Want my JFrame to be the *only* one that can end the program when closed

Question

Hi all,
I have an application that is essentially a launcher for other applications -- it's a holder to allow us to demo our work and other Java examples (not necessarily our work). The launcher will either run methods to launch an application or will find a class's main method and invoke that.
In all cases, the other applications open up their own JFrames, separate from my launcher (this is a good thing). The problem is that, in general, the other JFrames are set to EXIT_ON_CLOSE. This means that if the user closes the second window, everything will close.
Is there anyway to prevent this from happening? I'd like either a way to say that my JFrame is the only one that can exit the program when closed, or to say globally that JFrames can't exit on close, and then re-work my initial frame so that it is still able to exit.
Note that changing all the other applications so that they do not include the EXIT_ON_CLOSE line is not an option (several of the applications we have the right to use, but not the right to modify, for instance).
Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Sam

Answer 1

Darryl.Burke wrote:
I have a similar launcher application and this is how I tackled the issue....
Window[] windows = Window.getWindows();
This seems like a great work-around. The only problem is that Window.getWindows() is only 6.0, and unfortunately I can only assume 5.0. I can't see another method in the Window class that will return unowned windows -- is there another method that you know of?
Edit: I found I can use Frame.getFrames() instead, but unfortunately I've discovered this doesn't solve my problem. One of the applications is listening to window closing and is calling System.exit(0) itself, and is not using EXIT_ON_CLOSE as I previously thought. So I think that launching a new JVM may be the only option.... Any advice on how to do this? I'm a little stuck with the ProcessBuilder stuff above.
>
edit In future (not this time), Swing related questions should be posted in the [Swing forum|http://forums.sun.com/forum.jspa?forumID=57]
I guess I was thinking this as a process-oriented question (I had already been thinking of the "different JVM" tactic), but the other option was to think of it as a pure-swing problem, like your solution above. Guess I should have just cross-posted -- everyone loves that! ;-)
Edited by: Asbestos on Dec 18, 2008 12:32 PM