How to launch Ubuntu Center from my application?

Question

My Java application needs this library libswt-webkit-gtk-3-jni to run successfully. So if the user doesn't have this library installed, I want Ubuntu Software Center to be launched and tell the user "you should have this library".

Is that possible?

Answer 1

Yes, it is, but don't use Ubuntu center to do that. In pseudo code I would do something like:

 if result_of("dpkg --get-selections libswt-webkit-gtk-3-jni") != "install"  
    then  
       ask user "Should the necessary libraries be installed?"
                "This requires administrator privileges"
       if yes
          gksudo apt-get install libswt-webkit-gtk-3-jni -y  
       if no
          tell user "Necessary libraries are missing"
          exit
       end if
 end if  

Answer 2

Sure, the command to launch the software center is

/usr/bin/software-center

You can even specify a package name on the command line:

/usr/bin/software-center libswt-webkit-gtk-3-jni