Module Information

This module's teaching pattern each week consists of two 2-hour lecturer-led teaching sessions in a large computer laboratory. This enables small presentations to be followed by related practical exercises and quizzes. Students also have a 1-hour small-group tutorial for team-based design and coding exercises. The module will cover the following topics:
1. Introductory workshops as a taster of many of the topics to be covered during the module: The idea of class and object. Storing data in instance variables. Methods. Java Virtual Machine and bytecode. Applications running from an integrated development environment tool. Review of concepts from semester one as used in Java: variables, conditional tests, loops.
2. Basic concepts. Exploration of objects and classes. The UML class diagram. Instance variables, methods and parameters, object diagrams. Relationships between classes and their representation in class diagrams. Mapping a simple procedural program from semester one to a Java program.
3. Review of basic concepts. Reading from the keyboard. Null references. Running programs from the command line. Javadoc comments. Naming conventions. Tutorial on the use of the Classes, Responsibilities and Collaborations technique.
4. Types and equality. Searching, loading and saving. Reading from and writing to files. Iteration over Java Collections. Java arrays. UML sequence diagrams.
5. Access modifiers. Packages and JAR files. The static modifier. Revisiting abstraction and encapsulation. Consolidation: design and implementation. The role of use-case diagrams and their relationship to class diagrams and implementation.
6. Focus on inheritance, polymorphism, interfaces and abstract classes. Overriding the equals method. Exception classes.
7. Graphical user interfaces. Event-driven programming. Separation of concerns.