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Introduction To Programming Using Java - Textbook
Introduction To Programming Using Java - Textbook
David J. Eck
Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Preface xi
i
CONTENTS ii
3 Control 71
3.1 Blocks, Loops, and Branches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
3.1.1 Blocks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
3.1.2 The Basic While Loop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
3.1.3 The Basic If Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
3.1.4 Control Abstractiont . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
3.1.5 Definite Assignment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
3.2 Algorithm Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
3.2.1 Pseudocode and Stepwise Refinement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
3.2.2 The 3N+1 Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
3.2.3 Coding, Testing, Debugging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
3.3 while and do..while . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
3.3.1 The while Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
3.3.2 The do..while Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
3.3.3 break and continue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
3.4 The for Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
3.4.1 For Loops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
3.4.2 Example: Counting Divisors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
3.4.3 Nested for Loops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
3.5 The if Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
3.5.1 The Dangling else Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
3.5.2 Multiway Branching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
3.5.3 If Statement Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
3.5.4 The Empty Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
3.6 The switch Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
3.6.1 The Basic switch Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
3.6.2 Menus and switch Statements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
3.6.3 Enums in switch Statements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
3.6.4 Definite Assignment and switch Statements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
3.6.5 Switch Expressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
3.6.6 The Traditional switch Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
3.7 Exceptions and try..catch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
3.7.1 Exceptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
3.7.2 try..catch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
CONTENTS iii
4 Subroutines 143
4.1 Black Boxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
4.2 Static Subroutines and Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
4.2.1 Subroutine Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
4.2.2 Calling Subroutines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
4.2.3 Subroutines in Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
4.2.4 Member Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
4.3 Parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
4.3.1 Using Parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
4.3.2 Formal and Actual Parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
4.3.3 Overloading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
4.3.4 Subroutine Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
4.3.5 Array Parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
4.3.6 Command-line Arguments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
4.3.7 Throwing Exceptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
4.3.8 Global and Local Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
4.4 Return Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
4.4.1 The return statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
4.4.2 Function Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
4.4.3 3N+1 Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
4.5 Lambda Expressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
4.5.1 First-class Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
4.5.2 Functional Interfaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
4.5.3 Lambda Expressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
4.5.4 Method References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
4.6 APIs, Packages, Modules, and Javadoc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
4.6.1 Toolboxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
4.6.2 Java’s Standard Packages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
4.6.3 Using Classes from Packages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
4.6.4 About Modules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
4.6.5 Javadoc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
4.6.6 Static Import . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
4.7 More on Program Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
CONTENTS iv
Glossary 769
Preface
xi
Preface xii
∗ ∗ ∗
Java currently has two major approaches to Graphical User Interface programming: JavaFX
and Swing. This edition of the textbook uses Swing, but there is an alternative edition that uses
JavaFX. The main differences are in Chapters 6 and 13, which are devoted to GUI programming,
but GUI programs and GUI-related material in other chapters also use Swing exclusively. For
the Swing edition, much of the GUI material is taken from Version 7 of this textbook, with
some updating and modification.
Swing is a standard part of Java. JavaFX was introduced as a more modern approach to
GUI programming, but it must be downloaded and installed separately from Java itself, which
makes it more complicated to use. Swing and JavaFX can both be used to write complex, fully
functional GUI programs, and either one is a reasonable choice. Version 8 of this textbook used
JavaFX. The alternative edition that uses Swing has been added for Version 9.
GUI programming was never included in the textbook as an end in itself, and it would take
another textbook to cover the topic in its entirety. I cover GUI because it is a great example of
object-oriented programming, it lets me introduce event-driven programs, and it lets students
literally see the effect of the code that they write. JavaFX and Swing both offer good support
for all of those purposes.
∗ ∗ ∗
Version 8 of this textbook originally covered Java 8, but minor updates of that version added
notes about new features in Java 9 through Java 16. Version 9 of the book covers Java 17. The
main change from Version 8 is the addition of the Swing edition. A section on records has been
added to Chapter 7. Many examples have been modified to use text blocks and the new switch
statement syntax. Some references to the general idea of “abstraction” have been added, such
as a short subsection on control abstraction in Section 3.1. A short subsection on final classes
and methods has been added to Section 5.5. There are also small corrections and modifications
throughout.
The majority of this textbook is valid for Java 8, and the book does not cover features
added after Java 8 in as much detail. Note that only Java 8, 11, and 17 are “long-term
support” releases. When I introduce a feature that requires Java 11 or Java 17, I will make
note of that fact. However, I will never refer to any of the non-long-term-support releases.
∗ ∗ ∗
The first version of the book was written in 1996, and there have been several versions since
then. Version 9 will be the last version. All editions are archived (at least until my retirement
in December 2022 and hopefully beyond) at the following Web addresses:
• First edition: https://math.hws.edu/eck/cs124/javanotes1/ (Covers Java 1.0.)
• Second edition: https://math.hws.edu/eck/cs124/javanotes2/ (Covers Java 1.1.)
• Third edition: https://math.hws.edu/eck/cs124/javanotes3/ (Covers Java 1.1.)
• Fourth edition: https://math.hws.edu/eck/cs124/javanotes4/ (Covers Java 1.4.)
• Fifth edition: https://math.hws.edu/eck/cs124/javanotes5/ (Covers Java 5.0.)
• Sixth edition: https://math.hws.edu/eck/cs124/javanotes6/ (Covers Java 5.0, with a bit
of 6.0.)
• Seventh edition: https://math.hws.edu/eck/cs124/javanotes7/ (Covers Java 7.)
• Eighth edition: https://math.hws.edu/eck/cs124/javanotes8/ (Covers Java 8, plus a bit
of 11 and 17.)
Preface xiii
When you begin a journey, it’s a good idea to have a mental map of the terrain you’ll be
passing through. The same is true for an intellectual journey, such as learning to write computer
programs. In this case, you’ll need to know the basics of what computers are and how they
work. You’ll want to have some idea of what a computer program is and how one is created.
Since you will be writing programs in the Java programming language, you’ll want to know
something about that language in particular and about the modern computing environment for
which Java is designed.
As you read this chapter, don’t worry if you can’t understand everything in detail. (In fact,
it would be impossible for you to learn all the details from the brief expositions in this chapter.)
Concentrate on learning enough about the big ideas to orient yourself, in preparation for the
rest of the book. Most of what is covered in this chapter will be covered in much greater detail
later in the book.
1
CHAPTER 1. THE MENTAL LANDSCAPE 2
specified location. The CPU can also store information in memory by specifying the information
to be stored and the address of the location where it is to be stored.
On the level of machine language, the operation of the CPU is fairly straightforward
(although it is very complicated in detail). The CPU executes a program that is stored as a
sequence of machine language instructions in main memory. It does this by repeatedly reading,
or fetching , an instruction from memory and then carrying out, or executing , that instruction.
This process—fetch an instruction, execute it, fetch another instruction, execute it, and so on
forever—is called the fetch-and-execute cycle. With one exception, which will be covered
in the next section, this is all that the CPU ever does. (This is all really somewhat more
complicated in modern computers. A typical processing chip these days contains several CPU
“cores,” which allows it to execute several instructions simultaneously. And access to main
memory is speeded up by memory “caches,” which can be more quickly accessed than main
memory and which are meant to hold data and instructions that the CPU is likely to need soon.
However, these complications don’t change the basic operation.)
A CPU contains an Arithmetic Logic Unit, or ALU, which is the part of the processor
that carries out operations such as addition and subtraction. It also holds a small number of
registers, which are small memory units capable of holding a single number. A typical CPU
might have 16 or 32 “general purpose” registers, which hold data values that are immediately
accessible for processing, and many machine language instructions refer to these registers. For
example, there might be an instruction that takes two numbers from two specified registers,
adds those numbers (using the ALU), and stores the result back into a register. And there
might be instructions for copying a data value from main memory into a register, or from a
register into main memory.
The CPU also includes special purpose registers. The most important of these is the
program counter , or PC. The CPU uses the PC to keep track of where it is in the program
it is executing. The PC simply stores the memory address of the next instruction that the
CPU should execute. At the beginning of each fetch-and-execute cycle, the CPU checks the
PC to see which instruction it should fetch. During the course of the fetch-and-execute cycle,
the number in the PC is updated to indicate the instruction that is to be executed in the next
cycle. Usually, but not always, this is just the instruction that sequentially follows the current
instruction in the program. Some machine language instructions modify the value that is stored
in the PC. This makes it possible for the computer to “jump” from one point in the program
to another point, which is essential for implementing the program features known as loops and
branches that are discussed in Section 1.4.
∗ ∗ ∗
A computer executes machine language programs mechanically—that is without under-
standing them or thinking about them—simply because of the way it is physically put together.
This is not an easy concept. A computer is a machine built of millions of tiny switches called
transistors, which have the property that they can be wired together in such a way that an
output from one switch can turn another switch on or off. As a computer computes, these
switches turn each other on or off in a pattern determined both by the way they are wired
together and by the program that the computer is executing.
Machine language instructions are expressed as binary numbers. A binary number is made
up of just two possible digits, zero and one. Each zero or one is called a bit. So, a machine
language instruction is just a sequence of zeros and ones. Each particular sequence encodes
some particular instruction. The data that the computer manipulates is also encoded as binary
numbers. In modern computers, each memory location holds a byte, which is a sequence of
CHAPTER 1. THE MENTAL LANDSCAPE 3
eight bits. A machine language instruction or a piece of data generally consists of several bytes,
stored in consecutive memory locations. For example, when a CPU reads an instruction from
memory, it might actually read four or eight bytes from four or eight memory locations; the
memory address of the instruction is the address of the first of those bytes.
A computer can work directly with binary numbers because switches can readily represent
such numbers: Turn the switch on to represent a one; turn it off to represent a zero. Machine
language instructions are stored in memory as patterns of switches turned on or off. When a
machine language instruction is loaded into the CPU, all that happens is that certain switches
are turned on or off in the pattern that encodes that instruction. The CPU is built to respond
to this pattern by executing the instruction it encodes; it does this simply because of the way
all the other switches in the CPU are wired together.
So, you should understand this much about how computers work: Main memory holds
machine language programs and data. These are encoded as binary numbers. The CPU
fetches machine language instructions from memory one after another and executes them.
Each instruction makes the CPU perform some very small task, such as adding two numbers or
moving data to or from memory. The CPU does all this mechanically, without thinking about or
understanding what it does—and therefore the program it executes must be perfect, complete
in all details, and unambiguous because the CPU can do nothing but execute it exactly as
written. Here is a schematic view of this first-stage understanding of the computer:
Memory
CPU 10001010
00001100
(Location
(Location
0)
1)
10111000 (Location 2)
Registers Data to Memory 01000001 (Location 3)
00001011 (Location 4)
Data from Memory 11011101 (Location 5)
10110000 (Location 6)
01010010 (Location 7)
ALU 11111010 (Location 8)
01001100 (Location 9)
Address for 00100011 (Location 10)
PC
reading/writing
00011010 (Location 11)
data
. .
. .
. .
Input/ Data
Output Address
Controller Control
Now, devices such as keyboard, mouse, and network interface can produce input that needs
to be processed by the CPU. How does the CPU know that the data is there? One simple idea,
which turns out to be not very satisfactory, is for the CPU to keep checking for incoming data
over and over. Whenever it finds data, it processes it. This method is called polling , since
the CPU polls the input devices continually to see whether they have any input data to report.
Unfortunately, although polling is very simple, it is also very inefficient. The CPU can waste
an awful lot of time just waiting for input.
CHAPTER 1. THE MENTAL LANDSCAPE 5
To avoid this inefficiency, interrupts are generally used instead of polling. An interrupt
is a signal sent by another device to the CPU. The CPU responds to an interrupt signal by
putting aside whatever it is doing in order to respond to the interrupt. Once it has handled
the interrupt, it returns to what it was doing before the interrupt occurred. For example, when
you press a key on your computer keyboard, a keyboard interrupt is sent to the CPU. The
CPU responds to this signal by interrupting what it is doing, reading the key that you pressed,
processing it, and then returning to the task it was performing before you pressed the key.
Again, you should understand that this is a purely mechanical process: A device signals an
interrupt simply by turning on a wire. The CPU is built so that when that wire is turned on,
the CPU saves enough information about what it is currently doing so that it can return to
the same state later. This information consists of the contents of important internal registers
such as the program counter. Then the CPU jumps to some predetermined memory location
and begins executing the instructions stored there. Those instructions make up an interrupt
handler that does the processing necessary to respond to the interrupt. (This interrupt handler
is part of the device driver software for the device that signaled the interrupt.) At the end of
the interrupt handler is an instruction that tells the CPU to jump back to what it was doing;
it does that by restoring its previously saved state.
Interrupts allow the CPU to deal with asynchronous events. In the regular fetch-
and-execute cycle, things happen in a predetermined order; everything that happens is
“synchronized” with everything else. Interrupts make it possible for the CPU to deal efficiently
with events that happen “asynchronously,” that is, at unpredictable times.
As another example of how interrupts are used, consider what happens when the CPU needs
to access data that is stored on a hard disk. The CPU can access data directly only if it is
in main memory. Data on the disk has to be copied into memory before it can be accessed.
Unfortunately, on the scale of speed at which the CPU operates, the disk drive is extremely
slow. When the CPU needs data from the disk, it sends a signal to the disk drive telling it
to locate the data and get it ready. (This signal is sent synchronously, under the control of
a regular program.) Then, instead of just waiting the long and unpredictable amount of time
that the disk drive will take to do this, the CPU goes on with some other task. When the disk
drive has the data ready, it sends an interrupt signal to the CPU. The interrupt handler can
then read the requested data.
∗ ∗ ∗
Now, you might have noticed that all this only makes sense if the CPU actually has several
tasks to perform. If it has nothing better to do, it might as well spend its time polling for input
or waiting for disk drive operations to complete. All modern computers use multitasking to
perform several tasks at once. Some computers can be used by several people at once. Since the
CPU is so fast, it can quickly switch its attention from one user to another, devoting a fraction
of a second to each user in turn. This application of multitasking is called timesharing . But a
modern personal computer with just a single user also uses multitasking. For example, the user
might be typing a paper while a clock is continuously displaying the time and a file is being
downloaded over the network.
Each of the individual tasks that the CPU is working on is called a thread . (Or a process;
there are technical differences between threads and processes, but they are not important here,
since it is threads that are used in Java.) Many CPUs can literally execute more than one
thread simultaneously—such CPUs contain multiple “cores,” each of which can run a thread—
but there is always a limit on the number of threads that can be executed at the same time.
Since there are often more threads than can be executed simultaneously, the computer has to be
CHAPTER 1. THE MENTAL LANDSCAPE 6
able switch its attention from one thread to another, just as a timesharing computer switches
its attention from one user to another. In general, a thread that is being executed will continue
to run until one of several things happens:
• The thread might voluntarily yield control, to give other threads a chance to run.
• The thread might have to wait for some asynchronous event to occur. For example, the
thread might request some data from the disk drive, or it might wait for the user to press
a key. While it is waiting, the thread is said to be blocked , and other threads, if any, have
a chance to run. When the event occurs, an interrupt will “wake up” the thread so that
it can continue running.
• The thread might use up its allotted slice of time and be suspended to allow other threads
to run. Most computers can “forcibly” suspend a thread in this way; computers that
can do that are said to use preemptive multitasking . To do preemptive multitasking,
a computer needs a special timer device that generates an interrupt at regular intervals,
such as 100 times per second. When a timer interrupt occurs, the CPU has a chance to
switch from one thread to another, whether the thread that is currently running likes it
or not. All modern desktop and laptop computers, and even typical smartphones and
tablets, use preemptive multitasking.
Ordinary users, and indeed ordinary programmers, have no need to deal with interrupts and
interrupt handlers. They can concentrate on the different tasks that they want the computer to
perform; the details of how the computer manages to get all those tasks done are not important
to them. In fact, most users, and many programmers, can ignore threads and multitasking
altogether. However, threads have become increasingly important as computers have become
more powerful and as they have begun to make more use of multitasking and multiprocessing.
In fact, the ability to work with threads is fast becoming an essential job skill for programmers.
Fortunately, Java has good support for threads, which are built into the Java programming
language as a fundamental programming concept. Programming with threads will be covered
in Chapter 12.
Just as important in Java and in modern programming in general is the basic concept of
asynchronous events. While programmers don’t actually deal with interrupts directly, they
do often find themselves writing event handlers, which, like interrupt handlers, are called
asynchronously when specific events occur. Such “event-driven programming” has a very
different feel from the more traditional straight-through, synchronous programming. We will
begin with the more traditional type of programming, which is still used for programming
individual tasks, but we will return to threads and events later in the text, starting in Chapter 6
∗ ∗ ∗
By the way, the software that does all the interrupt handling, handles communication with
the user and with hardware devices, and controls which thread is allowed to run is called
the operating system. The operating system is the basic, essential software without which
a computer would not be able to function. Other programs, such as word processors and
Web browsers, are dependent upon the operating system. Common desktop operating systems
include Linux, various versions of Windows, and MacOS. Operating systems for smartphones
and tablets include Android and iOS.
CHAPTER 1. THE MENTAL LANDSCAPE 7
Of course, a different Java bytecode interpreter is needed for each type of computer, but
once a computer has a Java bytecode interpreter, it can run any Java bytecode program, and
the same program can be run on any computer that has such an interpreter. This is one of the
essential features of Java: the same compiled program can be run on many different types of
computers.
Java Interpreter
for Mac OS
Java
Java Java Interpreter
Compiler Bytecode
Program for Windows
Program
Java Interpreter
for Linux
Why, you might wonder, use the intermediate Java bytecode at all? Why not just distribute
the original Java program and let each person compile it into the machine language of whatever
computer they want to run it on? There are several reasons. First of all, a compiler has to
understand Java, a complex high-level language. The compiler is itself a complex program.
A Java bytecode interpreter, on the other hand, is a relatively small, simple program. This
makes it easy to write a bytecode interpreter for a new type of computer; once that is done,
that computer can run any compiled Java program. It would be much harder to write a Java
compiler for the same computer.
Furthermore, Java was created with the idea that some programs would be downloaded over
a network. This leads to obvious security concerns: you don’t want to download and run a
program that will damage your computer or your files. The bytecode interpreter acts as a buffer
between you and the program you download. You are really running the interpreter, which runs
the downloaded program indirectly. The interpreter can protect you from potentially dangerous
actions on the part of that program.
When Java was still a new language, it was criticized for being slow: Since Java bytecode was
executed by an interpreter, it seemed that Java bytecode programs could never run as quickly
as programs compiled into native machine language (that is, the actual machine language of the
computer on which the program is running). However, this problem has been largely overcome
by the use of just-in-time compilers for executing Java bytecode. A just-in-time compiler
translates Java bytecode into native machine language. It does this while it is executing the
program. Just as for a normal interpreter, the input to a just-in-time compiler is a Java bytecode
program, and its task is to execute that program. But as it is executing the program, it also
translates parts of it into the native machine language. The translated parts of the program
can then be executed much more quickly than they could be interpreted. Since a given part
of a program is often executed many times as the program runs, a just-in-time compiler can
significantly speed up the overall execution time.
I should note that there is no necessary connection between Java and Java bytecode. A
program written in Java could certainly be compiled into the machine language of a real
computer. And programs written in other languages can be compiled into Java bytecode.
However, the combination of Java and Java bytecode is platform-independent, secure, and
CHAPTER 1. THE MENTAL LANDSCAPE 9
subroutine to do it for you. A subroutine becomes just like a built-in part of the language which
you can use without thinking about the details of what goes on “inside” the subroutine.
∗ ∗ ∗
Variables, types, loops, branches, and subroutines are the basis of what might be called
“traditional programming.” However, as programs become larger, additional structure is needed
to help deal with their complexity. One of the most effective tools that has been found is object-
oriented programming, which is discussed in the next section.
One common format for software modules is to contain some data, along with some
subroutines for manipulating that data. For example, a mailing-list module might contain
a list of names and addresses along with a subroutine for adding a new name, a subroutine for
printing mailing labels, and so forth. In such modules, the data itself is often hidden inside
the module; a program that uses the module can then manipulate the data only indirectly, by
calling the subroutines provided by the module. This protects the data, since it can only be
manipulated in known, well-defined ways. And it makes it easier for programs to use the module,
since they don’t have to worry about the details of how the data is represented. Information
about the representation of the data is hidden.
Modules that could support this kind of information-hiding became common in program-
ming languages in the early 1980s. Since then, a more advanced form of the same idea has
more or less taken over software engineering. This latest approach is called object-oriented
programming , often abbreviated as OOP.
