WiiLi.org

bellwethr · Joined: 05 Nov 2007 Posts: 25

It's not just the use of Java per se that would make that difficult, but the fact that there also seems to be a desire to keep this platform agnostic...

SwedishFrog · Posted: Fri Nov 23, 2007 1:03 am Post subject:

You're right about that. However I think that if someone wants to write a script that makes API calls from some OS, we should let them do it so that the language is flexable.

The API call would make that particular script platform dependent. but I guess that's a choice the script writer should make for themselves.

bellwethr · Joined: 05 Nov 2007 Posts: 25

How do you actually envision implementing that?

Calls to native functionality need to be wrapped with a JNI stub. To support any arbitrary external call, you'd effectively have to generate your JNI stub automatically and compile it--all while inside a running JVM--and then dynamically load the class into your JVM.

This should be a feature that is added on later...

SwedishFrog · Posted: Fri Nov 23, 2007 7:45 am Post subject:

Yeah dude. I was only talking hypothetically. I've never implemented win32 on java and didn't really know what that entails until your post. Either way it's not very high on my priority list.

Cha0s · Site Admin Joined: 17 Jan 2007 Posts: 522

bellwethr: not true. There's a much easier way to deal with this. Runtime.exec. We can just provide a sort of open access to Runtime.exec. The only issue with that is that it could create security problems. Alternatively, we could provide OS-specific access to particular functions via Runtime.exec. This would require more effort, however. In any case, it's a discussion for the future. At the moment, we need to build up the basics.
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Cha0s

bellwethr · Joined: 05 Nov 2007 Posts: 25

Runtime.exec() is effectively a system call. You can execute an arbitrary process--this isn't the same as calling an external native API--for example, you couldn't call Win32 functions as the OP wanted. You'd have to write and compile a program around those functions, and then execute your program through the exec() call....

Additionally, you're limited to string-based parameters, and to get return values, you'd have to perform string parsing on standard output. I've done this before when I was working on developing a java wrapper around linux network utilities, but it can get pretty nasty.

Anyway, I agree that this should be something that is considered much later.

SwedishFrog: I wasn't trying to be combative, just pointing out that this was non-trivial to do right. Certainly, just offering a system call utility ala Runtime.exec would be easy, but making it useful might be difficult. I didn't mean to be rude!