My goal is to open a new window running a flash app from an url (http://curvefever.com/CF_Preloader.swf), and be able to interact with it with java, and do things like take screenshots of the content, and invoke keypresses.
while I could achieve this by opening the flash app in a browser and monitor the browser with selenium (and using an awt robot to take screenshots), I am looking for a better method because I want to avoid the extra lag brought with running the browser, but also because other windows might obstruct the screenshots when the browser window is in the background.