You can use API analysis to determine whether an application is suitable for i5/OS™ PASE. i5/OS PASE is not the best solution under some circumstances.
i5/OS PASE provides considerable flexibility when you are deciding how to port your AIX® applications to the iSeries™ server. Of course, i5/OS PASE is only one option of several from which you can choose.
Your starting point for determining whether an application is suitable for i5/OS PASE is an analysis of the application: the APIs, libraries, and utilities that it uses and how effectively it will run on i5/OS. The IBM® Virtual Innovation Center for Hardware offers help in this area with the API Analysis Tool, a free porting assessment tool that analyzes your application and describes potential stumbling blocks. For more information about how the analysis tool fits into the procedures for porting applications to i5/OS PASE, see the Prepare programs to run in i5/OS PASE topic.
Here are some useful guidelines that you might consider when making the decision whether to use i5/OS PASE:
i5/OS PASE provides a good environment for running computation-intensive applications on iSeries servers by providing highly optimized math libraries.
i5/OS PASE provides support for fork() and exec(), which do not currently exist on the i5/OS system (except through spawn(), which incorporates the fork() function with the exec() function).
i5/OS PASE lets you use AIX system-based build processes, which are especially useful when you have an existing, complicated process that is not readily transferred onto a new operating system.
i5/OS PASE provides good support for applications with these needs.
i5/OS PASE supports both 32- and 64-bit AIX addressing models with low performance cost and the ability to convert integers to pointers.
i5/OS PASE is generally not a good choice for code that provides a large number of callable interfaces that must be called from ILE and that has any of the following characteristics: