How does a native driver differ from a Java driver?
The primary differences between a native driver and a Java driver are the native interfaces’ use of pointers and the need to dispose of XML documents that the native driver creates. In addition, a native driver can more easily cause DirXML and NDS to crash because the native driver runs in the NDS process space and DirXML does not have the benefit of the Java Virtual Machine to insulate DirXML and NDS from an errant driver. Note, however, that DirXML does take some precautions when calling into a native driver: All calls into the native driver are protected by a try-catch block that catches all exceptions. If an exception is caught by this try-catch block (e.g., the driver didn’t catch it), the driver is shut down. On Win32 this works well. On NetWare however, it does not work at all. At the time of this writing it is unknown how well this works on the Unix platforms. This mechanism cannot, however, protect against a native driver writing over process memory. Future versions of DirXML
