CSc 221 Spring 2007 Homework 5

ADDED 4.12.2007: This homework is due Tues, April 17.

ADDED 3.22.2007: Added notes/requirements for HW5

Be sure your compliance level in Eclipse is 5.0, or some of the demonstration code from the Deitels' text won't work. Do: Windows/Preferences/Java/Compiler, and look for Compiler Compliance Level near the top. Or, go to Window/Preferences, and type "compliance" into the filter box at top left, and chase the links. If you have installed Java 6, try checking that. I assume backward compatibility was respected.
The homework has two major components: learn how Java deals with the Model/View/Controller design pattern, and learn something about Java GUI building (layout managers, components, colors & fonts, etc.). You will learn MVC from a combination of lecture and reading Joe Bergin's paper at http://csis.pace.edu/~bergin/mvc/mvcgui.html . The GUI stuff will be a combo of lecture and a lot of self study. To focus your study in this area, I'm going to require that in what you do to display the temperature creatively, you cover two major groupings:
- Color and fonts. Do something with one or the other. Make some color change, maybe at user action but maybe not, or let the user change something about the font.
- GUI components. Your creativity must include two of the following Java GUI components:
  - Sliders
  - Check box or radio button
  - Text field
  - Painter panel
  - Multiple selection list
  - Something building on the ListTest program in the Deitels' 6e fig11_23_24.
  DETAILS OF THIS REQUIREMENT ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE

This homework is an introduction to the Model/View/Controller (MVC) Design Pattern, which is pervasive--from a simple Excel spreadsheet, to a Google's network reportedly containing 700,000 servers. We can't study designs patterns in general, or even look at a few more, but we can get some experience with what is arguably the most important.

The code will be due before the start of class on Thursday, March 29, our last class meeting before the Spring Break.

The application is to show a temperature in a variety of formats, with graphics of your choice and design.

Goals:

Get some experience with a central design pattern
Get some experience with the graphics capabilities of Java

These goals being what they are, I am retracting the offer to let you use whatever graphics tools you like; I mentioned Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Not. I could see the HW turning into a competition on who can produce the wildest whizzies. That's OK--if you do it with Java. No Dreamweaver or anything like that.

This should not be too much of a disappointment, considering that nobody handed in the piece of paper with your favorite graphics package on it. As you saw in the run-through of past student work, there is still a lot of room for creativity.

Java supports the MVC pattern with the Observer and Observable classes, which we will study starting today (March 15). There will be a quiz on the day you turn in your homework, but nothing about this HW will be on MT I.

I wish I had put the code for the MVC pattern of HW5 on the CD you got at the beginning of the term. I've done that other times. Too late now. Here's the code, on pages that are otherwise blank, making it easy for you to copy them into files on your machines. I don't have the energy to correct the indentation. When you get a file into Eclipse, Select-All the Ctrl-Shift-F to reformat the whole thing using Sun's recommended style, which you may customize if you wish. (Although I don't know why you would wish.)

TemperatureCanvas.java

TemperatureGauge.java

TemperatureGUI.java

TemperatureModel.java

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