Question

I’m working on a configuration script for a JNI wrapper. One of the configuration parameters is the path to jni.h. What’s a good quick-and-dirty Autoconf test for whether this parameter is set correctly for C++ compilation? You can assume you’re running on Linux and g++ is available.

Alternatively, is there a way to get javah (or a supporting tool) to give me this path directly?

Answer 1

Checking for headers is easy; just use AC_CHECK_HEADER. If it’s in a weird place (i.e., one the compiler doesn’t know about), it’s entirely reasonable to expect users to set CPPFLAGS.

The hard part is actually locating libjvm. You typically don’t want to link with this; but you may want to default to a location to dlopen it from if JAVA_HOME is not set at run time.

But I don’t have a better solution than requiring that JAVA_HOME be set at configure time. There’s just too much variation in how this stuff is deployed across various OSes (even just Linux distributions). This is what I do:

AC_CHECK_HEADER([jni.h], [have_jni=yes]) AC_ARG_VAR([JAVA_HOME], [Java Runtime Environment (JRE) location]) AC_ARG_ENABLE([java-feature],               [AC_HELP_STRING([--disable-java-feature],                               [disable Java feature])]) case $target_cpu in      x86_64) JVM_ARCH=amd64 ;;      i?86)   JVM_ARCH=i386 ;;      *)      JVM_ARCH=$target_cpu ;; esac AC_SUBST([JVM_ARCH]) AS_IF([test X$enable_java_feature != Xno], [AS_IF([test X$have_jni != Xyes],        [AC_MSG_FAILURE([The Java Native Interface is required for Java feature.])]) AS_IF([test -z '$JAVA_HOME'], [AC_MSG_WARN([JAVA_HOME has not been set.  JAVA_HOME must be set at run time to locate libjvm.])], [save_LDFLAGS=$LDFLAGS LDFLAGS='-L$JAVA_HOME/lib/$JVM_ARCH/client -L$JAVA_HOME/lib/$JVM_ARCH/server $LDFLAGS' AC_CHECK_LIB([jvm], [JNI_CreateJavaVM], [LIBS=$LIBS],              [AC_MSG_WARN([no libjvm found at JAVA_HOME])]) LDFLAGS=$save_LDFLAGS ])])