com4j Garbage Collection and Reference Counting
A life cycle of a COM object is governed by reference counting, while that of a Java object is governed by the garbage collection. This document explains how com4j handles this difference.
When does a COM object get released?
By default, a proxy object releases a reference to a COM object shortly after the JVM figures out that the proxy itself can be garbage collected. This hides the detail of the life-cycle management from user applications, but the downside is that you can't generally predict when a COM object will be deallocated.
Releasing COM objects earlier
User applications can explicitly call Com4jObject.dispose method to release a reference to the COM object earlier. Once this method is called, the proxy object will become "diposed", and all successive calls to any of its COM methods will fail with IllegalStateException.
Using ComObjectListener
Another way for applications to manage COM object life-cycle is to use ComObjectListener. A listener can be register to the current thread, and if registered, it will receive a callback each time a new com4j proxy is created.
This is useful when your application has a code block in which the COM access is confined. The idea is to keep track of all the COM objects and then dipose them all (except a few that outlive the scope) after the code block is done. See the javadoc of ComObjectCollector for more about this.
This is useful for larger applications where calling dispose method on individual objects is too tedious.