Process handling API

In prior versions of Java, developers interacting with native operating system processes had to use a fairly limited API, with some operations requiring resorting to native code. As part of Java Enhancement Proposal (JEP) 102, the Java process API was extended with the following features (quoting from the JEP text):

• The ability to get the pid (or equivalent) of the current Java virtual machine and the pid of processes created with the existing API.
• The ability to enumerate processes on the system. Information on each process may include its pid, name, state, and perhaps resource usage.
• The ability to deal with process trees; in particular, some means to destroy a process tree.
• The ability to deal with hundreds of subprocesses, perhaps multiplexing the output or error streams to avoid creating a thread per subprocess.

We will explore these API changes in our first project, the Process Viewer/Manager (see the following sections for details).