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Control other applications using Java?

How can I control other applications using Java ?
I'm using the Mary Speech Synthesizer(Open source, Java). It can synthesize speech well , but it requires the text to be in a textbox in the application window itself and then a button to be clicked . For this project of mine
the text that needs to be realized is gonna be inbound from another java application . I need to know how I can place the text in the textbox and send a click to one of the buttons in the application .
I'm hoping to figure out a way to synthesize speech from a buffer later on but till then this seems like it's a way to get things working . Also , I'm pretty sure I'll be able to find other applications for this later on and this seems like a very interesting problem ..

Get the other application's API and call its methods accordingly.

If an application does not offer an API to interact with it, there is no simple solution to make it.
However, since the application is open source you can verify what type of licensing it has, and include a part of its source code in your Java application and call it properly.

I think your best option is to find a library that does the text synthesizing. Since controlling another java application required that java application to provide the necessary API for you to access it. As #Edmondo1984 told in his answer you can include the part of the code from the open source application(After checking the licence).

workspaces aka desktops in Java

Has there been any advancement in discovering and/or setting which desktop/workspace my application is on (under Linux/Solaris of course)?

Discovering/setting the desktop on modern window managers is done through reading/setting the _NET_WM_DESKTOP property from the EWMH specification ( http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=proftpd-basic&searchon=names&suite=all&section=all )
I'm not aware of any neatly encapsulated API's that expose this functionality, but google turned up http://code.google.com/p/ewm/source/browse/trinity/fusion-X11/trunk/src/main/java/org/fusion/x11/ewmh/NetFrameExtents.java which might be a start.

I'm the author of the project proviously linked by the "NetFrmeExtents.java"
Here's my answer:
It's hard to do in pure java if not impossible unless swing/awt has implemented it by now. The most straightforward (and only?) way is to use JNI and do it through xlib/xcb. But it is possible to do what you ask.
There is a desktop convention called EWMH that can help you with what you want.
The basic order of steps you need to is:
Get the window id of your application. To do this Google how to retrieve the window handle/window id in awt.
Next you need to read several "properties" defined by atoms. If you don't know what this is google how to read a property from a window in xlib/xcb.
In the EWMH there is a property that lists all virtual desktops defined by the window manager.
See http://standards.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-spec-1.3.html#id2449367
Set the property a property on your application's window, see http://standards.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-spec-1.3.html#id2507080 to the number of the virtual desktop you want your application to be on.
If you have done everything correct and the window manager supports ewmh (most do) it should work.

It is possible to control a java application from a delphi written application?

My problem is pretty simple i have an application written in java and i want to send commands to it ex ( click a button , send some key strokes , click a menu item ) from my application witch i will write in delphi. Is this concept even possible ?

I actually had to do this at the last place I worked, you can get around it with complex window events etc... as mentioned above but if you have access to the Java source simply write other access methods either that call a specific runtime that closes (i.e. trigger a public static void main(String[] args); via a native call or via the command line.
OR
Implement simple a simple message system between Java/Delphi over TCP/IP and send either XML or some simple string mappings (I think it took about an hour to set up Maps that could pass back and forth).
In my case we were simply handling reporting and talking to the database so it was pretty easy to work around without getting into a native call. Alternatively, there is(was) a port of the JNI for Delphi that worked pretty well with Delphi 7. I have no clue what runtime you're using but it might be an option.
Honestly, the TCP/IP method is probably the easiest. It doesn't take a lot to implement, it doesn't eat a lot of resources and it allows you to execute "myMenuItem.onClick()" pretty easily as a packet, you just have to expose the methods.
http://home.pacifier.com/~mmead/jni/delphi/

Well It depends on which Java GUI technology is used . If SWT or AWT is used , you can get handle of UI components, because these two toolkit uses native libararies.. On the other hand, if that java application GUI is created by beans of SWING, you can not get any handle. Because, swing toolkit is implemented by pure Java..

If the Java app can be modified, the Java Robot API (included in JRE 1.3 and newer) might be helpful. This would allow to control a Swing application which does not provide windows handles as Gursel wrote. Obviously there would be some IPC required, which could be implemented using sockets for example.

