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It’ll be interesting to see, how well it performs compared to Mongrel and how much memory it consumes. According to the website, performance should be on par with Mongrel.

Currently, the following operating systems are supported:

• Ubuntu Linux 6.06 (x86)
• Ubuntu Linux 7.10 (x86)
• Debian Sarge (x86)
• Debian Etch (x86)
• Debian Lenny/Sid (x86)
• CentOS 5 (x86)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (x86)
• Gentoo, March 14 2008 (AMD64)
• FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE (x86)
• MacOS X Tiger (x86)
• MacOS X Leopard (x86)

That’s quite a lot already, hopefully support for Debian Etch AMD64 is coming soon, maybe the x86 release will just work as well.

In the next week or so, I’ll be doing some extensive benchmarking with mod_rails. Since this project is in an early stage, we also have to show it some patience while waiting for future development, but this will definitely be very helpful in getting Ruby and Rails to the next level in terms of adoption, since every kid will be able to deploy his or her first Rails app via some easy to use control panel now.

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Here’s the official, short version of the announcement:
Sun believes deeply in creating communities and sharing innovations and technologies to foster more participation. Today in a historic move, Sun is opening the door to greater innovation by open sourcing key Java implementations—Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE), Java Platform Micro Edition (Java ME), and Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE)—under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2), the same license as GNU/Linux.

Read the full announcement here.

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And so here are my recommendations:

1st Place: O’Reilly
Because it is a good starting point for almost any programmer to search for code. The reason why you should start with O’Reilly is simply that the code you’ll find here will not only work, but is also beautifully written and well-formed.

2nd Place: QuickRef
QuickRef offers a great AJAXified interface that let’s you find source code for something you don’t even exactly know the name of. It also shows you related info based on your search which is useful for further research you might not even have thought about before. The resources QuickRef uses (it’s a meta search engine) are great and well-respected websites on their own, thus the source code should be of high quality most of the time.

3rd Place: Koders
Koders is a great resource as well. It might often be the last place of hope to find source code to programmers coding in more exotic languages like Ada and Eiffel. But it should be also of great value to more mainstream programmers using Java or C++.

Summary
You should use a combination of these search engines for your daily work, because all of them use different resources, so you might be able to find source code for a specific problem with one search engine, while you might not succeed with another one. So, it might be a good idea to bookmark this page for your future reference. I will also update it as soon as I find out about a new one.

Hope this helps you guys to write better code, more efficiently. It certainly helped me.

Update: There’s a new kid in town called Codefetch, after some reviewing I’ll update the comparison appropriately.

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For those who don’t know what the MSDN Library is: It’s a great collection of documentation and sample code for Microsoft’s programming tools and languages. It is an essential tool for every Windows programmer.

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Update: Thanks to Chad Moore’s suggestion, I changed the name of the “walk” method to proceed.

public class MyThread extends Thread {
    private boolean paused = false;

    public void run() {
         while (true) {
              synchronized (this) {
                   while (paused) {
                        try {
                             //MyThread is waiting
                             wait();
                        } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                             e.printStackTrace();
                        }
                   }
              }
    //MyThread is running
    //Do work
    }
}

    public void pause() {
         synchronized (this) {
              paused = true;
         }
    }

    public void proceed() {
         synchronized (this) {
              paused = false;
              this.notify();
         }
    }
}

And here's a little class for testing purposes:

public class MyThread_Test {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException {
        MyThread mythread = new MyThread();
        System.out.print("Starting MyThread");
        mythread.start();
        Thread.sleep(4000L);
        System.out.println("Stopping MyThread");
        mythread.pause();
        Thread.sleep(4000L);
        System.out.print("Resuming MyThread");
        mythread.proceed();
    }
}

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Of course you can use standard icons by Microsoft or Sun found in thousands of other products. Or you can use the following quality icons listed below. They will surely enhance your application’s visuals. There are numerous services out there which will create custom icons for your application for a fee, but I decided to concentrate on the free ones for now as the sets below contain a decent amount of high quality icons and surely suffice for smaller, low-budget projects.

