Prevent background process from showing up on Dock

Question

I have a Java application. For some tasks, I run another JVM instance in parallel using ProcessBuilder. i.e. my main application starts another JVM instance using Process and then both communicate using I/O.

But on the Dock on Mac, it shows both the process:

I do not want that, as the other process only does the back-end work and is not required to be shown up front. Also it is a risk as he can manually force quit the another process easily.

What should be done to make sure it runs on background and doesn't show itself on dock

Answer 1

If your back-end processor truly does not need any screen resources then the simplest thing to do is too launch the new JVM in headless mode:

java -Djava.awt.headless=true com.bl.ProcessMain