Syllabus

Pre-class Assignment: Introduction and Informal Design.

Objectives: Understand how programs are put together. Begin to spec out designs (informally).

Types, Names, Interfaces.

Reading: Chapters 3 (Types); skim Chapter 4 (Interfaces).

Objectives: Begin to understand basic structure of programs at micro level.

Design assignment (written homework) due

Objectives: Begin to think in terms of objects, systems, and interactions.

NB: All assignments are due on the Wednesday following, unless otherwise indicated.

Expressions and statements

Reading: Chapter 5 (Expressions) and Chapter 6 (Statements) through Simple Conditionals

Objectives: Determine type and value resulting from evaluation. Construct compund expressions. Fluency with method invocation.

LAB: Expressions and Statements

Objectives: Apply knowledge of expressions, statements, local and persistent state in an interactive context. Design behavior to specification. Prepare pre- and post-lab to expectations.

Control Flow, Recipes, State

Reading: Chapter 1 (Introduction), remainder of Chapter 6 (Statements), review Chapter 4 (Interfaces)

Objectives: Determine effect and flow of statement execution. Construct code blocks (including loops and conditionals). Distinguish local state (variables) from persistent state (fields).

Classes and objects

Reading: Chapter 7 (Objects) and Chapter 8 (OO Design)

Objectives: Distinguish class from instance. Design classes to spec. Implement methods to match signatures. Distinguish local and persistent state and implement accordingly. Use OO principles to analyze designs.

LAB: Classes and Objects

Objectives: Apply knowledge of expressions, statements, classes and objects to build classes and instantiate objects.

Animacies and threads

Reading: Chapter 9 (Animacies); also review Chapter 1 (Introduction) and Chapter 6 (Statements)

Objectives: Build active objects. Explain activity in multi-threaded programs. Appropriately use and distinguish constructor, initializer, and start.

Debugging and Exceptions

Reading: Chapter 2 (Programming Process), especially the section on Testing; Chapter 10 (Exceptions)

Objectives: Understand and use try/catch and throw statements, throws declaration. Design and implement appropriate exception handling. Explain interactions among typing, inheritance, and exceptions.

LAB: Animacies, communication, exceptions

Objectives: Apply knowledge of class and animate object construction, control flow and simple collection structures to implement interactions. Handle exceptions. Debug subtle errors, especially fenceposting.

Abstraction, Encapsulation

Reading: Chapter 13 (Encapsulation); section on Inner Classes optional

Objectives: Appreciate and appropriately use procedural encapsulation to modularize code. Design using interfaces, inheritance, and visibility modifiers. Write cleaner, more stylish, and better designed code.

Dispatch, Procedural Abstraction

Reading: Chapter 12 (Dispatch)

Objectives: Understand and appropriately use various conditional forms. Use models to plan control flow and delegate responsibility. Write cleaner, more stylish, and better designed code.

LAB: Dispatch

Objectives: Apply an understanding of conditional control flow and procedural abstraction to create a substantial program. Reinforce scaled design.

Inheritance

Reading: Chapter 11 (Inheritance)
Possible suppliment from Coad.

Objectives: Extend classes. Relate behaviors of instances. Explain typing rules for inheritance, method invocation. Appropriately design distinguishing interfaces from superclasses.

From Procedures to Objects; Object Design

Reading: Chapter 14 (Intelligent Objects)

Objectives: Understand the relationship between encapsulated procedures and object-oriented design. Be able to move from one idiom to the other.

No Lab Meeting

Written Assignment 2

Objectives: Apply understanding of object-oriented programming to a design problem.

NB: The laboratory meeting time will be used for open (optional) office hours.

Polymorphism

Reading: Review Chapter 14 (Intelligent Objects)

Objectives: Understand and take advantage of method overloading. Appreciate differences between (procedural) caller and (object-oriented) callee selection of method. Understand structural and procedural recursion.

Olin Event: No Class Meeting

LAB: Software Lifecycle

Objectives: Revisit, refine, revise. Work with legacy code and software lifecycle issues.

Columbus Day: No Lab

NB: This week's lab will actually be held on October 10 (the preceding Friday), which is an Olin Monday

Event Handling, GUI 1

Reading: Chapter 15 (Event-Driven Programming). Also review Appendix on java.awt

Objectives: Understand and implement simple event handlers, including paint. Use Java components.

Software Project Management 1

Reading: TBD.

Objectives: Understand some of the tools of professional programming; begin to prepare for final project.

LAB: Event Handling/GUI

Objectives: Apply understanding of event handlers to build a simple customized graphical user interface.

Event Delegation, GUI 2

Reading: Chapter 16 (Event Delegation)

Objectives: Use event listeners to connect events to their handler methods. Design using model/view and model/view/controller paradigms.

GUI pragmatics and java.awt

Reading: TBD

Objectives: Develop comfort with the java.awt toolkit. Learn about GUI design and alternative approaches.

LAB: Event Delegation/GUI 2

Objectives: Apply understanding of event delegation to construct a full graphical user interface. Implement to specification.

Communication Patterns

Reading: Chapter (Communication Patterns)

Objectives: Understand the roles of client and server. Understand blocking and non-blocking communication. Make appropriate tradeoffs in client/server architectures. Appreciate duality and common interface. Build simple clients/servers.

Concurrency

Reading: Chapter (Synchronization)

Objectives: Identify the potential modes of concurrency failure and their causes. Eliminate some simple causes of concurrency failure.

LAB: Communicating Applications

Objectives: Design to an interface. Use understanding of communication patterns and concurrency to build a multi-user networked application with GUI.

Olin Wednesday: No Class Meeting

I/O and networking

Reading: Chapter (Networking)

Objectives: Understand and use Java streams and sockets to perform input and output to/from files, console, and network.

Project Conference (Networked apps mini-lab)

Objectives: Ensure projects are appropriate and realistic. Set up individual timetables. (Project objectives include building a networked application with graphical user interface, documenting design and user interface, applying topics learned so far, building something cool, and maybe even making something useful.)

Software Project Management 2

Reading: TBD

Objectives: Sum up course so far. Introduce final project. Prepare for remainder of semester.

Special Topics

Reading: TBD

Objectives: Cover additional topics while students work primarily on projects. List of topics may include: Inner classes; Threads as objects; Network architectures; Web server; Peer-to-peer; RMI; JINI; Database-backed Web Programming; Student special topics.

LAB: First checkpoint

Objectives: Ensure that projects are progressing. Replan as necessary.

Special Topics

Reading: TBD

Objectives: See May 8.

Special Topics

Reading: TBD

Objectives: See May 8.

THANKSGIVING BREAK

Objectives: Rest, relax, revise. (Remember software lifecycle.) Also eat a lot. Sleep more.

LAB: Project checkpoint (T - 1 week)

Objectives: Projects should be in pretty good shape by now. Documentation should be well underway.

Special Topics

Reading: TBD

Objectives: See May 8.

Special Topics

Reading: TBD

Objectives: See May 8.

LAB: Project Demos/Peer Assessment

Objectives: Impress the heck out of one another. Also get the kinks out. Look at projects from the other side. Evaluate them. Prepare for exhibition.

Project Presentations

Objectives: Communicate with one another about what you've done. Enjoy your classmates' accomplishments. Give them critical feedback.