Usually, when new versions of Java are released, we at JNBridge don’t have much to do.  The features generally don’t have an impact on what JNBridgePro does, and things just work.  Sometimes, as with variable-length argument lists (introduced in Java 5), they are simply syntactic sugar and are automatically proxied into their underlying form (an array).  Other times, new features occur behind the scenes (for example, lambda expressions in Java 8) and are never exposed to .NET users through proxies, so JNBridgePro doesn’t need to worry about them.

Java 8, however, contains two new features, static interface methods and default interface methods, that do affect JNBridgePro functionality. Both features are designed to improve usability of the language (whether or not they do is debatable, but that’s a topic for another blog post).  Static methods in interfaces are designed to add additional functionality to an interface, in the same way that static field constants have existed in Java interfaces in the past.  Default interface methods are intended to spare users from having to incorporate common implementations of certain interface methods; only unusual implementations need to be supplied.  Both static and default interface methods cause interfaces to act like abstract classes, with greater flexibility.

For JNBridgePro, the problem is that interfaces in most .NET languages (including C#) do not have these features, and attempting to map these features directly during proxy generation will cause exceptions to be thrown, or will cause DLLs to fail verification at run time.  In order to make these new Java 8 features available to .NET developers, we had to make some changes in the way that these new members of Java interfaces are mapped to their .NET proxies.

It was easy to determine how to map static interface methods. We’ve already had to deal with the problem with mapping static interface constants to proxied .NET interfaces, because most .NET languages don’t allow these, either.  For each proxied Java interface, we automatically create an associated helper class (called IConstants, when the original interface is I), which contains the static constants. Starting with JNBridgePro 7.2, static interface methods are also proxied into those same helper classes.

Handling default interface classes is a bit more involved. Not only are C# interfaces not permitted to include actual method implementations, “default” or not, but any C# class implementing an interface must account for every method in the interface, even if a Java class implementing the underlying interface doesn’t need to account for default interface methods.  This means that when we proxy a Java class that implements an interface with default methods, and that uses the default method, the proxied class will fail .NET verification because it doesn’t account for all methods in the implemented interface. To remedy this, starting with JNBridgePro 7.2 if a Java class relies on a default interface method and doesn’t actually provide an implementation of its own, then the .NET proxy will include an implementation of the method, which when called will result in a call to the default method. This should be transparent to the user.