This interactive diagram to the Java universe is a flash application that links
to the documentation. I thank Malcolm Davies on
Java.Net for drawing our attention to
this excellent resource.
In a nutshell:
"Developers learn and use Java to create and run Programs that make Devices and the Internet useful for People."
A new tutorial article by Stefan Bodewig on the OracleTM Technology Network has been brought to my attention by a news article on TSS (thanks Sudhakar Ramakrishan). Describes the new , and tasks that should make ant even better! Will print and read the detail later, but I can’t wait to try some of these out on the EG-140 build (which needs all kinds of scripting tricks to work).
Not quite on topic, but well worth considering:
“If I were sitting down to design a course today, I’d put at the top of my paper: What can I do to make them curious and interested? What can I do to get them to where they can be creative? And finally, What can I do to help them feel like THEY kick ass, as opposed to thinking that I kick ass? (too many teachers try to impress the students with how smart the teacher is, but IMHO it’s way better for everyone if the students leave your class impressed with how smart THEY are).”
Found this simple UML tool Violet on Cay
Horstmann’s web site. Thanks to
Frank Carver
for starting a thread on tools for Java teaching on JavaRanch and
Marlene Miller for suggesting Violet.
Version 1.0.0 jMock – A Lightweight Mock Object Library for Java has been released. jMock is a framework that uses reflection (I assume) to programmatically define mock objects for unit testing. Tutorials and source code ready for downloading.
Daily trawl through the java.blogs feeds picked up a reference to ONJava.com: SSS (Small, Simple, Safe) [May. 26, 2004]. SSS is apparently a simple tool that allows you to instantiate and play with Java objects. It is apparently used and useful in teaching. I simply had to make a comment to the effect that BlueJ has had this feature for ever! Here’s my response in full:
BlueJ is a simple Java IDE (avalable from www.bluej.org) which also has this sort of behaviour. You can instantiate an object of any class on the classpath by providing the fully qualified name and then selecting any of the class’s constructors. Once the object has been instantiated and a small icon (sort of like a UML object diagram) appears. You can then right-click on the “object” to call any of the object’s methods. Because BlueJ is an IDE and debugger it has privileged access to the JVM, which allows you to also inspect the object to see all its private state.
BlueJ has built up quite a following in the educational arena just lately and there are several “CS101″ text books using it (but none from O’Reilly). See the web site quoted above for more info and access to the lively discussion lists.
It’ll be interesting to see if there is any feedback!
Nice blog article about Java’s pass-by-reference semantics. I still think Kathy Sierra’s Campfire Story Pass-by-Value Please is a good an explanation of this difficult concept as you’ll find. And it’s nice and memorable. Kathy and Bert Bates make good use of the analogy in Head First Java too.
Thanks to Val’s Blog.