CIS 5930-04
Spring 2001

Assignment #2

The Graphical User Interface

    Writing a Java application with Swing components

    You are asked to write a Java application to manipulate entries in a text file. The program must have a Graphical User Interface using Swing components.

    Choose a meaningful interpretation for the entries stored in your file. They might be names and addresses, or titles and bibliographic information, or something more imaginative. Each file entry should consist of a "key" string (e.g. a person's name or ID, a book's author or ISBN, etc) and one or more strings representing associated data fields. You may choose to lay out these fields in your text file on consecutive lines, e.g. 

       key
   data1
   data2
   key
   data1
   data2
   ...

    Your program should be able to read the whole text file and store all entries in internal data structures of your design. One convenient possibility may be to store the keys in a javax.swing.DefaultListModel and to store the data fields in objects stored in a java.util.HashMap. The program should also be able to save the modified data structures back to the text file in the original format.

    The graphical user interface should have at least

    Try to add one or two other features relevant to your chosen application.

    Development Platform

    You may be able to develop and run your Swing-based program on sirah or the other course hosts. However this is only likely to work if you are logging in from a computer that can display remote X-Windows based applications--perhaps a UNIX workstation or a PC running Hummingbird Exceed. Even then you may still have problems displaying the remote graphical application if there is a firewall between you and sirah.

    So in general I recommend you develop your GUI application locally on your PC or workstation instead. If necessary (and allowed), you can download Java software from SDK 1.2 or SDK 1.3. Please let me know if this is impractical for you. I will accept software developed with any version of Java that includes the Swing set.

    Submission of your Homework

    Your submission should consist of files including
    1. A description of your program and the format of your data file, preferably in Microsoft Word, HTML, or plain text format,
    2. all Java source code, and
    3. an example data file.
    You may optionally include javadoc documentation as .html files. However this cannot be submitted in place of your main document.

    On sirah you will find a directory called /home/project/it1spring01/homework2/uid where uid is your login ID. To submit Assignment 2, please copy your files into this directory.

    Grading

    For this assignment, there will be a total of 20 points. Grading criteria are similar to Assignment 1. Some points will be assigned on the basis of apparent effort and uniqueness, and on the extent to which your application presents an attractive and intuitive GUI.

    Useful resources

    Simple Swing examples

    You will find most of the Swing components you are likely to need illustrated in the examples from the lectures.

    Simple reading and writing of text files

    Since this wasn't covered in class, there is an example that reads lines in a text file, and writes them back to another text file, in here.

    Simple use of collection classes

    I have added a few extra slides on Vector and Hashmap to the online lectures on the Java language. See slides 71 to 76.

    The Standard API classes

    Including Swing, see the Java 2 API specification.
    Please send questions to Bryan Carpenter at dbc@csit.fsu.edu.