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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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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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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Mitch Stuart has taken the time to sit down and write a comprehensive overview over the current tools. Take a look at it here. Have another valuable tip for the Java community? Post it in a comment!

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jarsigner -keystore C:myapplicationmykeystore -storepass password
-keypass Pwd1pwd -signedjar signedmyapplication.jar myapplication.jar pvKey

Here, mykeystore is the keystore present in the C:\myapplication folder. The password for the keystore is password. The password for the “pvKey” private key is Pwd1pwd. The alias for mykeystore is pvKey.

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Long stoptime = 2000L; //2 Seconds
System.out.println("Going to sleep...");
try {
Thread.sleep(stoptime);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
System.out.println("Woke up again!");

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JFrame.setDefaultLookAndFeelDecorated(true);

This will be applied to all other frames in your application as well, as you should not use different designs within one application, because this would leave the user confused.

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frame.setIconImage(new ImageIcon(”feed-icon-16×16.png”).getImage());

Pretty easy, huh?

I successfully tested it with the PNG, JPEG and GIF formats. But I suggest you use the PNG format if possible, because of its sophisticated, built-in transparency features. The dimensions your icon should have are: 16 x 16 pixels. If it isn’t, it will be scaled to that size resulting in some ugly artifacts.

As you can see, I tested it with the official RSS feed icon, which can be found at: http://www.feedicons.com

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