Question:
I have a huge chunk of C code that currently uses a shareware GUI library for I/O. I would like to replace the current GUI with a browser-based one. Is there a way I can use Java to do this and still ship only C source code and Java bytecode? It would be a pain if users had to install a Java compiler in order to compile the code. They are already having trouble with their pre-installed C compilers.
Answer:
If I understand correctly, you want to replace your shareware GUI with aJava GUI running inside a browser.
If the number of C functions called from the GUI isn’t too large, they could be imported into Java as native functions, and called from yourJava GUI. (See the Java tutorial at www.javasoft.com for instructions).
Unfortunately, most browsers won’t allow applets to call native functionson the client machine. This means your Java GUI would have to beimplemented as an application. Although users wouldn’t need to compile it,they would need a Java interpreter to run it.
