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Declare function from JNI

Is there any way to create native function from jni without creating dll? I mean like in python http://docs.python.org/2/extending/embedding.html
Section 5.4. Extending Embedded Python
I don't want to use dll exported functions.
Regards

You can embbed VM in a native application, call into Java from C/C++ then callback from Java back into C/C++. See the Invocation API in JNI documentation. This way there is no need for dynamic linking (DLLs). You can also dynamically generate classes in runtime by generating bytecode with native methods (e.g. with ASM) and then registering whatever C/C++ function pointers you need with RegisterNatives.

technically it is possible.
Around 6 or 8 years ago I saw a C++ implementation (it was at codeproject site presented), which created a JVM and did access Java classes. Isn't very popular, for very good reasons, are to many to enumerate here, but is possible.
I would strongly recommend to do the other side, exactly what you don't want: java invoke the dll or so, but to many reasons, but is up to you...

Perhaps JNA does what you want?

Best choice. Use .Net Dll in Java Application

I know three is some questions about this, but I've not found the exact response.
We have a .Net dll (C#) with no dependencies or p/Invoke. So it's a full .net platform library.
One of our clientes wants to use it in a Java Application.
What's the best choice?
I've been looking at jni4net wich could be a perfect solution, but it seems don't support generics in .Net (our dll uses lot of generics dictionaries and collections)
It's JNA the best choice?
Thanks in advance

I had a similar problem several years ago. I had a dll written in Delphi. (Delphi was a Pascal-based Windows app development tool sold by Borland.) I needed to call the dll from Java, but some of the dll functionss had parameters and return types that that were incompatible with Java. (As an interesting, if irrelevant, aside, Anders Hejlsberg, who invented C# for Microsoft, also invented Delphi for Borland.) Here is how I solved the problem.
1) I did use jni to allow my Java code to call a dll.
2) I wrote a thin wrapper dll in Delphi that was the actual dll called by my Java jni code. For those functions that were completely compatible with Java, the wrapper dll simply acted as a pass though, directly calling the actual dll functions and returning the return value. For those functions that were not compatible, the wrapper dll defined corresponding methods that were compatible with Java and did the appropriate translation from Java to Delphi before calling the actual dll.
3) I also wrote a thin wrapper object above my jni calls. Again, for the most part, the java wrapper directly made jni calls for those functions that were completely compatible between Java and Delphi. However, in my case, a few functions required that I pass in Delphi objects. So, what I did was define corresponding Java objects. The main purpose of my Java wrapper object was to take these Java objects, translate them into parameters that were compatible with my Delphi wrapper dll, and then make the apprropriate jni call. Also, for those dll functions which passed back an object, my java wrapper took the java-compatible return value from the jni call, and created and asssembled the appropriate object.
This may sound like a lot of work, but it really was not (and my dll had over 100 methods, and a dozen or so Delphi object types). When I was done, writing the Java application code that actually used the dll was very straight forward.
Regarding the generics, that could be a problem. But, if in real life, the number of object types you support is relatively small (and it often is), you can just write separate calls for each object type in your wrapper. (That is what those of us who remember Java 2 used to do before they invented generics and it worked just fine, even if it was a bit less elegant.) Your application Java code could stll use generics; the wrapper would make the appropriate call based on the actual type that was passed in.
Hopefully this will give you some ideas on how you might proceed.

