Developers of open source Java are moving forward with an effort to let Java programmers access non-Java APIs, including many interfaces used by C programmers.
According to the proponent,the main benefit of this proposal is that it will open up the world of native libraries written in C or similar languages to Java developers without requiring them to write anything but plain Java code.And also he mentioned its functionality as "You just specify what library to load, what function you want to access, and its parameters and return value and the API should do the rest".
The project is intended to provide for native interconnect between code managed by the JVM and APIs for libraries not managed by the JVM.
The challenge will be making the API flexible enough to handle a range of native library types, including C, C++, Windows, Linux, and Solaris, without making the API too difficult to use,and also Good tools will be needed for generating Java code for binding libraries, to accommodate subtle, platform-specific differences, said Nutter, who works as a principal software engineer at Red Hat.
Project Panama provides an alternative to JNI (Java Native Interface) for interfacing Java code to code written in unmanaged languages, said Forrester analyst John Rymer.The proposal, he said, describes technical mechanisms and conventions required for this to work. JNI serves as a Java intermediary that other languages can use to expose an API to Java code, Rymer noted. "The way I read the Project Panama proposal, the team will seek a more streamlined intermediary perhaps direct calls. We'll have to see how this all works out."
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