gpg or gpgme?

[Jonathan Revusky]

Hi,

I posted this question earlier to gpg-user, and didn't get much of a 
response. I apologize to people who are on both lists and are seeing 
this again.

----

I have been charged with the task of creating a java wrapper API around 
gnupg.

When I saw that there was a shared library gpgme, and that it was in 
principle "made easy", I thought that the best thing to do would be to 
use JNI (Java native interface) to call routines in the gpgme shared 
library. However, once I realized that gpgme simply invokes in turn the 
gpg executable, and given the extreme PITA that working with JNI is, it 
now seems to be that the most appealing approach is just to use 
interprocess communication and invoke the gpg executable from java.

All that said, I would really appreciate any feedback on this topic. Are 
there advantages to using gpgme in this case that I am unaware of? I 
understand that, in principle, if you have other crypto 
engines/back-ends supported by gpgme, then an app that uses gpgme will 
automatically support those back-ends. But I don't think this is so 
important for us. Are there other aspects of this that I'm missing?

Best Regards,

Jonathan Revusky