Why and when to perform this task
WebSphere Application Server for z/OS V5 or higher is much closer to the other WebSphere Application Server platforms in how it treats code page issues. This improvement should allow greater portability of applications from other platforms or from the development environment. Encoding changes should no longer be required as part of deployment.If you are migrating from WebSphere Application Server Standard Edition V3.5, you should be aware of the following potential migration issues:
Note: Properties or resource bundles that were contained in .jar files or that were loaded from a Web application class loader were not required to be in EBCDIC. Therefore they should already be in ASCII format.
Even though the Java language allows programmers to explicitly specify the encoding of a file that is to be opened and read by the JVM, many programmers do not take advantage of this capability and rely on the default encoding. V5 or higher should improve portability of applications by starting the JVM with a default file encoding of ISO-8859-1 (US ASCII). This implies that applications that rely on JVM behavior instead of explicit specification of encoding will be able to execute unchanged on a WebSphere Application Server for z/OS V5 or higher system. If you have applications which access EBCDIC encoded files, you must ensure that they explicitly specify this encoding in the application code, or you must change the encoding of the target file to match this new JVM setting.
Note: If you have applications which access EBCDIC encoded files, you need to insure that they are explicitly specifying this encoding in the application code or change the encoding of the target file to match the new JVM setting.