To use .NET DLL in JAVA I would say that the best choice is to go with native bridge like Javonet. With such bridge all you have to do is just copy .NET dll to your JAVA project folder and load it with one method call and use the .NET objects like they were JAVA objects. You skip the whole native part and get a lot of built-in tools for data types conversion, subscribing events, garbage collector, exceptions and many others.
Sample code to use "Your.dll" could look like this:
Javonet.addReference("Your.dll");
NObject yourDotNetObject = Javonet.New("MyDotNetClass");
yourDotNetObject.invoke("FooMethod", arg1, arg2);
//out of the box you get also support for all types, arrays, generics etc
yourDotNetObject.generic(Javonet.getType("String")).invoke("Foo", "sample");
//such code could call following .NET method passing String as T
//void Foo<T>(T arg);
So as you see with semi-reflection syntax you get access to whole .NET world including any custom DLL or .NET framework classes. Manual solution is good but rather for learning then using in real project as it could take more time to solve all issue then your whole project needs ;)
For more samples check this:
http://www.javonet.com/quick-start-guide/

Calling Python in Java?

I am wondering if it is possible to call Python functions from Java code using Jython, or is it only for calling Java code from Python?

Jython: Python for the Java Platform - http://www.jython.org/index.html
You can easily call python functions from Java code with Jython. That is as long as your python code itself runs under jython, i.e. doesn't use some c-extensions that aren't supported.
If that works for you, it's certainly the simplest solution you can get. Otherwise you can use org.python.util.PythonInterpreter from the new Java6 interpreter support.
A simple example from the top of my head - but should work I hope: (no error checking done for brevity)
PythonInterpreter interpreter = new PythonInterpreter();
interpreter.exec("import sys\nsys.path.append('pathToModules if they are not there by default')\nimport yourModule");
// execute a function that takes a string and returns a string
PyObject someFunc = interpreter.get("funcName");
PyObject result = someFunc.__call__(new PyString("Test!"));
String realResult = (String) result.__tojava__(String.class);
As of 2021, Jython does not support Python 3.x

I think there are some important things to consider first with how strong you wish to have the linking between java and python.
Firstly Do you only want to call functions or do you actually want python code to change the data in your java objects? This is very important. If you only want to call some python code with or without arguments, then that is not very difficult. If your arguments are primitives it makes it even more easy. However if you want to have java class implement member functions in python, which change the data of the java object, then this is not so easy or straight forward.
Secondly are we talking cpython or will jython do? I would say cpython is where its at! I would advocate this is why python is so kool! Having such high abstractions however access to c,c++ when needed. Imagine if you could have that in java. This question is not even worth asking if jython is ok because then it is easy anyway.
So I have played with the following methods, and listed them from easy to difficult:
Java to Jython
Advantages: Trivially easy. Have actual references to java objects
Disadvantages: No CPython, Extremely Slow!
Jython from java is so easy, and if this is really enough then great. However it is very slow and no cpython! Is life worth living without cpython I don't think so! You can easily have python code implementing your member functions for you java objects.
Java to Jython to CPython via Pyro
Pyro is the remote object module for python. You have some object on a cpython interpreter, and you can send it objects which are transferred via serialization and it can also return objects via this method. Note that if you send a serialized python object from jython and then call some functions which change the data in its members, then you will not see those changes in java. You just need to remember to send back the data which you want from pyro. This I believe is the easiest way to get to cpython! You do not need any jni or jna or swig or .... You don't need to know any c, or c++. kool huh?
Advantages: Access to cpython, not as difficult as following methods
Disadvantages: Cannot change the member data of java objects directly from python. Is somewhat indirect, (jython is middle man).
Java to C/C++ via JNI/JNA/SWIG to Python via Embedded interpreter (maybe using BOOST Libraries?)
OMG this method is not for the faint of heart. And I can tell you it has taken me very long to achieve this in with a decent method. Main reason you would want to do this is so that you can run cpython code which as full rein over you java object. There are major major things to consider before deciding to try and bread java (which is like a chimp) with python (which is like a horse). Firstly if you crash the interpreter that's lights out for you program! And don't get me started on concurrency issues! In addition, there is allot allot of boiler, I believe I have found the best configuration to minimize this boiler but still it is allot! So how to go about this:
Consider that C++ is your middle man, your objects are actually c++ objects! Good that you know that now. Just write your object as if your program as in cpp not java, with the data you want to access from both worlds. Then you can use the wrapper generator called swig (http://www.swig.org/Doc1.3/Java.html) to make this accessible to java and compile a dll which you call System.load(dll name here) in java. Get this working first, then move on to the hard part!
To get to python you need to embed an interpreter. Firstly I suggest doing some hello interpreter programs or this tutorial Embedding python in C/C. Once you have that working, its time to make the horse and the monkey dance! You can send you c++ object to python via [boost][3] . I know I have not given you the fish, merely told you where to find the fish. Some pointers to note for this when compiling.
When you compile boost you will need to compile a shared library. And you need to include and link to the stuff you need from jdk, ie jawt.lib, jvm.lib, (you will also need the client jvm.dll in your path when launching the application) As well as the python27.lib or whatever and the boost_python-vc100-mt-1_55.lib.
Then include Python/include, jdk/include, boost and only use shared libraries (dlls) otherwise boost has a teary. And yeah full on I know. There are so many ways in which this can go sour. So make sure you get each thing done block by block. Then put them together.

