Jabaco is a free new BASIC-like programming language with a VisualBasic-like syntax and a powerfull RAD. Its developer, who's a great fan of VisualBasic 6, deciced to develop its own VisualBasic-like programming language and environment when Microsoft suspended VB6 technology for DOT NET technology, and - in my opinion - he did an excellent job. Jabaco builds applications using the Java framework. Source code is similar to VB6 code, but the output differs from VB6 as Visual Basic 6 creates native (or p-code) EXE-files which lay on Windows-only compatible runtimes libraries, Jabaco instead creates a Java output bytecode that, thanks to the Java framework, may run on many operating systems. Most of the language is similar to Visual Basic 6, but Jabaco has added new features as object oriented programming, threading and other features typical of modern languages. Jabaco has an excellent RAD environment (based on Swing) very similar to VB6 IDE with all the main features that someone expects in a modern IDE such as autocompletion, code highlighting, object browsing, GUI editor, drag&drop of controls, etc. To run Jabaco on your system, you only have to install the newest Java Runtime Environment (JRE). Jabaco creates stand-alone EXEs with an overhead of aprox. 500Kb. The language is in beta stage but it's fully functional and it's developer is constantly improving it. Very good, you must take a look.
August 2009. Release 1.5.0 beta in out. Some bugs and many minor bugs were fixed, and many new improvements: added Unicode-support for the IDE, IDE-UI improvements, case correction, remote-debugger, method-navigator, import resources from existing VB6-projects, ClassName.class support, import-statement, ForEach/Next-support, With/EndWith-support, declare array-values within the definition, support for array of controls, etc.

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