Getting Started with Lab Assignments

ICS H22

Winter 2006

Handing in Lab Assignments

Each new lab assignment will be made available by Wednesday morning through the class home page. An electronic copy of the lab will be due the following Wednesday at midnight. To turn in the lab, log in to the UCI Electronic Educational Environment, and upload the requested files following the link you should have for the ICS.H22 class.

Each .java file must include a comment template at the top. This comment should have the following form:

// NAME: Your full name
// STUDENT ID: Your UCI student ID

Grading of Lab Assignments

Each program you submit (on homework, quiz, or the final exam) will be graded on the following components: Program Design, Algorithmic Correctness, Coding Style, Efficiency. You should review each assignment after it is returned to make sure that you understand the reason for any deducted points and can improve your performance accordingly.

Programming Environment

Working in the lab is a good idea since help is more readily available there. However, many of you may want to work on your programming assignments from home. You are responisble for installing the necessary software on your own machines. It is not realistic to expect us to provide support for your home installations. Here is the software you will need to get started:

• A Text Editor. There are many to choose from. You can purchase TextPad at www.textpad.com .
• Sun Java 2 Standard Edition SDK . This is available for free at www.java.sun.com . It contains the java compiler javac and the virtual machine java and all the libraries you will need for programming in Java for this course. We will be using version 1.5. The following link is to the Java API for version 1.5 and will be invaluable in using Java's wealth of pre-defined classes Java API . If you are interested in some documentation on the new version of Java, an over view can be found at http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/releases/j2se15/ . More details can be found at http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/relnotes/features.html .

Many people also like to use an integrated development environment (IDE). These provide an editor, compiler, virtual machine and usually other tools, such as a debugger. A relatively easy one to get started with is BlueJ. BlueJ is available on all the machines in the labs and can be downloaded for free from www.bluej.org . There is a very good tutorial available at that web site as well. I will be using BlueJ when presenting and writing code in class.

Java Coding Style Rules

• Align all curly braces vertically to allow easy visual matching.
• Use four (4) spaces for each indentation.
• Indent all statements contained within compound statements (if, for, while, {}, etc).
• Use meaningful names for variables, parameters, subprograms, and classes. (You may use simple names like i, c, s, or f for general integers, characters, strings, or floats respectively.)
• Define and use names for all constants, e.g., PI instead of 3.14159, and BUF_SIZE instead of 1024.
• Use the following conventions for letter-case of identifiers:

  Identifier	Convention	Examples
  class names	capitalize first word, capitalize all other words (no underscores)	Circle, FilledCircle, ShadedFilledCircle
  class member names	lowercase first word, capitalize all other words (no underscores)	draw(), drawLine(), centerX, centerY, radius
  function names	lowercase first word, capitalize all other words (no underscores)	findIndex(), factorial(), toLowerCase(), isUpperCase()
  named constants	all caps, use underscores to separate words	PI, MAX_BUFFER_SIZE

• Use whitespace around every binary operator (e.g, x + y instead of x+y) and around function arguments (e.g, put( x, y ) instead of put(x,y)).
• Comment each class, each method, and each class variable (describing it's purpose) using a form similar to the example at the very end. (Note I only commented a few members to avoid cluttering up the Class example.)
• Comments should convey some additional information not immediate from the code. They should not simply reiterate what is obvious from the code.

Examples of Class Definitions

     import java.awt.*;

     /*
         class Triangle defines a two dimmensional Triangle
     */

     class Triangle
     {

         // the x,y coordinates of the origin of this Triangle

         private int x, y;

         // draws this Triangle on the display

         public void draw()
         {
            // ...
         }

         // inverts this Triangle along a horizontal line

         public void flip()
         {
            // ...
         }

         // rotates this Triangle by number of degrees specified by angle

         public void rotate( int angle )
         {
            // ...
         }

     }