JDK 1.6 comes bundled with a handy tool called VisualVM that lets you inspect and interact with running Java processes. One feature is that it auto-detects running JVMs on the local machine. Most are listed as " (pid xxxx)" but some have a name and an icon, like VisualVM itself and others like NetBeans (see the screenshot in this dzone article for example).
How do I inject my application name and icon into the JVM so it shows up properly in VisualVM's application list? Does my app need to be running JRE 1.6 or can I do this under 1.5 too?
I solved half of my own question via a NetBeans forum post answer. Adding a JVM command line arg of -Dvisualvm.display.name=FooBar makes VisualVM show the app as "FooBar". But I still can't figure out how to affect the icon.
UPDATE: Alas, I think I found my answer for the icon. The icons are hard-coded into VisualVM via MainClassApplicationTypeFactory in the VisualVM source, invoked from the static method ApplicationTypeFactory.getApplicationTypeFor(Application). I can't see any way to inject a new icon into VisualVM except by making a VisualVM plugin which could register a new type factory -- the Glassfish plugin does this via GlassFishApplicationTypeFactory.initialize() for example.
