Accessing resources in a jar

Question

im working on a msn clone in jbuilder 9(enternprise), and im having a really hard time organizing my resources. i have a few icons and i grouped them into a folder name 'icons'. at first, the images can only be loaded when i place them in the class directory, which is fine until i compiled the project into a executable jar. the jar has trouble loading the images, i opened up the jar with winzip and found all the images are included. i also played around with the source for a while but with no luck. im just wondering if this have ever happened to you and how u dealt with it, thank you

Answer 1

package gui;
import javax.swing.tree.DefaultTreeCellRenderer;
import javax.swing.ImageIcon;
import java.awt.Component;
import javax.swing.tree.DefaultMutableTreeNode;
import dataobjects.UserStruc;
import javax.swing.JTree;
import java.net.URL;
class IconBuilder
extends DefaultTreeCellRenderer {
ImageIcon online;
ImageIcon offline;
ImageIcon away;
ImageIcon phone;
ImageIcon lunch;
ImageIcon busy;
ImageIcon brb;
ImageIcon idle;
URL onlineURL;
public IconBuilder() {
System.out.println("Creating icons");
onlineURL = gui.IconBuilder.class.getResource("images/online.jpg");//this worked in jbuilder but not in the jar
online = new ImageIcon(onlineURL);
//online = new ImageIcon("images/online.jpg");
offline = new ImageIcon("images/offline.jpg");
away = new ImageIcon("images/away.jpg");
phone = new ImageIcon("images/busy.jpg");
lunch = new ImageIcon("images/away.jpg");
busy = new ImageIcon("images/busy.jpg");
brb = new ImageIcon("images/away.jpg");
idle = new ImageIcon("images/away.jpg");
public Component getTreeCellRendererComponent(
JTree tree,
Object value,
boolean sel,
boolean expanded,
boolean leaf,
int row,
boolean hasFocus) {
super.getTreeCellRendererComponent(
tree, value, sel,
expanded, leaf, row,
hasFocus);
DefaultMutableTreeNode node = (DefaultMutableTreeNode) value;
UserStruc user = (UserStruc) (node.getUserObject());
if (user.getStatus().compareTo("NLN") == 0) {
setIcon(online);
setToolTipText(user.getUsername() + " (Online)");
else if (user.getStatus().compareTo("FLN") == 0) {
setIcon(offline);
setToolTipText(user.getUsername() + " (Offline)");
else if (user.getStatus().compareTo("BRB") == 0) {
setIcon(brb);
setToolTipText(user.getUsername() + " (BeRightBack)");
else if (user.getStatus().compareTo("AWY") == 0) {
setIcon(away);
setToolTipText(user.getUsername() + " (Away)");
else if (user.getStatus().compareTo("LUN") == 0) {
setIcon(lunch);
setToolTipText(user.getUsername() + " (Out To Lunch)");
else if (user.getStatus().compareTo("PHN") == 0) {
setIcon(phone);
setToolTipText(user.getUsername() + " (On the Phone)");
else if (user.getStatus().compareTo("BSY") == 0) {
setIcon(busy);
setToolTipText(user.getUsername() + " (Busy)");
else if (user.getStatus().compareTo("IDL") == 0) {
setIcon(idle);
setToolTipText(user.getUsername() + " (Idle)");
return this;