It's not smart to have python code inside java. Wrap your python code with flask or another web framework to make it a microservice. This makes your java program able to call this microservice (e.g. via REST).
This approach is simple and it will save you tons of issues. And the codes are loosely coupled so they are scalable.
Updated on Mar 24th 2020:
According to #stx's comment, the above approach is not suitable for massive data transfer between client and server.
Here is another approach I recommended:
Connecting Python and Java with Rust(C/C++ also ok).
https://medium.com/#shmulikamar/https-medium-com-shmulikamar-connecting-python-and-java-with-rust-11c256a1dfb0

Several of the answers mention that you can use JNI or JNA to access cpython but I would not recommend starting from scratch because there are already open source libraries for accessing cpython from java. For example:
JEP
JPY

GraalVM is a good choice. I've done Java+Javascript combination with GraalVM for microservice design (Java with Javascript reflection). They recently added support for python, I'd give it a try especially with how big its community has grown over the years.
UPDATE June 2021
https://www.graalvm.org/reference-manual/python/ says
GraalVM provides a Python 3.8 compliant runtime. A primary goal of the GraalVM Python runtime is to support SciPy and its constituent libraries, as well as to work with other data science and machine learning libraries from the rich Python ecosystem. At this point, the Python runtime is made available for experimentation and curious end-users.

Here a library that lets you write your python scripts once and decide which integration method (Jython, CPython/PyPy via Jep and Py4j) to use at runtime:
https://github.com/subes/invesdwin-context-python
Since each method has its own benefits/drawbacks as explained in the link.
(3 modules: jep, Py4J, jython )

It depends on what do you mean by python functions? if they were written in cpython you can not directly call them you will have to use JNI, but if they were written in Jython you can easily call them from java, as jython ultimately generates java byte code.
Now when I say written in cpython or jython it doesn't make much sense because python is python and most code will run on both implementations unless you are using specific libraries which relies on cpython or java.
see here how to use Python interpreter in Java.

Depending on your requirements, options like XML-RPC could be useful, which can be used to remotely call functions virtually in any language supporting the protocol.

Jython has some limitations:
There are a number of differences. First, Jython programs cannot use CPython
extension modules written in C. These modules usually have files with the
extension .so, .pyd or .dll. If you want to use such a module, you should look
for an equivalent written in pure Python or Java. Although it is technically
feasible to support such extensions - IronPython does so - there are no plans
to do so in Jython.
Distributing my Python scripts as JAR files with Jython?
you can simply call python scripts (or bash or Perl scripts) from Java using Runtime or ProcessBuilder and pass output back to Java:
Running a bash shell script in java
Running Command Line in Java
java runtime.getruntime() getting output from executing a command line program

You can call any language from java using Java Native Interface

This gives a pretty good overview over the current options. Some of which are named in other answers. Jython is not usable until they decide to not implement Python 3. Many of the other projects are coming from the python side and want to access java. But there are a few options still, to name something which has not been named yet: gRPC

