Another reason might be that the string looks like garbage. Maybe a character encoding issue - haven't run it on a mac, which I am now. It was definitely working on the big machine.
...
Yes, character encoding. For the purposes of test use
(unwind-protect
(let ((name (#"getName" next-in)))
(funcall fn (jss:new 'java.lang.string buffer 0 size "UTF-8") name))
(#"close" in-stream))
in jar-map, which gets the string as UTF-8. I need to think about what the right way to handle this in general. Presumably there is some way to figure out the character encoding...
-Alan