The central concept of object-oriented programming is the object, which is a kind of module
containing data and subroutines. The point-of-view in OOP is that an object is a kind of self-
sufficient entity that has an internal state (the data it contains) and that can respond to
messages (calls to its subroutines). A mailing list object, for example, has a state consisting
of a list of names and addresses. If you send it a message telling it to add a name, it will
respond by modifying its state to reflect the change. If you send it a message telling it to print
itself, it will respond by printing out its list of names and addresses.
The OOP approach to software engineering is to start by identifying the objects involved in
a problem and the messages that those objects should respond to. The program that results is
a collection of objects, each with its own data and its own set of responsibilities. The objects
interact by sending messages to each other. There is not much “top-down” in the large-scale
design of such a program, and people used to more traditional programs can have a hard time
getting used to OOP. However, people who use OOP would claim that object-oriented programs
tend to be better models of the way the world itself works, and that they are therefore easier
to write, easier to understand, and more likely to be correct.
∗ ∗ ∗
You should think of objects as “knowing” how to respond to certain messages. Different
objects might respond to the same message in different ways. For example, a “print” message
would produce very different results, depending on the object it is sent to. This property of
objects—that different objects can respond to the same message in different ways—is called
polymorphism.
It is common for objects to bear a kind of “family resemblance” to one another. Objects
that contain the same type of data and that respond to the same messages in the same way
belong to the same class. (In actual programming, the class is primary; that is, a class is
created and then one or more objects are created using that class as a template.) But objects
can be similar without being in exactly the same class.
For example, consider a drawing program that lets the user draw lines, rectangles, ovals,
polygons, and curves on the screen. In the program, each visible object on the screen could be
represented by a software object in the program. There would be five classes of objects in the
program, one for each type of visible object that can be drawn. All the lines would belong to
one class, all the rectangles to another class, and so on. These classes are obviously related;
all of them represent “drawable objects.” They would, for example, all presumably be able to
respond to a “draw yourself” message. Another level of grouping, based on the data needed to
represent each type of object, is less obvious, but would be very useful in a program: We can
CHAPTER 1. THE MENTAL LANDSCAPE 13
group polygons and curves together as “multipoint objects,” while lines, rectangles, and ovals
are “two-point objects.” (A line is determined by its two endpoints, a rectangle by two of its
corners, and an oval by two corners of the rectangle that contains it. The rectangles that I am
talking about here have sides that are vertical and horizontal, so that they can be specified by
just two points; this is the common meaning of “rectangle” in drawing programs.) We could
diagram these relationships as follows:
DrawableObject
MultipointObject TwoPointObject
was only one person involved at a time. This type of interaction between a user and a computer
is called a command-line interface.
Today, of course, most people interact with computers in a completely different way. They
use a Graphical User Interface, or GUI. The computer draws interface components on the
screen. The components include things like windows, scroll bars, menus, buttons, and icons.
Usually, a mouse is used to manipulate such components or, on “touchscreens,” your fingers.
Assuming that you have not just been teleported in from the 1970s, you are no doubt already
familiar with the basics of graphical user interfaces!
A lot of GUI interface components have become fairly standard. That is, they have similar
appearance and behavior on many different computer platforms including MacOS, Windows,
and Linux. Java programs, which are supposed to run on many different platforms without
modification to the program, can use all the standard GUI components. They might vary a
little in appearance from platform to platform, but their functionality should be identical on
any computer on which the program runs.
Shown below is an image of a very simple Java program that demonstrates a few standard
GUI interface components. When the program is run, a window similar to the picture shown
here will open on the computer screen. There are four components in the window with which the
user can interact: a button, a checkbox, a text field, and a pop-up menu. These components
are labeled. There are a few other components in the window. The labels themselves are
components (even though you can’t interact with them). The right half of the window is a
text area component, which can display multiple lines of text. A scrollbar component appears
alongside the text area when the number of lines of text becomes larger than will fit in the text
area. And in fact, the whole window can itself be considered to be a “component.”
(If you would like to run this program, the source code, GUIDemo.java, is available on line.
For more information on using this and other examples from this textbook, see Section 2.6.)
In fact, there are three complete sets of GUI components that can be used with Java. One
of these, the AWT or Abstract Windowing Toolkit, was part of the original version of Java.
The second, which is known as Swing , builds on the AWT; it was introduced in Java version
1.2, and was the standard GUI toolkit for many years. The third GUI toolkit, JavaFX, briefly
became a standard part of Java in Version 8 but is now distributed separately. JavaFX is meant
as a more modern way to write GUI applications, but using it is complicated by the fact that
it has to be downloaded and installed separately. This textbook covers Swing exclusively, but
an alternative version of the textbook is available that covers JavaFX instead. Either version
of the textbook can be a reasonable choice.
When a user interacts with GUI components, “events” are generated. For example, clicking
a push button generates an event, and pressing a key on the keyboard generates an event.
Each time an event is generated, a message is sent to the program telling it that the event has
occurred, and the program responds according to its program. In fact, a typical GUI program
CHAPTER 1. THE MENTAL LANDSCAPE 15
consists largely of “event handlers” that tell the program how to respond to various types of
events. In the above example, the program has been programmed to respond to each event by
displaying a message in the text area. In a more realistic example, the event handlers would
have more to do.
The use of the term “message” here is deliberate. Messages, as you saw in the
previous section, are sent to objects. In fact, Java GUI components are implemented as objects.
Java includes many predefined classes that represent various types of GUI components. Some
of these classes are subclasses of others. Here is a diagram showing just a few of the Swing GUI
classes and their relationships:
JComponent
JCheckBox JRadioButton
Don’t worry about the details for now, but try to get some feel about how object-oriented
programming and inheritance are used here. Note that all the GUI classes are subclasses,
directly or indirectly, of a class called JComponent, which represents general properties that are
shared by all Swing components. In the diagram, two of the direct subclasses of JComponent
themselves have subclasses. The classes JTextArea and JTextField, which have certain behaviors
in common, are grouped together as subclasses of JTextComponent. Similarly JButton and
JToggleButton are subclasses of JAbstractButton, which represents properties common to both
buttons and checkboxes. (JComboBox, by the way, is the Swing class that represents pop-up
menus.)
Just from this brief discussion, perhaps you can see how GUI programming can make
effective use of object-oriented design. In fact, GUIs, with their “visible objects,” are probably
a major factor contributing to the popularity of OOP.
Programming with GUI components and events is one of the most interesting aspects of
Java. However, we will spend several chapters on the basics before returning to this topic in
Chapter 6.
both by wireless communication and by physical connection using technologies such as DSL,
cable modems, and Ethernet.
There are elaborate protocols for communication over the Internet. A protocol is simply a
detailed specification of how communication is to proceed. For two computers to communicate
at all, they must both be using the same protocols. The most basic protocols on the Internet are
the Internet Protocol (IP), which specifies how data is to be physically transmitted from one
computer to another, and the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which ensures that
data sent using IP is received in its entirety and without error. These two protocols, which are
referred to collectively as TCP/IP, provide a foundation for communication. Other protocols
use TCP/IP to send specific types of information such as web pages, electronic mail, and data
files.
All communication over the Internet is in the form of packets. A packet consists of some
data being sent from one computer to another, along with addressing information that indicates
where on the Internet that data is supposed to go. Think of a packet as an envelope with an
address on the outside and a message on the inside. (The message is the data.) The packet
also includes a “return address,” that is, the address of the sender. A packet can hold only
a limited amount of data; longer messages must be divided among several packets, which are
then sent individually over the Net and reassembled at their destination.
Every computer on the Internet has an IP address, a number that identifies it uniquely
among all the computers on the Net. (Actually, the claim about uniqueness is not quite true, but
the basic idea is valid, and the full truth is complicated.) The IP address is used for addressing
packets. A computer can only send data to another computer on the Internet if it knows that
computer’s IP address. Since people prefer to use names rather than numbers, most computers
are also identified by names, called domain names. For example, the main computer of
the Mathematics Department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges has the domain name
math.hws.edu. (Domain names are just for convenience; your computer still needs to know
IP addresses before it can communicate. There are computers on the Internet whose job it
is to translate domain names to IP addresses. When you use a domain name, your computer
sends a message to a domain name server to find out the corresponding IP address. Then, your
computer uses the IP address, rather than the domain name, to communicate with the other
computer.)
The Internet provides a number of services to the computers connected to it (and, of course,
to the users of those computers). These services use TCP/IP to send various types of data over
the Net. Among the most popular services are instant messaging, file sharing, electronic mail,
and the World-Wide Web. Each service has its own protocols, which are used to control
transmission of data over the network. Each service also has some sort of user interface, which
allows the user to view, send, and receive data through the service.
For example, the email service uses a protocol known as SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer
Protocol) to transfer email messages from one computer to another. Other protocols, such as
POP and IMAP, are used to fetch messages from an email account so that the recipient can
read them. A person who uses email, however, doesn’t need to understand or even know about
these protocols. Instead, they are used behind the scenes by computer programs to send and
receive email messages. These programs provide the user with an easy-to-use user interface to
the underlying network protocols.
The World-Wide Web is perhaps the most exciting of network services. The World-Wide
Web allows you to request pages of information that are stored on computers all over the
Internet. A Web page can contain links to other pages on the same computer from which it
CHAPTER 1. THE MENTAL LANDSCAPE 17
was obtained or to other computers anywhere in the world. A computer that stores such pages
of information is called a web server . The user interface to the Web is the type of program
known as a web browser . Common web browsers include Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Chrome,
and Safari. You use a Web browser to request a page of information. The browser sends a
request for that page to the computer on which the page is stored, and when a response is
received from that computer, the web browser displays it to you in a neatly formatted form.
A web browser is just a user interface to the Web. Behind the scenes, the web browser uses a
protocol called HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) to send each page request and to receive
the response from the web server.
∗ ∗ ∗
Now just what, you might be thinking, does all this have to do with Java? In fact, Java
is intimately associated with the Internet and the World-Wide Web. When Java was first
introduced, one of its big attractions was the ability to write applets. An applet was a small
program that is transmitted over the Internet and that runs on a web page. Applets made it
possible for a web page to perform complex tasks and have complex interactions with the user.
Alas, applets suffered from a variety of problems, and they are no longer used. There are now
other options for running programs on Web pages.
But applets were only one aspect of Java’s relationship with the Internet. Java can be
used to write complex, stand-alone applications that do not depend on a Web browser. Many
of these programs are network-related. For example many of the largest and most complex
web sites use web server software that is written in Java. Java includes excellent support for
network protocols, and its platform independence makes it possible to write network programs
that work on many different types of computer. You will learn about Java’s network support
in Chapter 11.
Its support for networking is not Java’s only advantage. But many good programming
languages have been invented only to be soon forgotten. Java had the good luck to ride on the
coattails of the Internet’s immense and increasing popularity.
∗ ∗ ∗
As Java has matured, its applications have reached far beyond the Net. The standard
version of Java already comes with support for many technologies, such as cryptography, data
compression, sound processing, and graphics. And programmers have written Java libraries to
provide additional capabilities. Complex, high-performance systems can be developed in Java.
For example, Hadoop, a system for large scale data processing, is written in Java. Hadoop
has been used by Yahoo, Facebook, and other Web sites to process the huge amounts of data
generated by their users.
Furthermore, Java is not restricted to use on traditional computers. For example, Java can
be used to write programs for Android smartphones (though not for the iPhone). (Android uses
Google’s own version of Java and does not use the same graphical user interface components
as standard Java.)
At this time, Java certainly ranks as one of the most widely used programming languages.
It is a good choice for almost any programming project that is meant to run on more than
one type of computing device, and is a reasonable choice even for many programs that will
run on only one device. It is probably still the most widely taught language at Colleges and
Universities. It is similar enough to other popular languages, such as C++, JavaScript, and
Python, that knowing it will give you a good start on learning those languages as well. Overall,
learning Java is a great starting point on the road to becoming an expert programmer. I hope
you enjoy the journey!
Quiz 18
Quiz on Chapter 1
(answers)
1. One of the components of a computer is its CPU. What is a CPU and what role does it
play in a computer?
5. If you have the source code for a Java program, and you want to run that program, you
will need both a compiler and an interpreter. What does the Java compiler do, and what
does the Java interpreter do?
6. What is a subroutine?
8. What is a variable? (There are four different ideas associated with variables in Java. Try
to mention all four aspects in your answer. Hint: One of the aspects is the variable’s
name.)
10. What is the “Internet”? Give some examples of how it is used. (What kind of services
does it provide?)
Chapter 2
On a basic level (the level of machine language), a computer can perform only very simple
operations. A computer performs complex tasks by stringing together large numbers of such
operations. Such tasks must be “scripted” in complete and perfect detail by programs. Creating
complex programs will never be really easy, but the difficulty can be handled to some extent by
giving the program a clear overall structure. The design of the overall structure of a program
is what I call “programming in the large.”
Programming in the small, which is sometimes called coding , would then refer to filling in
the details of that design. The details are the explicit, step-by-step instructions for performing
fairly small-scale tasks. When you do coding, you are working “close to the machine,” with some
of the same concepts that you might use in machine language: memory locations, arithmetic
operations, loops and branches. In a high-level language such as Java, you get to work with
these concepts on a level several steps above machine language. However, you still have to
worry about getting all the details exactly right.
This chapter and the next examine the facilities for programming in the small in the Java
programming language. Don’t be misled by the term “programming in the small” into thinking
that this material is easy or unimportant. This material is an essential foundation for all types
of programming. If you don’t understand it, you can’t write programs, no matter how good
you get at designing their large-scale structure.
The last section of this chapter discusses programming environments. That section
contains information about how to compile and run Java programs, and you should take a look
at it before trying to write and use your own programs or trying to use the sample programs
in this book.
19
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 20
using things like loops, branches, and subroutines. A syntactically correct program is one that
can be successfully compiled or interpreted; programs that have syntax errors will be rejected
(hopefully with a useful error message that will help you fix the problem).
So, to be a successful programmer, you have to develop a detailed knowledge of the syntax
of the programming language that you are using. However, syntax is only part of the story. It’s
not enough to write a program that will run—you want a program that will run and produce
the correct result! That is, the meaning of the program has to be right. The meaning of
a program is referred to as its semantics. More correctly, the semantics of a programming
language is the set of rules that determine the meaning of a program written in that language.
A semantically correct program is one that does what you want it to.
Furthermore, a program can be syntactically and semantically correct but still be a pretty
bad program. Using the language correctly is not the same as using it well. For example, a
good program has “style.” It is written in a way that will make it easy for people to read and
to understand. It follows conventions that will be familiar to other programmers. And it has
an overall design that will make sense to human readers. The computer is completely oblivious
to such things, but to a human reader, they are paramount. These aspects of programming are
sometimes referred to as pragmatics. (I will often use the more common term style.)
When I introduce a new language feature, I will explain the syntax, the semantics, and
some of the pragmatics of that feature. You should memorize the syntax; that’s the easy part.
Then you should get a feeling for the semantics by following the examples given, making sure
that you understand how they work, and, ideally, writing short programs of your own to test
your understanding. And you should try to appreciate and absorb the pragmatics—this means
learning how to use the language feature well, with style that will earn you the admiration of
other programmers.
Of course, even when you’ve become familiar with all the individual features of the language,
that doesn’t make you a programmer. You still have to learn how to construct complex programs
to solve particular problems. For that, you’ll need both experience and taste. You’ll find hints
about software development throughout this textbook.
∗ ∗ ∗
We begin our exploration of Java with the problem that has become traditional for such
beginnings: to write a program that displays the message “Hello World!”. This might seem like
a trivial problem, but getting a computer to do this is really a big first step in learning a new
programming language (especially if it’s your first programming language). It means that you
understand the basic process of:
1. getting the program text into the computer,
2. compiling the program, and
3. running the compiled program.
The first time through, each of these steps will probably take you a few tries to get
right. I won’t go into the details here of how you do each of these steps; it depends on the
particular computer and Java programming environment that you are using. See Section 2.6 for
information about creating and running Java programs in specific programming environments.
But in general, you will type the program using some sort of text editor and save the program
in a file. Then, you will use some command to try to compile the file. You’ll either get
a message that the program contains syntax errors, or you’ll get a compiled version of the
program. In the case of Java, the program is compiled into Java bytecode, not into machine
language. Finally, you can run the compiled program by giving some appropriate command.
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 21
For Java, you will actually use an interpreter to execute the Java bytecode. Your programming
environment might automate some of the steps for you—for example, the compilation step is
often done automatically—but you can be sure that the same three steps are being done in the
background.
Here is a Java program to display the message “Hello World!”. Don’t expect to understand
what’s going on here just yet; some of it you won’t really understand until a few chapters from
now:
/** A program to display the message
* "Hello World!" on standard output.
*/
public class HelloWorld {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("Hello World!");
}
} // end of class HelloWorld
The command that actually displays the message is:
System.out.println("Hello World!");
This command is an example of a subroutine call statement. It uses a “built-in subroutine”
named System.out.println to do the actual work. Recall that a subroutine consists of the
instructions for performing some task, chunked together and given a name. That name can be
used to “call” the subroutine whenever that task needs to be performed. A built-in subroutine
is one that is already defined as part of the language and therefore automatically available for
use in any program.
When you run this program, the message “Hello World!” (without the quotes) will be
displayed on standard output. Unfortunately, I can’t say exactly what that means! Java is
meant to run on many different platforms, and standard output will mean different things on
different platforms. However, you can expect the message to show up in some convenient or
inconvenient place. (If you use a command-line interface, like that in a Java Development Kit,
you type in a command to tell the computer to run the program. The computer will type
the output from the program, Hello World!, on the next line. In an integrated development
environment such as Eclipse, the output might appear somewhere in one of the environment’s
windows.)
You must be curious about all the other stuff in the above program. Part of it consists of
comments. Comments in a program are entirely ignored by the computer; they are there for
human readers only. This doesn’t mean that they are unimportant. Programs are meant to be
read by people as well as by computers, and without comments, a program can be very difficult
to understand. Java has two types of comments. The first type begins with // and extends to
the end of a line. There is a comment of this form on the last line of the above program. The
computer ignores the // and everything that follows it on the same line. The second type of
comment starts with /* and ends with */, and it can extend over more than one line. The first
three lines of the program are an example of this second type of comment. (A comment that
actually begins with /**, like this one does, has special meaning; it is a “Javadoc” comment
that can be used to produce documentation for the program. See Subsection 4.6.5.)
Everything else in the program is required by the rules of Java syntax. All programming in
Java is done inside “classes.” The first line in the above program (not counting the comment)
says that this is a class named HelloWorld. “HelloWorld,” the name of the class, also serves as
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 22
the name of the program. Not every class is a program. In order to define a program, a class
must include a subroutine named main, with a definition that takes the form:
public static void main(String[] args) {
hstatements i
}
When you tell the Java interpreter to run the program, the interpreter calls this main()
subroutine, and the statements that it contains are executed. Those statements make up the
script that tells the computer exactly what to do when the program is executed. The main()
routine can call other subroutines that are defined in the same class or even in other classes,
but it is the main() routine that determines how and in what order the other subroutines are
used.
The word “public” in the first line of main() means that this routine can be called from
outside the program. This is essential because the main() routine is called by the Java
interpreter, which is something external to the program itself. The remainder of the first
line of the routine is harder to explain at the moment; for now, just think of it as part of
the required syntax. The definition of the subroutine—that is, the instructions that say what
it does—consists of the sequence of “statements” enclosed between braces, { and }. Here,
I’ve used hstatementsi as a placeholder for the actual statements that make up the program.
Throughout this textbook, I will always use a similar format: anything that you see in hthis
style of texti (italic in angle brackets) is a placeholder that describes something you need to
type when you write an actual program.
As noted above, a subroutine can’t exist by itself. It has to be part of a “class”. A program
is defined by a public class that takes the form:
hoptional-package-declaration i
hoptional-imports i
public class hprogram-name i {
hoptional-variable-declarations-and-subroutines i
public static void main(String[] args) {
hstatements i
}
hoptional-variable-declarations-and-subroutines i
}
The first two lines have to do with using packages. A package is a group of classes. You will
start learning about packages in Section 2.4, but our first few example programs will not use
them.
The hprogram-namei in the line that begins “public class” is the name of the program, as
well as the name of the class. (Remember, again, that hprogram-namei is a placeholder for the
actual name!) If the name of the class is HelloWorld, then the class must be saved in a file
called HelloWorld.java. When this file is compiled, another file named HelloWorld.class
will be produced. This class file, HelloWorld.class, contains the translation of the program
into Java bytecode, which can be executed by a Java interpreter. HelloWorld.java is called
the source code for the program. To execute the program, you only need the compiled class
file, not the source code.
