How to load and use JVM form other types of applications ?

Question

Hello
I have a site that runs with ASP and I would like to execute some java applications to output some of the pages.
I there a way to execute java programs in the JVM without having to create a new process running java.exe ?
Like using and ActiveX component or a special .dll from Sun. How does a web browser run applets ?
I can not use .jsp directly for my pages because my client also uses some custom language (MediaBase)
they bought that works only with ASP.
Thank you,
Timothy Madden,
Romania

Answer 1

Yes, or something like IPC with a service process, as Michael said.
First I wanted to know if JNI has an option the create a shared VM, since my client's web server has some other processes running that also run the JVM. Now it looks like JNI will load the JVM in-process, although the documentation says little about this, but the InitArgs structure has no 'is_shared' member.
But all these are complicated for some web page, difficult to invoke from a scripting language, and there is too much effort just to use some library that happens to be written in Java, which I use to export search results into an Excel workbook (the library is Apache POI). I mean I would do it, but my client will not understand the need for this effort. Than I also want some data transferred between my web script and the java application.
So I am going to stick to java.exe and create a new process on every hit, with the standard input, output and error files redirected to some vars in my script. At least until I find out more.
Thank you,
Timothy Madden,
Romania