Thread: Interacting with OS

Originally Posted by keepStriving

I would like to know how can I go about interacting with OS so I can get information. For example if I have my program running in the background and I want to have a popup appear when battery level reaches a certain level or at a certain point in time defined by the laptop e.g. based on switchOn time or laptop time. .

The standard Java SE framework doesn't have functionalities to get e.g. battery infos, system processes, networking loads, etc...
You need a third party library. One I know (by name, never used) is the SIGAR API but at this moment I don't know if it handles battery infos.

If you are on a single specific O.S. and you need to access one or few "native" functions, it could be quite easy using JNA but you need good knowledge/documentation on the native function(s).


P.S. utility applications like that you have described, generally are not developed in Java but in languages more close to the system, e.g. C/C++, or (on Windows) Delphi or C#.
This doesn't mean that in Java is impossible ....

Originally Posted by keepStriving

I should learn C++.

Ok, but remember that Java is a clean, beautiful, secure programming language, with well defined semantics on many things (primitive data types, operators, memory management, threading, synchronization, etc...).

In C/C++ you don't have a well known (and portable) data type system, you don't have a "guarded" access to array elements (you can go out-of-bounds, causing from nothing, in the best/lucky case, to application crash, in the worst case) and arrays don't have a "length" property. C/C++ don't have, by itself, a garbage collection, you must be very very careful about when/where you release memory.
In C/C++ you don't have a clean/portable way to define a new thread and there isn't the beautiful synchronized keyword for mutual exclusion.
I could go on for many other issues.

In other words, if you are having, say, N troubles learning/programming in Java ...... in C/C++ you will have at least 40×N troubles!