Rafal Rusin's blog: 2012

Recently, I stumbled upon JCGO, an interesting project, which translates Java 1.4 code into C.
In this article, I show how to create a native Windows app out of a small Java app.

The Java app I will use is NetCat (https://github.com/rafalrusin/netcat). You can download precompiled executable, netcat.exe, from https://github.com/rafalrusin/netcat/downloads.

So the first step is to download all dependencies. I will use MinGW, MinGW GCC, jcgo-lib-1_14.tar.gz, jcgo-src-1_14.tar.bz2, classpath-0.93 (http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/classpath/classpath-0.93.tar.gz) and Java sources for the app with dependent libraries: https://github.com/rafalrusin/netcat, commons cli 1.2 (http://commons.apache.org/cli/download_cli.cgi). You need to put all this in the same directory, so it'll have structure like this:

auxbin
classpath-0.93
commons-cli-1.2-src
dlls
goclsp
src
jcgo
jcgo.exe
jcgo.jar
libs
miscsrc
netcat
out
rflg_out
stdpaths.in

Then, you need to run Java to C translator by using command:

jcgo.exe -sourcepath netcat/src -sourcepath commons-cli-1.2-src/src/java netcat.NetCat @stdpaths.in -d out

Initializing...

Analysis pass...

Output pass...

Writing class tables...

Creating main file...

Parsed: 293 java files (2699 KiB). Analyzed: 3067 methods.

Produced: 640 c/h files (3769 KiB).

Contains: 1490 java methods, 4119 normal and 288 indirect calls.

Done conversion in 1 seconds. Total heap size: 36572 KiB.

Next step is to compile it into final executable. Following command does this:

gcc -DJCGO_INET -DJCGO_NOFP -DJCGO_WIN32 -DJCGO_THREADS -I src/include/ -I src/include/boehmgc/ -I src/native/ out/Main.c -o netcat.exe libs/x86/mingw/libgcmt.a -lws2_32

I used some switches, which are suitable for this particular app. For example, by default JCGO doesn't use multithreading or networking. This has to be enabled explicitly.

And that's it. Now you can try out the app by calling google.com, like this:

$ netcat.exe google.com -p 80

Connecting to google.com port 80

GET

HTTP/1.0 302 Found

Location: http://www.google.pl/

Cache-Control: private

Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Set-Cookie: PREF=ID=2f3085ac38771e98:FF=0:TM=1345885031:LM=1345885031:S=8A-IkreMgCogMsey; expires=Mon, 25-Aug-2014 08:57:11 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.com

Set-Cookie: NID=63=O_QZ4bDrzYNiiE0DY8RT-34c_pGt_OZagP3gzrzqCAx_Xo2kO7s9zVrUOx7FVz4TyAEY7Wx9UhglYZSX9UHSdzT7c9mUKzfkJFp5lk5FyfiMIcKITLhgSX4__3QwEYBS; expires=Sun

, 24-Feb-2013 08:57:11 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.com; HttpOnly

P3P: CP="This is not a P3P policy! See http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151657 for more info."

Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2012 08:57:11 GMT

Server: gws

Content-Length: 218

X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block

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<TITLE>302 Moved</TITLE></HEAD><BODY>

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The document has moved

<A HREF="http://www.google.pl/">here</A>.

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I like the approach of translating Java code into C, because compared to other tools, which generate C++ code, this is more suitable for embedded devices. For example it is possible to generate code for iOS, because Objective C is a superset of C.

One feature I would like to see though is to be able to use reference counting instead of full gc. This is because one of the advantages of C over Java is that it doesn't have GC hangs. So then the programmer would have to make sure there's no cycles in orphaned object structure.

Update: Ivan Maidansky, an author of JCGO, has put some interesting comments regarding this article. In particular, he is aware of some apps in Apple Store, which do this kind of translation. Also, reference counting is discouraged due to multithreading issues. These comments can be found here: https://github.com/ivmai/JCGO/issues/2

Recently, I tried to run netcat under Windows and I failed to compile it. So I decided to write a simple equivalent in Java, which works under all platforms.

NetCat is a very simple and useful tool, which allows to see contents of TCP/IP requests, like HTTP etc., both server and client side. With NetCat it is possible to either set up TCP/IP listener on a port and receive data or send TCP/IP request to remote server.

The code and executable for Java version of NetCat is available on GitHub:
http://github.com/rafalrusin/netcat/downloads

I used Jakarta Commons CLI to handle commandline parameters. The code is as simple as that:

In order to handle stream I/O I implemented a simple StreamTransferer class like this:

The only issue I had was that whenever I closed Java I/O stream using OutputStream.close(), it was closing the whole socket. So I couldn't receive any response back from server. So instead of doing that I had to use Socket shutdownOutput method, like in the code below.

It worked perfectly then.

So it is possible to send HTTP GET requests to google using this tool. In order to do that, you need to connect to google.com and type GET and enter. CTRL+Z and enter is for closing input stream under Windows. CTRL+D is for Linux. The example looks like below:

Rafal Rusin's blog

Saturday, August 25, 2012

How to create a native Java App

Saturday, May 19, 2012

NetCat in Java

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