Using JNI to call remotely

[Michael Brewer]

I read through the JNI tutorial and didn't see anything about this, so I thought I would ask here.
Is there any way to call native methods on a remote machine? The reason I ask, is we're ramping up to create a WebSphere application that uses an API that is only available through a DLL. The WebSphere people in our company would like to run all of our application servers on unix boxes. Will this be possible? Can we remotely call the methods in the DLL that sits on a Windows 2000 box?

[Vijayakumar Arya]

Hi Michael,
There is no direct way of invoking a remotely located native code, JNI does not support this. Alternatively you have 2 choices,
1. Create a Remote object and let that run in the windows box. When any client wishes to get the functionality let it contact the Remote server using RMI and let the Remote server invoke the dll locally and return the response.
2. The same functionality mentioned in the above case can be implemented in native also. Using sockets for instance.
Hope this helps