The core shared library is only used by Java. It is necessary to have the library libchm_java.so in a directory that is in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH for Java support. This shared object contains the core parsing logic for Chameleon. C++ users do not need this since Chameleon's C++ support under Unix is implemented by statically linking to the Chameleon library (libChameleon.a).

libchm_java.so has all the libraries that Chameleon uses statically linked into it. This includes the C runtime library for Python and the expat XML parser that Chameleon uses. There is no need for java applications using Chameleon to load in additional shared objects for these dependencies.

	The actual name of the shared library can be different for certain flavors of Unix. For example, for HPUX the name of the library is libchm_java.sl. Also some platforms use environmental variables other than LD_LIBRARY_PATH.