I am working on developing an on-screen keyboard with java. This keyboard has a JComponent for every possible key. When a mouse down is detected on the button, I want to send a specific keyboard code to the application currently on focus. The keyboard itself is within a JFrame with no decorations and set to always-on-top.
I found that the Robot class can be used to simulate these keyboard events on the native queue. However, in this case, selecting the JComponent would mean that the key-press is received on the JFrame, and I wouldn’t be able to receive it in the other application
How can I keep my on-screen keyboard ‘Always-without-focus’? Is it maybe possible to use another approach to send the key-press?
Apparently the only way to do this is to have a JNI layer that will make the conversion from java to native. Java has no easy way to provide such funcionality.
This could be an interesting concept for a small, third party library for someone who wants to learn JNI…