An equivalent of the Unix “ps” and “kill” commands for the JVM would be nice. Maybe for “top” and “vmstat” too…”

What I really want is a sane way to wrap an application in java, or some standard launcher technology.

When you are running multiple Java applications, the process list shows “java.exe” instead of my program name. The only way is in windows you can map an existing Window (if the app has one) to the process name.

This allows much greater leverage in building custom libraries (like things like file manipulation, transparent/shaped windows, etc) which require native access but which you’d probably prefer to write in java over C++. And you don’t have to deal with JNI compilation and linkage headaches.

Stuart Gathman hints at a possible approach for I/O, provide a Java wrappers for Posix, so that we can get platform portable access to most of the useful Posix facilities on various OSs, including Windows, even if via GNU libraries.

WORA should not be an issue, provide generic factories and interfaces to tell you want devices are available and want their facilities are, this should not be hard. Another approach is to provide a virtual device file system(s) with special filenames and virtual files to get and set device capabilities and view/read sub-device trees e.g. for USB.

Use some imagination!

As for sound/video support, JMF may have a lot of room for improvement but how much demand for it is there? Java isn’t the first choice for desktop applications, although it has made major leaps forward in the last few years. But it still is the best thing on the server side and nothing comes close to it… yet.

As Sergey said, the JMF hasn’t been updated in ages and never really had decent Mac support in the first place. Apple’s got their QuickTime libraries, but they don’t work with Linux. As far as I know, there’s no easy way to play a video on all three major platforms.