Window management system

[MDUK]

Hello, I'm new here! My name's martin and I'm a third year computer science student.

I've been thinking about doing a project involving a custom user interface, involving a search bar and also a custom window management system, and basically needed some advice on feasibility.

Has anyone done any work involving window management? What I want to do is create a system where instead of automatically being displayed full screen, multiple windows are laid out on screen and they can focused / unfocused with a click, or double click, or something. Also I wanted it so that users can drag the windows around and organise them as they wish. Anyone know if this is possible / how do-able it is? I was thinking maybe create a class that contains an MS window within it and just change how the user interacts with it. How accessible are the windows classes?

I was thinking of making a full-screen application that will hide the existing windows interface and access the files / programs through my own code. My main concern is window management, whether or not I will be able to override the windows interaction. How flexible are the application frame classes in java? Am I able to pass, for example, an exe filepath to an application frame and have it open that application.

Any thoughts are welcome aside from answering the questions listed, at the moment I'm trying to gather ideas and decide whether or not its a viable project. Anyone with experience of any kind in this area would be a big bonus.

Thanks,
Martin

[fishtoprecords]

I think you should talk to your professor and get some guidance. General window management is a big topic, its more of an OS topic than a language topic.

For example, your question about being able to read the name of an .exe file, execute it and display the user interface of the .exe program is a huge issue, and very OS dependant. If you are working on OS-X or Linux, you don't even typically use the extension name of .exe

When a Windows program runs, it assumes that it has the usual Windows windowing system available, so it can just call the usual Windows API function to say open a dialog box. If you ran that same file on OS-X or Linux, you would not have the Windows API.

I may be not understanding you, but what you describe sounds more like a team project for graduate students, not a one term undergrad project