Busy (GUI) Building Bee
I couldn’t quite get the title all B’s, but I tried!
Things have been really hectic recently and it’s all come out of nowhere - honest! Well, that’s not strictly true, but I will elaborate:
In just over two weeks time I have to hand in my final year project. This includes the finished program, documentation, technical report and then 4 days later an individual report too (it is a group project). The project that I have been working on this year with three other guys is a Graphical User Interface Builder extension for the BlueJ Java IDE. Essentially, people new to Java that are learning using the BlueJ IDE might want to build a GUI for their projects and so we have been developing an extension that allows users to create simple GUIs for their projects.
The emphasis really is on simple, as BlueJ is not meant to be used as a fully-fledged Java IDE - it’s for beginners to Java to learn the basics about Objects and Methods etc. before moving onto a more powerful IDE such as Netbeans or Eclipse. People using the GUI Builder aren’t expected to be trying to make complicated GUIs - the majority of the time, if you want to be doing that you should be creating the GUI yourself rather than using a builder.
But anyway, the GUI Builder is written in Java (as it is an extension of BlueJ, which is also written in Java) and we are generating the GUI templates in XML and then converting that XML into Java and vice versa (when re-opening a GUI in our builder). I have been doing the majority of the XML stuff, and have learned a huge amount about Java and XML as well as just about Java. My Java programming skills weren’t the best, but I feel a lot more comfortable about programming in Java now than I did a couple of years ago. I spent a year working with JSP, but the applications that we developed were developed in a very different way to standalone programs.
So the project due date is coming up and I’ve suddenly realised that I have loads of other work to do too! I have two Concurrency assessments due (parallel programming, one assignment is programming a robot brain for use in a simulation and the other is programming a visualization of the Dining Philosophers Problem that has already been solved for us), a report for my Software Failure & Risk module (our project is regarding the Ariane 5 Flight 501 failure as well as a 20 minute presentation to prepare about the same subject.
On top of this I have a report due for my New Enterprise Start-Up business plan that I wrote and submitted a few months ago. The report is about how I found the module and what I took from it, so shouldn’t be too hard - it is only 1000 words long). I also have lots on with my Computing in the Classroom module. I basically go into a local school twice every other week and help out in their IT classes.
I went in today (getting absolutely drenched in the abysmal weather) and everything went well, and have to give a presentation about Computing at my University as well as demonstrating my final year project to them (well, talking about parts of it, not really going into too much detail as it is more complicated than they need to know).
Once all these pieces of coursework are due in, I then have to start revising for my exams. Woooooo! Argh!
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