[libextractor] libextractor, java, windows

[Steve Whitlatch]

Hello libextractor  developers, 

Thank you for the libextractor package. I am looking for an alternative to
my current solution for mime-type checking.

I have many questions about libextractor, but if you will answer just a few,
I hope to figure out the rest on my own.

The libextractor-0.5.14.zip package is a binary package, but is it a cygwin
binary package? Meaning, does it require cygwin? The libextractor.pc file in
that package seems to indicate that the package is not a cygwin package as
the libextractor.pc file contains no value for "prefix=" (it's blank). So it
expects not to be installed in /usr or /usr/local, correct? If not requiring
cygwin, then I suppose that extract.exe should work from a DOS command line,
but it does not and gives the error: "The application failed to initialize
properly . . .". 

I tried to compile libextrator from source in  cygwin myself but no joy. In
Linux, no problems, everything OK. The java package seems to have installed
correctly too. That is what I am actually after.

Except, I need something like a set of javadocs so that I know what methods
are available and the method signatures that I can call. How do I get that?
I was never much of a C programmer to begin with and now it has been many
years. Reading the C code is not a good choice for me. I am looking to be
able to do something like: 
    String returnedMimeType = libextractorObject.getMimeType(byte[])

Send a file as a byte array and get back the mime-type as a String. Can I do
that with libextractor via Java?

I need something like javadocs. How do C programmers know what function
signatures are available in a library? I don't think I ever knew. 

I am looking for a faster, more thorough alternative to a java package
called jmimemagic and I am hoping that libextractor might be it. I work in
both windows and Linux, so I am hoping to get libextractor ready to be
called from Java on both. 

Thanks, 

Steve Whitlatch