JNITL - Java Native Interface Template Library

JNI is the programming interface when developing native libraries that work with Java. Unfortunately, this interface is designed to be compatible with C, and therefore it cannot take advantage of C++ language features.

This project aims to bridge this gap by providing a C++ layer on top of JNI, and making it a lot easier to use.

Features

The current version has the following features:

• Method/field access regrouped by types (so that they can be driven by other templates more easily)
• Array access regrouped by types (so that they can be driven by other templates more easily)
• Convenient method/field invocations that hide method/field IDs.
• Convenient java.lang.String <-> LPCSTR/LPCWSTR conversion

TODOs

This library can be extended in many ways, and here are some ideas. Volunteers are welcome.

• Support more platforms

• Write a little Java tool that reads a class definition and generates a wrapper C++ code that access it through JNITL, so that you can write as follows:

    // assume you've translated java.io.File to Java::Io::File
    void foo(jobject o) {
      Java::Io::File pFile = static_cast<Java::Io::File>(o);
      pFile = pFile->getAbsoluteFile();
      jboolean exists = pFile->exists();
      if(exists) {
        ...
      }
    }
  

Unlike a Java library, where every unsed feature still bloats the application using it, C++ applications only pay for the features they actually use. So that allows us to add more features without worrying too much about the size bloat.

Usage

To use JNITL, first check out the code and extract it somewhere. Then configure your C++ compiler and linker so that jnitl/include and jnitl/lib are searched by the compiler and the linker respectively.

From your program, do the following:

// in your stdafx.h header file
#include <jnitl.h>
using namespace jnitl;	// if you want to.

extern JNIModule module;

// in your stdafx.cpp file
JNIModule module;

Customers

This project is used by:

• com4j
• nlink

(File a ticket to be listed here)