Mouse coordinates on the screen

Question

is it possible to get mouse coordinates on the screen? i want to make a program which makes screenshots of areas on the screen and i want use the mouse to mark them.
how could i do that? is it possible to get mousecoordinates even if the mouse is outside the java JFrame?
there must be a way! i searched in the forum but i found no answer.
please don't tell me i have to use jni, the app should be platform independent.

Answer 1

Yeah, basically there's no way to do this. This should be requested if it hasn't already (too lazy to check). It's not hard for sun to add, they just need to add it. Ok, anyway, I looked into it and see if there was a way to do this even somewhat reasonably in Java. I was very disappointed. I pretty much had no luck, but I did get a lame way of implementing this :P After some thought, this is what I ended up with:
import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.event.*;
import javax.swing.*;
public class MousePosition extends JFrame implements MouseMotionListener
    private int x = 0;
    private int y = 0;
    private boolean isAP = true;
    public MousePosition()
        setSize(300, 300);
        setLocation(200, 200);
        addMouseMotionListener(this);
        addMouseListener(new MouseAdapter()
            public void mousePressed(MouseEvent e)
                isAP = false;
        setVisible(true);
        try
            Robot r = new Robot();
            r.mouseMove(getLocation().x + 50, getLocation().y + 50);
            r.mousePress(InputEvent.BUTTON1_MASK);
        } catch(AWTException e) {}
    public void mouseDragged(MouseEvent e)
        System.out.println(e.getX() + getLocation().x + ", " + (e.getY() + getLocation().y));
    public void mouseMoved(MouseEvent e) {}
    public static void main(String[] args)
        new MousePosition();
}So it'll "lock" the program getting the absolute coordinates until you press the mouse, then you're free to do what you want. You could also do this with keyPressed or anything else you want. JNI would be the real solution as of now, until then I think sun should address the problem.