Not sure about your requirement, but a launcher is an object which is managed by Gnome and the File Manager to display the specified icon and to trigger some process if clicked. Take a look at
http://library.gnome.org/users/user-...nchers.html.en for some insight.
From a lower point of view it is simply a text file containing a list of key/value pairs. The file manager interprets these values and displays it accordingly. In other words a launcher is simply what you see if you open it with a text editor or if you print its content using
cat in a terminal. A text file. The actual icon, whose name or path is specified by the
Icon key is an image file placed in some default path. The program executed is an executable placed somewhere in your path. Each object is independent from the launcher: it just contains a reference to that object.
A complete description of the launcher properties is given here:
http://library.gnome.org/devel/desktop-entry-spec/. Hope this is what you're looking for. Otherwise, please correct me.