06-08166 Software Workshop Java (A)

Alan Sexton

20 credits in Semester 1

Aims

To develop students' program design and development skills to cope with large programs.
To learn to design and use more sophisticated data structures and objects and use them in a practical application.
To explore issues of user interface design, database connectivity, debugging, and documentation in the context of practical program development.

Learning Outcomes

On completion of this module, the student should be able to:

Design and build large programs requiring moderately sophisticated data structures, user interfaces, and database interactions.
Apply suitable strategies for debugging and testing such systems
Analyse and criticise designs and to produce sufficiently detailed and precise documentation.
Find performance problems and to understand issues involved in dealing with them

Prerequisites and Corequisites

06-11224 Introduction to Software Engineering or 06-08755 Introduction to Software & Hardware Engineering B or equivalent software engineering experience.

06-08744 +06-08745 Software Workshop 1 or 06 08747 + 06 08750 Software Workshop 1(A) or equivalent Java programming experience.

Four hours lab sessions a week with demonstrator support One hour lecture per week on latest exercise or issues to do with the exercise. One hour extra tutorial per week for students who need extra support

Assessment

2-hour unseen exam counts for 80% of the course mark 3 exercises, tested by viva in the labs plus paper submission count for 5%, 5% and 10% respectively

Recommended Books

Title	Author(s)	Publisher, Date	Comments
The Java Programming Language, 3rd Edition	Arnold, Gosling, Holmes	Addison Wesley	ISBN 0201704331. An excellent, precise but readable coverage of the core language. Very little on the extra libraries (swing, jdbc etc.) Recommended
Core JAVA 1.2 Volume 1 - Fundamentals	Cai Horstmann, Gary Cornell	Prentice Hall 1999	ISBN 0-13-081933-6. An excellent text but you Collection Classes and JDBC are only covered in Volume 2 Recommended
Core JAVA 2 Volume 2 - Advanced Features	Gary Cornell, Cai Horstmann	Prentice Hall 1999	ISBN 0-13-081934-4. Covers most of the extras that are very useful or necessary for unusual situations. Background reading
Practical Object Oriented Design with UML	Priestley	McGraw Hill	ISBN 0077095995. A tutorial introduction to object oriented design using UML. Very easy text but intentionally does not cover many of the finer points. Background reading
UML Distilled, 2nd Edition	Fowler and Scott	Addison Wesley	ISBN 020165783X. A short text that manages to cover pretty much all of UML with good explanations on how to use it. It is focused more on UML than on object oriented design. Background reading
Software Engineering, 6th Edition	Ian Sommerville	Addison Wesley	ISBN 0-2-1-39815-X. An excellent text on software engineering in general. Background reading

Detailed Syllabus

The following is a list of topics that will be covered during the course. Learning about them will involve independent study, supported by lectures, handouts and demonstrator assistance during lab sessions, by the students in order to fulfill the requirements of individual exercises.

Java programming
Object oriented design for large programs
Program coding and debgging strategies
Program documentation
Use of the Collection Class library
Database access using JDBC
Graphical User Interfaces using Swing
XML parsing using the JAXP library

Relevant Links

Course Handouts

Maintained by: Alan Sexton, School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham
Last update: 5 September 2000