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Java AWT Robot - how to read item text / label?

I need to select appropriate option from the popup window. Unfortunately, it is not the popup displayed by the web page, so I cannot use Selenium framework for that purpose.
As I checked, it is possible to navigate to different option by pressing arrow keys. Thus keyPress and keyRelease​ from Java AWT Robot should work for me perfectly to select option and confirm the selection by pressing Enter key.
Unfortunately, I do not see a method to read currently selected item text. Without that I cannot find appropriate option. Is it possible to read item label using Java AWT Robot?

If the target application is another java application, then you should be able to get a reference to the component hierarchy and traverse it until you find the text field & label in question.
Assuming it's not a java application, then I don't believe it's possible to do this - at least directly. Robot just provides mouse / keyboard input, but you could use it combined with other classes in the toolkit to at least partially solve your problem.
Use the Robot methods keyPress & keyRelease to input CTRL-A. Then CTRL-C.
Once the text is in the clipboard, you could read it using Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getSystemClipboard().getData(DataFlavor.stringFlavor)
You might be able to use the same approach for a text label, assuming it is selectable.
This question is talking about using java.awt.Robot to alter text in another program (MS excel), but it might provide you some additional ideas for tackling the problem:
How can I select text in another application with java.awt.robot (example: shift+home)

Java KeyBindings not working after entering text in jTextField?

Basically, I have a java program that acts like a media player, PLAY PAUSE FAST FORWARD options etc.
Which also have keybindings.
However, in another JPanel I also have a JTextField that allows the user to enter some text to act as commentary.
If the user decides to write some text, then this JTextField is focused and they key bindings don't work anymore.
But if I did setFocusable(false) to all containers and child containers, the user won't be able to enter text into the JTextfield.
How do I solve this?

JComponent#getInputMap uses WHEN_FOCUSED by default.
Depending on your needs you can use WHEN_ANCESTOR_OF_FOCUSED_COMPONENT or WHEN_IN_FOCUSED_WINDOW to change the level of focus you component needs in order to respond to key input
See JComponent#getInputMap(int) and How to Use Key Bindings for more details

Format an editable textarea

At the moment I try to find a method to create a TextArea that I can edit and simply (without cheating) apply syntax highlighting to. Is that possible without the need of a custom Component? I already managed to format a text using a JEditorPane, but I am not sure how to implement that the text is dynamicly highlighted... And that efficiently. Is that possibly without an enormous amount of coding?

You can't use a JTextArea since it does not support text attributes.
Instead you can use a JTextPane. Read the section from the Swing tutorial on Text Component Features for more information and examples.

Getting a Swing to read input without a submit button

This is for an assignment so responses should not contain the code written for me.
I have written a program that is essentially an auto-complete program. It takes a word and returns the best matches.
I am trying to write a front end for it in swing(which I have no experience in) and want my front end to do the following: I want the input box to constantly be reading for user input, feeding that value to the other program, and returning the matches immediately in a drop down box, as, say, Google does. I can't seem to find any information on how to do this, all the intro tutorials use a submit button.
Can anyone explain to me how this would be done, or point me to a resource that could explain it? Again, please don't write the code for me, I don't want to unwittingly cheat on my assignment.

If you are using a JTextField, you could register a document listener on it.

If your input box is a JTextField, you can add a DocumentListener (this is a good tutorial) to capture character entries.

I think that no one from answerers ..., I'm only about Don't reinvent the wheel
1) use JTable with one (or two if is about Dictionary) Column and with basic implmentation for Sorting and Filtering (example with filtering from JTextField is in the Tutorial), JTable could be most complex from JComponents and there is everything (quite easilly) possible
2) use AutoComplete JComboBox / JTextField
3) use SwingX Decorator with JXList or JXTable
4) if you needed redirect output to the separate window then use JDialog / JWindow for popup window

One approach could be:
Attach a handler to detect a key press on the text box.
Grab the text from the box, and construct a "lookup" event which is runnable and submit this to some form of service which will dispatch it at some point in the future (hint: ExecutorService, Future)
Save this handle, and if the key press event happens again, cancel the previous and submit a new one.
When the event executes in the future and returns the result, popup a panel which displays the list of items.

How can I create an AutoComplete popup in a JTextPane in Java?

I am creating a SQL editor. I am using JTextPane for the editor. I want to implement AutoCompletion for table name etc. like Eclipse.

I think the appropriate class for displaying info on top of another component is JPopupMenu, which already handles layering correctly to display itself. JPopupMenu has a show() method that takes its 'parent' component as an argument, and it will show itself in that component's coordinate space. Since you want to display a selection of terms for the user to choose from, a menu seems appropriate.
To check for text changes, you'd add a DocumentListener to the document that's wrapped by the JTextPane; you can access it using getDocument().
To find out where the cursor (actually, the caret) is, you can use getCaretPosition(). That returns the caret's position within the text stream as an int. You can use modelToView() to translate that position to actual (x,y) coordinates. That in turn will tell you where to show your menu.
You can use addKeyListener() to catch keyboard events on your JTextPane, like hitting Ctrl-Space.
The combination of all that should allow you to do what you're looking to do.

You can also use http://fifesoft.com/autocomplete/. You can install it on any JTextComponent.

For things like this you probably should consider layered panes so your auto-complete suggestions appear in the correct place and z-order.
Furthermore you will have to look for changes in the JTextPane to know when the user is typing and you will need a parser that understands what is typed so you can offer the feature only at appropriate points.
It's not quite clear what exactly your problem is and what you got so far.

I achieved this by adding a key listener to the JTextPane and checking for CTRL + Space keystrokes. When the appropriate key combo was detected the listener went off and looked up the list of possible matches based on the characters directly to the left of the cursor at the time of the key press and found the best matches and displayed them to the user in a JPopup. If there was an exact match then it simply replaced the partial text with the match. If no matches were found an option was given to the user to add the text that they had already typed, edit it and record it into the list of acceptable data.

We use jide. They have a lot of components that help you do this kind of thing really easily