The Microsoft way

At

the time of this writing, Microsoft does not support JNI, but provides

proprietary support to call non-Java code. This support is built into the

compiler, the Microsoft JVM, and external tools. The features described in this

section will work only if your program was compiled using the Microsoft Java

compiler and run on the Microsoft Java Virtual Machine. If you plan to

distribute your application on the Internet, or if your Intranet is built on

different platforms, this can be a serious issue.

The

Microsoft interface to Win32 code provides three ways to connect to Win32:

1. J/Direct:
   A way to easily call Win32 DLL functions, with some limitations.
2. Raw
   Native Interface (RNI)
   :
   You can call Win32 DLL functions, but you must then handle garbage collection.
3. Java/COM
   integration
   :
   You can expose or call COM services directly from Java.

I’ll

cover all three techniques in the following sections.

At

the time of writing, these features were tested on the Microsoft SDK for Java

2.0 beta 2, which was downloaded (with a painful process they call

“Active Setup”) from the Microsoft Web site. The Java SDK is a set

of command-line tools, but the compilation engine can be easily plugged into

the Developer Studio environment, allowing you to use Visual J++ 1.1 to compile

Java 1.1 code.

|

|