I happen to know from a good source that Mr. Abrantes has done some interesting research on a concept called FileWatcher. It has very strong ties with the hot deploy concept that he is trying to implement, and I''m pretty sure that should be a teaser for us, code junkies, reading these posts.

Just a tease for the next post in the series.

Anyway, congratulations. It is a very good introspection into the mechanisms that make up the Java VM. I can honestly say I learned a lot from this. I would like, however, to ask (and I'm not so sure this relates to the subject at hand) about the bootstrap. If I understood correctly, this loads the standard VM classes. How does Java implement the low level operations (down the OS integration path) when dealing at this level? I mean... file handling differs from Windows to Linux... Is this integration done at this level or further down the hierarchy?