Difference between jna.jar and jna-platform.jar?

[RobertBColton]

This should be clarified in the README.md because I have looked all over online and can't seem to find the difference between these two downloads.

[cosmicdan]

JNA is the core stuff. Platform has all the platform-specific stuff like constants and interface mappings for supported OS's (though are not 100% comprehensive, as is expected).

You don't technically need the platform jar, but it will save you a lot of time.

Just browse the source tree at contrib/platform/ for all the stuff it has.

[RobertBColton]

Good enough for me, so platform just has a bunch of utility stuff. We can close this but you guys should still maybe add it to the README. Thanks! 👍

[cosmicdan]

Well, it is already documented here: https://github.com/java-native-access/jna/blob/master/www/PlatformLibrary.md But there’s no direct link to these document files, there’s a whole bunch in the www folder that aren’t linked from anywhere. Seems like a staging area or WIP. Maybe you guys (JNA maintainers) should look into using MkDocs? If you want to stick with doing documentation in markdown and just pushing changes to GitHub, you can setup a hook to generate nice documentation automatically to something like RadTheDocs.org. Or host the generated docs on GitHub Pages or something. But in the meantime, yeah - might be a good idea to just put a link to that www folder in the readme.

[matthiasblaesing]

I created #906 with added descriptions and links. In general: If you want to improve JNA, feel free to propose PRs and/or (for larger changes) start a discussion in the google group.

Just keep in mind: changes need to be sustainable in the long run.