I assume Windows.

Commonly called a keyboard-wedge interface.

Was there an earlier question?

I find it hard to work out what your mean. If you want the use of the
card-reader to change which application has focus then you are probably
out of luck with your current card-reader.

If your card has some unique characters at the start then you might be
able to find a Windows "hotkey" application which could be configured to
launch your application.

I think you'd need a card reader with a different sort of interface.
Then you could probably write an application that listens to that interface.

Java wouldn't be my first choice for this sort of thing, but maybe
that's because I'm still a relative novice at it.

On Oct 17, 7:53 am, andrea.po...@gmail.com wrote:

If you have focus on your application, you can set a global
KeyEventDispatcher to handle this. (Doing this you avoid to implement a
keyboard listener on every frame, dialog, etc)
See:
KeyboardFocusManager.getCurrentKeyboardFocusManager().addKeyEventDispatcher(new
MyDispatcher());

If you don't have focus, you will need to implement that using JNI...

RZR