Activex from java application?

Question

Is it possible to easily embed ActiveX controls in Java application? Is it worth it. In my next project I should either use existing activex in Java app or have to reimplement everything from scratch, so I'm wondering what will be less hassle.

Answer 1

I don't think there's a way to do this without resorting to a third party library. (Or rolling your own, but you did say "easily".)

SWT (The "Standard Widget Toolkit") contains support for embedding ActiveX controls. SWT is an alternative to Swing, though there is a degree of interoperability between them.
Here's an example of embedding Windows Media Player in an SWT window.

Alternatively there's the Jacob project, though I haven't used that myself.

As for "is it worth it?" Well, I can say from experience that SWT makes it relatively easy, but unless your application can gracefully deal with not having them available, by relying on COM components you are losing the ability to run on multiple platforms that makes Java attractive in the first place.

Answer 2

It really depends on how much you are going to have to re-implement. The Jacob project is quite good (we use it extensively for automation of Excel and Word), but you have to really understand COM to use it, especially the vagaries of the IDispatch interface (very few people who use ActiveX / COM actually understand COM - they just rely on Microsoft's template generation).

If you are just trying to save yourself some typing for some simple DAO objects, you'll probably be better off re-implementing (heck, you could probably take the DTD and write a script to generate Java code for it).