Next: 4.1 Compiling ready-to-use wrappers Up: Manual Previous: 3.4 Advanced Topics

4. Wrapping Objective-C Libraries

In this chapter we are going to learn how to use JIGS to expose an existing Objective-C library to Java. Technically, we call this procedure wrapping the library.

4.0.1 Historical Notes

Building java wrappers for an objective-C library in JIGS used to be strongly coupled with building the library itself. Starting with JIGS 1.4.0, the wrapping mechanism has been redesigned to be totally independent from the original library: building the objective-C library and building the java wrappers for it are now totally independent processes. You can now build the objective-C library, install it, and only later on create java wrappers for the library. You can also easily wrap objective-c libraries which you got in binary form (as soon as you have the header files from them).

You can still build wrappers in the old way by including

old-java-wrapper.make

rather than java-wrapper.make. But please - whenever possible - use the new - much better - way, and please update any old wrapper to the new design. In this manual, we only document the new design. The old backward compatibility code will be dropped at some point in the future.

Next: 4.1 Compiling ready-to-use wrappers Up: Manual Previous: 3.4 Advanced Topics