Types

Java types are mapped to native Julia types.

Primitive Types

The Java primitive types are aliased to their corresponding types in Julia. When writing Julia code, it is usually convenient to use these aliases since they provide a direct correspondence when transcribing Java method signatures.

Java Objects

Any java object (as opposed to a primitive) is referenced in JNI via a pointer. In Julia this is a Ptr{Void}. The pointer to an object is wrapped into an instance of the JavaObject{T} composite type. The type parameter T is a symbol, and is the name of the Java class that the object belongs to. Thus, a java object of class java.net.URL will be stored in Julia as an instance of the composite type JavaObject(:java.net.URL)

Java class identifiers (such as the java.net.URL above) cannot be expressed in Julia as a literal symbol, since the . is the composite field access operator. To express the required type, you will therefore have to write JavaObject{symbol("java.net.URL")}. This can get tedious very quickly. Therefore a @jimport macro is provided, which can covert a bare java type literal into the property parameterised JavaObject type. This type can then be aliased to a user defined name.

j_l_math = @jimport java.lang.Math

Some commonly used Java types have pre defined Julia aliases to make them easier to type

Strings

A Java string object is represented in Julia as the JString type. A JString can be created from a plain Julia string using its constructor JString(str::String). A JString object, returned, for example, from a Java method call, can be converted to a plain Julia string using the bytestring(jstr::JString) method.

Multidimensional Arrays

Unlike Julia, Java doesn’t support multidimensional arrays, but may emulate them using array of arrays, e.g.:

double[][] create2DArray() { ... }

The result of such a function may be interpreted in Julia as both - Vector{Vector{jdouble}} or Matrix{jdouble}. JavaCall supports both cases (in the later case JavaCall also checks that all nested arrays have the same length):

jcall(obj, "create2DArray", Vector{Vector{jdouble}}, ())
jcall(obj, "create2DArray", Matrix{jdouble}, ())

Arrays with more than 2 dimensions are not supported, but one may still extract all the data using nested Vector{...} type, e.g.:

jcall(obj, "create3DArray", Vector{Vector{Vector{jdouble}}}, ())

Conversions

The Julia representation of Java objects can be converted from one type to the other using the standard Julia convert method.

convert(JObject, JString("hello"))

The conversion is checked, and will throw an error (equivalent to a java ClassCastException) if the object cannot be converted to the required type. Note that jcall will automatically attempt to convert the parameters to the specified types, and fail if the conversion fails.