Jabaco - Java VB6 clone

[dilettante]

Has anyone else looked at Jabaco (rhymes with "tobacco") yet?

It is in what looks like a fairly early beta stage. Nowhere near as clownish looking as REALBasic but also a thousand miles further behind in fit and finish. For one thing there is ZERO documentation as I write this.

Considering it appears to be a one- (to maybe three-) man show this should not come as a surprise.

In some ways it seems to be a remarkably good VB6 imposter. In others it falls flat. Some of this is the long way its IDE has to go in terms of basic amenities we've come to depend on in VB6. Another is the curse of Java frameworks in general. By default it uses Swing, but you can rework the Jabaco Framework to use alternatives if you're very ambitious.


Depending on the sort of programming you do in VB6 you'll either find Jabaco easy to port to or incredibly difficult. Many standard things carry over easily, other basic things must be done entirely differently.

A better replacement by keeping the spirit of VB6 in the development process. Making it useable for experienced VB6 users.

So they say, but for anything but Hello World in a Form programs I think you'll find Jabaco at least as nastily different as VB.Net.

It does free VB6 programmers of the Great Treason of Redmond to some extent, since the code can be ported to many Java-supported OSs. As far as I can tell you still have to develop on Windows though.

We'll see once Jabaco matures a bit how well the community treats it.


Simple Program

Public Sub Form_Load()
   Dim fItems As VBFileHandler
   
   fItems = open(App.Path & "\stuff.txt", Input)
'  Do Until EOF(fItems)               'Goofy EOF syntax 1.
   Do Until fItems.EOF                'Goofy EOF syntax 2.
'     List1.AddItem readLine(fItems)  'Goofy read syntax 1.
      List1.AddItem fItems.readLine   'Goofy read syntax 2.
   Loop
'  Close fItems                       'Goofy close syntax 1.
   fItems.close                       'Goofy close syntax 2.
End Sub

Public Sub Form_Resize()
   If Me.WindowState <> vbMinimized Then
      List1.Top = 0
      List1.Left = 0
      List1.Height = Me.ScaleHeight
      List1.Width = Me.ScaleWidth
   End If
End Sub

One Form, with one ListBox. Start up and read lines of a text file into the ListBox. Resize the ListBox to fill the Form.

Even here we see the seams showing.

No With... End With yet. Controls have no Move() method.

Funky Java-esque I/O: both inside-out and outside-in syntaxes. These are a common curse in Java and related worlds with overweight frameworks, such as .Net.

However more extensive examples doing a lot more work seem to show much better performance than VB.Net, so that's a plus.


Who can say? A VB and Java guy might love it.