I have similar requirement, I think best solution is thrift for me(also a rpc solution), just run test passed successfully right now, and can use thrift-generator to gen thrift file from java interface, then gen python files and java client files from the thrift file

Wrapping C/C++ inside Java

I develop applications/programs in C/C++. I am more versed in these two languages and love being a C++ developer. I am wondering how to create a Java program that contains all my C++ code.
I mean, I would like to wrap all my C++ code (that is already developed) inside Java class. But clueless how to do it.
Please post your responses or methods/steps on integrating C++ inside Java.
(using JNI is the way, but I could not figure it out on www how to use it)
FYI, I use Eclipse IDE to develop.
How and what packages should I include in my project workspace?

Instead of JNI, or JNI with some assist from an automatic wrapper generator like SWIG, or even JNA, you might consider separating the C/C++ and Java into separate processes and using some form of IPC and/or Java's Process abstraction to call to a program written in C/C++. This approach abandons "wrapping," so in some sense it isn't an answer to this question, but please read on before down-voting. I believe that this is a reasonable answer to the broader issue in some cases.
The reason for such an approach is that when you call C/C++ directly from Java, the JVM is put at risk of any error in the native code. The risk depends somewhat on how much of the native code is yours and how much you link to third party code (and how much access you have to the source code of such third party code).
I've run into a situation where I had to call a C/C++ library from Java and the C/C++ library had bugs that caused the JVM to crash. I didn't have the third party source code, so I couldn't fix the bug(s) in the native code. The eventual solution was to call a separate C/C++ program, linked to the third party library. The Java application then made calls to many ephemeral native processes whenever it needed to call the C/C++ stuff.
If the native code has a problem, you might be able to recover/retry in Java. If the native code is wrapped and called from the JVM process, it could take down the entire JVM.
This approach has performance/resource consumption implications and may not be a good fit for your application, but it is worth considering in certain situations.
Having a separate application that exercises the functionality of the C/C++ code is potentially useful as a stand-alone utility and for testing. And having some clean command-line or IPC interface could ease future integrations with other languages.
As another alternative, you could get into native signal handling to mitigate the risks to the integrity of the JVM process if you like and stick with a wrapping solution.

If you want to call C++ from Java, you'll need to use JNI - Java Native Interface.
Be warned that you lose some of the benefits of the garbage collector, since it can't deal with your C++ objects, and your code won't be portable anymore.
Maybe you'd be better served by learning to write 100% Java and leaving C++ behind, but that's just a suggestion.

You can't "just wrap it", you have to write some C/C++ glue.
For starters, SWIG can do most of the works for you.

There are plenty of tutorials for doing exactly what you want to do. For example, check out: http://www.javamex.com/tutorials/jni/getting_started.shtml
There are also plenty of caveats of using JNI. I've recently started working with it (just for fun, really), and it tends to be a lot less fun than I had first anticipated.
First of all, you have to deal with cryptic code such as:
#include "test_Test.h"
JNIEXPORT jint JNICALL Java_test_Test_getDoubled(JNIEnv *env, jclass clz, jint n) {
return n * 2;
}
Second of all, it tends to downplay one of the primary reasons why you use Java in the first place: WORA (Write Once, Run Anywhere). As duffymo mentioned, there can also be issues with the garbage collector, but I think that in recent years, the JVM has gotten pretty smart about JNI integration.
With that said, to port all of your C++ code to JNI, you'd need to refactor your interfaces (and maybe even do some internal gymnastics). It's not impossible, but it's really not recommended. The ideal solution is just re-writing your code in Java.
With that said, you could also "convert" your code from C/C++ into Java programatically, and there are multitudes of such utilities. But, of course, machines are dumber than people and they are also bound to make mistakes, depending how complex your class is.

