🚀 go-pugleaf

one of our directors has decided that Java is "the Holy Grail" of
> programming and that it will replace every other tool we use from
mainframe
> Cobol to C++ to Delphi and VB.  His position is that desktop apps are a
> waste of resources and that traditional client/server technologies have
> failed
Ouch.

Having seen the size of the Delphi O97 server interfaces, the thought of
having to do JNI wrappers for all of them would make me quake.
At http://www.linar.com/ they sell a commercial generic Java-COM bridge,
which (they claim) can manage conversations with Office, among other things.
It's not spectacularly cheap, however (a cost which, I assume, would be
passed on to clients...). I've never used this, so I don't know how well it
works.

As far as the traditional Win API goes - very little of it pre-2k was
COM-ified, so JNI seems like the only option. I did find a wrapper project
already in progress at http://www.rolemaker.dk/JWindows/ , but again I've
never used it so I can't attest as to its usefulness.

(In fact having just looked at it, I fear it's only an MFC wrapper. Yuck.)

hth
Owen