As a java developer, at times you may face a situation where you need to create a desktop shortcut on Windows, from a java application to launch another jar file.

Such a particular and especial situation is when you are creating a desktop application which will be installed through java web start and hence you can not use a third party software to create a setup.exe which will have no use here.

So you need a java application that will create a desktop shortcut, so that a double click on the shortcut will launch the jar file present in an installation directory in that system.

There is a JNI library (jshortcut-0.4-oberzalek https://github.com/jimmc/jshortcut/downloads ) using which you can do this task .

Here is a sample code for creating a shortcut to IE.

import net.jimmc.jshortcut.JShellLink;

public class Sc {

JShellLink link;

String filePath;

public Sc() {

try {

link = new JShellLink();

filePath = JShellLink.getDirectory(“”) + “C:\\Program Files\\Internet Explorer\\iexplore.exe”;

} catch (Exception e) {

}

}

public void createDesktopShortcut() {

try {

link.setFolder(JShellLink.getDirectory(“desktop”));

link.setName(“ie”);

link.setPath(filePath);

link.save();

} catch (Exception ex) {

ex.printStackTrace();

}

}

public static void main(String a[]) {

Sc sc = new Sc();

sc.createDesktopShortcut();

}

}

You can customize it to do your job, i.e create a shortcut to your jar file, by providing path to your jar file, an icon for the shortcut image etc