[quoted text, click to view] > has to call some MS Office [PowerPoint] internal methods,
> which only seems to be possible from either VBA or C#.
The Office methods are methods in COM objects and can be called from any language that supports COM. As we all know, Sun is/was not
very fond of the COM support MS offered in their Java implementation, so Sun does not support it.
You can get this COM (bridge) support from an other third parts like
http://www.intrinsyc.com/ for the Sun Java.
http://j-integra.intrinsyc.com/ With J-Integra the COM objects appears as normal Java objects.
There is a second bridge:
http://www.jnbridge.com/ However these brides have a serious price tag if this is for personal home enthusiast usage. I think they offer free trail versions.
[quoted text, click to view] > Can anybody suggest a way of Java calling VBA or C# ?
I have called .net from Java over RMI - SOAP - Remoring.net calls, using the free Axis Apache xml webservice api (wsdl)
http://ws.apache.org/axis/ . The downside is that this is veeeery slooooow, and it does only support a few primitives like int,
double, string etc, and you have to read and modify the generated java code.
[quoted text, click to view] > I do know how to call an executable from Java
> or Java interface with C/C++ through JNI.
A C++ call is probably what you should be looking more at.
A google search on "Automating MS-Office applications" gives us lots of hits. If you know C++ here is a power point example :
http://www.codeproject.com/com/ole_automation.asp Regards,
Lars-Inge Tønnessen
www.larsinge.com