Development status Active | Written in C and Java | |
Original author(s) Initial release May 9, 2007 (2007-05-09) Stable release 4.3.0 / January 14, 2017; 52 days ago (2017-01-14) Operating system | ||
Java Native Access (JNA) is a community-developed library that provides Java programs easy access to native shared libraries without using the Java Native Interface. JNA's design aims to provide native access in a natural way with a minimum of effort. No boilerplate or generated glue code is required.
Contents
Architecture
The JNA library uses a small native library called foreign function interface library (libffi) to dynamically invoke native code. The JNA library uses native functions allowing code to load a library by name and retrieve a pointer to a function within that library, and uses libffi library to invoke it, all without static bindings, header files, or any compile phase. The developer uses a Java interface to describe functions and structures in the target native library. This makes it quite easy to take advantage of native platform features without incurring the high development overhead of configuring and building JNI code.
JNA is built and tested on Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD / OpenBSD, Solaris, Linux, AIX, Windows Mobile, and Android. It is also possible to tweak and recompile the native build configurations to make it work on most other platforms that run Java.
Mapping types
The following table shows an overview of types mapping between Java and native code and supported by the JNA library.
Note: The meaning of TCHAR changes between char and wchar_t according to some preprocessor definitions. LPCTSTR follows.
Memory byte alignment for data structures
Native libraries have no standardized memory byte alignment flavor. JNA defaults to an OS platform specific setting, that can be overridden by a library specific custom alignment. If the alignment details are not given in the documentation of the native library, the correct alignment must be determined by trial and error during implementation of the Java wrapper.
Example
The following program loads the local C standard library implementation and uses it to call the printf function.
Note: The following code is portable and works the same on Windows and Linux / Unix / Mac OS X platforms.
The following program loads the C POSIX library and uses it to call the standard mkdir function.
Note: The following code is portable and works the same on POSIX standards platforms.
The program below loads the Kernel32.dll and uses it to call the Beep and Sleep functions.
Note: The following code works only on Windows platforms.
Adoption
Java Native Access is known to be used in: