How to choose a Java-COM bridge?

java com
Daniel Rikowski picture Daniel Rikowski · Aug 23, 2010 · Viewed 17.4k times · Source

I have to create an application which automates Outlook and Word and I want to use Java for that task. (The only allowed alternative would be VB6, so...)

After a quick Google survey I found several libraries, but I'm not sure which one to use:

I have no idea how to compare these libraries and make an informed decision. It seems that COM4J is a little bit outdated, JACOB leaks memory (allegedly) and jacoZoom is commercial. Each and every one seems to require a lot of boilerplate code to perform a simple method call. (Which might be unavoidable given the design of COM)

Besides that I have no idea how to choose between one of them. Which one is the best?

Answer

Christopher picture Christopher · Aug 24, 2010

We use Jacob in production environment and it works out pretty well. Nevertheless the projects seems to be not very active.

Speaking of which: Activity seems to be an advantage for J-Interop. We tried the project as well and it seems to work out pretty good with even better logging messages. I think we might choose J-Interop for new projects.

COM4J seems to be outdated, you're right.

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