As I understand it the ICU4JNI interface is deprecated as of ICU 3.8. However you have not provide an alternative way to use all the convertors previously surfaced via the JNI interface. I looked at both the latest 3.8.1 and the most recent beta of 4.0 and I do not see the LMBCS convertor. This is a seriously problem for my product, because the LMBCS convertor is critical to convert Lotus strings. Our only alternative is to use the JNI interface, which is extremely flawed. I looked at the code for the JNI interface and none of the native method calls are synchronized. This can cause a JVM hang in a multi-threaded Java environment. I'm wondering if there are any plans to fix this gap in support. In product development we are never able to deprecate or release a new version of our product without either supporting all the features of a previous release or providing an alternative. The lack of a LMBCS convertor in the past two releases of ICU4J seem like a major bug in the product.
