About native library loader

The native library loader is a utility that assists with loading native libraries from Java. It provides the ability to painlessly identify, extract and load the correct platform-specific native library from a JAR file.

License

Simplified BSD License

Usage

Add dependency

Search Maven Central for latest version and add a dependency to your pom.xml.

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.scijava</groupId>
    <artifactId>native-lib-loader</artifactId>
    <version>x.y.z</version>
</dependency>

Package native libraries

Native libraries should be packaged into a single jar file, with the following directory & file structure:

/natives
  /linux_32
     libxxx[-vvv].so
  /linux_64
     libxxx[-vvv].so
  /osx_32
     libxxx[-vvv].dylib
  /osx_64
     libxxx[-vvv].dylib
  /windows_32
     xxx[-vvv].dll
  /windows_64
     xxx[-vvv].dll
  /aix_32
     libxxx[-vvv].so
     libxxx[-vvv].a
  /aix_64
     libxxx[-vvv].so
     libxxx[-vvv].a

Here "xxx" is the name of the native library and "-vvv" is an optional version number. Depending on the platform at runtime, a native library will be unpacked into a temporary file and will be loaded from there.

The version information will be grabbed from the MANIFEST.mf file from "Implementation-Version" entry. So it's recommended to follow Java's package version information convention.

Load library

If you want to load 'awesome.dll' (on Windows) or 'libawesome.so' (on Linux or AIX), simply do like this ...

NativeLoader.loadLibrary("awesome");