Tango Icons
Nuvola Icon Set
Silk Icon Set
Mini Icon Set
Gnome Icons*
KDE Icons*
Icons by Jakub ‘jimmac’ Steiner

The sets for Gnome and KDE were of course primarly designed with those window managers in mind, but since they’re normally released under an open-source license you may well find an icon that suits your needs and use it without any legal issues.

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As Visual Basic 6 gets older and older, more and more problems start to appear. Microsoft stopped supporting it, hoping most developers would migrate to Visual Basic.Net. But a lot of companies still have huge investments in Visual Basic 6 code, thus not allowing them to simply migrate to the .Net framework. As other technologies like operating systems evolve (remember Vista which is due to release sometime this millennium?), the problems programming for a platform which is not being supported anymore, get bigger and heavier. Not being sure if VB 6 applications will work flawlessly on Windows Vista and Microsoft not planning to do something on this part, means it is about time to start thinking of migrating your code (even if it seems impossible to some companies). If a VB 6 application is running on a dedicated Windows 2000 or XP machine (a point of sale system for example) and it may continue to do so for a couple of years, then I guess it’s okay and you still have plenty of time before migrating. But that’s not the case for most applications. So which options do you have?

Sun comes to the rescue! Sun has a new project called “Semplice”. It made its first appearance on the JavaOne summit. It enables Visual Basic 6 developers to code for the Java platform, while not having to learn the .Net framework which scared a lot of VB 6 developers because of its overly complex nature (although in my opinion it kinda resembles the Java platform). At the current stage, the project is still very young and immature. It allows you to import your VB 6 source code and compile it into a Java class file. This way you get cross-platform compatibility out of the box! But it doesn’t compile every source code you can find. Windows 32 API calls are not supported. As well as OCX (and probably Dynamic Link Libraries, too). So you might eventually have to rewrite parts of your code or cut some features to enable compatibility. This project seams very promising, but I kinda wish it had been done a few years earlier, so that right after Microsoft stopped supporting VB 6, you would have had a mature, working project, enabling you to migrate to the Java platform. Let’s see how fast Sun continues development on this project.

Since I used to count myself to the Visual Basic 6 developer crowd as well, I do not hate them, although I abandoned VB 6 for Java quite a while ago. I still like its simplicity and its efficiency. Often times I wish Java was a bit more like Visual Basic, easier to use and a lot faster to get results with, especially while doing GUI programming.

To end this, I have a valuable tip to all you desperate VB 6 developers (and Java developers maybe too). There are a few good alternatives out there. RealSoftware’s REALbasic provides great features (even cross-platform compatibility) and greatly resembles the look and feel of VB 6. It is being continuously developed and its company, plans to support it for as long as they exist, as they do not have any other products at the moment. They even provide a free edition for Linux (you can’t compile cross-platform binaries with that one though). If you’re a VB 6 developer, you should definitely take a look at it, because it really is the next best thing to VB 6, if not even better and it looks to be very future-prove.

Then there’s also PowerBasic, which seems to be pretty fast, but not as user-friendly. I have not used this product, so I won’t go into detail here, but it seems to be mainly the compiler you get.

FreeBasic is a free, open-source alternative. You’ll only get the compiler, so building GUIs might be awkward. There are compilers available for Windows, DOS and Linux.

And last but not least, is PureBasic. This one owes its roots to the good ol’ Amiga. It’s available for Windows, MacOS X, Linux and AmigaOS. It is pretty inexpensive at $99, enabling you to compile for all four platforms I mentioned and receiving future upgrades for free. It’s also supposed to be very fast, because it directly translates your Basic code to Assembler instructions making it perfect for game development.

Do you know any other great Basic products? If so, please mention them in the comments. I would also like to hear from your experiences with VB 6 or its alternatives.

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