Load DLL (using JNA) inside an OSGi bundle

Question

OSGi cannot find my DLL file, and I can\'t seem to figure out why.

Currently I have the DLL file (foo.dll) at the root of my bundle, I\'ve also tried ha

Answer 1

The problem is the specialised JNA loadLibrary call, which is not OSGi aware. When you invoke loadLibrary from an OSGi bundle, it will use the OSGi classloader (which is bundle aware) to find where the DLL is, and in this case, extract it out from the bundle and make it loadable via the System.loadLibrary() call against a specific location.

Since this JNA seems to be (a) not OSGi aware, and (b) superflous, why not just use System.loadLibrary() instead?

If you need to write both, then perform a System.loadLibrary() in the bundle's start() method in the BundleActivator, which will bring the native library in (you probably want to ensure that if it can't be loaded, the bundle can't be started in any case).