I would avoid JNI because it's tedious to write, verbose, and just an altogether pain. Instead I'd use JNA library which makes writing native integration so simple.
https://github.com/twall/jna/
Good luck.

You can write C++ code through JNI but there isn't a direct mapping from C++ classes to Java classes.
I've used JNI to fix problems found in the android SDK (specifically, an incredibly slow FloatBuffer.put implementation) and I may end up using it for some performance critical areas. My advice would be to be use it sparingly and in a duck in, do the performance critical stuff and leave, without doing any memory allocation if you can help it. Also, don't forget to measure your code to see if it really is faster.
Out of interest, what platform are you developing for? The only platform where it would make sense to wrap a lot of C++ code in a light java layer would be Android - on other platforms, just compile in C++ and have done with it.

JNI module is not a Java classes. It's C. Using JNI incur many restrictions and some Java environment doesn't support JNI well.
There is no supported way of "wrap my C++ code inside Java class" (EDIT: I mean, without JNI noway but JNI is problematic.)
You could investigate custom C++ compiler emit Java byte codes, but nobody (include me) will recommend this approach.

BridJ was designed on purpose for that (and it's supported by JNAerator, which will parse your C/C++ headers and spit out the Java bindings for you).
It is a recent alternative to JNA, with support for C++.

How do you bind a language (python, for example) to another (say, C++)?

I'm far from a python expert but I hear this one all the time, about its C/C++ bindings. How does this concept work, and how does Python (and Java) bind to C-based APIs like OpenGL? This stuff has always been a mystery to me.

Interpreters Written in C89 with Reflection, Who Knew?
I have a feeling you are looking for an explanation of the mechanism and not a link to the API or instructions on how to code it. So, as I understand it . . .
The main interpreter is typically written in C and is dynamically linked. In a dynamically linked environment, even C89 has a certain amount of reflective behavior. In particular, the dlopen(3) and dlsym(3) calls will load a dynamic (typically ELF) library and look up the address of a symbol named by a string. Give that address, the interpreter can call a function. Even if statically linked, the interpreter can know the address of C functions whose names are compiled into it.
So then, it's just a simple matter of having the interpreted code tell the interpreter to call a particular native function in a particular native library.
The mechanism can be modular. An extension library for the interpreter, written in the script, can itself invoke the bare hooks for dlopen(3) and dlsym(3) and hook up to a new library that the interpreter never knew about.
For passing simple objects by value, a few prototype functions will typically allow various calls. But for structured data objects (imagine stat(2)) the wrapper module needs to know the layout of the data. At some point, either when packaging the extension module or when installing it, a C interface module includes the appropriate header files and in conjunction with handwritten code constructs an interface object. This is why you may need to install something like libsqlite3-dev even if you already had sqlite3 on your system; only the -dev package has the .h files needed to recompile the linkage code.
I suppose we could sum this up by saying: "it's done with brute force and ignorance". :-)

The main general concept is known as FFI, "Foreign Function Interface" -- for Java it's JNI, for Python it's the "Python C API", for Perl it's XS, etc, etc, but I think it's important to give you the general term of art to help you research it more thoroughly.
Given a FFI, you can write (e.g.) C programs that respect it directly, and/or you can have code generators that produce such C code from metainformation they receive and/or introspect from code written in other languages (often with some help, e.g., to drive the SWIG code generator you typically decorate the info that's in a .h C header file with extra info that's SWIG-specific to get a better wrapper).
There are also special languages such as Cython, an "extended subset" of Python that's geared towards easy generation of FFI code while matching much of Python's syntax and semantics -- may often be the easiest way for mostly-Python programmers to write a Python extension module that compiles down to speedy machine code and maybe uses some existing C-callable libraries.
The ctypes approach is different from the traditional FFI approaches, though it self-describes as a "foreign function library for Python" -- it relies on the foreign code being available in a DLL (or equivalent, such as an .so dynamic library in Linux), and generates and executes code at run-time to reach into such dynamically loaded C code (typically all done via explicit programming in Python -- I don't know of ctypes wrappers based on introspection and ctypes-code generation, yet). Handy to avoid having to install anything special for simple tasks of accessing existing DLLs with Python, but I think it doesn't scale up as well as the FFI "linker-based" approaches (as it requires more runtime exertion, etc, etc). I don't know of any other implementation of such an approach, targeting other languages, beyond ctypes for Python (I imagine some do exist, given today's prevalence of DLL and .so packaging, and would be curious to learn about them).

