JNI has been enhanced in v 1.4 to reflect a new feature of the java.nio package: direct buffers. The contents of a direct buffer can, potentially, reside in native memory outside of the ordinary garbage-collected heap. For information about direct buffers, please see New I/O APIs and the specification of the java.nio.ByteBuffer class.
The best sample of java.nio API is the JCanyon Demo. The jcanyon demonstration is a simple flight simulator which visualizes a large data set (roughly three hundred megabytes in size) using a slightly modified version of the free software OpenGLTM binding "OpenGL for Java" with a few minor additions to support java.nio direct buffers for holding geometric data.
