Native Bindings

Modern game development relies on many libraries (for physics, rendering, sound) and engines (complete systems for producing games). These libraries are mostly written in C and C++. Ideally most of these libraries could be ported into Java, however this might take some time. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to utilise these libraries now? Native bindings are a way to do this.

A native binding takes some compiled platform dependent library (normally referred to as the natives) and wraps it in a Java layer so it can be utilised by Java developers. Good examples of this a JOGL, LWJGL and ODEJava. The downside of natives is that these libraries may not be platform independent (although most work on the major 3 platforms - Win32, Linux and MacOS) and that they must be distributed with your game (increasing the size of the deliverable).

-- Main.kevglass - 24 Oct 2005