I've been trying to find an answer to this for some time, but I think part of my problem is that I don't really know how to phrase my question. I understand the that JVM ultimately preforms all the system calls at run-time that the Java program needs to make, my confusion is about the underlying way that Java classes tell the JVM to do this.
Take for example, the File class in the standard Java library. As far as I know, this is considered the most fundamental API for opening/creating files in Java. But, File is just another class right? So in theory I should be able to write my own File class from scratch which doesn't utilize the pre-exisitng one, right? How would I do that? What is happening inside the File class that tells the VM to actually create the file? I looked at the source code for the File class, and it looks like it calls another class called VMFile, but I could find no explanation of what VMFile is. When I looked at the VMFile source code, it just had function declarations with no definitions.
Thank you for your help.
The Java Native Interface (JNI) is the glue between Java classes and the OS. Native methods have a 'native' attribute (look it up in the JLS).