Java Swing and Windows XP touch events - java

I'm trying to find a concrete yes for some assumptions I have about developing a Java Swing app to be run on a Windows tablet device (I believe it'll be running Windows XP). We have a demo we are writing and we're leveraging previous experience with Java Swing to write the UI and I just want to make sure that touch events in Windows are treated like mouse clicks, is this true? Does anyone have any direct experience writing Swing apps for Windows tablets? The target device is http://www.amazon.com/Promotion-X70EX-3GP-Accessory-Standard/dp/B002MZZX76.
Also, wondering if the soft keyboard will automatically be activated when focus is given to a JTextField and other Swing data entry fields.
Thanks!

We developed an application in Swing which runs well on Windows XP tablets. Yes, touches are treated just like mouse clicks. However, I can only confirm this for basic touch events, e.g. clicking on a button. I can neither confirm nor deny whether they work for more complex gestures.
As for the soft keyboard, I cannot remember whether this works or not. In the end our users ended up using the tablet just like a regular laptop, i.e. with the keyboard not the touch screen. This is mostly due to the amount of text they need to enter in the application.

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How to make sure the user does not able to do any other thing once my window is shown in linux/mac [duplicate]

How can I disable OS-level keyboard shortcuts (e.g. Alt-Tab, Ctrl-Alt-Left/Right, etc.) on a [Ubuntu] Linux machine? I'm developing a full-screen Java Swing app and don't want the user to be able to task switch away from the program arbitrarily. It's not enough to toggle the "always on top" flag; users mustn't be allowed to switch workspaces, migrate focus or any other such things. The machine must function normally before and after the application is executed. Google says that this will require JNI or JNA but I'm looking for a bit more hand-holding.
There's no point in trying to do this in your application because any of these changes are going to need to be handled by X11 and/or the window manager since those are what respond to the commands. Assuming that you have control of the platform, choose a window manager which supports a kiosk mode. Then use the window manager's settings to start your application and enter kiosk mode.
Options for window managers which can do this include KDE or twm-kiosk.
(And if you don't have control of the platform, you're not likely to be able to have your application intercept things like ctrl-alt-backspace anyway.)
Edit:
In response to a scaled-down version of the question in which he's willing to let things like ctl-alt-backspace go and just wants most of the keys including alt-tab or other similar application switching key combinations, the following should work:
You should be able to do this using XLib's XGrabKeyboard method through JNI. This Java/XLib JNI keypress capture tutorial should be a good starting point. However, it uses XGrabKey which just passively listens for keys and does not prevent other applications from receiving them. You'll instead want to use XGrabKeyboard which actively snags all of the normal keyboard events (which, if the premise of this StackOverflow question is correct, includes the task switching keys).
Note that as a side-effect, key capture in Swing will also probably stop working because your Swing windows are going to be separate from the window you create in C. As such, you will probably have to use your JNI interface to get key presses to your program when needed. (Although I would definitely advise testing it first before writing the code.) You might be able to avoid this if you can get the window using Java AWT Native Interface to get the window ID. (Note that Swing is built on top of AWT, so this will work for Swing.) However, I'm not sure how to do this. It looks like you might be able to navigate the window tree by getting the root window from the Display and going from there to find your Window, but it's all kind of weird. It would be nice if the AWT NI just told you the window ID, but it doesn't look like it does that.
As this warning Reminder: XGrabKeyboard is not a security interface notes, this doesn't make it impossible for other programs to see the keys, but it seems likely that window managers will not be using XQueryKeyMap so it is likely to prevent task switching.

Java Robot get focus of other application

I have a java Robot program ,where it can type a word on notepad,word etc,.
But the problem is i am not getting focus of window application, when i tried to enter the cursor in its textbox manually by using ALT-TAB,
And the application is not available in the list ,while doing ALT-TAB ,
also it is not visible in Task Manager-> Application tab
but, it is available with Processes tab of Task Manager.
Is there any solution to get focus of that windows application for keyPress using Java Robot.
Also ,in some other PC's ,i am getting Clear Focus of the application when i put the cursor manually after running the java robot program. I have installed JDK1.6 in all my PC's. It is not working only in my PC's.
Thanks in advance!!
I think that your best bet is to use JNA to allow you to make system calls.
Assuming a Windows program, you could use JNA to make calls to the user32.dll including dll functions such as FindWindowEx(...) and SetForegroundWindow(...) to set the window of your choice to the foreground.
Instead of getting the focus of the other app, you could put your robot to the background, returning whatever was in the foreground previously (ie your target app) to get the focus.

Minimize to tray with SWT

I'm trying to make a SWT-app that I'm building to minimize itself to it's tray-icon (i.e. a TrayItem in SWT). More specifically I want to achieve the following:
Both pressing close and minimize will minimize the app.
The app is not shown in the task-bar while it's minimized.
You can intercept window events in SWT quite easily.
Hiding apps from taskbar is something I haven't tried and I'd assume it requires calling some native function. I've found an example with taskbar which may be a starting point here .

Screen capturing inactive window

Is it possible to get image contents of an obstructed window without bringing it to the front? Also, is it possible to send mouse clicks to a specific locations of such window? I want to do this in Java, using JNA, running Windows XP (if it is possible, would it also work on Windows 7?). If that can be done, would you mind telling me what functions will be needed and where can I read about it, because I have never worked with JNA yet. Thank you.

record mouse movements, clicks and keyboard input with Java or C++

I want to be able to record mouse movements, clicks and keyboard input from a user. It would be great if it was a cross platform solution.
I'd like to get back something like this (pseudo code):
mouse moved to 500, 500
mouse double clicked
mouse moved to 800, 300
mouse left clicked
keyboard typed "Hello World"
Does either C++ or Java have any classes that can do this? If I was using C++, I would probably working with the QT framework.
Edit:
I should have said this originally, but I want to record the movements and clicks outside of the applications gui, so on the desktop too.
GLUT does this, but it's tied to OpenGL which might be overkill for your project.
OpenGL is cross-platform.
I don't believe there's a cross-platform toolkit specifically for grabbing input from a window and nothing more, but most toolkits provide this capability. Two good options are:
Use SDL, as it's fairly lightweight and can handle simple input.
Implement the functionality natively per platform, as it should be trivial in X11, Windows, Mac OS X, etc.
On Windows, this is called a Journal Record Hook. You should write the hook part in C or C++, it might be technically possible to do in java, but it's not a good idea, you want your hook procedure to have as few dependencies as possible, and to be a quick as possible. System wide hooks, especially journal add a lot of overhead to keyboard and mouse input, you want to minized your impact as much as possible.
You Install Windows hooks by using SetWindowsHookEx passing WH_JOURNALRECORD to get a Journal Record Hook.
You could also (maybe) get this working by installing both WH_KEYBOARD_LL and WH_MOUSE_LL, but your two hook procedures would be called separately, and you would have to write your own code to put the events in order.
I doubt you will find a cross-platform solution.
It sounds like Qt might allow you to implement event filters that extend beyond the application to the window system. See also Qt - top level widget with keyboard and mouse event transparency?
If you want to trap events across the whole GUI system, not just one app, there's not much likelihood of a cross platform solution. However, the event hooking part could easily be separated from the recording part, so you could make most of the program cross-platform.
For Windows, you need this 17 year old (!) document. (Man, I'm getting old!)

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