The layout of the program on the page, such as the use of blank lines and indentation, is not
part of the syntax or semantics of the language. The computer doesn’t care about layout—you
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 23
could run the entire program together on one line as far as it is concerned. However, layout is
important to human readers, and there are certain style guidelines for layout that are followed
by most programmers.
Also note that according to the above syntax specification, a program can contain other
subroutines besides main(), as well as things called “variable declarations.” You’ll learn more
about these later, but not until Chapter 4.
2.2.1 Variables
Programs manipulate data that are stored in memory. In machine language, data can only be
referred to by giving the numerical address of the location in memory where the data is stored.
In a high-level language such as Java, names are used instead of numbers to refer to data. It
is the job of the computer to keep track of where in memory the data is actually stored; the
programmer only has to remember the name. A name used in this way—to refer to data stored
in memory—is called a variable.
Variables are actually rather subtle. Properly speaking, a variable is not a name for the
data itself but for a location in memory that can hold data. You should think of a variable as
a container or box where you can store data that you will need to use later. The variable refers
directly to the box and only indirectly to the data in the box. Since the data in the box can
change, a variable can refer to different data values at different times during the execution of
the program, but it always refers to the same box. Confusion can arise, especially for beginning
programmers, because when a variable is used in a program in certain ways, it refers to the
container, but when it is used in other ways, it refers to the data in the container. You’ll see
examples of both cases below.
In Java, the only way to get data into a variable—that is, into the box that the variable
names—is with an assignment statement. An assignment statement takes the form:
hvariable i = hexpression i;
where hexpressioni represents anything that refers to or computes a data value. When the
computer comes to an assignment statement in the course of executing a program, it evaluates
the expression and puts the resulting data value into the variable. For example, consider the
simple assignment statement
rate = 0.07;
The hvariablei in this assignment statement is rate, and the hexpressioni is the number 0.07.
The computer executes this assignment statement by putting the number 0.07 in the variable
rate, replacing whatever was there before. Now, consider the following more complicated
assignment statement, which might come later in the same program:
interest = rate * principal;
Here, the value of the expression “rate * principal” is being assigned to the variable
interest. In the expression, the * is a “multiplication operator” that tells the computer
to multiply rate times principal. The names rate and principal are themselves variables,
and it is really the values stored in those variables that are to be multiplied. We see that when
a variable is used in an expression, it is the value stored in the variable that matters; in this
case, the variable seems to refer to the data in the box, rather than to the box itself. When
the computer executes this assignment statement, it takes the value of rate, multiplies it by
the value of principal, and stores the answer in the box referred to by interest. When a
variable is used on the left-hand side of an assignment statement, it refers to the box that is
named by the variable.
(Note, by the way, that an assignment statement is a command that is executed by the
computer at a certain time. It is not a statement of fact. For example, suppose a program
includes the statement “rate = 0.07;”. If the statement “interest = rate * principal;”
is executed later in the program, can we say that the principal is multiplied by 0.07? No!
The value of rate might have been changed in the meantime by another statement. The
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 25
2.2.2 Types
A variable in Java is designed to hold only one particular type of data; it can legally hold that
type of data and no other. The compiler will consider it to be a syntax error if you try to
violate this rule by assigning a value of the wrong type to a variable. We say that Java is a
strongly typed language because it enforces this rule.
There are eight so-called primitive types built into Java. The primitive types are named
byte, short, int, long, float, double, char, and boolean. The first four types hold integers
(whole numbers such as 17, -38477, and 0). The four integer types are distinguished by the
ranges of integers they can hold. The float and double types hold real numbers (such as 3.6 and
-145.99). Again, the two real types are distinguished by their range and accuracy. A variable
of type char holds a single character from the Unicode character set. And a variable of type
boolean holds one of the two logical values true or false.
Any data value stored in the computer’s memory must be represented as a binary number,
that is as a string of zeros and ones. A single zero or one is called a bit. A string of eight
bits is called a byte. Memory is usually measured in terms of bytes. Not surprisingly, the byte
data type refers to a single byte of memory. A variable of type byte holds a string of eight
bits, which can represent any of the integers between -128 and 127, inclusive. (There are 256
integers in that range; eight bits can represent 256—two raised to the power eight—different
values.) As for the other integer types,
• short corresponds to two bytes (16 bits). Variables of type short have values in the range
-32768 to 32767.
• int corresponds to four bytes (32 bits). Variables of type int have values in the range
-2147483648 to 2147483647.
• long corresponds to eight bytes (64 bits). Variables of type long have values in the range
-9223372036854775808 to 9223372036854775807.
You don’t have to remember these numbers, but they do give you some idea of the size of
integers that you can work with. Usually, for representing integer data you should just stick to
the int data type, which is good enough for most purposes.
The float data type is represented in four bytes of memory, using a standard method for
encoding real numbers. The maximum value for a float is about 10 raised to the power 38.
A float can have about 7 significant digits. (So that 32.3989231134 and 32.3989234399 would
both have to be rounded off to about 32.398923 in order to be stored in a variable of type
float.) A double takes up 8 bytes, can range up to about 10 to the power 308, and has about
15 significant digits. Ordinarily, you should stick to the double type for real values.
A variable of type char occupies two bytes in memory. The value of a char variable is a
single character such as A, *, x, or a space character. The value can also be a special character
such a tab or a carriage return or one of the many Unicode characters that come from different
languages. Values of type char are closely related to integer values, since a character is actually
stored as a 16-bit integer code number. In fact, we will see that chars in Java can actually be
used like integers in certain situations.
It is important to remember that a primitive type value is represented using only a certain,
finite number of bits. So, an int can’t be an arbitrary integer; it can only be an integer
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 26
in a certain finite range of values. Similarly, float and double variables can only take on
certain values. They are not true real numbers in the mathematical sense. For example, the
mathematical constant π can only be approximated by a value of type float or double, since
it would require an infinite number of decimal places to represent it exactly. For that matter,
many simple numbers such as 1/3 can only be approximated by floats and doubles.
2.2.3 Literals
A data value is stored in the computer as a sequence of bits. In the computer’s memory, it
doesn’t look anything like a value written on this page. You need a way to include constant
values in the programs that you write. In a program, you represent constant values as literals.
A literal is something that you can type in a program to represent a value. It is a kind of name
for a constant value.
For example, to type a value of type char in a program, you must surround it with a pair
of single quote marks, such as ’A’, ’*’, or ’x’. The character and the quote marks make up a
literal of type char. Without the quotes, A would be an identifier and * would be a multiplication
operator. The quotes are not part of the value and are not stored in the variable; they are just
a convention for naming a particular character constant in a program. If you want to store the
character A in a variable ch of type char, you could do so with the assignment statement
ch = ’A’;
Certain special characters have special literals that use a backslash, \, as an “escape character.”
In particular, a tab is represented as ’\t’, a carriage return as ’\r’, a linefeed as ’\n’, the
single quote character as ’\’’, and the backslash itself as ’\\’. Note that even though you
type two characters between the quotes in ’\t’, the value represented by this literal is a single
tab character.
Numeric literals are a little more complicated than you might expect. Of course, there
are the obvious literals such as 317 and 17.42. But there are other possibilities for expressing
numbers in a Java program. First of all, real numbers can be represented in an exponential
form such as 1.3e12 or 12.3737e-108. The “e12” and “e-108” represent powers of 10, so that
1.3e12 means 1.3 times 1012 and 12.3737e-108 means 12.3737 times 10−108 . This format can be
used to express very large and very small numbers. Any numeric literal that contains a decimal
point or exponential is a literal of type double. To make a literal of type float, you have to
append an “F” or “f” to the end of the number. For example, “1.2F” stands for 1.2 considered
as a value of type float. (Occasionally, you need to know this because the rules of Java say that
you can’t assign a value of type double to a variable of type float, so you might be confronted
with a ridiculous-seeming error message if you try to do something like “x = 1.2;” if x is a
variable of type float. You have to say “x = 1.2F;". This is one reason why I advise sticking
to type double for real numbers.)
Even for integer literals, there are some complications. Ordinary integers such as 177777
and -32 are literals of type byte, short, or int, depending on their size. You can make a literal
of type long by adding “L” as a suffix. For example: 17L or 728476874368L. As another
complication, Java allows binary, octal (base-8), and hexadecimal (base-16) literals. I don’t
want to cover number bases in detail, but in case you run into them in other people’s programs,
it’s worth knowing a few things: Octal numbers use only the digits 0 through 7. In Java, a
numeric literal that begins with a 0 is interpreted as an octal number; for example, the octal
literal 045 represents the number 37, not the number 45. Octal numbers are rarely used, but
you need to be aware of what happens when you start a number with a zero. Hexadecimal
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 27
numbers use 16 digits, the usual digits 0 through 9 and the letters A, B, C, D, E, and F. Upper
case and lower case letters can be used interchangeably in this context. The letters represent
the numbers 10 through 15. In Java, a hexadecimal literal begins with 0x or 0X, as in 0x45
or 0xFF7A. Finally, binary literals start with 0b or 0B and contain only the digits 0 and 1; for
example: 0b10110.
As a final complication, numeric literals can include the underscore character (“ ”), which
can be used to separate groups of digits. For example, the integer constant for two billion could
be written 2 000 000 000, which is a good deal easier to decipher than 2000000000. There is
no rule about how many digits have to be in each group. Underscores can be especially useful
in long binary numbers; for example, 0b1010 1100 1011.
I will note that hexadecimal numbers can also be used to represent arbitrary Unicode
characters. A Unicode literal consists of \u followed by four hexadecimal digits. For example,
the character literal ’\u00E9’ represents the Unicode character that is an “e” with an acute
accent.
For the type boolean, there are precisely two literals: true and false. These literals
are typed just as I’ve written them here, without quotes, but they represent constant values,
not variables. Boolean values occur most often as the values of conditional expressions. For
example,
rate > 0.05
is a boolean-valued expression that evaluates to true if the value of the variable rate is greater
than 0.05, and to false if the value of rate is less than or equal to 0.05. As you’ll see in
Chapter 3, boolean-valued expressions are used extensively in control structures. Of course,
boolean values can also be assigned to variables of type boolean. For example, if test is a
variable of type boolean, then both of the following assignment statements are legal:
test = true;
test = rate > 0.05;
because strings are useful but because objects and classes are essential to understanding another
important programming concept, subroutines.
and returns the square root of that value. Since Math.sqrt(x) represents a value, it doesn’t
make sense to put it on a line by itself in a subroutine call statement such as
Math.sqrt(x); // This doesn’t make sense!
What, after all, would the computer do with the value computed by the function in this case?
You have to tell the computer to do something with the value. You might tell the computer to
display it:
System.out.print( Math.sqrt(x) ); // Display the square root of x.
or you might use an assignment statement to tell the computer to store that value in a variable:
lengthOfSide = Math.sqrt(x);
The function call Math.sqrt(x) represents a value of type double, and it can be used anyplace
where a numeric literal of type double could be used. The x in this formula represents the
parameter to the subroutine; it could be a variable named “x”, or it could be replaced by any
expression that represents a numerical value. For example, Math.sqrt(2) computes the square
root of 2, and Math.sqrt(a*a+b*b) would be legal as long as a and b are numeric variables.
The Math class contains many static member functions. Here is a list of some of the more
important of them:
• Math.abs(x), which computes the absolute value of x.
• The usual trigonometric functions, Math.sin(x), Math.cos(x), and Math.tan(x). (For
all the trigonometric functions, angles are measured in radians, not degrees.)
• The inverse trigonometric functions arcsin, arccos, and arctan, which are written as:
Math.asin(x), Math.acos(x), and Math.atan(x). The return value is expressed in
radians, not degrees.
• The exponential function Math.exp(x) for computing the number e raised to the power
x, and the natural logarithm function Math.log(x) for computing the logarithm of x in
the base e.
• Math.pow(x,y) for computing x raised to the power y.
• Math.floor(x), which rounds x down to the nearest integer value that is less than or
equal to x. Even though the return value is mathematically an integer, it is returned
as a value of type double, rather than of type int as you might expect. For example,
Math.floor(3.76) is 3.0, and Math.floor(-4.2) is -5.0. The function Math.round(x)
returns the integer that is closest to x, and Math.ceil(x) rounds x up to an integer.
(“Ceil” is short for “ceiling”, the opposite of “floor.”)
• Math.random(), which returns a randomly chosen double in the range 0.0 <=
Math.random() < 1.0. (The computer actually calculates so-called “pseudorandom”
numbers, which are not truly random but are effectively random enough for most pur-
poses.) We will find a lot of uses for Math.random in future examples.
For these functions, the type of the parameter—the x or y inside the parentheses—can be
any value of any numeric type. For most of the functions, the value returned by the function
is of type double no matter what the type of the parameter. However, for Math.abs(x), the
value returned will be the same type as x; if x is of type int, then so is Math.abs(x). So, for
example, while Math.sqrt(9) is the double value 3.0, Math.abs(9) is the int value 9.
Note that Math.random() does not have any parameter. You still need the parentheses,
even though there’s nothing between them. The parentheses let the computer know that this is
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 32
a subroutine rather than a variable. Another example of a subroutine that has no parameters
is the function System.currentTimeMillis(), from the System class. When this function is
executed, it retrieves the current time, expressed as the number of milliseconds that have passed
since a standardized base time (the start of the year 1970, if you care). One millisecond is one-
thousandth of a second. The return value of System.currentTimeMillis() is of type long (a
64-bit integer). This function can be used to measure the time that it takes the computer to
perform a task. Just record the time at which the task is begun and the time at which it is
finished and take the difference. For more accurate timing, you can use System.nanoTime()
instead. System.nanoTime() returns the number of nanoseconds since some arbitrary starting
time, where one nanosecond is one-billionth of a second. However, you should not expect the
time to be truly accurate to the nanosecond.
Here is a sample program that performs a few mathematical tasks and reports the time that
it takes for the program to run.
/**
* This program performs some mathematical computations and displays the
* results. It also displays the value of the constant Math.PI. It then
* reports the number of seconds that the computer spent on this task.
*/
public class TimedComputation {
public static void main(String[] args) {
long startTime; // Starting time of program, in nanoseconds.
long endTime; // Time when computations are done, in nanoseconds.
long compTime; // Run time in nanoseconds.
double seconds; // Time difference, in seconds.
startTime = System.nanoTime();
double width, height, hypotenuse; // sides of a triangle
width = 42.0;
height = 17.0;
hypotenuse = Math.sqrt( width*width + height*height );
System.out.print("A triangle with sides 42 and 17 has hypotenuse ");
System.out.println(hypotenuse);
System.out.println("\nMathematically, sin(x)*sin(x) + "
+ "cos(x)*cos(x) - 1 should be 0.");
System.out.println("Let’s check this for x = 100:");
System.out.print(" sin(100)*sin(100) + cos(100)*cos(100) - 1 is: ");
System.out.println( Math.sin(100)*Math.sin(100)
+ Math.cos(100)*Math.cos(100) - 1 );
System.out.println("(There can be round-off errors when"
+ " computing with real numbers!)");
System.out.print("\nHere is a random number: ");
System.out.println( Math.random() );
System.out.print("\nThe value of Math.PI is ");
System.out.println( Math.PI );
endTime = System.nanoTime();
compTime = endTime - startTime;
seconds = compTime / 1000000000.0;
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 33
• s1.substring(N,M), where N and M are integers, returns a value of type String. The
returned value consists of the characters of s1 in positions N, N+1,. . . , M-1. Remember
that character positions are numbered starting from zero. Note that the character in
position M is not included. The returned value is called a substring of s1. The subroutine
s1.substring(N), with just one parameter, returns the substring of s1 consisting of
characters starting at position N up until the end of the string.
• s1.indexOf(s2) returns an integer. If s2 occurs as a substring of s1, then the returned
value is the starting position of that substring. Otherwise, the returned value is -1. You
can also use s1.indexOf(ch) to search for a char, ch, in s1. To find the first occurrence
of x at or after position N, you can use s1.indexOf(x,N). To find the last occurrence of
x in s1, use s1.lastIndexOf(x).
• s1.compareTo(s2) is an integer-valued function that compares the two strings. If the
strings are equal, the value returned is zero. If s1 is less than s2, the value returned is
a number less than zero, and if s1 is greater than s2, the value returned is some number
greater than zero. There is also a function s1.compareToIgnoreCase(s2). (If both of
the strings consist entirely of lower case letters, or if they consist entirely of upper case
letters, then “less than” and “greater than” refer to alphabetical order. Otherwise, the
ordering is more complicated; it compares individual characters using their Unicode code
numbers.)
• s1.toUpperCase() is a String -valued function that returns a new string that is equal to s1,
except that any lower case letters in s1 have been converted to upper case. For example,
"Cat".toUpperCase() is the string "CAT". There is also a function s1.toLowerCase().
• s1.trim() is a String -valued function that returns a new string that is equal to s1 except
that any non-printing characters such as spaces and tabs have been trimmed from the
beginning and from the end of the string. Thus, if s1 has the value "fred ", then
s1.trim() is the string "fred", with the spaces at the end removed.
For the functions s1.toUpperCase(), s1.toLowerCase(), and s1.trim(), note that the
value of s1 is not changed. Instead a new string is created and returned as the value of
the function. The returned value could be used, for example, in an assignment statement
such as “smallLetters = s1.toLowerCase();”. To change the value of s1, you could use an
assignment “s1 = s1.toLowerCase();”.
∗ ∗ ∗
Here is another extremely useful fact about strings: You can use the plus operator, +, to
concatenate two strings. The concatenation of two strings is a new string consisting of all the
characters of the first string followed by all the characters of the second string. For example,
"Hello" + "World" evaluates to "HelloWorld". (Gotta watch those spaces, of course—if you
want a space in the concatenated string, it has to be somewhere in the input data, as in
"Hello " + "World".)
Let’s suppose that name is a variable of type String and that it already refers to the name
of the person using the program. Then, the program could greet the user by executing the
statement:
System.out.println("Hello, " + name + ". Pleased to meet you!");
Even more surprising is that you can actually concatenate values of any type onto a String
using the + operator. The value is converted to a string, just as it would be if you printed it to
the standard output, and then that string is concatenated with the other string. For example,
the expression "Number" + 42 evaluates to the string "Number42". And the statements
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 36
System.out.print("After ");
System.out.print(years);
System.out.print(" years, the value is ");
System.out.print(principal);
can be replaced by the single statement:
System.out.print("After " + years +
" years, the value is " + principal);
Obviously, this is very convenient. It would have shortened some of the examples presented
earlier in this chapter.
Because an enum is technically a class, the enum values are technically objects. As objects,
they can contain subroutines. One of the subroutines in every enum value is named ordinal().
When used with an enum value, it returns the ordinal number of the value in the list
of values of the enum. The ordinal number simply tells the position of the value in the
list. That is, Season.SPRING.ordinal() is the int value 0, Season.SUMMER.ordinal() is
1, Season.FALL.ordinal() is 2, and Season.WINTER.ordinal() is 3. (You will see over and
over again that computer scientists like to start counting at zero!) You can, of course, use the
ordinal() method with a variable of type Season, such as vacation.ordinal().
Using enums can make a program more readable, since you can use meaningful names for
the values. And it can prevent certain types of errors, since a compiler can check that the values
assigned to an enum variable are in fact legal values for that variable. For now, you should just
appreciate them as the first example of an important concept: creating new types. Here is a
little example that shows enums being used in a complete program:
public class EnumDemo {
// Define two enum types for use in this program.
enum Day { SUNDAY, MONDAY, TUESDAY, WEDNESDAY, THURSDAY, FRIDAY, SATURDAY }
enum Month { JAN, FEB, MAR, APR, MAY, JUN, JUL, AUG, SEP, OCT, NOV, DEC }
public static void main(String[] args) {
Day tgif; // Declare a variable of type Day.
Month libra; // Declare a variable of type Month.
tgif = Day.FRIDAY; // Assign a value of type Day to tgif.
libra = Month.OCT; // Assign a value of type Month to libra.
System.out.print("My sign is libra, since I was born in ");
System.out.println(libra); // Output value will be: OCT
System.out.print("That’s the ");
System.out.print( libra.ordinal() );
System.out.println("-th month of the year.");
System.out.println(" (Counting from 0, of course!)");
System.out.print("Isn’t it nice to get to ");
System.out.println(tgif); // Output value will be: FRIDAY
System.out.println( tgif + " is the " + tgif.ordinal()
+ "-th day of the week.");
}
}
(As I mentioned, an enum can actually be defined in a separate file. The sample program
SeparateEnumDemo.java is identical to EnumDemo.java, except that the enum types that it
uses are defined in files named Month.java and Day.java.)
rather than built into the program. So you need to know how to do input as well as output.
