News
JNBridge Pro Extends Interop to Windows 10, Visual Studio 2015
New 'Proxy By Name' feature allows Visual Studio developers to view metadata of the underlying binaries.
- By John K. Waters
- 08/25/2015
JNBridge has recently upgraded its flagship JNBridgePro to support both Windows 10 and Visual Studio 2015. A new feature, "Proxy By Name," is one that was added at the request of JNBridge users, according to company CTO Wayne Citrin.
"Our users like the fact that they can use proxies in Visual Studio and Eclipse, etc., but don't like the parameter placeholder names they get when IntelliSense pops up," Citrin said. "They really wanted to see the names of the original parameters, which are generally in the metadata of the underlying binaries." That metadata hasn't been so easily extracted from Java, but now Java 8 and the Java Reflection API allow for the extraction of that parameter info.
As described in the Oracle doc page, the Reflection API "enables Java code to discover information about the fields, methods and constructors of loaded classes, and to use reflected fields, methods, and constructors to operate on their underlying counterparts, within security restrictions. The API accommodates applications that need access to either the public members of a target object (based on its runtime class) or the members declared by a given class. It also allows programs to suppress default reflective access control."
Proxy By Name maps the names of the underlying parameters of methods when generating proxies so that the parameters of the proxied methods have the same names as the parameters in the underlying methods. The result: Developers can better understand how the proxied methods should be used.
JNBridgePro is a general purpose Java/.NET interoperability tool designed to allow developers to access the entire API from either platform. As Citrin explained it to me once, the tool "connects Java and .NET Framework-based components and applications with simple-to-use Visual Studio and Eclipse plug-ins that remove the complexities of cross-platform interoperability."
About the Author
John K. Waters is the editor in chief of a number of Converge360.com sites, with a focus on high-end development, AI and future tech. He's been writing about cutting-edge technologies and culture of Silicon Valley for more than two decades, and he's written more than a dozen books. He also co-scripted the documentary film Silicon Valley: A 100 Year Renaissance, which aired on PBS. He can be reached at [email protected].