INTRODUCTION

ONE of the biggest challenges of software engineering is to deal with the complexity involved in programming. There is a great need for good design that can lead to simpler way to solve the problems. This could be done using mixed languages, where the advantages of each constituent language can be used. There is an increasing research interest in the field of mixed language programming. Java offers several advantages over other languages, especially, the absence of pointer, explicit memory management, garbage collection, applet for graphical user interface through web browsers, etc. Due to its built in security mechanisms such as sand box for applets, it is especially suited for web-based network computing.

However, there are limitations for Java. To take advantage of the capabilities of other languages, Java has been integrated with some other languages. Java program itself has difficulty in accessing the hardware and lower level components of a computer. JNI allows Java classes to communicate with applications and libraries written in other languages such as C, C++ and assembly. However, there are limitations using JNI. We have developed ChJava for communicating between Java classes and C/C++ scripts. ChJava allows mixed language programming in both C/C++ and Java. So that applications can take advantage of salient features of both C/C++ and Java. As a superset of C, Ch can easily interface with hardware for

motion control. The application of ChJava for control of mechatronic systems is also illustrated in this article.