Writing output to the console

Me and my colleagues are trying to simulate a Network Printing Project on a single machine.We are trying to simulate multiple printers on Server side.

We are representing individual consoles for each printer so that when our code assigns printing jobs to printers (by giving a text file as a feed to the Printer) then that number of consoles will get open and printing can be simulated by displaying content at say 'x' characters/second.

So I would like to ask that whether there are any APIs in Java for opening consoles and writing the content or can we see the output getting printed
into another file if we open that file on another console.

Thank You,

Regards,
Kedar Patwardhan.

There's no Java API specific to opening a console. You could probably use java.lang.Runtime.exec() to run your platform's command interpreter (i.e. cmd on Windows or sh/bash/ksh. . . on *nix) and feed it data through the streams provided. Runtime.exec has some peculiararities. See this article for details.

There is no API that will allow you to open a console. But you could save to a file and then open it when desired to check if there is any data. Alternatively you can keep polling to check if the files exist and then print the data in every file to one console ( the console in which you java program runs ).

Why don't you use multiple Panels, or one Panel, with multiple Textareas or something like that?