This section explains how to get data from the user, and it covers output in more detail than
we have seen so far. It also has a section on using files for input and output.
integer will be printed using just as many spaces as necessary. (The “d,” by the way, stands
for “decimal”—that is, base-10—numbers. You can replace the “d” with an “x” to output an
integer value in hexadecimal form.)
The letter “s” in a format specifier can be used with any type of value. It means that
the value should be output in its default format, just as it would be in unformatted output. A
number, such as the “20” in %20s, can be added to specify the (minimum) number of characters.
The “s” stands for “string,” and it can be used for values of type String. It can also be used for
values of other types; in that case the value is converted into a String value in the usual way.
The format specifiers for values of type double are more complicated. An “f”, as in %1.2f,
is used to output a number in “floating-point” form, that is with digits after a decimal point. In
%1.2f, the “2” specifies the number of digits to use after the decimal point. The “1” specifies
the (minimum) number of characters to output; a “1” in this position effectively means that
just as many characters as are necessary should be used. Similarly, %12.3f would specify a
floating-point format with 3 digits after the decimal point, right-justified in a field of length 12.
Very large and very small numbers should be written in exponential format, such as
6.00221415e23, representing “6.00221415 times 10 raised to the power 23.” A format specifier
such as %15.8e specifies an output in exponential form, with the “8” telling how many digits
to use after the decimal point. If you use “g” instead of “e”, the output will be in exponential
form for very small values and very large values and in floating-point form for other values. In
%1.8g, the 8 gives the total number of digits in the answer, including both the digits before the
decimal point and the digits after the decimal point.
For numeric output, the format specifier can include a comma (“,”), which will cause the
digits of the number to be separated into groups, to make it easier to read big numbers. In
the United States, groups of three digits are separated by commas. For example, if x is one
billion, then System.out.printf("%,d",x) will output 1,000,000,000. In other countries, the
separator character and the number of digits per group might be different. The comma should
come at the beginning of the format specifier, before the field width; for example: %,12.3f.
If you want the output to be left-justified instead of right justified, add a minus sign to the
beginning of the format specifier: for example, %-20s.
In addition to format specifiers, the format string in a printf statement can include other
characters. These extra characters are just copied to the output. This can be a convenient way
to insert values into the middle of an output string. For example, if x and y are variables of
type int, you could say
System.out.printf("The product of %d and %d is %d", x, y, x*y);
When this statement is executed, the value of x is substituted for the first %d in the string, the
value of y for the second %d, and the value of the expression x*y for the third, so the output
would be something like “The product of 17 and 42 is 714” (quotation marks not included in
output!).
To include an actual percent sign in the output, use the format specifier %% in the format
string. You can use %n to output a line feed. You can also use a backslash, \, as usual in strings
to output special characters such as tabs and double quote characters.
The format string in a System.printf statement can be given by a text block, which makes
it easier to output multiple lines of text. For example,
System.out.printf("""
The equivalent of %d miles is:
%,d yards,
%,d feet, or
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 41
%,d inches
""", miles, 1760*miles, 5280*miles, 12*5280*miles);
of type int (created with a declaration statement “int userInput;”), then you could use the
assignment statement
userInput = TextIO.getlnInt();
When the computer executes this statement, it will wait for the user to type in an integer value.
The user must type a number and press return before the program can continue. The value
that the user typed will then be returned by the function, and it will be stored in the variable,
userInput. Here is a complete program that uses TextIO.getlnInt to read a number typed
by the user and then prints out the square of that number. Note the import directive on the
first line:
import textio.TextIO;
/**
* A program that reads an integer that is typed in by the
* user and computes and prints the square of that integer.
*/
public class PrintSquare {
public static void main(String[] args) {
int userInput; // The number input by the user.
int square; // The userInput, multiplied by itself.
System.out.print("Please type a number: ");
userInput = TextIO.getlnInt();
square = userInput * userInput;
System.out.println();
System.out.println("The number that you entered was " + userInput);
System.out.println("The square of that number is " + square);
System.out.println();
} // end of main()
} //end of class PrintSquare
When you run this program, it will display the message “Please type a number:” and will pause
until you type a response, including a carriage return after the number. Note that it is good
style to output a question or some other prompt to the user before reading input. Otherwise,
the user will have no way of knowing exactly what the computer is waiting for, or even that it
is waiting for the user to do something.
For these statements to be legal, the variables on the left side of each assignment statement
must already be declared and must be of the same type as that returned by the function on
the right side. Note carefully that these functions do not have parameters. The values that
they return come from outside the program, typed in by the user as the program is running.
To “capture” that data so that you can use it in your program, you have to assign the return
value of the function to a variable. You will then be able to refer to the user’s input value by
using the name of the variable.
When you call one of these functions, you are guaranteed that it will return a legal value of
the correct type. If the user types in an illegal value as input—for example, if you ask for an
int and the user types in a non-numeric character or a number that is outside the legal range
of values that can be stored in a variable of type int—then the computer will ask the user to
re-enter the value, and your program never sees the first, illegal value that the user entered. For
TextIO.getlnBoolean(), the user is allowed to type in any of the following: true, false, t, f, yes,
no, y, n, 1, or 0. Furthermore, they can use either upper or lower case letters. In any case, the
user’s input is interpreted as a true/false value. It’s convenient to use TextIO.getlnBoolean()
to read the user’s response to a Yes/No question.
You’ll notice that there are two input functions that return Strings. The first, getlnWord(),
returns a string consisting of non-blank characters only. When it is called, it skips over any
spaces and carriage returns typed in by the user. Then it reads non-blank characters until
it gets to the next space or carriage return. It returns a String consisting of all the non-
blank characters that it has read. The second input function, getln(), simply returns a string
consisting of all the characters typed in by the user, including spaces, up to the next carriage
return. It gets an entire line of input text. The carriage return itself is not returned as part of
the input string, but it is read and discarded by the computer. Note that the String returned
by TextIO.getln() might be the empty string , "", which contains no characters at all. You
will get this return value if the user simply presses return, without typing anything else first.
TextIO.getln() does not skip blanks or end-of-lines before reading a value. But the
input functions getlnInt(), getlnDouble(), getlnBoolean(), and getlnChar() behave like
getlnWord() in that they will skip past any blanks and carriage returns in the input before
reading a value. When one of these functions skips over an end-of-line, it outputs a ’ ?’ to let
the user know that more input is expected.
Furthermore, if the user types extra characters on the line after the input value, all the
extra characters will be discarded, along with the carriage return at the end of the
line. If the program executes another input function, the user will have to type in another line
of input, even if they had typed more than one value on the previous line. It might not sound
like a good idea to discard any of the user’s input, but it turns out to be the safest thing to do
in most programs.
∗ ∗ ∗
Using TextIO for input and output, we can now improve the program from Section 2.2 for
computing the value of an investment. We can have the user type in the initial value of the
investment and the interest rate. The result is a much more useful program—for one thing, it
makes sense to run it more than once! Note that this program uses formatted output to print
out monetary values in their correct format.
import textio.TextIO;
/**
* This class implements a simple program that will compute
* the amount of interest that is earned on an investment over
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 44
TextIO.writeFile("result.txt");
After this statement is executed, any output from TextIO output statements will be sent to the
file named “result.txt” instead of to standard output. The file will be created if it does not
already exist. Note that if a file with the same name already exists, its previous contents will
be erased without any warning!
When you call TextIO.writeFile, TextIO remembers the file and automatically sends any
output from TextIO.put or other output functions to that file. If you want to go back to
writing to standard output, you can call
TextIO.writeStandardOutput();
Here is a simple program that asks the user some questions and outputs the user’s responses to
a file named “profile.txt.” As an example, it uses TextIO for output to standard output as well
as to the file, but System.out could also have been used for the output to standard output.
import textio.TextIO;
public class CreateProfile {
public static void main(String[] args) {
String name; // The user’s name.
String email; // The user’s email address.
double salary; // the user’s yearly salary.
String favColor; // The user’s favorite color.
TextIO.putln("Good Afternoon! This program will create");
TextIO.putln("your profile file, if you will just answer");
TextIO.putln("a few simple questions.");
TextIO.putln();
/* Gather responses from the user. */
TextIO.put("What is your name? ");
name = TextIO.getln();
TextIO.put("What is your email address? ");
email = TextIO.getln();
TextIO.put("What is your yearly income? ");
salary = TextIO.getlnDouble();
TextIO.put("What is your favorite color? ");
favColor = TextIO.getln();
/* Write the user’s information to the file named profile.txt. */
TextIO.writeFile("profile.txt"); // subsequent output goes to file
TextIO.putln("Name: " + name);
TextIO.putln("Email: " + email);
TextIO.putln("Favorite Color: " + favColor);
TextIO.putf( "Yearly Income: %,1.2f%n", salary);
/* Print a final message to standard output. */
TextIO.writeStandardOutput();
TextIO.putln("Thank you. Your profile has been written to profile.txt.");
}
}
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 46
In many cases, you want to let the user select the file that will be used for output. You
could ask the user to type in the file name, but that is error-prone, and users are more familiar
with selecting a file from a file dialog box. The statement
TextIO.writeUserSelectedFile();
will open a typical graphical-user-interface file selection dialog where the user can specify the
output file. This also has the advantage of alerting the user if they are about to replace
an existing file. It is possible for the user to cancel the dialog box without selecting a file.
TextIO.writeUserSelectedFile is a function that returns a boolean value. The return value
is true if the user selected a file, and is false if the user canceled the dialog box. Your program
can check the return value if it needs to know whether it is actually going to write to a file or
not.
∗ ∗ ∗
TextIO can also read from files, as an alternative to reading from standard input. You can
specify an input source for TextIO’s various “get” functions. The default input source is standard
input. You can use the statement TextIO.readFile("data.txt") to read from a file named
“data.txt” instead, or you can let the user select the input file with a GUI-style dialog box by
saying TextIO.readUserSelectedFile(). After you have done this, any input will come from
the file instead of being typed by the user. You can go back to reading the user’s input with
TextIO.readStandardInput().
When your program is reading from standard input, the user gets a chance to correct any
errors in the input. This is not possible when the program is reading from a file. If illegal data
is found when a program tries to read from a file, an error occurs that will crash the program.
(Later, we will see that it is possible to “catch” such errors and recover from them.) Errors can
also occur, though more rarely, when writing to files.
A complete understanding of input/output in Java requires a knowledge of object oriented
programming. We will return to the topic later, in Chapter 11. The file I/O capabilities in
the TextIO class are rather primitive by comparison. Nevertheless, they are sufficient for many
applications, and they will allow you to get some experience with files sooner rather than later.
prompting the user for input. This allows the computer to read several values from one line
of the user’s input. Strictly speaking, the computer actually reads only from the input buffer.
The first time the program tries to read input from the user, the computer will wait while the
user types in an entire line of input. TextIO stores that line in the input buffer until the data
on the line has been read or discarded (by one of the “getln” functions). The user only gets to
type when the buffer is empty.
Previously, I said that TextIO.getln() reads a full line of input. Given the way that
TextIO uses the input buffer, that is not quite true. In fact, if TextIO.getln() is called when
the buffer is not empty, then it will simply return whatever characters remain in the buffer
without getting a new line of input from the user. If you ever want to empty the input buffer
and simply discard the input, you can call TextIO.getln() as a subroutine, without assigning
the returned value to a variable:
TextIO.getln();
Note, by the way, that although most TextIO input functions will skip past blank spaces and
carriage returns while looking for input, they will not skip past other characters. For example,
if you try to read two ints and the user types “42,17”, the computer will read the first number
correctly, but when it tries to read the second number, it will see the comma. It will regard this
as an error and will force the user to retype the number. If you want to input several numbers
from one line, you should make sure that the user knows to separate them with spaces, not
commas. Alternatively, if you want to require a comma between the numbers, use getChar()
to read the comma before reading the second number.
There is another character input function, TextIO.getAnyChar(), which does not skip past
blanks or carriage returns. It simply reads and returns the next character typed by the user,
even if it’s a blank or carriage return. If the user typed a carriage return, then the char returned
by getAnyChar() is the special linefeed character ’\n’. There is also a function, TextIO.peek(),
that lets you look ahead at the next character in the input without actually reading it. After
you “peek” at the next character, it will still be there when you read the next item from input.
This allows you to look ahead and see what’s coming up in the input, so that you can take
different actions depending on what’s there.
The TextIO class provides a number of other functions. To learn more about them, you can
look at the comments in the source code file, TextIO.java.
Clearly, the semantics of input is much more complicated than the semantics of output!
Fortunately, for the majority of applications, it’s pretty straightforward in practice. You only
need to follow the details if you want to do something fancy. In particular, I strongly advise
you to use the “getln” versions of the input routines, rather than the “get” versions, unless you
really want to read several items from the same line of input, precisely because the semantics
of the “getln” versions is much simpler.
how to do it here, without explaining why it works. You won’t understand all the syntax at
this point. (Scanners will be covered in more detail in Subsection 11.1.5.)
First, since Scanner is defined in the package java.util, you should add the following import
directive to your program at the beginning of the source code file, before the “public class. . . ”:
import java.util.Scanner;
Then include the following statement at the beginning of your main() routine:
Scanner stdin = new Scanner( System.in );
This creates a variable named stdin of type Scanner. (You can use a different name for the
variable if you want; “stdin” stands for “standard input.”) You can then use stdin in your
program to access a variety of subroutines for reading user input. For example, the function
stdin.nextInt() reads one value of type int from the user and returns it. It is almost the
same as TextIO.getInt() except for two things: If the value entered by the user is not a legal
int, then stdin.nextInt() will crash rather than prompt the user to re-enter the value. And
the integer entered by the user must be followed by a blank space or by an end-of-line, whereas
TextIO.getInt() will stop reading at any character that is not a digit.
There are corresponding methods for reading other types of data, including
stdin.nextDouble(), stdin.nextLong(), and stdin.nextBoolean(). (stdin.nextBoolean()
will only accept “true” or “false” as input.) These subroutines can read more than one value
from a line, so they are more similar to the “get” versions of TextIO subroutines rather than
the “getln” versions. The method stdin.nextLine() is equivalent to TextIO.getln(), and
stdin.next(), like TextIO.getWord(), returns a string of non-blank characters.
As a simple example, here is a version of the sample program Interest2.java that uses Scanner
instead of TextIO for user input:
import java.util.Scanner;
public class Interest2WithScanner {
public static void main(String[] args) {
Scanner stdin = new Scanner( System.in ); // Create the Scanner.
double principal; // The value of the investment.
double rate; // The annual interest rate.
double interest; // The interest earned during the year.
System.out.print("Enter the initial investment: ");
principal = stdin.nextDouble();
System.out.print("Enter the annual interest rate (as a decimal): ");
rate = stdin.nextDouble();
interest = principal * rate; // Compute this year’s interest.
principal = principal + interest; // Add it to principal.
System.out.printf("The amount of interest is $%1.2f%n", interest);
System.out.printf("The value after one year is $%1.2f%n", principal);
} // end of main()
} // end of class Interest2WithScanner
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 49
Note the inclusion of the two lines given above to import Scanner and create stdin.
Also note the substitution of stdin.nextDouble() for TextIO.getlnDouble(). (In fact,
stdin.nextDouble() is really equivalent to TextIO.getDouble() rather than to the “getln”
version, but this will not affect the behavior of the program as long as the user types just one
number on each line of input.)
I will continue to use TextIO for input for the time being, but I will give a few more examples
of using Scanner in the on-line solutions to the end-of-chapter exercises. There will be more
detailed coverage of Scanner later in the book.
is quite large. I will not cover them all here, but most of the important ones are here.
counter = counter + 1;
goalsScored = goalsScored + 1;
The effect of the assignment statement x = x + 1 is to take the old value of the variable
x, compute the result of adding 1 to that value, and store the answer as the new value of
x. The same operation can be accomplished by writing x++ (or, if you prefer, ++x). This
actually changes the value of x, so that it has the same effect as writing “x = x + 1”. The two
statements above could be written
counter++;
goalsScored++;
Similarly, you could write x-- (or --x) to subtract 1 from x. That is, x-- performs the same
computation as x = x - 1. Adding 1 to a variable is called incrementing that variable,
and subtracting 1 is called decrementing . The operators ++ and -- are called the increment
operator and the decrement operator, respectively. These operators can be used on variables
belonging to any of the numerical types and also on variables of type char. (If ch is ’A’ then
ch++ changes the value of ch to ’B’.)
Usually, the operators ++ or -- are used in statements like “x++;” or “x--;”. These
statements are commands to change the value of x. However, it is also legal to use x++,
++x, x--, or --x as expressions, or as parts of larger expressions. That is, you can write things
like:
y = x++;
y = ++x;
TextIO.putln(--x);
z = (++x) * (y--);
The statement “y = x++;” has the effects of adding 1 to the value of x and, in addition, assigning
some value to y. The value assigned to y is defined to be the old value of x, before the 1 is
added. Thus, if the value of x is 6, the statement “y = x++;” will change the value of x to 7,
but it will change the value of y to 6, because the value assigned to y is the old value of x. On
the other hand, the value of ++x is defined to be the new value of x, after the 1 is added. So if
x is 6, then the statement “y = ++x;” changes the values of both x and y to 7. The decrement
operator, --, works in a similar way.
Note in particular that the statement x = x++; does not change the value of x! This is
because the value that is being assigned to x is the old value of x, the one that it had before the
statement was executed. The net result is that x is incremented but then immediately changed
back to its previous value! You also need to remember that x++ is not the same as x + 1. The
expression x++ changes the value of x; the expression x + 1 does not.
This can be confusing, and I have seen many bugs in student programs resulting from the
confusion. My advice is: Don’t be confused. Use ++ and -- only as stand-alone statements,
not as expressions. I will follow this advice in almost all examples in these notes.
A == B Is A "equal to" B?
A != B Is A "not equal to" B?
A < B Is A "less than" B?
A > B Is A "greater than" B?
A <= B Is A "less than or equal to" B?
A >= B Is A "greater than or equal to" B?
These operators can be used to compare values of any of the numeric types. They can also be
used to compare values of type char. For characters, < and > are defined according the numeric
Unicode values of the characters. (This might not always be what you want. It is not the same
as alphabetical order because all the upper case letters come before all the lower case letters.)
When using boolean expressions, you should remember that as far as the computer is
concerned, there is nothing special about boolean values. In the next chapter, you will see
how to use them in loop and branch statements. But you can also assign boolean-valued
expressions to boolean variables, just as you can assign numeric values to numeric variables.
And functions can return boolean values.
By the way, the operators == and != can be used to compare boolean values too. This is
occasionally useful. For example, can you figure out what this does:
boolean sameSign;
sameSign = ((x > 0) == (y > 0));
One thing that you cannot do with the relational operators <, >, <=, and >= is to use them
to compare values of type String. You can legally use == and != to compare Strings, but
because of peculiarities in the way objects behave, they might not give the results you want.
(The == operator checks whether two objects are stored in the same memory location, rather
than whether they contain the same value. Occasionally, for some objects, you do want to
make such a check—but rarely for strings. I’ll get back to this in a later chapter.) Instead,
you should compare strings using subroutines such as equals() and compareTo(), which were
described in Subsection 2.3.3.
Another place where == and != don’t always work as you would expect is with Double.NaN,
the constant that represents an undefined value of type double. The value of x == Double.NaN
is defined to be false for any x, and x != Double.NaN is defined to be true in all cases. Those
values hold even when x is Double.NaN! To test whether a real value x is the undefined value
Double.NaN, use the boolean-valued function Double.isNaN(x).
int A;
double X;
short B;
A = 17;
X = A; // OK; A is converted to a double
B = A; // illegal; no automatic conversion
// from int to short
The idea is that conversion should only be done automatically when it can be done without
changing the semantics of the value. Any int can be converted to a double with the same
numeric value. However, there are int values that lie outside the legal range of shorts. There
is simply no way to represent the int 100000 as a short, for example, since the largest value of
type short is 32767.
In some cases, you might want to force a conversion that wouldn’t be done automatically.
For this, you can use what is called a type cast. A type cast is indicated by putting a type
name, in parentheses, in front of the value you want to convert. For example,
int A;
short B;
A = 17;
B = (short)A; // OK; A is explicitly type cast
// to a value of type short
You can do type casts from any numeric type to any other numeric type. However, you should
note that you might change the numeric value of a number by type-casting it. For example,
(short)100000 is -31072. (The -31072 is obtained by taking the 4-byte int 100000 and throwing
away two of those bytes to obtain a short—you’ve lost the real information that was in those
two bytes.)
When you type-cast a real number to an integer, the fractional part is discarded. For
example, (int)7.9453 is 7. As another example of type casts, consider the problem of
getting a random integer between 1 and 6. The function Math.random() gives a real number
between 0.0 and 0.9999. . . , and so 6*Math.random() is between 0.0 and 5.999. . . . The type-
cast operator, (int), can be used to convert this to an integer: (int)(6*Math.random()).
