program interaction possible?

[Pierced1]

I'm wondering how (and if it's possible) to "interact" with other program-windows(possibly none-java programs) through java.

Lets say I'm running a program who has an window/GUI open and i want to get my hands on the info that a server sends to that window/GUI. My thought would be to have a java-program that "hocks" to that window by clicking on it or something rather then that i check what port it's using and there "hijacking" the info.

Any ideas or other better solutions to this? What i really want to know is how i interact/read info from other programs that are not build to interact with this program.

Big thanks for any help.

[Fubarable]

Java is built to be able to be run on many different pieces of hardware and multiple operating systems, and for this to succeed, you loose the ability to program close to either the hardware or the OS. So the short answer here is: Java is not the tool you want to use for doing something like this. Yes, it may be possible with some fancy JNI code together with C++ code, but if you're going to do this, you might as well code the whole thing in C++ or C#.

[Pierced1]

That was pretty much my fear, since I'm only able to code in Java it's kind of a problem =).

Is it possible to listen to the right port then and "read" the data there?

[Fubarable]

Yes, programs can communicate via sockets, but the other program has to be written to do this. You'll not be able to easily use Java for instance as a driver for say MS Word.