How to reconnect to a background GUI application after session disconnect?

Question

We have Eclipse setup as our IDE on a central Linux server. Everyone will connect to the server, opens an Eclipse instance, work on it.

Eclipse will be run as a background process, showing the GUI to the user.

What happens is, sometimes people disconnect from the SSH session abruptly(making the laptop to sleep ..etc), without properly closing eclipse, which sometimes leaves the Eclipse process running in the background.

Whenever the user tries to connect next time, they are unaware of the existing Eclipse sessions, and continue starting a new one, while the existing Eclipse processes continue running in the background taking up all the resources.

Question is, can we re-connect to that abandoned Eclipse session somehow? Is it possible to bring up the Eclipse in the same state where user left it?

I looked at GNU screen . However, it can't bring the GUI application back to the user.

Answer 1

This seems to be a problematic setup to me. Why not work on the local computer in the first place? But if you want (or have to) to work on the server, better start the desktop directly on the server via XDMCP, VNC, or Citrix XenAPP (commercial).

EDIT: Just found this article about xmove. I haven't heard about it before, but maybe it works.