Thus, (int)(6*Math.random()) is one of the integers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. To get a number
between 1 and 6, we can add 1: “(int)(6*Math.random()) + 1”. (The parentheses around
6*Math.random() are necessary because of precedence rules; without the parentheses, the type
cast operator would apply only to the 6.)
The type char is almost an integer type. You can assign char values to int variables, and you
can assign integer constants in the range 0 to 65535 to char variables. You can also use explicit
type-casts between char and the numeric types. For example, (char)97 is ’a’, (int)’+’ is
43, and (char)(’A’ + 2) is ’C’.
∗ ∗ ∗
Type conversion between String and other types cannot be done with type-casts. One way to
convert a value of any type into a string is to concatenate it with an empty string. For example,
"" + 42 is the string "42". But a better way is to use the function String.valueOf(x), a static
member function in the String class. String.valueOf(x) returns the value of x, converted into
a string. For example, String.valueOf(42) is the string "42", and if ch is a char variable,
then String.valueOf(ch) is a string of length one containing the single character that is the
value of ch.
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 55
It is also possible to convert certain strings into values of other types. For example, the
string "10" should be convertible into the int value 10, and the string "17.42e-2" into the
double value 0.1742. In Java, these conversions are handled by built-in functions.
The standard class Integer contains a static member function for converting from String to
int. In particular, if str is any expression of type String, then Integer.parseInt(str) is a
function call that attempts to convert the value of str into a value of type int. For example, the
value of Integer.parseInt("10") is the int value 10. If the parameter to Integer.parseInt
does not represent a legal int value, then an error occurs.
Similarly, the standard class Double includes a function Double.parseDouble. If str is a
String, then the function call Double.parseDouble(str) tries to convert str into a value of
type double. An error occurs if str does not represent a legal double value.
∗ ∗ ∗
Getting back to assignment statements, Java has several variations on the assignment
operator, which exist to save typing. For example, “A += B” is defined to be the same as
“A = A + B”. Many of Java’s operators give rise to similar assignment operators. For example:
x -= y; // same as: x = x - y;
x *= y; // same as: x = x * y;
x /= y; // same as: x = x / y;
x %= y; // same as: x = x % y;
The combined assignment operator += even works with strings. Recall that when the + operator
is used with a string as one of the operands, it represents concatenation. Since str += x is
equivalent to str = str + x, when += is used with a string on the left-hand side, it appends
the value on the right-hand side onto the string. For example, if str has the value “tire”, then
the statement str += ’d’; changes the value of str to “tired”.
the name “Eclipse Temurin.” You will want to download Temurin 17 or later. The JDK comes
in different versions, depending on the operating system and type of CPU for your computer,
but the Adoptium web page should detect your operating system and CPU, so that you just
need to click the “Latest release” download button to get the appropriate version. (If you need
to select the version yourself, note that the CPU type is referred to as “Architecture.” You are
most likely to be using the “x64” architecture, which works for Intel and AMD CPUs, but the
newer M1 Macs use “aarch64,” which refers to ARM CPUs.)
The Adoptium site provides installers for MacOS and Windows that make it easier to set up
Java on those platforms. (The installer for MacOS is a .pkg file, and the installer for Windows
is a .msi file.) If you use the Linux operating system, you can probably install an OpenJDK
using the usual software manager for your distribution; if not, you can download a version from
Adoptium, but it will just be a compressed archive rather than an installer.
If you download a JDK installer for Windows or MacOS from Adoptium, you can just
double-click the installer file to start the installation, if it does not start automatically. If you
use the default installation, the installer will set up your computer so that you can use the
javac and java commands on the command line.
(An OpenJDK can also be downloaded as a compressed archive, which you can decompress
and place anywhere on your computer. However, to use the javac and java commands, you will
either need to put the bin directory from the OpenJDK directory on your PATH environment
variable, or use full path names for the javac and java commands. The Adoptium installers
for Windows and for MacOS will take care of this detail for you.)
use. For example, if the current directory is your home directory, then you can change into
your Desktop directory by typing the command cd Desktop (and then pressing return).
You might want to create a directory (that is, a folder) to hold your Java work. For example,
you might create a directory named javawork in your home directory. You can do this using
your computer’s GUI; another way is to use the command line: Open a command window. If
you want to put your work directory in a different folder from your home directory, cd into
the directory where you want to put it. Then enter the command mkdir javawork to make
the directory. When you want to work on programming, open a command window and use the
cd command to change into your Java work directory. Of course, you can have more than one
working directory for your Java work; you can organize your files any way you like.
∗ ∗ ∗
The most basic commands for using Java on the command line are javac and java. The
javac command is used to compile Java source code, and java is used to run Java programs.
These commands, and other commands for working with Java, can be found in a directory
named bin inside the directory that holds the JDK. If you set things up correctly on your
computer, it should recognize these commands when you type them on the command line. Try
typing the commands java -version and javac -version. The output from these commands
should tell you which version of Java is being used. If you get a message such as “Command
not found,” then Java is not correctly configured.
Java should already be configured correctly on Linux, if you have installed Java from the
Linux software repositories. The same is true on MacOS and Windows, if you have used an
installer from Adoptium.
∗ ∗ ∗
To test the javac command, place a copy of HelloWorld.java into your working directory.
(If you downloaded the Web site of this book, you can find it in the directory named chapter2
inside the directory named source; you can use your computer’s GUI to copy-and-paste this
file into your working directory, or you could cd into the chapter2 folder and work there.
Alternatively, you can navigate to HelloWorld.java on the book’s Web site and use the “Save As”
command in your Web browser to save a copy of the file into your working directory.) Type
the command (while working in the directory that contains the file HelloWorld.java):
javac HelloWorld.java
This will compile HelloWorld.java and will create a bytecode file named HelloWorld.class
in the same directory. Note that if the command succeeds, you will not get any response from
the computer; it will just redisplay the command prompt to tell you it’s ready for another
command. You will then be able to run the program using the java command:
java HelloWorld
The computer should respond by outputting the message “Hello World!”. Note that although
the compiled program is stored in a file named HelloWorld.class, the java command uses
the name of the class, HelloWorld, not the name of the file. To run the program, you only need
.class file, not the .java file.
Many of the sample programs for this book use TextIO to read input from the user (see
Subsection 2.4.3). Since TextIO is not a standard part of Java, you must make it available to any
program that uses it. This means that your working directory should contain a folder named
textio, and inside that folder should be the file TextIO.java. You can copy TextIO.java from
this book’s source directory, or your can download it from the web site, but you should be sure
to place it inside a folder named textio in the same directory as the program that uses TextIO.
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 59
Once you have TextIO.java you can run a sample program such as Interest2.java to test
user input. First, compile the program with the command
javac Interest2.java
If successful, this will create the compiled file named Interest2.class. But you will also notice
that it creates the file TextIO.class inside the textio folder, if that file does not already exist.
More generally, the javac command will compile not just the file that you specify but also any
additional Java files that are needed. Once you have Interest2.class, you can run it using
the command
java Interest2
You will be asked to enter some information, and you will respond by typing your answers into
the command window, pressing return at the end of each line. When the program ends, you
will see the command prompt, and you can enter another command. (Note, by the way, that
“java TextIO” would not make sense, since TextIO does not have a main() routine, and so it
is not possible to execute it as a program.)
You can follow a similar procedure to run all of the examples in this book.
∗ ∗ ∗
To create your own programs, you will need a text editor . A text editor is a computer
program that allows you to create and save documents that contain plain text. It is important
that the documents be saved as plain text, that is without any special encoding or formatting
information. Word processor documents are not appropriate, unless you can get your word
processor to save as plain text. A good text editor can make programming a lot more pleasant.
Linux comes with several text editors. On Windows, you can use notepad in a pinch, but you
will probably want something better. For MacOS, you might download the BBEdit application,
which can be used for free. One possibility that will work on any platform is to use jedit, a
programmer’s text editor that is itself written in Java and that can be downloaded for free from
www.jedit.org. Another popular cross-platform programming editor is Atom, available from
atom.io.
To work on your programs, you can open a command line window and cd into the working
directory where you will store your source code files. Start up your text editor program, such
as by double-clicking its icon or selecting it from a Start menu. Type your code into the editor
window, or open an existing source code file that you want to modify. Save the file into your
working directory. Remember that the name of a Java source code file must end in “.java”, and
the rest of the file name must match the name of the class that is defined in the file. Once the
file is saved in your working directory, go to the command window and use the javac command
to compile it, as discussed above. If there are syntax errors in the code, they will be listed in the
command window. Each error message contains the line number in the file where the computer
found the error. Go back to the editor and try to fix one or more errors, save your changes,
and then try the javac command again. (It’s usually a good idea to just work on the first few
errors; sometimes fixing those will make other errors go away.) Remember that when the javac
command finally succeeds, you will get no message at all, or possibly just some “warnings”;
warnings do not stop a program from running. Then you can use the java command to run
your program, as described above. Once you’ve compiled the program, you can run it as many
times as you like without recompiling it.
That’s really all there is to it: Keep both editor and command-line window open. Edit,
save, and compile until you have eliminated all the syntax errors. (Always remember to save
the file before compiling it—the compiler only sees the saved file, not the version in the editor
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 60
window.) When you run the program, you might find that it has semantic errors that cause it
to run incorrectly. In that case, you have to go back to the edit/save/compile loop to try to
find and fix the problem.
different types of information, for different tasks. For compiling and running programs, the
only perspective that you will need is the “Java Perspective,” which is the default. As you
become more experienced, you might want to use the “Debug Perspective,” which has features
designed to help you find semantic errors in programs. There are small buttons in the Eclipse
toolbar that can be used to switch between perspectives.
The Java Perspective includes a large area in the center of the window that contains text
editor views. This is where you will create and edit your programs. To the left of this is the
Package Explorer view, which will contain a list of your Java projects and source code files. To
the right are one or more other views that you might or might not find useful; I usually close
them by clicking the small “X” next to the name of each one. Several other views that will
certainly be useful appear under different tabs in a section of the window below the editing
area. If you accidently close one of the important views, such as the Package Explorer, you can
get it back by selecting it from the “Show View” submenu of the “Window” menu. You can
also reset the whole window to its default contents by selecting “Reset Perspective” from the
“Window” menu.
∗ ∗ ∗
To do any work in Eclipse, you need a project. To start a Java project, go to the “New”
submenu in the “File” menu, and select the “Java Project” command. In the window that pops
up, you will need to fill in a “Project Name,” which can be anything you like. There are two
other sections of the window that you might need to pay attention to:
For the “JRE,” you should use an “execution environment,” which should be set to JavaSE 17
or later, as shown here. And for any program from this textbook, you need to uncheck the
option labeled “Create module-info.java file” in the “Module” section. This textbook does not
use modular programs! Note that the workspace will remember these two settings for the next
time that you create a new project.
After entering a project name, and changing the options if necessary, click the “Finish”
button. The project should appear in the “Package Explorer” view on the left side of the
Eclipse window. Click on the small triangle or plus sign next to the project name to see the
contents of the project. Assuming that you use the default settings, there should be a directory
named “src,” which is where your Java source code files will go. The project also contains the
“JRE System Library”. This is the collection of standard built-in classes that come with Java.
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 62
To run any of the sample Java programs from this textbook, you need to copy the source
code file into your Eclipse Java project. Assuming that you have downloaded the source code
file onto your computer, you can copy-and-paste it into the Eclipse window. (Right-click the
file icon (or control-click on MacOS); select “Copy” from the pop-up menu; then right-click the
project’s src folder in the Eclipse window, and select “Paste”. Be sure to paste it into the src
folder, not into the project itself; files outside the src folder are not treated as Java source
code files.) Alternatively, you can try dragging the file icon from a file browser window onto
the src folder in the Eclipse window.
To use the TextIO-based examples from this textbook, you must add the source code file
TextIO.java to your project. This file has to be in a “package” named textio. If you already
have TextIO.java in a folder named “textio,” as described above, then you can simply copy-
and-paste the textio folder into the “src” folder of your project. Alternatively, you can create
the textio package using the “New/Package” command from the “File” menu. This will make
a folder named “textio” in your project, inside the src folder, and you can then copy-and-paste
TextIO.java into that folder. In any case, package textio should appear under “src” in your
project, with TextIO.java inside it. (You can drag files from one location to another in the
Package Explorer view, if you accidently put a file in the wrong location.)
Once a Java program is in the project, you can open it in an editor by double-clicking the
file name in the “Package Explorer” view. To run the program, right-click in the editor window,
or on the file name in the Package Explorer view (or control-click in MacOS). In the menu that
pops up, go to the “Run As” submenu, and select “Java Application”. The program will be
executed. If the program writes to standard output, the output will appear in the “Console”
view, in the section of the Eclipse window below the editor section. If the program uses TextIO
or Scanner for input, you will have to type the required input into the “Console” view—click
the “Console” view before you start typing so that the characters that you type will be
sent to the correct part of the window. (For an easier way to run a program, find and click
the small “Run” button in Eclipse’s tool bar. This will run either the program in the editor
window, the program selected in the Package Explorer view, or the program that was run most
recently, depending on context.) Note that when you run a program in Eclipse, it is compiled
automatically. There is no separate compilation step.
You can have more than one program in the same Eclipse project, or you can create
additional projects to organize your work better. Remember to place a copy of TextIO.java,
inside a folder named textio, in any project that requires it.
∗ ∗ ∗
To create a new Java program in Eclipse, you must create a new Java class. To do that,
right-click the Java project name in the “Project Explorer” view. Go to the “New” submenu
of the popup menu, and select “Class”. (Alternatively, there is a small icon in the toolbar at
the top of the Eclipse window that you can click to create a new Java class.) In the window
that opens, type in the name of the class that you want to create. The class name must be
a legal Java identifier. Note that you want the name of the class, not the name of the source
code file, so don’t add “.java” at the end of the name. The window also includes an input box
labeled “Package” where you can specify the name of a package to contain the class. Most
examples in this book use the “default package,” but you can create your own programs in any
package. To use the default package, the “Package” input box should be empty. Finally, click
the “Finish” button to create the class. The class should appear inside the “src” folder, in a
folder corresponding to its package. The new file should automatically open in the editing area
so that you can start typing your program.
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 63
Eclipse has several features that aid you as you type your code. It will underline any syntax
error with a jagged red line, and in some cases will place an error marker in the left border
of the edit window. If you hover the mouse cursor over the error marker or over the error
itself, a description of the error will appear. Note that you do not have to get rid of every
error immediately as you type; many errors will go away as you type in more of the program!
If an error marker displays a small “light bulb,” Eclipse is offering to try to fix the error for
you. Click the light bulb—or simply hover your mouse over the actual error—to get a list of
possible fixes, then click the fix that you want to apply. For example, if you use an undeclared
variable in your program, Eclipse will offer to declare it for you. You can actually use this
error-correcting feature to get Eclipse to write certain types of code for you! Unfortunately,
you’ll find that you won’t understand a lot of the proposed fixes until you learn more about
the Java language, and it is not a good idea to apply a fix that you don’t understand—often
that will just make things worse in the end.
Eclipse will also look for spelling errors in comments and will underline them with jagged
red lines. Hover your mouse over the error to get a list of possible correct spellings.
Another essential Eclipse feature is content assist. Content assist can be invoked by typing
Control-Space. It will offer possible completions of whatever you are typing at the moment. For
example, if you type part of an identifier and hit Control-Space, you will get a list of identifiers
that start with the characters that you have typed; use the up and down arrow keys to select
one of the items in the list, and press Return or Enter. (You can also click an item with the
mouse to select it, or hit Escape to dismiss the list.) If there is only one possible completion
when you hit Control-Space, it will be inserted automatically. By default, Content Assist will
also pop up automatically, when you type a period or certain other characters. For example, if
you type “TextIO.”, you will get a list of all the subroutines in the TextIO class. Personally, I
find this auto-activation annoying. You can disable it in the Eclipse Preferences. (Look under
Java / Editor / Content Assist, and turn off the “Enable auto activation” option.) You can
still call up Code Assist manually with Control-Space.
Once you have an error-free program, you can run it as described above. If you find a
problem when you run it, it’s very easy to go back to the editor, make changes, and run it
again.
∗ ∗ ∗
(As a side note, it is possible to use the JDK that is included with Eclipse on the command
line. That JDK is a directory inside the Eclipse installation, with a long, complex name.
The best way to find the name might be to open The “Installed JREs” section of the Eclipse
preferences, as described above, select the built-in JRE in the list of “Installed JREs”, and click
“Edit.” The name of the JDK directory will be in the “JRE home” section of the dialog, and
you can copy-and-paste it from there. You need to add /bin— or \bin on Windows—to that
directory name to get the name of the directory that contains the JDK command line programs
such as javac. You can add the full name of that bin directory to your PATH environment
variable, or you can use full path names for the javac and java commands.)
2.6.4 BlueJ
As a simpler alternative to Eclipse, I will mention BlueJ, a small IDE that is designed specifically
for people who are learning to program. It is much less complex than Eclipse, but it does have
some features that make it useful for education. BlueJ can be downloaded from bluej.org.
There are installers available for Windows, for MacOS, and for Debian-based Linux (such as
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 64
Ubuntu Linux and Linux Mint). The installers include an OpenJDK as well as JavaFX (which is
required to run BlueJ), so you will not need to do any additional downloading or configuration.
As of March, 2022, BlueJ supports Java 11 but not later versions.
In BlueJ, you can begin a project with the “New Project” command in the “Project” menu.
A BlueJ project is simply a folder. When you create a project, you will have to select a folder
name that does not already exist. The folder will be created and a window will be opened to
show the contents of the folder. Files are shown as icons in the BlueJ window. You can drag
.java files from the file system onto that window to add files to the project; they will be copied
into the project folder as well as shown in the window. You can also copy files directly into the
project folder, but BlueJ won’t see them until the next time you open the project. When you
restart BlueJ, it should show the project that you were working on most recently, but you can
open any project with a command from the “Project” menu.
There is a button in the project window for creating a new class. An icon for the class is
added to the window, and a .java source code file is created in the project folder. The file is not
automatically opened for editing. To edit a file, double-click its icon in the project window. An
editor will be opened in a separate window. (A newly created class will contain some default
code that you probably don’t want; you can erase it and add a main() routine instead.) The
BlueJ editor does not show errors as you type. Errors will be reported when you compile the
program. Also, it does not offer automatic fixes for errors. It has a less capable version of
Eclipse’s Content Assist, which seems only to work for getting a list of available subroutines in
a class or object; call up the list by hitting Control-Space after typing the period following the
name of a class or object.
An editor window contains a button for compiling the program in the window. There is
also a compile button in the project window, which compiles all the classes in the project.
To run a program, it must already be compiled. Right-click the icon of a compiled program.
In the menu that pops up, you will see “void main(String[] args)”. Select that option from
the menu to run the program.
One of the neatest features of BlueJ is that you can actually use it to run any subroutine,
not just main(). If a class contains other subroutines, you will see them in the list that you get
by right-clicking its icon. A pop-up dialog allows you to enter any parameters required by the
routine, and if the routine is a function, you will get another dialog box after the routine has
been executed to tell you its return value. This allows easy testing of individual subroutines.
Furthermore, you can also use BlueJ to create new objects from a class. An icon for the object
will be added at the bottom of the project window, and you can right-click that icon to get
a list of subroutines in the object. This will, of course, not be useful to you until we get to
object-oriented programming in Chapter 5.
use it, since it seems easier for beginning programmers to avoid packages as much as possible,
at least at first. If Eclipse tries to put a class into a package, you can delete the package name
from the class-creation dialog to get it to use the default package instead. But if you do create
a class in a package, the source code starts with a line that specifies which package the class is
in. For example, if the class is in a package named test.pkg, then the first line of the source
code will be
package test.pkg;
For example, the source code for TextIO begins with “package textio;”. I put TextIO in a
package because a class that is in a non-default package cannot use a class from the default
package. That is, if TextIO were in the default package, then it could only be used by programs
that are also in the default package. (In fact, in earlier versions of this textbook, TextIO was
in the default package. I moved it to package textio as of Version 8 of the book.)
When packages are used in a command-line environment, some complications arise. For
example, if a program is in a package named test.pkg, then the source code file must be in a
subdirectory named “pkg” inside a directory named “test” that is in turn inside your main
Java working directory. Nevertheless, when you compile or execute the program, you should
be working in the main directory, not in the subdirectory. When you compile the source
code file, you have to include the name of the directory in the command: For example, for a
program in package test.pkg use “javac test/pkg/ClassName.java” on Linux or MacOS, or
“javac test\pkg\ClassName.java” on Windows. The command for executing the program is
then “java test.pkg.ClassName”, with a period separating the package name from the class
name.
