Re: [Openjnlp-devel] ClassLoader, Native Methods, and Java 1.1

[Kevin H. <ke...@na...>]

On Wednesday, November 21, 2001, at 01:34 , Doug Zwick wrote:

[...]
> I guess I wasn't very clear. I'm looking for suggestions on
> how I can hack the 0.4 class loader to handle native methods,
> not asking your team to shuffle the schedule and move it up.
> I feel bad enough dragging you away to answer these questions!

Don't feel bad! I really appreciate getting direction from users who 
need features. User feedback helps to keep motivation high and 
development active (four months since the last release is terrible!).

As to adding nativelib support I think I failed to respond clearly, 
actually. Here's basically what needs to be done:

  1) The nativelib resource needs to be downloaded to the local 
filesystem.

  2) System.loadLibrary() needs to be called with the path to the local 
version of the library.

  3) calls to native methods provided by that library should magically 
work.

You could accomplish this yourself within your own code as a short-term 
solution, I think. Especially since OpenJNLP doesn't have any security 
checking.

[...]
> Am I missing something? I thought that page was just the basics of
> JNI, I could find nothing there on how the native code actually gets
> loaded. If you have a link to a page on that subject, I would
> appreciate your sharing it.

Start here: 
<http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/native1.1/stepbystep/step5.html>. 
That should help.

Finally, there is a good chance nativelib stuff will happen with 
OpenJNLP much, much sooner than expected. I've been in contact with some 
colleagues who've done a lot of work in this area and they've been 
providing some good insight.