Use the first class to work on the exercises below. No hand-in is required.
Form groups of two (recommended) or three persons and enroll in one of the available groups on BrightSpace. If no free group is available, contact a TA or Henrik Bærbak and we will create one.
Discuss a deadline for handing in the mandatory project (which weekday?) It should ideally be a weekday that allows the TA to provide you feedback within a day or two.
SWEA assumes some proficiency in programming in Java and specifically the object-oriented paradigm! So if you are a bit rusty, then start out by reading and coding the prerequisites with exercises that I have designed. If you master these small exercises, you have the skills that the SWEA course requires.
This course requires a lot of tools running on your machines and I provide two options for you. Either you use a pre-installed virtual Lubuntu Linux machine that has all tools; or you install the tool stack onto your machine by yourself. Either way, consult the Tools page for what to do.
gradle test
in the root folder of the project. It should output
something like
csdev@m33:~/proj/hotstone$ gradle test Starting a Gradle Daemon (subsequent builds will be faster) BUILD SUCCESSFUL in 879ms 4 actionable tasks: 4 executed
CoPilot and AI tools are great tools to increase development productivity. However, in a learning context, they may hinder your learning experience as they "spew out a lot of code": Are you in charge of CoPilot, or does CoPilot take charge of you? You should not use a tool that produces code that you do not have the ability to overview and understand.
Therefore, do not use AI generated code at least until after the Autumn break. You need to learn to master coding before you let AI generate code for you. In the late parts of the course, when CoPilot is a faster way of writing the code you could write yourself, it is OK to turn it on.
It is sadly a recurring reason for failing the SWEA exam, that students with too weak programming and coding experience, has relied too much on IntelliJ 'code completion' and 'intention action' support, and therefore are incapable of producing valid Java code at the exam. I fear AI tools may make this situation even worse. Avoid the trap, become a good programmer before turning on AI tools!
Several hand-ins will require delivering screencasts. If you have not made screencasts before, check out our group's ability to make such. Consult the Tools page that contains suggestions. If you have others, please report so on the web board, to get everyone going.
The course uses a concrete programming project, HotStone, to illustrate central concepts from course curriculum: test driven development, design patterns, compositional design, frameworks, systematic testing, and the Broker pattern for remote method calls.
The project, when finished, will be a framework for designing variants of a card playing game, quite a few simple variants, and one variant that is playable (and approaching 'fun to play'), and includes a functional graphical user interface and the ability to play over the internet.
If you have never played any card games like Blizzard Hearthstone, etc., I suggest that you "play around with them" a bit. Many of them are free games to try out.
I have made two videos (in Danish) about HotStone, demonstrating the user interface that you will work on in Iteration 8. If you already know HearthStone, then choose:
If you do not know Hearthstone, then pick this longer one:Another route is to play HotStone directly. You play with a friend using my game server (you will be alpha-tester of the system, so please report issues/defects/crashes on the SWEA forum). Find instructions on hotstone.littleworld.dk:5220. It is a bit tedious to start a game, sorry about that.
Start on the Iteration 1 exercises which is next weeks mandatory.