Programming :: Get Started With Making 'a SIMPLE Dock'?

This is probably hopelessly ambitious as I'm not a C or C++ programmer (I normally like to stick to scripting languages like BASH or Perl). Basically I'm looking on good advice to get me started with writing a Application Dock with the functionality of the OSX dock but without the overly flamboyant graphics that have characterised the Linux versions.At the moment the closest I've found to what I would like is bbdock. However it falls well short of the functionality of what I would like.

What bbdock does is read a file to create an icon for the openbox dock/fluxbox slit/wmaker whatever that launches an application when first clicked, shows an little arrow when the application is running, and brings the application to the fore when clicked once running.Here's a screenshot of it doing just that.The drawback to bbdock is that it doesn't really look for running applications, only those launched from bbdock. So for example it wont notice if I've launched an instance of pcmanfm from the openbox menu. And therefore it obviously also doesn't add icons for other applications that are running.

What I would like to be able to do is detect new running applications and add a bbdock icon for them. Also to detect if an application already with a shortcut has been run and update it's status to show it's open. Probably have an up and down arrow to move the icons up and down when there are too many to fit on the screen. None of the above needs fancy animation. The fade to gray effect used by bbdock is quite nice and could probably be augmented with a fade in and out to grey to represent another action, say fading to grey and back when launching and greyed when iconified.So, my question is what do I need to get started doing this? Am I best using the pretty outdated bbdock wmaker dockapp style? What functions and libraries am I likely to need to achieve the effects I want? Are there any examples of how to monitor running applications (well windows and figure out what constitutes a new application) that I could look at for inspiration. Is there anyone who's into C++ for linux who would be interested in helping me out to get this small project working?