTUAL hardware that inturn interfaces with the PHYSICAL hardware. Examples of cross-platform or platform independent languages are Python, JavaScript, Java etc.

Hope it helps. Let me know.

Kanchan

• Jun 12th, 2006

 

that was the most clear defnition.. thnkx a lot..... but wht do u mean by virtual hardware...??

rufus

• Jun 19th, 2006

 

what is the main difference between "portability" ...

sudhalakshmi

• Oct 1st, 2006

 

here virtual hardware means clr environment in dotnet where as in java it is jvm

akki21

 Profile Answers by akki21 

• Feb 21st, 2007

 

"portability" refers to the ability of a system to support a particular software.it depends on the system configurations.

"platform independent"
JAVA is a platform independent software. it need not be installed for the processing of its program

Lecks

 Profile Answers by Lecks 

• Feb 21st, 2010

 

I agree it is correct to say that Java is platform independent, but it is due to the Java Virtual Machine. Java programs are only intermediately compiled, which allows adaptation to the given environment it needs to run in later.

An example of a portability issue is the creation of Unix. The first version was not portable. It was specific only to that computer's architecture. Unix became portable when it was rewritten in C. The new version written in C was portable because C served as a "translator", if you will, between what underlying architecture or devices were physically in the computer and what unix wanted them to do.