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Andershand Observer
Personals Applet As we had a small class, Anders and I thought it would be cool to do a class project together. Each person would program one part of the whole application, then we would stitch them all together at the end and all the components would magically work together. Well, things did work out okay in the end (despite a lot of frustration and last-minute work) -- but it wasn't quite as smooth as we'd hoped and we ran into some limitations of the Java language. Still, it was a good project and we learned a lot about working together and Java Beans. To prove to the class that the product of this concurrent, multi-person project was possible, I programmed a partially functional prototype in an evening. The applet demonstrates how all the pieces were supposed to work together. Each of the various windows you see has some application logic below it, and each has to communicate with a simple database on the back end (non-functional here). This applet also uses an innovation Anders and I thought up -- a "Style Bean". To maintain some consistency in look and feel across 6 people's programming efforts, we conceived of the Java equivalent of Cascading Style Sheets. That is, the Style Bean is a central repository for the look and feel aspects of the user interface elements -- colors, fonts, and sizes. And if we decided in the future to change the color scheme for the entire applet, for example, we could do it quite easily by changing the code in just one place. While the Style Bean normally would not be made visible, I programmed one that could be made visible just so that my classmates would have an idea of how their final product might look. In another effort to make things easier for my classmates, I programmed a simple error window that they could use to send messages to the user if there was a problem. For example, if there were a login problem, or if a user forgot to fill out a required field. Without needing to read the source code, my classmates were supposed to be able to use the error window by simply creating an instance of the error window and setting 3 variables (since it, too, is a bean). (See the Error Window's source code. The Error Window has since been improved substantially. Contact me for more details.) See the Style Bean and Error Window demo applet in action! Source code is available for these, as well. As mentioned above, the applet below is a partially functioning demonstration only. It was simply meant to prove to the class that this project was feasible and it could get its look and feel values from the Style Bean. That said, give it a try! The book Anders and I used to prepare for this project is "JavaBeans Programming from the Ground Up." We both like it a lot and highly recommend it if you'd like to learn more about Beans. The author, Joseph O'Neil, writes in an approachable and easy-to-understand style, and focuses on developing professional, production-quality Beans. For more information, see its listing on Amazon.com, or go to the publisher's, Osborne, where you can download code used in the book. Take a look at some of the JavaBeans application development products available. They're suprisingly affordable, too. First is NetObjects BeanBuilder (actually developed by IBM/Lotus). There's a very positive review of it on C|NET called "Cool Beans". It's only $99 for students! The other major product is called Java Studio from Sun. You can read a good review of it on C|NET called "Java for everyone." This product is also surprisingly affordable. |
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