title: Hybrid polylingual object model: an efficient and seamless integration of Java and native components on the Dalvik virtual machine.
abstract: JNI in the Android platform is often observed with low efficiency and high coding complexity. Although many researchers have investigated the JNI mechanism, few of them solve the efficiency and the complexity problems of JNI in the Android platform simultaneously. In this paper, a hybrid polylingual object (HPO) model is proposed to allow a CAR object being accessed as a Java object and as vice in the Dalvik virtual machine. It is an acceptable substitute for JNI to reuse the CAR-compliant components in Android applications in a seamless and efficient way. The metadata injection mechanism is designed to support the automatic mapping and reflection between CAR objects and Java objects. A prototype virtual machine, called HPO-Dalvik, is implemented by extending the Dalvik virtual machine to support the HPO model. Lifespan management, garbage collection, and data type transformation of HPO objects are also handled in the HPO-Dalvik virtual machine automatically. The experimental result shows that the HPO model outweighs the standard JNI in lower overhead on native side, better executing performance with no JNI bridging code being demanded.
authors.affiliation: Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China ; Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics, Nanchang 330029, China.
authors.forename: Yukun
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.affiliation: Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China ; Shanghai Kortide Century Technology, Shanghai 201203, China.
authors.forename: Rong
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: Academy of Space Technology, Nanchang University, Nanchang 330031, China.
authors.forename: Jingbo
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wei
authors.affiliation: Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China.
authors.forename: Xilong
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Pei
authors.affiliation: Shanghai Kortide Century Technology, Shanghai 201203, China.
authors.forename: Jing
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Cao
authors.affiliation: CSIRO, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia.
authors.forename: Prem
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Prakash Jayaraman
authors.affiliation: CSIRO, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia.
authors.forename: Rajiv
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Ranjan
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011381:Programming Languages