Running an External Program Within Processing + Overlay Images & Text

Processing Coding Questions
1

I’m reading and searching on JFrame, etc.

Everyone seems to have a different application than what I’m searching.

I’d like to run a 3rd party software within my Processing exe, and allow images and
text to be placed over it.

The first question is, how do get the 3rd Party software to run inside of Processing
to replace the background() function?

ie:


void draw(){

  //Load 3rd Party software in background
 JFrame ("C:/filepath.exe");  //or  Other? 

 image(img[flower], 20,20);

 text("I want this text to appear floating on top of the background software", 100, 100);
}

Thank you in advance for pointing me in the right direction.

2

I’m not sure you understand what launch is supposed to do. It does not run an application inside of the processing sketch, that would imply that processing has some sort of compiler or emulator for all other languages, which would be neat but virtually impossible and in any case would result in terrible performance.

Launch simply emulates the double click function, provide a link to a location of an application and it will simulate you double clicking the icon, and thus launch the app.

https://processing.org/reference/launch_.html

3

Correct.

Thus my question about which function to use? The closest I can find for my needs is JFrame, but is still appears to load a separate Window.

Is there are way to run the 3rd party software as the “background” of my sketch?

Thank you.

EDIT: I removed instances of Launch and Exec from my original post.

4

I’m struggling to understand what you’re trying to achieve…

5

It sounds like what you want to do is use processing as an overlay to other applications, which isn’t something that I know can be done.

I mean you could create a window with ought decorations, but then you would need to grab an image of the screen every frame and add whatever you wanted to that, but then you would lose focus of the app you opened and would be stuck in your sketch.

Again not sure I understand

6

Close.

I don’t want Processing to overlay to other applications.

I want other applications to run in Processing as background(0); [ the colour black] would do.

Think of MS Word running as a ‘layer’ [like the colour black, background(0);] of the draw() function.

Then while using Processing, overlay images and text on top of MS Word.