Calling javac in java code- possible?

Question

I'm writing a reasonably large app which can be run with X11 (using swing etc) or as a CLI app. This is basically because it will be useful in many different circumstances, for instance where there is no swing or X support, it'd be pointless building it with those capabilities. Now the easy way to do this, of course, (and I'm pretty lazy so I'll do it this way) is to write the base app, and then on one copy of it create a CLI, the other a GUI, and then give users the option of which to use. Also because of the size of it, I believe it'd be better for users to compile it themselves, so it is tailored perfectly (esp. where different J/SDKs are used.
Now what I decided to do was just fire out some javacode to take command line options to compile- makes sense I thought, then I hit a problem... Is it possible to call javac in a java app? Can I have a line of code to call javac in the same way I could in a bash script? For reference, here is my code thus far- the lines that need replacing are the print lines saying which option is being used...
class MakeII {
     private int choice;
                public static void main(String[] args) {
                         if (args.length != 1) {
              System.out.println("Bad choice/ no choice- please try again");
          } else { MakeII myComp = new MakeII(args[0]); }
     public MakeII (String choose) {
          System.out.println(choose);
          if (choose.equals("--make-x11") ) {choice = 1;}
                         else if (choose.equals("--make-sh") ) {choice = 2;}
                         else if (choose.equals("--make-full") ) {choice = 3;}
                         else {choice = 3;} //any error, assume full version
                         switch (choice) {
              case 1: System.out.println("x only"); break;
              case 2: System.out.println("cli only"); break;
              case 3: System.out.println("full ver"); break;
}And yes I know its ugly code, I just prefer to seperate everything out at this stage- I also know I've done everything the long way too, its for maintainability.

Answer 1

jamesCondron wrote:
Employer? Nah- this is a none-paid bit of project, more voluntry than anything, but I regret saying I would. Can't turn around now and say no... And I can't use anything but java because of how the project started, and the guys I'm working with; because Its server side stuff that needs to be distributed and portable I'd rather use python (or perl, but not quite that good) but ah well- what can you do?First off: challenge the requirement that it must be portable. More often than not, that's bogus. Beyond that, dude, you hold all the aces. They don't wanna pay but they still expect you to do it? That means they don't have a clue where to start. Baffle 'em with science, shouldn't be too hard. If it's lines of code they want, write them a bit of custom JSTL and show 'em how 2 lines of JSP can equate to 200 lines of Java, thus proving that lines-of-code is an utterly worthless metric. Then ask them if they want it done or not, and mumble a lot about going to the beach