Coding With the C++ v3 Proxy Types Tutorial

The purpose of this tutorial is to introduce you to the basics of writing C++ applications that use C++ v3 Proxy Types.

The v3 moniker stems from Codemesh's C++ runtime library that has to be compatible with the proxy types because the proxy types delegate most of their work to that runtime library. The runtime library is currently at major version 3, hence the v3 label.

We strive to make the C++ proxy types as faithful to their underlying Java types as possible, but that does not mean that there aren't any pitfalls. Some surprises are simply unavoidable. For example, there is simply no way you will ever be able in C++ to use the .class suffix to refer to a type; class is a reserved name and cannot be used like that. So how do you write C++ code that uses a Java type instance?

This tutorial will hopefully answer this and all similar questions that you might run into while using the C++ v3 proxy types.

Prerequisites

The focus of this tutorial is to introduce you to writing code with proxy types, not necessarily to teach you how to configure the application so it will actually run. We will have a lesson on how to configure your C++ project and as one of the tests we'll try to run the application you built but another tutorial deals with the application's runtime configuration in much more detail.

You should have access to a properly set up C++ compiler if you are going to try to follow the step-by-step instructions but you can also just read the lessons, in which case a C++ compiler is not necessary.

Lesson Plan