COP-3330: Object Oriented Programming

Course Introduction May 14, 2012 Eng. Hector M Lugo-Cordero, MS

Syllabus
Link to syllabus As of now my webpage will have all material for the course
http://www.eecs.ucf.edu/~hlugo

I will try to get a WebCT session

The Programming World

Couple of programming paradigms exists
Imperative:
Structural: C, FORTRAN

Functional: Scheme, Nodejs Object Oriented: Objective-C, C++, C#, Java

What is this course about?

Developing programs using the object oriented paradigm Allows abstraction of low level details giving more powerful tools to concentrate on the higher level tasks Sentences are composed of Subject, Verb, Predicate or Object
Mary eats the apple
Subject: Mary Verb (action): eats Object: the apple

Object oriented programming is composed of sentences var.addTo(temp);

Subject (an object): var Action (method): addTo Object (another object): temp

Problem Solving
1. 2. 3. 4. Understand the problem Dissect the problem into manageable pieces. Design a solution. Consider alternatives to the solution to refine it. 5. Implement the solution. 6. Test the solution and fix any problems that exist.

History of Java
Java was developed in 1995 be James Gosling who works at Sun Microsystems. Java's ability to execute programs on the WWW caused an initial buzz. However, the language has continued to gain in popularity because of its object-oriented design. This design is very well-suited for very large programming projects. Many academics even feel that Java is an excellent first programming language to learn. Java teaches the concept of objects very well. Other languages, such as C++, do not reinforce the concept quite as well. Although C++ is good for learning memory management. Recently Sun was bought by Oracle.

A Java Program
1. // Knights.java 2. // Arup Guha 3. // 1/9/07 4. // A very simple Java program that prints to the screen. 5. public class Knights { 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. } /* This is the main function of the program */ public static void main(String[] args) { System.out.println("GO KNIGHTS!!!!!!!"); }

Understanding the code (comments)

Single line comments are written as shown on lines 1 4, that is //with some text
It is good practice to keep your code clean and commented such that you may go back to understand it after some time Lines 1 4 contain the author and some info about the code, e.g. logs, known bugs, etc.

Multi line comments follow the C convention of /* anything between this is a comment */, as shown on lines 6 8

Class Definition
Line 5 presents the definition of a class
All java code resides within classes, and each class must have a name.
In main class the name should be the same filename

We shall go more into classes as the course moves on

The Main Function

Line 9 presents the main function of a Java program It is not necessary to have a main function in order to have a complete Java Class
For now all classes shall have one As in C, this is the first function that is called

Understanding Main
There are several keywords on the definition of main
1) public: access from everywhere 2) static: the method is the same for all instances of the class 3) void: return type, in this case none 4) String[] args: parameters to main. Equivalent to Cs int argc, char** argv

We shall go more into detail on this

System.out.println
On line 10 we our first line to write something to the stdout or console in this case System.out.println works as printf in C, however it is much simpler to use since it does not require format specifiers (i.e. %c, %s, %d, %f, etc.) System.out.printf does exits as well and it is used just liked in C Other standard streams include System.in and System.err

Primitive Data Types

Data Type byte short int long float double boolean char void Wrapper Class Byte Short Integer Long Float Double Boolean Character Void

Variable Names
Are case sensitive Can contain letters, underscores, and numbers Should not start with numbers Should be descriptive of the task, they can have any number of characters

Compilers and Interpreters

Compilers translate code into machine code to generate a binary file (e.g. .exe) Interpreters run the code as it reads it Java is an interpreted language, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) runs a .class code

Creating .class files

The command javac may be used as gcc with C to compile or create .class files which can be run by the JVM Consider the code Knights.java, to compile it javac Knights.java The above creates a .class file which may be run using java Knights Notice no .class is used (why?)