Thread: JNI Alternative?

I've got a problem that I *know* jni will solve, but I'm wondering if there's any alternatives.

I have a simple program, let's call it foo.exe

When you run foo.exe it asks for your name, and then plays a nice text move based game of chess by just spitting out the name of where it plays its move (i.e. 1. e2-e4 ...then it waits for you to move).

Input exists only through strings only, and all possible output from the foo.exe is known and are also strings.

Is it possible to avoid any kind of serious IPC setup? Maybe have java launch the program and then output messages to stdout and read from stdin? Or is that just not going to happen without me either setting up IPC via a named pipe or use JNI?

Best!
Janus

May not be pretty, but you can do this by launching the program via Runtime.exec() and retrieving the Process

Process proc = Runtime.exec("Your Program Here");

Once you have the Process reference, you can retrieve the InputStream, OutputSream, and ErrorStream to read and write. Reading and writing from the Process should (ideally) be performed in separate threads. One problem I've noticed in doing it this way that I haven't researched thoroughly is when a program receives an error from the ErrorStream (possibly through stderr from the exe), the connection becomes severed.