TeamDev Ltd has released JNIWrapper 3.0, a $149 payware library for invoking native API calls from Java without writing your own JNI code. It runs on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. I have not tried this myself, but it sounds like what JNI should have been. I'm intrigued. I'd definitely evaluate this if I were doing closed source development that needed to call the native API; but since I'm not, I won't. However if anyone who is does want to take alook and let me know what they find, I'll post it here.