Using jshell can be a great way to learn Java and to experiment with its features. I won’t
give any more detailed information about it in this book, but you can learn more at
https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/17/jshell/introduction-jshell.html
or you can use the /help command inside jshell to learn more about it.
Exercises 67
1. Write a program that will print your initials to standard output in letters that are nine (solution)
lines tall. Each big letter should be made up of a bunch of *’s. For example, if your initials
were “DJE”, then the output would look something like:
****** ************* **********
** ** ** **
** ** ** **
** ** ** **
** ** ** ********
** ** ** ** **
** ** ** ** **
** ** ** ** **
***** **** **********
2. Write a program that simulates rolling a pair of dice. You can simulate rolling one die by (solution)
choosing one of the integers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 at random. The number you pick represents
the number on the die after it is rolled. As pointed out in Section 2.5, the expression
(int)(Math.random()*6) + 1
does the computation to select a random integer between 1 and 6. You can assign this
value to a variable to represent one of the dice that are being rolled. Do this twice and
add the results together to get the total roll. Your program should report the number
showing on each die as well as the total roll. For example:
The first die comes up 3
The second die comes up 5
Your total roll is 8
3. Write a program that asks the user’s name, and then greets the user by name. Before (solution)
outputting the user’s name, convert it to upper case letters. For example, if the user’s
name is Fred, then the program should respond “Hello, FRED, nice to meet you!”.
4. Write a program that helps the user count his change. The program should ask how many (solution)
quarters the user has, then how many dimes, then how many nickels, then how many
pennies. Then the program should tell the user how much money he has, expressed in
dollars.
5. If you have N eggs, then you have N/12 dozen eggs, with N%12 eggs left over. (This is (solution)
essentially the definition of the / and % operators for integers.) Write a program that asks
the user how many eggs she has and then tells the user how many dozen eggs she has and
how many extra eggs are left over.
A gross of eggs is equal to 144 eggs. Extend your program so that it will tell the user
how many gross, how many dozen, and how many left over eggs she has. For example, if
the user says that she has 1342 eggs, then your program would respond with
Your number of eggs is 9 gross, 3 dozen, and 10
Exercises 68
6. This exercise asks you to write a program that tests some of the built-in subroutines for (solution)
working with Strings. The program should ask the user to enter their first name and their
last name, separated by a space. Read the user’s response using TextIO.getln(). Break
the input string up into two strings, one containing the first name and one containing the
last name. You can do that by using the indexOf() subroutine to find the position of the
space, and then using substring() to extract each of the two names. Also output the
number of characters in each name, and output the user’s initials. (The initials are the
first letter of the first name together with the first letter of the last name.) A sample run
of the program should look something like this:
Please enter your first name and last name, separated by a space.
? Mary Smith
Your first name is Mary, which has 4 characters
Your last name is Smith, which has 5 characters
Your initials are MS
7. Suppose that a file named “testdata.txt” contains the following information: The first (solution)
line of the file is the name of a student. Each of the next three lines contains an integer.
The integers are the student’s scores on three exams. Write a program that will read
the information in the file and display (on standard output) a message that contains the
name of the student and the student’s average grade on the three exams. The average is
obtained by adding up the individual exam grades and then dividing by the number of
exams.
Quiz 69
Quiz on Chapter 2
(answers)
1. Briefly explain what is meant by the syntax and the semantics of a programming language.
Give an example to illustrate the difference between a syntax error and a semantics error.
2. What does the computer do when it executes a variable declaration statement. Give an
example.
4. One of the primitive types in Java is boolean. What is the boolean type? Where are
boolean values used? What are its possible values?
6. Explain what is meant by an assignment statement, and give an example. What are
assignment statements used for?
8. What is a literal ?
9. In Java, classes have two fundamentally different purposes. What are they?
10. What is the difference between the statement “x = TextIO.getDouble();” and the
statement “x = TextIO.getlnDouble();”
11. Explain why the value of the expression 2 + 3 + "test" is the string "5test" while the
value of the expression "test" + 2 + 3 is the string "test23". What is the value of
"test" + 2 * 3 ?
12. Integrated Development Environments such as Eclipse often use syntax coloring , which
assigns various colors to the characters in a program to reflect the syntax of the language.
A student notices that Eclipse colors the word String differently from int, double, and
boolean. The student asks why String should be a different color, since all these words
are names of types. What’s the answer to the student’s question?
13. What is the purpose of an import directive, such as import textio.TextIO or import
java.util.Scanner?
14. Write a complete program that asks the user to enter the number of “widgets” they want
to buy and the cost per widget. The program should then output the total cost for all
the widgets. Use System.out.printf to print the cost, with two digits after the decimal
point. You do not need to include any comments in the program.
Chapter 3
3.1.1 Blocks
The block is the simplest type of structured statement. Its purpose is simply to group a
sequence of statements into a single statement. The format of a block is:
71
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 72
{
hstatements i
}
That is, it consists of a sequence of statements enclosed between a pair of braces, “{” and “}”.
In fact, it is possible for a block to contain no statements at all; such a block is called an empty
block , and can actually be useful at times. An empty block consists of nothing but an empty
pair of braces. Block statements usually occur inside other statements, where their purpose is
to group together several statements into a unit. However, a block can be legally used wherever
a statement can occur. There is one place where a block is required: As you might have already
noticed in the case of the main subroutine of a program, the definition of a subroutine is a
block, since it is a sequence of statements enclosed inside a pair of braces.
I should probably note again at this point that Java is what is called a free-format language.
There are no syntax rules about how the language has to be arranged on a page. So, for example,
you could write an entire block on one line if you want. But as a matter of good programming
style, you should lay out your program on the page in a way that will make its structure as
clear as possible. In general, this means putting one statement per line and using indentation
to indicate statements that are contained inside control structures. This is the format that I
will use in my examples.
Here are two examples of blocks:
{
System.out.print("The answer is ");
System.out.println(ans);
}
In this section, I’ll introduce the while loop and the if statement. I’ll give the full details of
these statements and of the other three control structures in later sections.
A while loop is used to repeat a given statement over and over. Of course, it’s not likely
that you would want to keep repeating it forever. That would be an infinite loop, which is
generally a bad thing. (There is an old story about computer pioneer Grace Murray Hopper,
who read instructions on a bottle of shampoo telling her to “lather, rinse, repeat.” As the
story goes, she claims that she tried to follow the directions, but she ran out of shampoo. (In
case you don’t get it, she was making a joke about the way that computers mindlessly follow
instructions.)) By the way, if you are working on the command line and need to stop a program
that has gotten into an infinite loop, you should be able to do so with Control-C, that is, hold
down the Control key and press the C key.
To be more specific, a while loop will repeat a statement over and over, but only so long
as a specified condition remains true. A while loop has the form:
while (hboolean-expression i)
hstatement i
Since the statement can be, and usually is, a block, most while loops have the form:
while (hboolean-expression i) {
hstatements i
}
Some programmers think that the braces should always be included as a matter of style, even
when there is only one statement between them, but I don’t always follow that advice myself.
The semantics of the while statement go like this: When the computer comes to a while
statement, it evaluates the hboolean-expressioni, which yields either true or false as its value.
If the value is false, the computer skips over the rest of the while loop and proceeds to the
next command in the program. If the value of the expression is true, the computer executes
the hstatementi or block of hstatementsi inside the loop. Then it returns to the beginning of
the while loop and repeats the process. That is, it re-evaluates the hboolean-expressioni, ends
the loop if the value is false, and continues it if the value is true. This will continue over and
over until the value of the expression is false when the computer evaluates it; if that never
happens, then there will be an infinite loop.
Here is an example of a while loop that simply prints out the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5:
int number; // The number to be printed.
number = 1; // Start with 1.
while ( number < 6 ) { // Keep going as long as number is < 6.
System.out.println(number);
number = number + 1; // Go on to the next number.
}
System.out.println("Done!");
The variable number is initialized with the value 1. So when the computer evaluates the
expression “number < 6” for the first time, it is asking whether 1 is less than 6, which is
true. The computer therefore proceeds to execute the two statements inside the loop. The
first statement prints out “1”. The second statement adds 1 to number and stores the result
back into the variable number; the value of number has been changed to 2. The computer has
reached the end of the loop, so it returns to the beginning and asks again whether number is
less than 6. Once again this is true, so the computer executes the loop again, this time printing
out 2 as the value of number and then changing the value of number to 3. It continues in this
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 74
way until eventually number becomes equal to 6. At that point, the expression “number < 6”
evaluates to false. So, the computer jumps past the end of the loop to the next statement
and prints out the message “Done!”. Note that when the loop ends, the value of number is 6,
but the last value that was printed was 5.
By the way, you should remember that you’ll never see a while loop standing by itself
in a real program. It will always be inside a subroutine which is itself defined inside some
class. As an example of a while loop used inside a complete program, here is a little program
that computes the interest on an investment over several years. This is an improvement over
examples from the previous chapter that just reported the results for one year:
import textio.TextIO;
/**
* This class implements a simple program that will compute the amount of
* interest that is earned on an investment over a period of 5 years. The
* initial amount of the investment and the interest rate are input by the
* user. The value of the investment at the end of each year is output.
*/
public class Interest3 {
You should study this program, and make sure that you understand what the computer does
step-by-step as it executes the while loop.
Yes Yes
Do statement Do statement
In these diagrams, the arrows represent the flow of time as the statement is executed. Control
enters the diagram at the top and leaves at the bottom. Similarly, a flow control diagram for an
if..else statement makes it clear that exactly one of the two nested statements is executed:
Yes No
Is condition true?
Do statement
∗ ∗ ∗
Of course, either or both of the hstatementsi in an if statement can be a block, and again
many programmers prefer to add the braces even when they contain just a single statement.
So an if statement often looks like:
if ( hboolean-expression i ) {
hstatements i
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 77
}
else {
hstatements i
}
or:
if ( hboolean-expression i ) {
hstatements i
}
As an example, here is an if statement that exchanges the value of two variables, x and y,
but only if x is greater than y to begin with. After this if statement has been executed, we
can be sure that the value of x is definitely less than or equal to the value of y:
if ( x > y ) {
int temp; // A temporary variable for use in this block.
temp = x; // Save a copy of the value of x in temp.
x = y; // Copy the value of y into x.
y = temp; // Copy the value of temp into y.
}
Finally, here is an example of an if statement that includes an else part. See if you can
figure out what it does, and why it would be used:
if ( years > 1 ) { // handle case for 2 or more years
System.out.print("The value of the investment after ");
System.out.print(years);
System.out.print(" years is $");
}
else { // handle case for 1 year
System.out.print("The value of the investment after 1 year is $");
} // end of if statement
System.out.printf("%1.2f", principal); // this is done in any case
I’ll have more to say about control structures later in this chapter. But you already know
the essentials. If you never learned anything more about control structures, you would already
know enough to perform any possible computing task. Simple looping and branching are all
you really need!
Abstraction is a central concept in computer science. Abstraction allows you to work with
something without understanding how it works in detail. It allows you to work on a “higher
level.” If statements and while loops are examples of control abstractions. They allow
you to work with a high-level programming language like Java, rather than with very low-level
machine language.
You will encounter other kinds of abstraction later in this book. In fact, you’ve already
encountered one: A variable is a basic example of data abstraction. A variable lets you use
a name to work with a data value of a certain type. The computer has to keep track of the
numerical address of that data in memory, how many bytes of memory the data occupies, and
how to interpret the bits that are stored in that memory to represent the value. The variable
is an abstraction that lets you avoid all that detail.
x = 1; x = 1;
else if (x >= 0)
x = 2; x = 2;
After the code on the left is executed, x is 1; after the code on the right, x is 2. If you don’t
believe this, work though the code step-by-step, doing exactly what the computer does when it
executes each step. The key point is that for the code on the right, both assignment statements,
x = 1 and x = 2, are executed. Make sure that you understand why.
adding steps and detail, until you have a complete algorithm that can be translated directly
into programming language. This method is called stepwise refinement, and it is a type of
top-down design. As you proceed through the stages of stepwise refinement, you can write out
descriptions of your algorithm in pseudocode—informal instructions that imitate the structure
of programming languages without the complete detail and perfect syntax of actual program
code.
As an example, let’s see how one might develop the program from the previous section, which
computes the value of an investment over five years. The task that you want the program to
perform is: “Compute and display the value of an investment for each of the next five years,
where the initial investment and interest rate are to be specified by the user.” You might then
write—or more likely just think—that this can be expanded as:
Get the user’s input
Compute the value of the investment after 1 year
Display the value
Compute the value after 2 years
Display the value
Compute the value after 3 years
Display the value
Compute the value after 4 years
Display the value
Compute the value after 5 years
Display the value
This is correct, but rather repetitive. And seeing that repetition, you might notice an
opportunity to use a loop. A loop would take less typing. More important, it would be more
general: Essentially the same loop will work no matter how many years you want to process.
So, you might rewrite the above sequence of steps as:
Get the user’s input
while there are more years to process:
Compute the value after the next year
Display the value
Following this algorithm would certainly solve the problem, but for a computer we’ll have
to be more explicit about how to “Get the user’s input,” how to “Compute the value after the
next year,” and what it means to say “there are more years to process.” We can expand the
step, “Get the user’s input” into
Ask the user for the initial investment
Read the user’s response
Ask the user for the interest rate
Read the user’s response
To fill in the details of the step “Compute the value after the next year,” you have to
know how to do the computation yourself. (Maybe you need to ask your boss or professor for
clarification?) Let’s say you know that the value is computed by adding some interest to the
previous value. Then we can refine the while loop to:
while there are more years to process:
Compute the interest
Add the interest to the value
Display the value
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 81
As for testing whether there are more years to process, the only way that we can do that is
by counting the years ourselves. This displays a very common pattern, and you should expect
to use something similar in a lot of programs: We have to start with zero years, add one each
time we process a year, and stop when we reach the desired number of years. This is sometimes
called a counting loop. So the while loop becomes:
years = 0
while years < 5:
years = years + 1
Compute the interest
Add the interest to the value
Display the value
We still have to know how to compute the interest. Let’s say that the interest is to be
computed by multiplying the interest rate by the current value of the investment. Putting
this together with the part of the algorithm that gets the user’s inputs, we have the complete
algorithm:
Ask the user for the initial investment
Read the user’s response
Ask the user for the interest rate
Read the user’s response
years = 0
while years < 5:
years = years + 1
Compute interest = value * interest rate
Add the interest to the value
Display the value
Finally, we are at the point where we can translate pretty directly into proper programming-
language syntax. We still have to choose names for the variables, decide exactly what we want
to say to the user, and so forth. Having done this, we could express our algorithm in Java as:
double principal, rate, interest; // declare the variables
int years;
System.out.print("Type initial investment: ");
principal = TextIO.getlnDouble();
System.out.print("Type interest rate: ");
rate = TextIO.getlnDouble();
years = 0;
while (years < 5) {
years = years + 1;
interest = principal * rate;
principal = principal + interest;
System.out.println(principal);
}
This still needs to be wrapped inside a complete program, it still needs to be commented,
and it really needs to print out more information in a nicer format for the user. But it’s
essentially the same program as the one in the previous section. (Note that the pseudocode
algorithm used indentation to show which statements are inside the loop. In Java, indentation
is completely ignored by the computer, so you need a pair of braces to tell the computer which
statements are in the loop. If you leave out the braces, the only statement inside the loop would
be “years = years + 1;". The other statements would only be executed once, after the loop
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 82
ends. The nasty thing is that the computer won’t notice this error for you, like it would if you
left out the parentheses around “(years < 5)”. The parentheses are required by the syntax of
the while statement. The braces are only required semantically. The computer can recognize
syntax errors but not semantic errors.)
One thing you should have noticed here is that my original specification of the problem—
“Compute and display the value of an investment for each of the next five years”—was far from
being complete. Before you start writing a program, you should make sure you have a complete
specification of exactly what the program is supposed to do. In particular, you need to know
what information the program is going to input and output and what computation it is going
to perform. Here is what a reasonably complete specification of the problem might look like in
this example:
“Write a program that will compute and display the value of
an investment for each of the next five years. Each year, interest
is added to the value. The interest is computed by multiplying
the current value by a fixed interest rate. Assume that the initial
value and the rate of interest are to be input by the user when the
program is run.”
Compute N = 3 * N + 1;
Output N;
Add 1 to counter;
Output the counter;
The first while loop will end only when N is a positive number, as required. (A common
beginning programmer’s error is to use an if statement instead of a while statement here: “If
N is not positive, ask the user to input another value.” The problem arises if the second number
input by the user is also non-positive. The if statement is only executed once, so the second
input number is never tested, and the program proceeds into an infinite loop. With the while
loop, after the second number is input, the computer jumps back to the beginning of the loop
and tests whether the second number is positive. If not, it asks the user for a third number,
and it will continue asking for numbers until the user enters an acceptable input. After the
while loop ends, we can be absolutely sure that N is a positive number.)
Here is a Java program implementing this algorithm. It uses the operators <= to mean “is
less than or equal to” and != to mean “is not equal to.” To test whether N is even, it uses
“N % 2 == 0”. All the operators used here were discussed in Section 2.5.
import textio.TextIO;
/**
* This program prints out a 3N+1 sequence starting from a positive
* integer specified by the user. It also counts the number of
* terms in the sequence, and prints out that number.
*/
public class ThreeN1 {
public static void main(String[] args) {
int N; // for computing terms in the sequence
int counter; // for counting the terms
System.out.print("Starting point for sequence: ");
N = TextIO.getlnInt();
while (N <= 0) {
System.out.print(
"The starting point must be positive. Please try again: " );
N = TextIO.getlnInt();
}
// At this point, we know that N > 0
counter = 0;
while (N != 1) {
if (N % 2 == 0)
N = N / 2;
else
N = 3 * N + 1;
System.out.println(N);
counter = counter + 1;
}
System.out.println();
System.out.print("There were ");
System.out.print(counter);
System.out.println(" terms in the sequence.");
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 85
} // end of main()
} // end of class ThreeN1
Two final notes on this program: First, you might have noticed that the first term of the
sequence—the value of N input by the user—is not printed or counted by this program. Is
this an error? It’s hard to say. Was the specification of the program careful enough to decide?
This is the type of thing that might send you back to the boss/professor for clarification. The
problem (if it is one!) can be fixed easily enough. Just replace the line “counter = 0” before
the while loop with the two lines:
System.out.println(N); // print out initial term
counter = 1; // and count it
Second, there is the question of why this problem might be interesting. Well, it’s interesting
to mathematicians and computer scientists because of a simple question about the problem that
they haven’t been able to answer: Will the process of computing the 3N+1 sequence finish after
a finite number of steps for all possible starting values of N? Although individual sequences are
easy to compute, no one has been able to answer the general question. To put this another
way, no one knows whether the process of computing 3N+1 sequences can properly be called
an algorithm, since an algorithm is required to terminate after a finite number of steps! (Note:
This discussion really applies to integers, not to values of type int! That is, it assumes that the
value of N can take on arbitrarily large integer values, which is not true for a variable of type
int in a Java program. When the value of N in the program becomes too large to be represented
as a 32-bit int, the values output by the program are no longer mathematically correct. So
the Java program does not compute the correct 3N+1 sequence if N becomes too large. See
Exercise 8.2.)
your program, it can get confused, and the rest of the error messages might just be guesses.
Maybe the best advice is: Take the time to understand the error before you try to fix it.
Programming is not an experimental science.
When your program compiles without error, you are still not done. You have to test the
program to make sure it works correctly. Remember that the goal is not to get the right output
for the two sample inputs that the professor gave in class. The goal is a program that will
work correctly for all reasonable inputs. Ideally, when faced with an unreasonable input, it
should respond by gently chiding the user rather than by crashing. Test your program on a
wide variety of inputs. Try to find a set of inputs that will test the full range of functionality
that you’ve coded into your program. As you begin writing larger programs, write them in
stages and test each stage along the way. You might even have to write some extra code to
do the testing—for example to call a subroutine that you’ve just written. You don’t want to
be faced, if you can avoid it, with 500 newly written lines of code that have an error in there
somewhere.
