dynalink alternative for jdk8

[Paulo Lopes]

Hi everyone,

I'm working with eclipse vert.x project javascript support and one
thing we would like to achieve was to simplify our bindings code by
having what could be done with dynalink to provide "automatic"
conversion between:

JSObject <--> io.vertx.core.json.JsonObject

We do not want to introduce helper functions to the end user like:

var java_type_object = Java.type(...);

java_type_object.someMethod(to_native({k: 1}));

but we would like to have:

java_type_object.someMethod({k: 1});


Currently we have a code generator that writes a full wrapper for the
vert.x API that will do this translation, but this has several
limitations, we must force a very restricted set of types to be used in
public APIs, there's a build step for each module, introduces potential
bugs if the generated code is not correct.

After reading the Dynalink API and examples from JDK9 it seems that
this could be done with it since one could write a linker from JSObject
properties to JsonObject and vice-versa but this is not present on
JDK8.

Even though dynalink was present on JDK8 the service loader is not
present or at least should not be used.

So my question is, what alternatives/suggestions do you have to achieve
this?

I'm thinking of something like groovy metaprogramming but that would
also require dynalink, or not?

For the sake of completeness I must say that JsonObject/JsonArray do
not implement java.util.Map/java.util.List interfaces so one cannot
rely on the fact that nashorn would internally handle those for us.

Best regards,
Paulo