Lab Orientation                               Peter Komisar
 latest revision April 10/ 2001


1. Get computer accounts

2. Type HelloPlanet into a text editor. Compile it. Run it.

4. Join Sun's Developer Connection. Browse 'Training'
     http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/

5. Go to the jdk docs.
    http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/api/index.html
    Notice this site is in the table at the top of the Java Post page.

6. Do the Planets excercise. Make sure it runs. You can refer back to HelloPlanet.

7. For an editor you can use notepad, or edit or you may wish to try the free editor
    JCreator. Color coding is a fair and useful technique to accelerate learning the
    a language. If you mispell a keyword the color will not change appropriately.
    These editors are sometimes a little buggy. You might wish to use them just for
    your source code creation. In this case you would save your file, but compile
    and run at the DOS prompt.

A Short Navigation of the Java API

 // don't worry about understanding the terminlogy, thats for later, for now just take the tour

The API is really the final word on what's available to you in Java. Notice all the packages
listed with a brief description of what they contain. All the classes that are useful for a
given topic will generally be contained in the same package.

Find the JFrame class in the list entitled all classes and click on it. The first thing you
see is the package the class is in followed by the name of the class. Then you see where the
class is located in the hierarchy of classes. Notice the root class of all classes is Object class
located in the lang package. The next thing to notice is the detailed description of what the
class does. For the novice this description is sometimes a little too 'intense' in which case you
need to refer back to a text to make sense of it. Still the description is a good reference.
(Lets ignore the Inner class summary. When Java gets fancy, programmers can include
classes inside other classes.)

Move on to the fields section. These are data items defined for the class. (Note fields
inherited from other classes are listed.)

Next you see constructors. These are the operations that create copies of the classes called
objects in memory. Notice JFrame has four variations of constructors listed. Following
constructors, are the list of methods. The methods are actions a class can perform in the
language. The first list is a brief description of the methods. They are followed by a more
detailed discussion at the end of the page. (Notice also, the methods that are listed as
being inherited by JFrames parent classes.)

A page like this exists for all the classes in the language. If you want to find a method or field
you can use the Index hyperlink on the front page. For instance, click Index, click C, and find
clone and click on it. You'll see a ton of clone methods. That's because clone is first defined in
Object class and is inherited by every other class. Here we see the list of classes that have
modified the clone method for the purposes of the class. If you look through the list you'll see
where it is defined in Object class. Click on it and you get the description of the method as
defined in the class Object.