The short: YES, but depending on the Java application, it might be difficult and unreliable.
I'm not a Java guy so I don't know if this is the norm, but the one Java application I had to automate displayed a single dialog that only used 1 (one) window handle! It was made up of several edit boxes, buttons, what looked like combo-boxes, but those were not true Windows controls but widgets re-created by whatever GUI toolkit the original developer used. I wasn't able to use normal Windows messages to manipulate those because, as far as Windows was concerned, it was a single window.
Happily the only thing I had to do was click a single button. I used mouse_event to move the mouse over the expected area for the button and then again to click the button. It works, but manipulating input this way is both unreliable and fragile.

To clarify Daniel Chapman  and mjn  comments, find below a code extract showing Delphi controlling a Java Swing UI component (TextField) contained in a Jframe based on NetBeans ClientEditor sample.
Please notice, that this example does not use the Java source code or use TCP, XML, Windowing events handling technics or IPC, it's just simply Delphi code calling some Java code.
procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject);
begin
FJFrame := Tjavax_swing_JFrame.Create('Client Editor');
FClientEditor := Tclienteditor_ClientEditor.Create;
FJFrame.GetContentPane().Add(FClientEditor);
FJFrame.Pack;
FJFrame.SetVisible(True);
end;
procedure TForm1.Button2Click(Sender: TObject);
begin
// Delphi setting a value in a Java Swing UI component
FclientEditor.FirstNameTextField.SetText('Delphi 1stName');
end;
The long type names are just as a matter of clarity for this example and can be shorter of course.Additionally there is no problem with JNI in this example.

Have you had a look at Java for Delphi?
It let's you call Java from Delphi exposing the Java types as Delphi types.

Making a Windows Taskbar Jump-List in Java

I know the following things, and was wondering if they can be combined to make Java use jump-lists in Windows:
Windows displays Jump-Lists for supporting programs when a taskbar icon is right-clicked
C++, C#, F#, and VB support this natively (as shown here)
Java can import native capabilities using the JNA (as shown here)
Anybody have experience they can lend to help me create a jump-list for a Java app?
The J7Goodies library won't work, as it no longer exists.

The word "natively" is overstating the case a bit. WPF provides jump list support. That's not the same as C# providing it. (For Windows Forms people there's the Code Pack which is a set of managed wrappers.) And MFC provides jump list support which is also not the same as C++ providing it. Anyway, there are two things going on here. One is adding files you opened recently to that jumplist, which under some circumstances you can get for free. The other is adding arbitrary files (typically starting point templates etc) to the jumplist.
To add a file to the recent/frequent list, you call SHAddToRecentDocs, though you may not have to if, for example, you use the Common File Dialog control to open files, and/or the user double-clicks files to launch your app and open them (you have the file type registered.) Lots of folks suggest calling it anyway to be on the safe side. To add any old thing to the jumplist see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd378402(v=VS.85).aspx.
How to call those from Java, I forget, but I hope they get you started.

There is a Java library providing the new Windows 7 features for Java. It's called J7Goodies by Strix Code. You can create your own jump lists with it.

Listening to print job event invoked using File menu from Java

I'm interested in knowing how can my Java program listen to the Print event generated by the underlying OS. As my project is based on Java, the Print job event listener should not be platform depended.
To be more specific my program will be running on the background and should be notified of the print job if a user is trying to print pages from MS Word (for an example). The event should notify not only the print job being started but also other details such as No. of pages, the document location etc (if that's possible). A link to complete tutorial or some snippets would be much appreciated. Thanks!

We are a C++ and Java shop. I have written code that does pretty much what you are asking for. It was written in C++ for Win32 (and was a right bugger to get correct - this is one of the least well documented areas of the Win32 API - and different printers send different event streams, so it can be really tough to develop robust print queue handling).
If someone has created a JNI library for doing this stuff (unlikely), there is no way it will be cross-platform. The effort involved would be enormous (different OSes handle print queues and notifications in completely different ways).
My recommendation would be to brush up on your Win32 programming (with C/C++). Once you have things working there, if you absolutely must have them interact with your Java app, you can use JNI to wrap it.
Here's MSDN articles on printer change notification monitoring (you'll have to call OpenPrinter first - but the next call is FindFirstPrinterChangeNotification): http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd162722(VS.85).aspx
If you are trying to support *nix and mac as well, you'll need to dig for those separately. Good luck.