The point of testing is to find bugs—semantic errors that show up as incorrect behavior
rather than as compilation errors. And the sad fact is that you will probably find them. Again,
you can minimize bugs by careful design and careful coding, but no one has found a way to
avoid them altogether. Once you’ve detected a bug, it’s time for debugging . You have to
track down the cause of the bug in the program’s source code and eliminate it. Debugging is a
skill that, like other aspects of programming, requires practice to master. So don’t be afraid of
bugs. Learn from them. One essential debugging skill is the ability to read source code—the
ability to put aside preconceptions about what you think it does and to follow it the way the
computer does—mechanically, step-by-step—to see what it really does. This is hard. I can still
remember the time I spent hours looking for a bug only to find that a line of code that I had
looked at ten times had a “1” where it should have had an “i”, or the time when I wrote a
subroutine named WindowClosing which would have done exactly what I wanted except that
the computer was looking for windowClosing (with a lower case “w”). Sometimes it can help
to have someone who doesn’t share your preconceptions look at your code.
Often, it’s a problem just to find the part of the program that contains the error. Most
programming environments come with a debugger , which is a program that can help you find
bugs. Typically, your program can be run under the control of the debugger. The debugger
allows you to set “breakpoints” in your program. A breakpoint is a point in the program where
the debugger will pause the program so you can look at the values of the program’s variables.
The idea is to track down exactly when things start to go wrong during the program’s execution.
The debugger will also let you execute your program one line at a time, so that you can watch
what happens in detail once you know the general area in the program where the bug is lurking.
I will confess that I only occasionally use debuggers myself. A more traditional approach to
debugging is to insert debugging statements into your program. These are output statements
that print out information about the state of the program. Typically, a debugging statement
would say something like
System.out.println("At start of while loop, N = " + N);
You need to be able to tell from the output where in your program the output is coming from,
and you want to know the value of important variables. Sometimes, you will find that the
computer isn’t even getting to a part of the program that you think it should be executing.
Remember that the goal is to find the first point in the program where the state is not what
you expect it to be. That’s where the bug is.
And finally, remember the golden rule of debugging: If you are absolutely sure that
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 87
everything in your program is right, and if it still doesn’t work, then one of the things that you
are absolutely sure of is wrong.
is not itself part of the data to be averaged. It’s just there to mark the end of the real data.
A data value used in this way is sometimes called a sentinel value. So now the test in the
while loop becomes “while the input integer is not zero”. But there is another problem! The
first time the test is evaluated, before the body of the loop has ever been executed, no integer
has yet been read. There is no “input integer” yet, so testing whether the input integer is zero
doesn’t make sense. So, we have to do something before the while loop to make sure that the
test makes sense. Setting things up so that the test in a while loop makes sense the first time
it is executed is called priming the loop. In this case, we can simply read the first integer
before the beginning of the loop. Here is a revised algorithm:
Let sum = 0
Let count = 0
Read an integer
while the integer is not zero:
Add the integer to the sum
Count it
Read an integer
Divide sum by count to get the average
Print out the average
Notice that I’ve rearranged the body of the loop. Since an integer is read before the loop, the
loop has to begin by processing that integer. At the end of the loop, the computer reads a new
integer. The computer then jumps back to the beginning of the loop and tests the integer that
it has just read. Note that when the computer finally reads the sentinel value, the loop ends
before the sentinel value is processed. It is not added to the sum, and it is not counted. This
is the way it’s supposed to work. The sentinel is not part of the data. The original algorithm,
even if it could have been made to work without priming, was incorrect since it would have
summed and counted all the integers, including the sentinel. (Since the sentinel is zero, the sum
would still be correct, but the count would be off by one. Such so-called off-by-one errors
are very common. Counting turns out to be harder than it looks!)
We can easily turn the algorithm into a complete program. Note that the program cannot
use the statement “average = sum/count;” to compute the average. Since sum and count
are both variables of type int, the value of sum/count is an integer. The average should be
a real number. We’ve seen this problem before: we have to convert one of the int values to
a double to force the computer to compute the quotient as a real number. This can be done
by type-casting one of the variables to type double. The type cast “(double)sum” converts
the value of sum to a real number, so in the program the average is computed as “average =
((double)sum) / count;”. Another solution in this case would have been to declare sum to
be a variable of type double in the first place.
One other issue is addressed by the program: If the user enters zero as the first input value,
there are no data to process. We can test for this case by checking whether count is still equal
to zero after the while loop. This might seem like a minor point, but a careful programmer
should cover all the bases.
Here is the full source code for the program (with comments added, of course!):
import textio.TextIO;
/**
* This program reads a sequence of positive integers input
* by the user, and it will print out the average of those
* integers. The user is prompted to enter one integer at a
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 89
do
hstatement i
while ( hboolean-expression i );
or, since, as usual, the hstatementi can be a block,
do {
hstatements i
} while ( hboolean-expression i );
Note the semicolon, ’;’, at the very end. This semicolon is part of the statement, just as
the semicolon at the end of an assignment statement or declaration is part of the statement.
Omitting it is a syntax error. (More generally, every statement in Java ends either with a
semicolon or a right brace, ’}’.)
To execute a do loop, the computer first executes the body of the loop—that is, the statement
or statements inside the loop—and then it evaluates the boolean expression. If the value of
the expression is true, the computer returns to the beginning of the do loop and repeats the
process; if the value is false, it ends the loop and continues with the next part of the program.
Since the condition is not tested until the end of the loop, the body of a do loop is always
executed at least once.
For example, consider the following pseudocode for a game-playing program. The do loop
makes sense here instead of a while loop because with the do loop, you know there will be at
least one game. Also, the test that is used at the end of the loop wouldn’t even make sense at
the beginning:
do {
Play a Game
Ask user if he wants to play another game
Read the user’s response
} while ( the user’s response is yes );
Let’s convert this into proper Java code. Since I don’t want to talk about game playing at the
moment, let’s say that we have a class named Checkers, and that the Checkers class contains
a static member subroutine named playGame() that plays one game of checkers against the
user. Then, the pseudocode “Play a game” can be expressed as the subroutine call statement
“Checkers.playGame();”. We need a variable to store the user’s response. The TextIO class
makes it convenient to use a boolean variable to store the answer to a yes/no question. The
input function TextIO.getlnBoolean() allows the user to enter the value as “yes” or “no”
(among other acceptable responses). “Yes” is considered to be true, and “no” is considered to
be false. So, the algorithm can be coded as
boolean wantsToContinue; // True if user wants to play again.
do {
Checkers.playGame();
System.out.print("Do you want to play again? ");
wantsToContinue = TextIO.getlnBoolean();
} while (wantsToContinue == true);
When the value of the boolean variable is set to false, it is a signal that the loop should end.
When a boolean variable is used in this way—as a signal that is set in one part of the program
and tested in another part—it is sometimes called a flag or flag variable (in the sense of a
signal flag).
By the way, a more-than-usually-pedantic programmer would sneer at the test
“while (wantsToContinue == true)”. This test is exactly equivalent to “while
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 91
break;
System.out.println("Your answer must be > 0.");
}
// continue here after break
If the number entered by the user is greater than zero, the break statement will be executed
and the computer will jump out of the loop. Otherwise, the computer will print out “Your
answer must be > 0.” and will jump back to the start of the loop to read another input value.
The first line of this loop, “while (true)” might look a bit strange, but it’s perfectly
legitimate. The condition in a while loop can be any boolean-valued expression. The computer
evaluates this expression and checks whether the value is true or false. The boolean literal
“true” is just a boolean expression that always evaluates to true. So “while (true)” can be
used to write an infinite loop, or one that will be terminated by a break statement.
A break statement terminates the loop that immediately encloses the break statement. It
is possible to have nested loops, where one loop statement is contained inside another. If you
use a break statement inside a nested loop, it will only break out of that loop, not out of
the loop that contains the nested loop. There is something called a labeled break statement
that allows you to specify which loop you want to break. This is not very common, so I will
go over it quickly. Labels work like this: You can put a label in front of any loop. A label
consists of a simple identifier followed by a colon. For example, a while with a label might
look like “mainloop: while...”. Inside this loop you can use the labeled break statement
“break mainloop;” to break out of the labeled loop. For example, here is a code segment that
checks whether two strings, s1 and s2, have a character in common. If a common character is
found, the value of the flag variable nothingInCommon is set to false, and a labeled break is
used to end the processing at that point:
boolean nothingInCommon;
nothingInCommon = true; // Assume s1 and s2 have no chars in common.
int i,j; // Variables for iterating through the chars in s1 and s2.
i = 0;
bigloop: while (i < s1.length()) {
j = 0;
while (j < s2.length()) {
if (s1.charAt(i) == s2.charAt(j)) { // s1 and s2 have a common char...
nothingInCommon = false; // so nothingInCommon is actually false.
break bigloop; // break out of BOTH loops
}
j++; // Go on to the next char in s2.
}
i++; //Go on to the next char in s1.
}
∗ ∗ ∗
The continue statement is related to break, but less commonly used. A continue
statement tells the computer to skip the rest of the current iteration of the loop. However,
instead of jumping out of the loop altogether, it jumps back to the beginning of the loop and
continues with the next iteration (including evaluating the loop’s continuation condition to see
whether any further iterations are required). As with break, when a continue is in a nested
loop, it will continue the loop that directly contains it; a “labeled continue” can be used to
continue the containing loop instead.
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 93
break and continue can be used in while loops and do..while loops. They can also be
used in for loops, which are covered in the next section. In Section 3.6, we’ll see that break can
also be used to break out of a switch statement. A break can occur inside an if statement,
but only if the if statement is nested inside a loop or inside a switch statement. In that case,
it does not mean to break out of the if. Instead, it breaks out of the loop or switch statement
that contains the if statement. The same consideration applies to continue statements inside
ifs.
Is condition true?
No
Yes
Do statement
Usually, the initialization part of a for statement assigns a value to some variable, and the
update changes the value of that variable with an assignment statement or with an increment
or decrement operation. The value of the variable is tested in the continuation condition, and
the loop ends when this condition evaluates to false. A variable used in this way is called a
loop control variable. In the example given above, the loop control variable was years.
Certainly, the most common type of for loop is the counting loop, where a loop control
variable takes on all integer values between some minimum and some maximum value. A
counting loop has the form
for ( hvariable i = hmin i; hvariable i <= hmax i; hvariable i++ ) {
hstatements i
}
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 95
where hmini and hmax i are integer-valued expressions (usually constants). The hvariablei takes
on the values hmini, hmini+1, hmini+2, . . . , hmax i. The value of the loop control variable is
often used in the body of the loop. The for loop at the beginning of this section is a counting
loop in which the loop control variable, years, takes on the values 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Here is an even
simpler example, in which the numbers 1, 2, . . . , 10 are displayed on standard output:
for ( N = 1 ; N <= 10 ; N++ )
System.out.println( N );
For various reasons, Java programmers like to start counting at 0 instead of 1, and they tend
to use a “<” in the condition, rather than a “<=”. The following variation of the above loop
prints out the ten numbers 0, 1, 2, . . . , 9:
for ( N = 0 ; N < 10 ; N++ )
System.out.println( N );
Using < instead of <= in the test, or vice versa, is a common source of off-by-one errors in
programs. You should always stop and think, Do I want the final value to be processed or not?
It’s easy to count down from 10 to 1 instead of counting up. Just start with 10, decrement
the loop control variable instead of incrementing it, and continue as long as the variable is
greater than or equal to one.
for ( N = 10 ; N >= 1 ; N-- )
System.out.println( N );
Now, in fact, the official syntax of a for statement actually allows both the initialization
part and the update part to consist of several expressions, separated by commas. So we can
even count up from 1 to 10 and count down from 10 to 1 at the same time!
for ( i=1, j=10; i <= 10; i++, j-- ) {
System.out.printf("%5d", i); // Output i in a 5-character wide column.
System.out.printf("%5d", j); // Output j in a 5-character column.
System.out.println(); // and end the line.
}
As a final introductory example, let’s say that we want to use a for loop that prints out
just the even numbers between 2 and 20, that is: 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20. There are
several ways to do this. Just to show how even a very simple problem can be solved in many
ways, here are four different solutions (three of which would get full credit):
(1) // There are 10 numbers to print.
// Use a for loop to count 1, 2,
// ..., 10. The numbers we want
// to print are 2*1, 2*2, ... 2*10.
for (N = 1; N <= 10; N++) {
System.out.println( 2*N );
}
Perhaps it is worth stressing one more time that a for statement, like any statement except
for a variable declaration, never occurs on its own in a real program. A statement must be
inside the main routine of a program or inside some other subroutine. And that subroutine
must be defined inside a class. I should also remind you that every variable must be declared
before it can be used, and that includes the loop control variable in a for statement. In all
the examples that you have seen so far in this section, the loop control variables should be
declared to be of type int. It is not required that a loop control variable be an integer. Here,
for example, is a for loop in which the variable, ch, is of type char, using the fact that the ++
operator can be applied to characters as well as to numbers:
// Print out the alphabet on one line of output.
char ch; // The loop control variable;
// one of the letters to be printed.
for ( ch = ’A’; ch <= ’Z’; ch++ )
System.out.print(ch);
System.out.println();
the number of levels of nesting. As a practical matter, though, it’s difficult to understand a
program that has more than a few levels of nesting, and it is a style rule that excessive nesting
should be avoided.
Nested for loops arise naturally in many algorithms, and it is important to understand how
they work. Let’s look at a couple of examples. First, consider the problem of printing out a
multiplication table like this one:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24
3 6 9 12 15 18 21 24 27 30 33 36
4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 44 48
5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60
6 12 18 24 30 36 42 48 54 60 66 72
7 14 21 28 35 42 49 56 63 70 77 84
8 16 24 32 40 48 56 64 72 80 88 96
9 18 27 36 45 54 63 72 81 90 99 108
10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 110 120
11 22 33 44 55 66 77 88 99 110 121 132
12 24 36 48 60 72 84 96 108 120 132 144
The data in the table are arranged into 12 rows and 12 columns. The process of printing them
out can be expressed in a pseudocode algorithm as
for each rowNumber = 1, 2, 3, ..., 12:
Print the first twelve multiples of rowNumber on one line
Output a carriage return
The first step in the for loop can itself be expressed as a for loop. We can expand “Print the
first twelve multiples of rowNumber on one line” as:
for N = 1, 2, 3, ..., 12:
Print N * rowNumber
so a refined algorithm for printing the table has one for loop nested inside another:
for each rowNumber = 1, 2, 3, ..., 12:
for N = 1, 2, 3, ..., 12:
Print N * rowNumber
Output a carriage return
We want to print the output in neat columns, with each output number taking up four spaces.
This can be done using formatted output with format specifier %4d. Assuming that rowNumber
and N have been declared to be variables of type int, the algorithm can be expressed in Java as
for ( rowNumber = 1; rowNumber <= 12; rowNumber++ ) {
for ( N = 1; N <= 12; N++ ) {
// print in 4-character columns
System.out.printf( "%4d", N * rowNumber ); // No carriage return !
}
System.out.println(); // Add a carriage return at end of the line.
}
This section has been weighed down with lots of examples of numerical processing. For our
next example, let’s do some text processing. Consider the problem of finding which of the 26
letters of the alphabet occur in a given string. For example, the letters that occur in “Hello
World” are D, E, H, L, O, R, and W. More specifically, we will write a program that will list all
the letters contained in a string and will also count the number of different letters. The string
will be input by the user. Let’s start with a pseudocode algorithm for the program.
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 100
In fact, there is actually an easier way to determine whether a given letter occurs in a string,
str. The built-in function str.indexOf(letter) will return -1 if letter does not occur in
the string. It returns a number greater than or equal to zero if it does occur. So, we could
check whether letter occurs in str simply by checking “if (str.indexOf(letter) >= 0)”.
If we used this technique in the above program, we wouldn’t need a nested for loop. This gives
you a preview of how subroutines can be used to deal with complexity.
if (hboolean-expression-1 i)
hstatement-1 i
else if (hboolean-expression-2 i)
hstatement-2 i
else
hstatement-3 i
You should think of this as a single statement representing a three-way branch. When the
computer executes this, one and only one of the three statements—hstatement-1 i, hstatement-
2 i, or hstatement-3 i—will be executed. The computer starts by evaluating hboolean-expression-
1 i. If it is true, the computer executes hstatement-1 i and then jumps all the way to the end of
the outer if statement, skipping the other two hstatementsi. If hboolean-expression-1 i is false,
the computer skips hstatement-1 i and executes the second, nested if statement. To do this,
it tests the value of hboolean-expression-2 i and uses it to decide between hstatement-2 i and
hstatement-3 i.
Here is an example that will print out one of three different messages, depending on the
value of a variable named temperature:
if (temperature < 50)
System.out.println("It’s cold.");
else if (temperature < 80)
System.out.println("It’s nice.");
else
System.out.println("It’s hot.");
If temperature is, say, 42, the first test is true. The computer prints out the message “It’s
cold”, and skips the rest—without even evaluating the second condition. For a temperature of
75, the first test is false, so the computer goes on to the second test. This test is true, so
the computer prints “It’s nice” and skips the rest. If the temperature is 173, both of the tests
evaluate to false, so the computer says “It’s hot” (unless its circuits have been fried by the
heat, that is).
You can go on stringing together “else-if’s” to make multiway branches with any number
of cases:
if (htest-1 i)
hstatement-1 i
else if (htest-2 i)
hstatement-2 i
else if (htest-3 i)
hstatement-3 i
.
. // (more cases)
.
else if (htest-N i)
hstatement-N i
else
hstatement-(N+1) i
The computer evaluates the tests, which are boolean expressions, one after the other until it
comes to one that is true. It executes the associated statement and skips the rest. If none
of the boolean expressions evaluate to true, then the statement in the else part is executed.
This statement is called a multiway branch because one and only one of the statements will be
executed. The final else part can be omitted. In that case, if all the boolean expressions are
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 104
false, none of the statements are executed. Of course, each of the statements can be a block,
consisting of a number of statements enclosed between { and }. Admittedly, there is lot of
syntax here; as you study and practice, you’ll become comfortable with it. It might be useful
to look at a flow control diagram for the general “if..else if” statement shown above:
Yes No
Yes No
Do statement-1
Yes No
Do statement-2
Yes No
Do statement-N Do statement-(N+1)
Finally, let’s write a complete program that uses an if statement in an interesting way. I
want a program that will convert measurements of length from one unit of measurement to
another, such as miles to yards or inches to feet. So far, the problem is extremely under-
specified. Let’s say that the program will only deal with measurements in inches, feet, yards,
and miles. It would be easy to extend it later to deal with other units. The user will type in
a measurement in one of these units, such as “17 feet” or “2.73 miles”. The output will show
the length in terms of each of the four units of measure. (This is easier than asking the user
which units to use in the output.) An outline of the process is
Read the user’s input measurement and units of measure
Express the measurement in inches, feet, yards, and miles
Display the four results
The program can read both parts of the user’s input from the same line by using
TextIO.getDouble() to read the numerical measurement and TextIO.getlnWord() to read
the unit of measure. The conversion into different units of measure can be simplified by first
converting the user’s input into inches. From there, the number of inches can easily be converted
into feet, yards, and miles. Before converting into inches, we have to test the input to determine
which unit of measure the user has specified:
Let measurement = TextIO.getDouble()
Let units = TextIO.getlnWord()
if the units are inches
Let inches = measurement
else if the units are feet
Let inches = measurement * 12 // 12 inches per foot
else if the units are yards
Let inches = measurement * 36 // 36 inches per yard
else if the units are miles
Let inches = measurement * 12 * 5280 // 5280 feet per mile
else
The units are illegal!
Print an error message and stop processing
Let feet = inches / 12.0
Let yards = inches / 36.0
Let miles = inches / (12.0 * 5280.0)
Display the results
Since units is a String, we can use units.equals("inches") to check whether the
specified unit of measure is “inches”. However, it would be nice to allow the units to be
specified as “inch” or abbreviated to “in”. To allow these three possibilities, we can check if
(units.equals("inches") || units.equals("inch") || units.equals("in")). It would
also be nice to allow upper case letters, as in “Inches” or “IN”. We can do this by converting
units to lower case before testing it or by substituting the function units.equalsIgnoreCase
for units.equals.
In my final program, I decided to make things more interesting by allowing the user to
repeat the process of entering a measurement and seeing the results of the conversion for each
measurement. The program will end only when the user inputs 0. To program that, I just had
to wrap the above algorithm inside a while loop, and make sure that the loop ends when the
user inputs a 0. Here’s the complete program:
import textio.TextIO;
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 107
/**
* This program will convert measurements expressed in inches,
* feet, yards, or miles into each of the possible units of
* measure. The measurement is input by the user, followed by
* the unit of measure. For example: "17 feet", "1 inch", or
* "2.73 mi". Abbreviations in, ft, yd, and mi are accepted.
* The program will continue to read and convert measurements
* until the user enters an input of 0.
*/
public class LengthConverter {
public static void main(String[] args) {
double measurement; // Numerical measurement, input by user.
String units; // The unit of measure for the input, also
// specified by the user.
double inches, feet, yards, miles; // Measurement expressed in
// each possible unit of
// measure.
