How often have you ended up writing code that spawns a new process? Not often. However, there may have been situations that necessitated the writing of such code. In such cases, you had to resort to using a third-party API such as Apache Commons Exec (https://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-exec/), among others. Why was this? Wasn't the Java API sufficient? No, it wasn't; at least not until Java 9. Now, with Java 9 and above, we have many more features added to the process API.
Until Java 7, redirecting the input, output, and error streams were not trivial. With Java 7, new APIs were introduced, which allowed the redirecting of the input, output, and error to other processes (pipe), to a file, or to a standard input/output. Then, in Java 8, a few more APIs were introduced. In Java 9, there are now new APIs for the following areas:
- Getting the process...
