On 2/9/2011 4:22 AM, Boris Brodski wrote:
Hello everyone,
I'm the maintainer of the 7-Zip-JBinding project: - On SourceForge: http://sevenzipjbind.sourceforge.net/ - On GitHub: https://github.com/borisbrodski/sevenzipjbinding/tree/RW (Check the RW branch)
In order to call C++ code from Java and vice versa the JNI (Java Native Interface) should be used. This interface is low level and provides little safety. (Java VM crashes very easy) Also to get a good performance, a bunch of code is always needed to cache ids and some pointers returned from jni.
In the new version of 7-Zip-JBinding (see git RW branch) I wrote a library, that solves some of JNI problems. It uses simple DSL (defines) to describe java classes/interfaces with their methods/fields. It generates from the DSL during pre-compile time some kind of easy to use skeletons around Java classes and interfaces, providing very simple access to their methods and fields.
Here are the features: - Type-safe calls from C++ to Java - The compiler will check the number and type of all passed arguments to the called methods. The same applies to setting field. - Caching of method ids and class pointers. - Auto-determining java method signature from the DSL. - Consistent JNI low level error handling - Tools to debug checking and cleaning exceptions after each method call. - Code completion of the java methods and fields from C++ with IDE, capable of expanding defines (for example, with Eclipse CDT).
In case, this library has a real chance to become a part of the Boost library, I would be happy to remove all the7-Zip-JBinding dependencies, implement missing features and discuss other possible improvements. It would be match better, if someone will volunteer to help me on this and share the responsibility.
Regards, Boris Brodski
I'm certainly interested in such a library. Boost has utilities for making Python bindings, I don't see why it shouldn't have them for Java bindings as well. I am maintaining a project which makes considerable use of C++/CLI to bind its native libraries to .NET. I'm not as familiar with Java as with C#; I was able to provide access to native fields with C# properties so that the interface is pretty much exactly the same in C# as in C++. Is that possible in Java? We've had quite a few requests for such bindings. Thanks, -Matt