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Is it possible to write an application in Java that runs in the tray and when a certain application is launched, it can detect it? I want to do this for certain programs to find out how long I use them for a weekly basis. I’m new to Java, so I don’t know if Java is even the best language for this, or if it has the proper access to the operating system to do this.
Java in itself does not have much integration into system-specific features (nor do most other general-purpose languages). If you’re talking about windows, the system language of choice would be C# (or C/C++). On Mac, it’d be ObjectiveC (or C/C++). On linux, it’d be C.
To access process monitoring facilities on a given system, you need to first understand the APIs you’re going to be using. Then you can evaluate whether a given language has built-in or third-party library support for those APIs.
In the case of Java, you’d need to either write some JNI (C code), use JNA (Java only), or parse the output of Runtime.exec() (call various system/shell commands) to access the system APIs related to managing and/or monitoring processes.