This requirement is for a local server that collects information of all devices that connect to it in a closed organization. Need to pull details like OS Version, software versions, hardware properties.
Your best bet is the user agent string that is in the header of all HTTP requests. You can access it via the HttpServletRequest like this:
String agent = request.getHeader("User-Agent");
It contains info like browser (client) name, browser version, OS, OS version etc. Although there is no guarantee that these will be complete and valid, but from the server you can't force the client to send complete and valid info about itself.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Chrome/34.0.1847.131 Safari/537.36
This means (source):
Mozilla: MozillaProductSlice. Claims to be a Mozilla based user agent, which is only true for Gecko browsers like Firefox and Netscape. For all other user agents it means 'Mozilla-compatible'. In modern browsers, this is only used for historical reasons. It has no real meaning anymore
5.0: Mozilla version
Windows NT 6.1: Operating System: Windows 7
WOW64: (Windows-On-Windows 64-bit) A 32-bit application is running on a 64-bit processor
AppleWebKit: The Web Kit provides a set of core classes to display web content in windows
537.36: Web Kit build
KHTML: Open Source HTML layout engine developed by the KDE project
like Gecko: like Gecko...
Chrome: Name: Chrome
34.0.1847.131: Chrome version
Safari: Based on Safari
537.36: Safari build
About analyzing user agent strings: Looking for a Java User Agent String Parser
Also useragentstring.com has an API.
And there are more on the internet (Google it).