Java Help

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Content

• Introduction
  • Environment Setup
• Environment
• Reference
  • Books
  • Online References
    • Remote
    • Local
• Java Tutorial

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Introduction

As we all know JAVA is the product of Sun. It becomes to be the new programming standard for web applications. It also required as a basic programming language for various of CS courses, such as CS542, CS561, CS536 etc.

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Environment

Ok, now assume we are going to do the JAVA project for our courses. We usually have following choices. We can select one of the following UNIX machines, or we can do it on a PC. Here is a list of UNIX machines and the versions of JAVA virtual machine installed on it.

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Reference

Books: Hmm, there are a lot of good JAVA books you can get start. These are the books that I used very often.

• Java In a Nutshell, 2nd Edition, David Flanagan, O'REILLY, ISBN 1-56592-262-X
• Beginning Java, Ivor Horton, WROX, ISBN 1-861000-27-8
• JDBC Developer's Resource, Art Taylor, INFORMIX Press, ISBN 0-13-842352-0

Want more about tutorial books? Check: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/book.html.

In general, Sun has suggested a list of books about JAVA programming. The address is at: http://java.sun.com/docs/books. External References: There are a lot references from Sun's homepage. Here we selected some of the most popular accessed web sites as the reference.

• All the java news: Java Homepage at Sun(http://java.sun.com).
• All the documentations: Homepage of the Documentations and Trainings provided by Sun (http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/infodocs)
• All the tutorials, such as Java, Applet, SWING, JDBC, etc.: The Java Tutorial (http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial).
• All the API Documents and Download of JDKs: Products & APIs (http://java.sun.com/products/index.html).
• Want to find something you want? Try the Really Big Index (http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/reallybigindex.html).

Internal References: There are also a lot of machines that already have some version of the documents downloaded. If you want a faster access, then you can try the following links:

• The Java Code Conversions
• The Java Language Specification
• Java CC

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Java Tutorial

The CS-GSO has conducted a Java-Tutorial on October 25, 1999. This section contains the material that was prepared for the tutorial. It also contains a number of Java programs that were not presented in the lecture. They cover a large part of what you are likely to need in Java.

As always: To download something rather than just seeing it on the screen, hold the SHIFT-key while clicking.

• The overheads that were used for the tutorial (PostScript, view with ghostview). Explains differences with Java and C, why to use Java, and some introduction into the language.
• A handout that explains how to get started with Java.

• Basic Java Concepts.

  • The essential Hello-World program. Use this to try out the Java-compiler.
  • An introduction to object-oriented concepts. This is commented code, read the comments in order of the numbers of the comments and it should give you a rough idea of some OO concepts. If you can predict what this program prints, you understand object-oriented programming.
  • An introduction to GUI programming using the Swing-AWT. Graphical User Interfaces are easily programmed using the Swing-Package (Java Foundation Classes - JFC). This is a short program that explains some concepts. To compile it, you need Java 1.2 (or the swingall.jar library under Java 1.1.x) program. Again, read in order of the numbers. Note that the appletviewer on crane, toucan, falcon takes about 5 minutes to start. In order to do meaningful development, you should start the appletviewer only once and then reload the applet everytime you compiled. That is much faster. Run this applet by typing appletviewer SwingGUI.html. The html-file that you need is here. Since this is a Java 1.2 applet, it will not run in Netscape (you have to write applets in Java 1.1 if you want them to run in current browsers).
  • An introduction to Java-exceptions. This was not part of the tutorial lecture.

• Some Advanced Concepts.

  • Networking. This code is a simple HTTP-client. It downloads a HTML-Page from a web server with given URL and outputs it to stdout.
  • Animation. This code shows a very simple application of Java's threads. It animates a simple graphical applet.
  • Databases. This code shows how to use Java and JDBC to communicate with a database system. In order to run this code, you need a database connectivity package (such as Oracle's JDBC-Thin-Client) in the classpath and, of course, an account on a database server.

• Incremental Java: The Mandelbrot Applet

  This section contains different steps of an applet that draws the Mandelbrot set (a fractal). It goes from easy to complicated, introducing elements like mouse click handling and colors along the way. This code is not blessed with a lot of comments, just take it as an example of coding and play with it. Again, you need the appletviewer and a lot of time to see anything on the screen, but it's worth it :) I did put the class-Files here so the applets should work in your browser, but remember that this is experimental code, they may behave weirdly. Be patient, some of them are quite slow.
  
  
  • Mandelbrot 1. Draws a black rectangle on an applet; pixel by pixel: Code and HTML-File.
  • Mandelbrot 2. Draws the original Mandelbrot set: Code and HTML-File.
  • Mandelbrot 3. Zooms into the set after a mouse click. Also much faster due to the elimination of the SQRT-Function: Code and HTML-File.
  • Mandelbrot 4. 16-Color version (with color table): Code and HTML-File.
  • Mandelbrot 5. 256-Color version. Continuous colors. Cool!!!: Code and HTML-File.
  • Mandelbrot 6. Right mouse button zooms out. Buffering the image, so it doesn't recompute everytime the applet repaints: Code and HTML-File.
  • Mandelbrot 7. Animates the process of building the image. Makes the whole thing look faster (although it's actually slower): Code and HTML-File.

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Last modified by CS-GSO, Sunday, 27-Nov-2005 09:05:43 EST