Take a look at your web server's log, there's likely to be a helpful error message in there somewhere. As a first shot, try using an absolute path in your system() call, e.g.

system("/usr/bin/java","JavaClassFile");
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(adjust path as appropriate). Note that there's probably a better way to reach your goal unless this is just a quick'n dirty solution you're developing (for example Inline::Java allows you to put Java code directly into your perl script).

Please give a bit more detail than simply "it doesn't work". What unexpected behaviour are you seeing? What behaviour did you expect to see? Are you getting any error messages? Is anything written to the web server error log?

It's probably a difference between a process running under your username and the web server process that runs under a different username - that almost certainly has different permissions on files and a whole different environment set up. The most obvious suspects I can see are that the web server user doesn't have the "java" command in it's path or that the JavaClassFile isn't in the current directory.

But without a more detailed description of your problem, it's impossible to do more than guess.

Just a stab in the dark, but I would guess that this is a CLASSPATH issue. You can pass the classpath via the command line or set the environment variable. The following syntax is used to set the CLASSPATH via the command line:

   java -cp dir/containing/package package.ClassFile
   java -classpath dir/containing/package package.ClassFile
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