Generally these languages have a way to load extensions written in C. The Java interface is called JNI (Java Native Interface). Python has comprehensive documentation about its extension interface.
Another option for Python is the ctypes module which allows you to work with dynamically loadable C libraries without having to write custom extension code.

The concepts below can be generalized relatively easily, however I'm going to refer specifically to C and Python a lot for clarity.
Calling C from Python
This can work because most lower level languages/architectures/operating systems have well-defined Application Binary Interfaces which specify all the low-level details of how applications interact with each other and the operating system. As an example here is the ABI for x86-64(AMD64): AMD64 System V Application Binary Interface . It specifies all the details of things like calling conventions for functions and linking against C object files.
With this information, it's up to the language implementors to
Implement the ABI of the language
you wish to call into
Provide an interface via the
language/library to access the
implementation
(1) is actually almost gotten for free in most languages due to the sole fact their interpreters/compilers are coded in C, which obviously supports the C ABI :). This is also why there is difficulty in calling C code from implementations of languages not coded in C, for example IronPython (Python implementation in C#) and PyPy (Python implementation in Python) do not have particularly good support for calling C code, though I believe there has been some work in regard to this in IronPython.
So to make this concrete, let's assume we have CPython (The standard implementation of Python, done in C). We get (1) for free since our interpreter is written in C and we can access C libraries from our interpreter in the same way we would from any other C program (dlopen,LoadLibrary, whatever). Now we need to offer a way for people writing in our language to access these facilities. Python does this via The Python C/C++ API or ctypes. Whenever a programmer writes code using these APIs, we can execute the appropriate library loading/calling code to call into the libraries.
Calling Python from C
This direction is actually a bit simpler to explain. Continuing from the previous example, our interpreter, CPython is nothing more than a program written in C, so it can export functions and be compiled as a library/linked against by any program we want to write in C. CPython exports a set of C functions for accessing/running Python program and we can just call these functions to run Python code from our application. For example one of the functions exported by the CPython library is:
PyObject* PyRun_StringFlags(const char *str, int start, PyObject *globals, PyObject *locals, PyCompilerFlags *flags)¶
Return value: New reference.
Execute Python source code from str in
the context specified by the
dictionaries globals and locals with
the compiler flags specified by flags.
The parameter start specifies the
start token that should be used to
parse the source code.
We can literally execute Python code by passing this function a string containing valid Python code (and some other details necessary for execution.) See Embedding Python in another application for details.

There are basically two ways of integrating c/c++ with python:
extending: accessing c/c++ from python
embedding: accessing the python interpreter from c/c++
What you mention is the first case. Its usually achieved by writing wrapper functions that serves as glue code between the different languages that converts the function arguments and data types to match the needed language. Usually a tool called SWIG is used to generate this glue code.
For an extensive explanation, see this tutorial.

For Perl, there are two ways to call C++ subroutines:
Perl XS (eXternal Subroutine) (See also Wiki) - allows calling subroutines from other languages (mainly, but not exclusively, C) from Perl by compiling C code into modules usable from Perl.
SWIG (Simplified wrapper and interface generator) is a software development tool that connects programs written in C and C++ with a variety of high-level / scripting languages including Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl and Ruby (though it seems SWIG's origins are bindings with Python).
This is a paper that goes into details of how SWIG works, if it was your interest to understand what happens under the hood.