Today I have experimented a bit with a java to com bridge. The aim was to make the CCP accesable from a Java application.

After some webseach I found various free and comercial tools. Eventually I choose to experiment with com4j which is a opensource toolset to create wrappers between Java and com.

https://com4j.dev.java.net/

Look a the tutorial is looked like exactly what we needed, so first I started of trying one of the included samples. This was not very successfull as I got none of them to work. Later I tried to create a wrapper for the CCP using there include tool. This worked fine, so now I have a wrapper..

I wrote the following small text applicatio:

import com4j.COM4J;

//import ICCPApp;

//import ISession;

//import ClassFactory;

public class Main {

  public static void main(String[] args) {

    com4j.Com4jObject obj = ClassFactory.createCCPApplication();

    ICCPApp app = obj.queryInterface(ICCPApp.class);

    app.showWindow((short)7);

    app.openSession("test");

  }

}

And tried to run it. Unfortunately whatever I did it always throwded an exception. Aftler long and frustation debug sessions I found the included com4j.dll needed to be regsvr32'd, I am still not sure why this is but this was one of the last things I did before its started working.

Now there is one issue left, It works when I run it under eclipse but when I start it standalone it still does not work. This is problly a missing classpath or other command line option I have to pass. Anyway I left this as an excercise for the reader.

Conclusion: It is possible to create I Java to CCP bridge.

Other comment I like to make, the same experiment but then to bridge C# .NET to the CCP took me less than 5 minutes!