METHOD FOR GENERATING A SOFTWARE CLASS COMPATIBLE WITH TWO OR MORE INTERPRETERS

The invention provides a technique for generating a portable software class that includes native methods, i.e., a software class compatible with interpreters conforming to two or more different interfaces. Therefore, the method of the invention allows the development of code that simultaneously supports two or more native method interfaces. The portable software class references a plurality of interface libraries, each of which interfaces to native methods included in the class. While in any given situation all but one of the interface libraries are unused, the overhead of carrying these extra libraries is minimal. The interface libraries are preferably generated from a shared piece of user-generated code. According to another embodiment of the invention, a separate version of the user-generated interface code is generated for each interface library.