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I finally got a JNI connection to the netCDF-4 C library.

The idea is to test the Java and C libraries against each other. Since they are independent implementations, agreement likely indicates correct results.

Because I wanted to do the work on my Windows development machine, I needed to wait until Ed could build a Windows DLL for netCDF-4. He had to go through the learning hump for Visual Studio etc. I did that 8-9 years ago, and I was glad not to do it again.

I bought a commercial package JNIWrapper, a companion product for my IDE, IntelliJ. It wasn't much money for an academic license ($150 ?), but still I expected that the documentation would be more than minimum. Its OK, but not that good. It is supposed to make it easy to write JNI to native code libraries.

Anyway, I couldn't get the damn thing to work on the netcdf.dll (it worked on other dlls) so I mistakenly thought that there was something wrong with the dll. In googling around to try to solve the problem, I ran across another JNI helper library, JNA, an open source package on java.net that is actively being maintained and supported. I switched over to it - still didnt work with netcdf.dll.

I finally downloaded a trial copy of PE Explorer, which analyzed netcdf.dll and showed all the netCDF-4 DLL dependencies. So all I had to do is to make sure to explicitly load those libraries, then it all worked. I liked PE Explorer, and would buy it if I had to work much with DLLs.

So I immediately got things working with netCDF-3 files (I think I've written this code 5 times before). The 2 libraries agreed on reading all the test files I threw at it, so that's a nice feeling. There was a moment of panic on one test file - then it turned out to be truncated, and the C library silently fills in the missing parts with zeros. In the Java library, Im returning garbage. I'm going to change the Java library to detect truncation and reduce the record count to reflect the actual number of complete records.

I like JNA, simple stuff is simple. There are some dark corners in trying to write portable JNI. The netCDF library uses size_t a lot, which is an integer whose size is system dependent, and possibly compile-flag dependent. I'm mapping size_t to  JNA's NativeLongByReference which should do the right thing most of the time. Mapping to structures and pointers to arrays of Structures etc gets pretty complicated.

Im currently working on the netCDF-4 specific bindings, and learning the C API (again). I should have done this when Ed was designing it, to give him feedback, but oh well. There are a number of JNI mappings that I'm not yet sure how to do.

If things get too hard in JNA, I will see if JNIWrapper does a better job. At the moment I don't really have a comparison between them.

Oh yeah, am I glad I get to work in Java and not C. Thanks to Ed and Russ and Dennis who use that lovely language so I don't have to!