JNI Types and Data Structures

Chapter   3

This chapter discusses how the JNI maps Java types to native C types.

Primitive Types

Table 3-1 describes Java primitive types and their machine-dependent native equivalents.

The following definition is provided for convenience.

#define JNI_FALSE  0 
#define JNI_TRUE   1 

The jsize integer type is used to describe cardinal indices and sizes:

typedef jint jsize; 

Reference Types

The JNI includes a number of reference types that correspond to different kinds of Java objects. JNI reference types are organized in the hierarchy shown in Figure 3-1.

In C, all other JNI reference types are defined to be the same as jobject. For example:

typedef jobject jclass; 

In C++, JNI introduces a set of dummy classes to enforce the subtyping relationship. For example:

class _jobject {}; 
class _jclass : public _jobject {}; 
... 
typedef _jobject *jobject; 
typedef _jclass *jclass; 

Field and Method IDs

Method and field IDs are regular C pointer types:

struct _jfieldID;              /* opaque structure */ 
typedef struct _jfieldID *jfieldID;   /* field IDs */ 
 
struct _jmethodID;              /* opaque structure */ 
typedef struct _jmethodID *jmethodID; /* method IDs */ 

The Value Type

The jvalue union type is used as the element type in argument arrays. It is declared as follows:

typedef union jvalue { 
    jboolean z; 
    jbyte    b; 
    jchar    c; 
    jshort   s; 
    jint     i; 
    jlong    j; 
    jfloat   f; 
    jdouble  d; 
    jobject  l; 
} jvalue; 

Type Signatures

The JNI uses the Java VM’s representation of type signatures. Table 3-2 shows these type signatures.

For example, the Java method:

long f (int n, String s, int[] arr); 

has the following type signature:

(ILjava/lang/String;[I)J 

Modified UTF-8 Strings

The JNI uses modified UTF-8 strings to represent various string types. Modified UTF-8 strings are the same as those used by the Java VM. Modified UTF-8 strings are encoded so that character sequences that contain only non-null ASCII characters can be represented using only one byte per character, but all Unicode characters can be represented.

All characters in the range \u0001 to \u007F are represented by a single byte, as follows:

The seven bits of data in the byte give the value of the character represented.

The null character ('\u0000') and characters in the range '\u0080' to '\u07FF' are represented by a pair of bytes x and y:

x:

The bytes represent the character with the value ((x & 0x1f) << 6) + (y & 0x3f).

Characters in the range '\u0800' to '\uFFFF' are represented by 3 bytes x, y, and z:

x:

The character with the value ((x & 0xf) << 12) + ((y & 0x3f) << 6) + (z & 0x3f) is represented by the bytes.

Characters with code points above U+FFFF (so-called supplementary characters) are represented by separately encoding the two surrogate code units of their UTF-16 representation. Each of the surrogate code units is represented by three bytes. This means, supplementary characters are represented by six bytes, u, v, w, x, y, and z:

u:

The character with the value 0x10000+((v&0x0f)<<16)+((w&0x3f)<<10)+(y&0x0f)<<6)+(z&0x3f) is represented by the six bytes.

The bytes of multibyte characters are stored in the class file in big-endian (high byte first) order.

There are two differences between this format and the standard UTF-8 format. First, the null character (char)0 is encoded using the two-byte format rather than the one-byte format. This means that modified UTF-8 strings never have embedded nulls. Second, only the one-byte, two-byte, and three-byte formats of standard UTF-8 are used. The Java VM does not recognize the four-byte format of standard UTF-8; it uses its own two-times-three-byte format instead.

For more information regarding the standard UTF-8 format, see section 3.9 Unicode Encoding Forms of The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0.