Thread: Getting list of Apps in java

Are you talking about a task the operating system would do for you?
Task manager handles executable applications at the time of viewing it.

I'm a little confused as to what you mean. You can run code profiler through
the IDE but I doubt that's what you want either.

Wishes Ada xx

Are you trying to get a list of processes running on the machine? It's not a very Java'ery thing to do because the solution depends on the platform (windows, mac, linux, etc). There is no platform independent way of doing this. On Linux I would make a system call to ps -e

Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("ps -e");

whereas on Windows I would execute tasklist.exe

So basically you want to write a Java application that displays to you
that the main method is running?

Wishes Ada xx

Right - so you want to write a Java application that when executed, will
display something like:

Execution begins...
 
Application Name: Windows Media Player v.12 - Running
Application Name: Microsoft Notepad Text Writer - Running

Wishes Ada xx

You are going to have a hard time with that. The operating systems task manager only care about processes. A process can have zero, one or many windowed applications associated with it and in odd cases like chrome, many processes associated with the one window. An exact solution would require poking around in the low level windows bindings for each process, a task that C# for windows or C for linux would be better suited for.

A way to cheat the results you are after would be to create a whitelist of processes such as chrome.exe, notepad.exe, etc and compare it against the result of ps -el or taskmanager.exe. It's an order of magnitude more simple but requirements the you have a list of all the applications you are interested in.

Originally Posted by Alex Stup

So, is it not possible to get the list like my requirements?

Like Christopher said previous, it is possible, but it's going to require a lot of low level
digging and you may even have to re-consider if Java if the best language for this type of application.
Low level system work is not what Java was designed for, being a high level language.

Another thing you may have to look out for is permissions created by software vendors. Some
OS specific tasks might have access blocks to prevent hacking.

Can I also ask, what is the purpose of this request in general

Wishes Ada xx

C# has more or less this capability, this might be what you want:

Display Running application list of desktop using c# - Stack Overflow

If you want the Java version, I would follow Cornix's advice.

Wishes Ada xx