Communication Java - COM

[Andreas Schachl]

Hello!

Ive got hte following problem:

I have to develop a Plug In for an already existing (java) software, which
allows me to take data out of the system and display them in the outlook
calendar. This Plug In should (!!!) work on win32 and apple (apple is no
"must have").

Im currently thinking about 3 ways to accomplish this:

For communication with Outlook I would like to use COM, but it looks like
that I will have to use middleware. I have already compared some products
and I think that J-Integra fits best - the problem is that its quite
expensive and this also increase the price of our product. Another way would
be to write a DLL and communicate with the DLL via JNI. This would be
cheaper, but my C / C++ skills arent very high and this solution would only
fit for this special case. The third possibillity would be to use an
existing implementation of a java calendar, but I havent found any suitable
calendars until now.

What do you think would be the best solution - anybody a different idea how
to solve this problem?


Thanks in advance!

Andreas

 

[Andreas Schachl]

...

I have to develop a Plug In for an already existing (java)
software, which allows me to take data out of the system
and display them in the outlook calendar. This Plug In
should (!!!) work on win32 and apple (apple is no
"must have").

[snipped alternatives]

What do you think would be the best solution - anybody
a different idea how to solve this problem?

A much simpler solution is to make ít Java-only! Since you can extract all
necessary data using only Java, you can do that and write a simple
ASCII-file using the .vcs (vCalendar) format.

The advantages with this approach is that the solution works on any
platform, with any Calendar-program that recognizes the vcs-format. Chances
are great that the suffixes .vcs and .ics are associated with their
Calendar-program. Then it's just to open the files, and the data is
automatically imported.

I have used this solution myself since our different users use so many
different calendars (Outlook, Palm/Palm Desktop on PC/Mac, iPod/iCal on Mac,
etc.).

You can read about the vCalendar-formats in the RFC:s:

http://www.imc.org/pdi/


// Bjorn A

Thx for the tip, but I wanted to use the outlook calendar only to
display the data from our main program, so that its very easy for
experienced Outlook users to work with our product.

 

[Eugene Toporov]

Hello Andreas!

For communication with Outlook I would like to use COM, but it looks like
that I will have to use middleware. I have already compared some products
and I think that J-Integra fits best - the problem is that its quite
expensive and this also increase the price of our product. Another way would
be to write a DLL and communicate with the DLL via JNI. This would be
cheaper, but my C / C++ skills arent very high and this solution would only
fit for this special case.

Are you sure you've evaluated all the bridges around?
I wanted to advice you take a look at JNIWrapper
(http://www.jniwrapper.com). It is a JNI bridge and besides the
recently released 2.0 Beta allows bridging with COM/ActiveX. The price
is far less than that for J-Integra.

Hope it helps,
EToporov