JNI and 3rd party DLL's
Hello everbody
I just recently started working with JNI and third party DLL's and therefore had to go through some painful education. I understand that in order to use 3rd party DLL's it is necessary to write a wrapper in C. However, I am curious and would like to know why it is not possible to link a library directly from Java through the System.loadLibrary() call. Detailed info or links to such are most appreciated.
Thanks,
Joe Weinberg
[469 byte] By [
JWeinberga] at [2007-11-27 9:54:06]
# 1
You can't do it because generally the pre-existing DLL exposes an interface that does nott meet java's (JNI) expectations:
o Doesn't take parameters of the type that java wants to pass.
o Doesn't return the type of information that java expects will be returned (if any).
o May have C++ linkage when java expects C linkage.
# 2
I also hate pure JNI (but I am writing JNI code for 7 years). Now I have issued SDK for Java that implements P/Invoke paradigm from .NET. It is called Java Platform Invoke (J/Invoke). This ver. runs only under MS Windows but in near future I plan to recompile J/Invoke SDK for Linux.
See Demo at
http://www.sharewareplaza.com/Java-Platform-Invoke-API-Demo-version-download_49212.html
