CSE 341, Java Major Assignment

Due Wednesday, December 10, 1:30 pm.

COOL JAVA ASSIGNMENT

Write a cool java applet or stand alone application.

This is still under constructions - I'm going to be adding some stuff to this in the next week or so.
Due 1:30 pm, Wednesday, December 10. (Last day of class).
A project proposal is due Friday, November 21. Send by email to hinshaw@cs and anderson@cs.
Your project must be written in Java. You may use any system you wish, although the Alphas will be the officially supported platform.
Your project must take advantages of the special facilities provided by Java, it may either be a stand alone application, or an applet.
You should use "good, object-oriented" style in program. This will be considered when your project is evaluated.
You may do your projects individually, or in groups of two.
The code should be primarily your own. If you base your code on existing code (there are tons of applets out there . . .), make sure you document this in a README file.

Project Ideas

A WWW site navigator. This would display the links and allow navigation. (Last quarter a student implemented this with an interface similar to windows explorer.)
Game applets - for example, Chinese Chess or German Bridge or Asteroids or Connect-Four or Pin Ball.
A multiplayer game, allowing internet play.
A really cool project from last quarter was a Logo interpreter applet.
Another cool application from last quarter was a 3d maze exploration game.
An algorithm animation applet - maybe one which brings your favorite CSE326 data structures to life.

Default Project

If you don't want to think up your own project, here is a default project:

Write a very minimal WWW browser. Maybe just something that can parse HTML, display formatted text, and allow the user to follow links.

This doesn't need to be Internet Explorer. Here are a base set of facilities (given in order of implementation):

Read text in from a file, breaking lines appropriately.
Add scroll bars to the window, and reformat the lines is the window width is changed.
Parse the input file for HTML tags. The first tag to implment is <P>.
Implement some basic font handling - maybe just bold and italic.
Allow mouse selection of words (this is just to get ready for selecting the links on the page).
Add the <a href=URL> tags.
Now add selecting and opening URLs - first just absolute addresses.
Add relative addresses.

This is the basic browser - any number of things could be added - images, more fonts, colors, lists, tables, sounds, smells, . . .

Here are a few hints, based on my experience of writing a truly minimal browser. As you can see, it doesn't give the folks at netscape much to worry about. My code is just under one thousand lines.

You can view my minimal browser from the java subdirectory of cse341. Just run the WebViewer class.
I used the StreamTokenizer class for IO, but it did take some work to get it running. You need to be careful about what you declare to be ordinary and special characters.
If you use scroll bars, start with an example from Java documents. (I based my on the Java Class Libraries example, but there is also code in the Java tutorial.)
Use a simple algorithm for breaking text into lines - and parameterize by the width so it is easy to handle resizing the window.
I started by reading text from a file, instead of from a URL. The most difficult part was getting to the point of displaying scrollable text.
Following links requires being able to determine what is being pointed to (you will need to keep track of coordinates somehow), and then opening URLs. Many web pages have relative URLs - however the URL class makes it fairly easy to handle them. (You need to distinguish between relative and absolute URLs - I just assumed it was absolute, and if it gave an exception, tried it as relative).
I implemented a back button (easy with a stack) - this was useful, just because many pages are dead ends.