STANDARDIZED INTERFACE BETWEEN JAVA VIRTUAL MACHINE CLASSES AND A HOST OPERATING ENVIRONMENT

A system and method are disclosed for a host platform interface (HPI), which defines a common set of functions implementing the native methods of Component Peer classes within the Java AWT. This allows the diverse native method implementations currently used in different versions of the AWT to be combined into a single body of source code, greatly improving code maintainability. Since the same source code defines a Component Peer class for each supported platform, changes or bug fixes need only be made in one body of code.