Class Desktop

This class enables Java application to access system commands to perform desktop oriented operations, like writing and sending emails, or surfing webpages with the system browser or editing/printing files with a default editor. Methods are provided to handle these common operations, plus an open command selects a default registered application for the specified file type. For example, opening an odf file results in launching OpenOffice. If an operation is not supported, or the application fails to launch, an exception is generated. Implementation note: As this class is used to manage Desktop integration, we provide some extension to configure the behaviour of this class depending on the type of dektop that is detected.
First of all, we support 5 system properties that can be used to define the application to launch in any given case. These properties are:

gnu.java.awt.peer.Desktop.html.command
gnu.java.awt.peer.Desktop.mail.command
gnu.java.awt.peer.Desktop.edit.command
gnu.java.awt.peer.Desktop.print.command
gnu.java.awt.peer.Desktop.open.command


These can be specified from the command line and have priority on every other setting.

The second method supported is defining a Java preference.
The main preference node is a user node relative to the class gnu.java.awt.peer.ClasspathDesktopPeer. This node contains a child for each supported operation. The key for each type is always command:

gnu.java.awt.peer.Desktop.html.command
gnu.java.awt.peer.Desktop.mail.command
gnu.java.awt.peer.Desktop.edit.command
gnu.java.awt.peer.Desktop.print.command
gnu.java.awt.peer.Desktop.open.command


The access to these keys is done with the Preference API or, if outside of the java scope, is done in a backend dependent way. For example, with the GConf backend, you can access these properties with (may not be accurate on your system):

gconftool-2 -g /apps/classpath/gnu/java/awt/peer/Desktop/html/command

Since: 1.6