JNI is extremely tedious. Not only do you have to have a native library built for every platform you support, you also have to manually convert between Java and

JNI is extremely tedious. Not only do you have to have a native library built for every platform you support, you also have to manually convert between Java and C representations of things. A lot of glue code for which there are no generators (I think). JNA is better, it still relies on JNI, but uses a tiny stub library to allow you to link to and call arbitrary functions from C dynamic libraries in pure Java. This feature is basically JNA, but more efficient and built into the JVM itself.