Resolved: Opening A File In Its Default Program (Platform Independently)

[Mark Newton]

Hi,

Firstly - apologies for the title of this post, I couldn't think of anything better!

I've searched JavaRanch and Google for the answer to this question, but drawn blanks, I suspect that I'm searching for the wrong thing. In a nutshell, I'm writing some software in which a user can link to an/some external file(s). These could be anything, PDF's, webpages, text documents, videos, ..., you get the idea. I want the user to be able to view the document that he/she has linked to from within my application.

I've found plenty of references to Runtime.exec(), and ProcessBuilder(), but these are all too platform dependent for my needs. I'm convinced that there must be a sensible way of doing this, because surely it's a problem that many people have had. Perhaps there's a component that I can download/buy that handles the platform independent-ness for me?

Any help greatly appreciated!
[ February 01, 2006: Message edited by: David Payne ]

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

JDIC can do this. It's a set of portable APIs with some platform-dependent native libraries.

[Mark Newton]

That's great, thanks Earnest. Looks like exactly what I was hoping to find. Much obliged.