Is it possible to write an operating system in java?

Question

Our highschool requires us to do a senior project to graduate. It has to be something you want to do as a career. I want to be a programmer so I thought it would be cool if I wrote an operating system. I really don't know where to start though, I thought you couldn't write an operating system in a high-level language at first but then I heard differently. I can see why you'd have to use assembly or someting to write one because it has to be in bionary but i guess that is not true. So is it possible to use java to write an operating system or is that just not possible? I'm only a sophmore right now so i have two years to figure it out but i'd like to get an idea now.
thanks, lateralus

Answer 1

it's not going to have a gui or anything like that,
it's just going to be something similar to DOS. It
really doesn't have to do much. I just like the
challenge, also I heard someone else in my school had
done it and they use java.You sure that you don't just want to write a command shell?
When you open a console window on windows that is a command shell, not an OS.
And writing one of those would be a lot easier than writing an OS.
I suppose you could write a very primitive pseudo OS using the Sun VM. However I am not sure that you would really be able to demonstrate the concepts of an OS except in a very complicated way. For example if you had the following 'OS' commands
1. Store file
2. Print file
Then you could implement it in the following way
- Create a big binary file managed via java
- Storing a file means 'managing' a hunk of that binary file and 'mapping' the file into that space.
- Printing the file would mean
....a Get map to access file (so find it in binary file.)
....b. Read contents (read bytes from binary file)
....c. Print contents to JFrame (or GUI thing)
If the above seems confusing then unless you have a teacher that is either willing to be very free with what a success is or a teacher that understands the concepts very well then going with a command shell would be much better.