TeachJava!

Resources

• Class Notes (also available in postscript)
• Java Design Recipe
• Scheme Design Recipe
• Java 1.4 library documentation (including Swing)
• Java 1.4 general documentation
• Sun Java Tutorials
• Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel (available for free downloading in PDF format)

Monday Outline

Morning

• Welcome to TeachJava!

• Guiding Vision: after TeachScheme, object-oriented programming (OOP) in Java is easy.
  Programming in Java = Programming in Scheme + Design Patterns

• Goals of TeachJava!
  • To promote the creation of high school curricula on OOP.
  • To show that the programming principles from TeachScheme apply to OOP.
  • To focus on OOP principles, expanding on TeachScheme.
  • To make Java reference materials such as Thinking in Java easily accessible.
  
  

• Non-Goals of TeachJava!
  • To teach every Java language feature.
  • To provide a whirlwind tour of the Java libraries.
  
  
• DrJava vs. DrScheme
  • DrJava supports exactly the same user interface as DrScheme

  • DrJava lacks
    • language levels (coming in Spring 2003)
    • stepper (coming ??)

  • DrJava offers
    • integrated unit testing
    • a full-featured debugger
    • support for generic extensions of Java (JSR14)
    • open source
  
  

• Fundamental Differences Between Scheme and Java:
  • Java uses C-style syntax: wordy, wordy, wordy

  • Java relies on object-oriented rather than procedural program organization

  • What is an object?
    • a collection of variables called fields to represent the properties of a particular physical or conceptual object
    • a collection of designated operations called methods to access and modify the fields

  • Example: maintaining a directory for Rice Computer Science Department. Each entry in the directory will contain a person's name, office address, and phone number.

    In Java, we can represent each entry as an Entry object consisting of three fields (name, address, phone) and the operations to access those three fields.

    Let's summarize the form of an Entry as a table:

    Fields:
  String name;
  String address;
  String phone;

Methods:
  String getName();
  String getAddress();
  String getPhone();


  • Most visible difference: method calls instead of procedure calls: e.getName() instead of (getName e)

• Do Finger Exercise 1.2.1.

  All files are available at teachjava.org/code/