Back to JNI

While still thinking about how to make progress with jkstat - basically, how closely to align it with the existing libjkstat implementation - I started another quick project to use JNI to get at Solaris system information from Java.

And, again, programming in JNI is hard going. The real problem is that it's astonishingly easy to make a mistake. And then it falls over with SIGSEGV and cores on me. Even the stack trace isn't too informative - it tells me that it's gone wrong in the native code (usually when calling back to java). As if I didn't know that! Even knowing where it blew up isn't that much help - it never tells you why. So you have to fix by inspection, and it's not the most obvious syntax.

(For example, it was blowing up at one point. Eventually I realized that I had a typo in the class name, but there was no indication in the failure that that might be the case.)

So what's the application this time? It's a java interface to PICL (the Solaris Platform Information and Control Library). The first aim is to produce a graphical picl browser (like my kstat browser). The prtpicl command is useful, and you get the information with -v, but it's not at all easy to browse through the many pages of output that can result. The picl data is tree structured, so the arrangement used in kstatbrowser works quite well - a Java JTree in the left panel to display the tree structure, and the actual data in a panel on the right.


Give me a day or two to work through the JNI errors I keep making and some code might be ready to release.