Reporting on my progress with PInvoke work. I have created a PInvoke wrapper dll around j.dll which can easily be used to call j from .NET. As a proof of concept I implemented the whole of JConsole in C#.
I believe this opens a lot of opportunities, allowing one to use J from inside XAML, Window Forms and if j engine instances are thread-safe, even from ASP.NET. Please let me know if interested to know more about this, I could post the current code somewhere on Wiki, I guess. Also if this discussion is more appropriate for source forum, let's take it there. Would love to get feedback and also see if there is interest to take this further. On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 4:16 PM, John Baker <[email protected]> wrote: > Seeing if J can be used from C# via Pinvoke has been something I've been > planning to try for awhile. > > COM itself is not to bad see: > > http://bakerjd99.wordpress.com/2010/05/28/a-c-net-class-for-calling-j/ > > but it's a deprecated technology because it's a royal pain in the rear in > most corporate environments as it pretty much assumes you > have administrative rights. The new IT trend is to reduce users to utter > peons that cannot do anything as dangerous as register a dll. > > Mordac the preventer of information technology is not a joke! For > subversive languages like J it's important to be able to install without > administrative rights. > > Let us know how this works out. > > > On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 3:22 PM, Greg Borota <[email protected]> wrote: > > > I've always found COM too hard to use. And suspected that it had inherent > > issues that were not fixable by me, the end developers. > > > > I'll let you know how things go via PInvoke route, which I plan on trying > > sometime next week. If it works at all, not sure yet. > > > > > > On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 3:11 PM, Raul Miller <[email protected]> > > wrote: > > > > > I've called j.dll from C#, but that was years ago and I was using j602 > > > (where you had to register j.dll as a COM server). > > > > > > > > > http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Guides/J%20VB.NET?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Session.cs.txt > > > > > > My biggest frustration was error handling. In my implementation I only > > > got the error message, without context. So I did not know what line > > > of code was experiencing the problem and I did not know what the data > > > was. And I had J doing file access (reading and parsing xml files) > > > which subjected me to a variety of runtime error conditions during > > > initialization. > > > > > > I wound up only supporting two users and I had to do a full install of > > > J on their systems and duplicate enough of the C# code in J to be able > > > to work through installation issues (which included making sure they > > > had appropriate access to some directories on network drives). > > > > > > The only thing C# had going for it in this context was that it it let > > > me use windows forms, which worked around an aversion to UI elements > > > that "look wrong". > > > > > > -- > > > Raul > > > > > > On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 4:00 PM, Greg Borota <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Has anybody used/created pinvoke C# signatures and used j.dll from > > .NET? > > > > If so, any feedback, how was that working? > > > > Also would there be interest in having pinvoke signatures someplace > for > > > > others to use? > > > > > > > > For non-windows users out there, apologies. > > > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > > > For information about J forums see > http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > > > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > > > > > > -- > John D. Baker > [email protected] > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
