Objective-C/Java interaction

Question

I have some java code that I use on a windows machine that runs as a service and has a tray icon that I want to port to Mac OS X. From what I can tell there is no good way to make a menu bar icon using java, so I want to basically wrap my java code with objective-c so I can have a nice menu bar icon and still interact with the java code as I am able to when running the code on my windows box. Is there a good way to do this?

My java code makes web requests every so often so the main functionality I'm looking for is to start/stop the web client, as well as receive updates from the java code on the status of the web requests (more or less push notifications).

Thanks for your help everyone!

Answer 1

If all you're trying to do is get your application's icon displayed in the Dock & the Finder, you don't need to write an objective-C wrapper; all you need to do is bundle the Java code up in with the icons in an OS X "application bundle". See Apple's Java Deployment Guide

You might also want to look into the com.apple.eawt package (see questions/1319805/java-os-x-dock-menu ), which provides some features to allow a Java app to appear more like a native OS X application to the user (for example, supporting drag-and-dropping a file to the application icon).