A pure Java DCOM Bridge with j-interop

For a past project I had to develop a Java DCOM bridge with j-interop (version 3.0) and in this post I want to share my findings on this topic.

j-interop is a free library for pure Java DCOM bridges to Windows WMI devices. Sadly there haven’t been any updates for about 2 years now, but for me this library worked magic.

Only requirements:

• Since we are using Java, the client side needs at least a JRE
• The Windows WMI device has to be DCOM enabled for the WbemScripting.SWbemLocator class. How this is done I explain in detail in this post.

First, you have to download the j-interop jar from here and add it to your project’s classpath.

Disable auto-registration

Be sure that auto-registration is disabled, by calling JISystem.setAutoRegistration(false); somewhere in your initial routines.

Windows will not allow remote fiddling with the registry keys through j-interop. If you do not disable auto-registration, you will run into Access Denied errors

Create DCOM Session

Next, for a DCOM connection, j-interop first has to create a JISession. For full access, this session is created with administrator credentials from the Windows WMI machine:

Create COM Server

Next, we need to create a JIComServer object from the WbemScripting.SWbemLocator class:

Connect to WMI namespace

WMI consists of multiple namespaces. You have to connect the WbemScripting.SWbemLocator object to one namespace before we can retrieve objects from it. Which namespace to connect to depends on what class you want to retrieve. In our examples we use the root\cimv2 namespace, which is used for Computer System Hardware Classes, Operating System Classes, Performance Counter Classes and WMI Service Management Classes. If you want to retrieve events from MSSQL server classes from running instances, the namespace is SQL.

Query performance counters

We can now use the WbemScripting.SWbemLocator for WQL (WMI Query Language) queries (similar to SQL syntax, but less powerful (no joins…)) to obtain machine performance counters (e.g., Memory/CPU usage, Network interface stats…) or listen for events (e.g., nny event from the Windows Event Viewer or thrown Events from self-made ASP applications…). For instance we could query the Disk IO performance:

Listen for WMI events

The WMI object attributes and methods that we can invoke are explained in the Microsoft WMI docs. Besides querying performance counters, we could also subscribe a listener to listen to events occuring on the Windows machine:

That’s it! We can now easliy remotely monitor our WMI target machine.