System.out.println("""
Enter measurements in inches, feet, yards, or miles.
For example: 1 inch 17 feet 2.73 miles
You can use abbreviations: in ft yd mi
I will convert your input into the other units
of measure.
""");
while (true) {
/* Get the user’s input, and convert units to lower case. */
System.out.print("Enter your measurement, or 0 to end: ");
measurement = TextIO.getDouble();
if (measurement == 0)
break; // Terminate the while loop.
units = TextIO.getlnWord();
units = units.toLowerCase(); // convert units to lower case
/* Convert the input measurement to inches. */
if (units.equals("inch") || units.equals("inches")
|| units.equals("in")) {
inches = measurement;
}
else if (units.equals("foot") || units.equals("feet")
|| units.equals("ft")) {
inches = measurement * 12;
}
else if (units.equals("yard") || units.equals("yards")
|| units.equals("yd")) {
inches = measurement * 36;
}
else if (units.equals("mile") || units.equals("miles")
|| units.equals("mi")) {
inches = measurement * 12 * 5280;
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 108
}
else {
System.out.println("Sorry, but I don’t understand \""
+ units + "\".");
continue; // back to start of while loop
}
/* Convert measurement in inches to feet, yards, and miles. */
feet = inches / 12;
yards = inches / 36;
miles = inches / (12*5280);
/* Output measurement in terms of each unit of measure. */
System.out.printf("""
That’s equivalent to:
%14.5g inches
%14.5g feet
%14.5g yards
%14.5g miles
""", inches, feet, yards, miles);
System.out.println();
} // end while
System.out.println();
System.out.println("OK! Bye for now.");
} // end main()
} // end class LengthConverter
(Note that this program uses text blocks for multiline outputs (see Subsection 2.3.4; text
blocks require Java 17). It also uses formatted output with the “g” format specifier. In this
program, we have no control over how large or how small the numbers might be. It could easily
make sense for the user to enter very large or very small measurements. The “g” format will
print a real number in exponential form if it is very large or very small, and in the usual decimal
form otherwise. Remember that in the format specification %14.5g, the 5 is the total number
of significant digits that are to be printed, so we will always get the same number of significant
digits in the output, no matter what the size of the number. If we had used an “f” format
specifier such as %14.5f, the output would be in decimal form with 5 digits after the decimal
point. This would print the number 0.000000000745482 as 0.00000, with no significant digits
at all! With the “g” format specifier, the output would be 7.4549e-10.)
The semicolon is legal after the }, but the computer considers it to be an empty statement,
not part of the if statement. Occasionally, you might find yourself using the empty statement
when what you mean is, in fact, “do nothing.” For example, the rather contrived if statement
if ( done )
; // Empty statement
else
System.out.println( "Not done yet.");
does nothing when the boolean variable done is true, and prints out “Not done yet” when
it is false. You can’t just leave out the semicolon in this example, since Java syntax requires
an actual statement between the if and the else. I prefer, though, to use an empty block,
consisting of { and } with nothing between, for such cases.
Occasionally, stray empty statements can cause annoying, hard-to-find errors in a program.
For example, the following program segment prints out “Hello” just once, not ten times:
for (i = 0; i < 10; i++);
System.out.println("Hello");
Why? Because the “;” at the end of the first line is a statement, and it is this empty statement
that is executed ten times. The System.out.println statement is not really inside the for
statement at all, so it is executed just once, after the for loop has completed. The for loop
just does nothing, ten times!
The case label is followed by ->, that is by a symbol made up of a hyphen and a greater-than
character, and then by a single statement. The statement can be a subroutine call statement,
a throw statement, or a block statement, containing several nested statements. A switch
statement can also, optionally, have one jump point labeled with default instead of with a
case label. The syntax for the statement can be specified as follows, noting that there can be
at most one default case and that all the constants in the case labels must be different:
switch ( hexpression i ) {
hcase-label-or-default i -> hstatement i
hcase-label-or-default i -> hstatement i
.
.
.
hcase-label-or-default i -> hstatement i
}
When the computer executes this switch statement, it evaluates the hexpressioni. If the value
is one of the constants in a case label, the computer executes the statement that follows that
case label, and then jumps out of the switch statement. If the value of the expression does
not match any of the case constants, then the computer looks for a default case, and if one is
present, executes the statement that follows it.
It is probably easiest to look at an example. This is not a useful example, but it should be
easy to follow:
switch ( N ) { // (Assume N is an integer variable.)
case 1 -> System.out.println("The number is 1.");
case 2, 4, 8 -> {
System.out.println("The number is 2, 4, or 8.");
System.out.println("(That’s a power of 2!)");
}
case 3, 6, 9 -> {
System.out.println("The number is 3, 6, or 9.");
System.out.println("(That’s a multiple of 3!)");
}
case 5 -> System.out.println("The number is 5.");
default ->
System.out.println("The number is 7 or is outside the range 1 to 9.");
}
The braces, { and }, in this example are required to group multiple statements into a single
block statement. Braces could also be added to the other cases, but are not required there.
This switch statement has exactly the same effect as the following multiway if statement:
if ( N == 1 ) {
System.out.println("The number is 1.");
}
else if ( N == 2 || N == 4 || N == 8 ) {
System.out.println("The number is 2, 4, or 8.");
System.out.println("(That’s a power of 2!)");
}
else if ( N == 3 || N == 6 || N == 9 ) {
System.out.println("The number is 3, 6, or 9.");
System.out.println("(That’s a multiple of 3!)");
}
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 111
else if ( N == 5 ) {
System.out.println("The number is 5.");
}
else {
System.out.println("The number is 7 or is outside the range 1 to 9.");
}
More generally, any switch statement could be replaced by a multiway if statement. The
switch statement can be easier to read. And it might be more efficient since the computer
can jump directly to the correct case instead of working through a series of tests to get to the
correct case.
}
case 3 -> {
System.out.println("Enter the number of yards: ");
measurement = TextIO.getlnDouble();
inches = measurement * 36;
}
case 4 -> {
System.out.println("Enter the number of miles: ");
measurement = TextIO.getlnDouble();
inches = measurement * 12 * 5280;
}
default -> {
System.out.println("Error! Illegal option number! I quit!");
System.exit(1);
}
} // end switch
/* Now go on to convert inches to feet, yards, and miles... */
Alternatively, this example could be designed to ask the use to enter the unit of measure as a
string, instead of as an option number, and then use that string directly in a switch statement:
String units; // Unit of measurement, entered by user.
double measurement; // A numerical measurement, input by the user.
double inches; // The same measurement, converted into inches.
/* Read the user’s unit of measurement. */
System.out.println("What unit of measurement does your input use?");
units = TextIO.getln().toLowerCase();
/* Read user’s measurement and convert to inches. */
System.out.print("Enter the number of " + units + ": ");
measurement = TextIO.getlnDouble();
switch ( units ) {
case "inch", "inches", "in" -> inches = measurement;
case "foot", "feet", "ft" -> inches = measurement * 12;
case "yard", "yards", "yd" -> inches = measurement * 36;
case "mile", "miles", "mi" -> inches = measurement * 12 * 5280;
default -> {
System.out.println("Wait a minute! Illegal unit of measure! I quit!");
System.exit(1);
}
} // end switch
and that the expression in a switch statement is an expression of type Season. The constants
in the case label must be chosen from among the values Season.SPRING, Season.SUMMER,
Season.FALL, or Season.WINTER. However, there is a quirk in the syntax: when an enum
constant is used in a case label, only the simple name, such as “SPRING” is used, not the full
name, such as “Season.SPRING”. Of course, the computer already knows that the value in the
case label must belong to the enumerated type, since it can tell that from the type of expression
used, so there is really no need to specify the type name in the constant. For example, assuming
that currentSeason is a variable of type Season, then we could have the switch statement:
System.out.print("The months in " + currentSeason + " are: ");
switch ( currentSeason ) {
case WINTER -> // ( NOT Season.WINTER ! )
System.out.println("December, January, February");
case SPRING ->
System.out.println("March, April, May");
case SUMMER ->
System.out.println("June, July, August");
case FALL ->
System.out.println("September, October, November");
}
A simple solution is to replace the final case in the switch statement with default. With
a default case, all possible values of the expression in the switch are certainly covered, and
the compiler knows that computerMove is definitely assigned a value:
String computerMove;
switch ( (int)(3*Math.random()) ) {
case 0 -> computerMove = "Rock";
case 1 -> computerMove = "Paper";
default -> computerMove = "Scissors";
}
System.out.println("The computer’s move is " + computerMove); // OK!
break;
.
. // (more cases)
.
case hconstant-N i:
hstatements-N i
break;
default: // optional default case
hstatements-(N+1) i
} // end of switch statement
Note that in the traditional syntax, only one constant is allowed in a case label (but Java 17
allows a comma-separated list of constants here). A case label can be followed by any number
of statements. This traditional syntax uses a colon after each case label, rather than ->. The
default case is optional.
To execute this switch statement, the computer will evaluate the hexpressioni and jump to
the case label that contains that constant, if there is one, or to the default case if not. The break
statements in this switch are not actually required by the syntax of the switch statement. The
effect of a break is to make the computer jump past the end of the switch statement, skipping
over all the remaining cases. If you leave out the break statement, the computer will just forge
ahead after completing one case and will execute the statements associated with the next case
label. This is called “fall through”; it is rarely what you want, and it is a common source of
bugs. However, it is legal and is even occasionally useful.
Note that you can leave out one of the groups of statements entirely (including the break).
You then have two case labels in a row, containing two different constants. This just means
that the computer will jump to the same place and perform the same action for each of the two
constants.
Here is how our first example switch statement would be written using the traditional
syntax:
switch ( N ) { // (Assume N is an integer variable.)
case 1:
System.out.println("The number is 1.");
break;
case 2:
case 4:
case 8:
System.out.println("The number is 2, 4, or 8.");
System.out.println("(That’s a power of 2!)");
break;
case 3:
case 6:
case 9:
System.out.println("The number is 3, 6, or 9.");
System.out.println("(That’s a multiple of 3!)");
break;
case 5:
System.out.println("The number is 5.");
break;
default:
System.out.println("The number is 7 or is outside the range 1 to 9.");
}
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 116
3.7.1 Exceptions
The term exception is used to refer to the type of event that one might want to handle with
a try..catch. An exception is an exception to the normal flow of control in the program.
The term is used in preference to “error” because in some cases, an exception might not be
considered to be an error at all. You can sometimes think of an exception as just another way
to organize a program.
Exceptions in Java are represented as objects of type Exception. Actual exceptions are
usually defined by subclasses of Exception. Different subclasses represent different types of
exceptions. We will look at only two types of exception in this section: NumberFormatException
and IllegalArgumentException.
A NumberFormatException can occur when an attempt is made to convert a string
into a number. Such conversions are done by the functions Integer.parseInt
and Double.parseDouble. (See Subsection 2.5.7.) Consider the function call
Integer.parseInt(str) where str is a variable of type String. If the value of str is the
string "42", then the function call will correctly convert the string into the int 42. However,
if the value of str is, say, "fred", the function call will fail because "fred" is not a legal
string representation of an int value. In this case, an exception of type NumberFormatException
occurs. If nothing is done to handle the exception, the program will crash.
An IllegalArgumentException can occur when an illegal value is passed as a parameter to a
subroutine. For example, if a subroutine requires that a parameter be greater than or equal to
zero, an IllegalArgumentException might occur when a negative value is passed to the subroutine.
How to respond to the illegal value is up to the person who wrote the subroutine, so we
can’t simply say that every illegal parameter value will result in an IllegalArgumentException.
However, it is a common response.
3.7.2 try..catch
When an exception occurs, we say that the exception is “thrown.” For example, we say that
Integer.parseInt(str) throws an exception of type NumberFormatException when the value
of str is illegal. When an exception is thrown, it is possible to “catch” the exception and
prevent it from crashing the program. This is done with a try..catch statement. In simplified
form, the syntax for a try..catch statement can be:
try {
hstatements-1 i
}
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 117
simply skips over blank lines. A solution is to use TextIO.getln() to read the user’s input.
This allows us to detect a blank input line, and we can convert non-blank inputs to numbers
using Double.parseDouble. And we can use try..catch to avoid crashing the program when
the user’s input is not a legal number. In this example, it makes sense to simply print an error
message, ignore the bad input, and let the program continue. Here’s the program:
import textio.TextIO;
public class ComputeAverage2 {
public static void main(String[] args) {
String str; // The user’s input.
double number; // The input converted into a number.
double total; // The total of all numbers entered.
double avg; // The average of the numbers.
int count; // The number of numbers entered.
total = 0;
count = 0;
System.out.println("Enter your numbers, press return to end.");
while (true) {
System.out.print("? ");
str = TextIO.getln();
if (str.equals("")) {
break; // Exit the loop, since the input line was blank.
}
try {
number = Double.parseDouble(str);
// If an error occurs, the next 2 lines are skipped!
total = total + number;
count = count + 1;
}
catch (NumberFormatException e) {
System.out.println("Not a legal number! Try again.");
}
}
avg = total/count;
System.out.printf("The average of %d numbers is %1.6g%n", count, avg);
}
}
As an example, we will look at yet another number-averaging program. In this case, we will
read the numbers from a file. Assume that the file contains nothing but real numbers, and we
want a program that will read the numbers and find their sum and their average. Since it is
unknown how many numbers are in the file, there is the question of when to stop reading. One
approach is simply to try to keep reading indefinitely. When the end of the file is reached, an
exception occurs. This exception is not really an error—it’s just a way of detecting the end of
the data. So, we can catch the exception and finish up the program when it occurs. We can
read the data in a while (true) loop and break out of the loop when an exception occurs.
This is an example of the somewhat unusual technique of using an exception as part of the
expected flow of control in a program.
To read from the file, we need to know the file’s name. To make the program more
general, we can let the user enter the file name, instead of hard-coding a fixed file name in
the program. However, it is possible that the user will enter the name of a file that does
not exist. When we use TextIO.readfile to open a file that does not exist, an exception of
type IllegalArgumentException occurs. We can catch this exception and ask the user to enter a
different file name. Here is a complete program that uses all these ideas:
import textio.TextIO;
/**
* This program reads numbers from a file. It computes the sum and
* the average of the numbers that it reads. The file should contain
* nothing but numbers of type double; if this is not the case, the
* output will be the sum and average of however many numbers were
* successfully read from the file. The name of the file will be
* input by the user. (The user can choose to end the program by
* typing Control-C.)
*/
public class AverageNumbersFromFile {
public static void main(String[] args) {
while (true) {
String fileName; // The name of the file, to be input by the user.
System.out.print("Enter the name of the file: ");
fileName = TextIO.getln();
try {
TextIO.readFile( fileName ); // Try to open the file for input.
break; // If that succeeds, break out of the loop.
}
catch ( IllegalArgumentException e ) {
System.out.println("Can’t read from the file \"" + fileName + "\".");
System.out.println("Please try again.\n");
}
}
/* At this point, TextIO is reading from the file. */
double number; // A number read from the data file.
double sum; // The sum of all the numbers read so far.
int count; // The number of numbers that were read.
sum = 0;
count = 0;
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 120
try {
while (true) { // Loop ends when an exception occurs.
number = TextIO.getDouble();
count++; // This is skipped when the exception occurs
sum += number;
}
}
catch ( IllegalArgumentException e ) {
// We expect this to occur when the end-of-file is encountered.
// We don’t consider this to be an error, so there is nothing to do
// in this catch clause. Just proceed with the rest of the program.
}
// At this point, we’ve read the entire file.
System.out.println();
System.out.println("Number of data values read: " + count);
System.out.println("The sum of the data values: " + sum);
if ( count == 0 )
System.out.println("Can’t compute an average of 0 values.");
else
System.out.println("The average of the values: " + (sum/count));
}
}
Clearly, that would be ridiculous! In reality, you can put all the names into an array. The array
is represented by a single variable, but it holds the entire list of names. The length of the array
would be 1000, since there are 1000 individual names. The base type of the array would be
String since the items in the array are strings. The first name would be at index 0 in the array,
the second name at index 1, and so on, up to the thousandth name at index 999.
The base type of an array can be any Java type, but for now, we will stick to arrays whose
base type is String or one of the eight primitive types. If the base type of an array is int, it
is referred to as an “array of ints.” An array with base type String is referred to as an “array
of Strings.” However, an array is not, properly speaking, a list of integers or strings or other
values. It is better thought of as a list of variables of type int, or a list of variables of type
String, or of some other type. As always, there is some potential for confusion between the two
uses of a variable: as a name for a memory location and as a name for the value stored in that
memory location. Each position in an array acts as a variable. Each position can hold a value
of a specified type (the base type of the array), just as a variable can hold a value. The value
can be changed at any time, just as the value of a variable can be changed. The items in an
array—really, the individual variables that make up the array—are more often referred to as
the elements of the array.
As I mentioned above, when you use an array in a program, you can use a variable to refer
to the array as a whole. But you often need to refer to the individual elements of the array. The
name for an element of an array is based on the name for the array and the index number of
the element. The syntax for referring to an element looks, for example, like this: namelist[7].
Here, namelist is the variable that names the array as a whole, and namelist[7] refers to
the element at index 7 in that array. That is, to refer to an element of an array, you use the
array name, followed by element index enclosed in square brackets. An element name of this
form can be used like any other variable: You can assign a value to it, print it out, use it in an
expression, and so on.
An array also contains a kind of variable representing its length. For example, you can refer
to the length of the array namelist as namelist.length. However, you cannot assign a value
to namelist.length, since the length of an array cannot be changed.
Before you can use a variable to refer to an array, that variable must be declared, and it
must have a type. For an array of Strings, for example, the type for the array variable would
be String[ ], and for an array of ints, it would be int[ ]. In general, an array type consists of the
base type of the array followed by a pair of empty square brackets. Array types can be used to
declare variables; for example,
String[] namelist;
int[] A;
double[] prices;
and variables declared in this way can refer to arrays. However, declaring a variable does not
make the actual array. Like all variables, an array variable has to be assigned a value before
it can be used. In this case, the value is an array. Arrays have to be created using a special
syntax. (The syntax is related to the fact that arrays in Java are actually objects, but that
doesn’t need to concern us here.) Arrays are created with an operator named new . Here are
some examples:
namelist = new String[1000];
A = new int[5];
prices = new double[100];
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 122
When you create an array of int, each element of the array is automatically initialized to
zero. Any array of numbers is filled with zeros when it is created. An array of boolean is filled
with the value false. And an array of char is filled with the character that has Unicode code
number zero. (For an array of String, the initial value is null, a special value used for objects
that we won’t encounter officially until Section 5.1.)
while (true) {
// Select a birthday at random, from 0 to 364.
// If the birthday has already been used, quit.
// Otherwise, record the birthday as used.
int birthday; // The selected birthday.
birthday = (int)(Math.random()*365);
count++;
System.out.printf("Person %d has birthday number %d%n", count, birthday);
if ( used[birthday] ) {
// This day was found before; it’s a duplicate. We are done.
break;
}
used[birthday] = true;
} // end while
System.out.println();
System.out.println("A duplicate birthday was found after "
+ count + " tries.");
}
} // end class BirthdayProblem
You should study the program to understand how it works and how it uses the array. Also, try
it out! You will probably find that a duplicate birthday tends to occur sooner than you expect.
import textio.TextIO;
public class ReverseInputNumbers {
public static void main(String[] args) {
int[] numbers; // An array for storing the input values.
int count; // The number of numbers saved in the array.
int num; // One of the numbers input by the user.
int i; // for-loop variable.
numbers = new int[100]; // Space for 100 ints.
count = 0; // No numbers have been saved yet.
System.out.println("Enter up to 100 positive integers; enter 0 to end.");
while (true) { // Get the numbers and put them in the array.
System.out.print("? ");
num = TextIO.getlnInt();
if (num <= 0) {
// Zero marks the end of input; we have all the numbers.
break;
}
numbers[count] = num; // Put num in position count.
count++; // Count the number
}
System.out.println("\nYour numbers in reverse order are:\n");
for ( i = count - 1; i >= 0; i-- ) {
System.out.println( numbers[i] );
}
} // end main();
} // end class ReverseInputNumbers
It is especially important to note how the variable count plays a dual role. It is the number
of items that have been entered into the array. But it is also the index of the next available
spot in the array.
When the time comes to print out the numbers in the array, the last occupied spot in the
array is location count - 1, so the for loop prints out values starting from location count - 1
and going down to 0. This is also a nice example of processing the elements of an array in reverse
order.
∗ ∗ ∗
You might wonder what would happen in this program if the user tries to input more than
100 numbers. The result would be an error that would crash the program. When the user enters
the 101-st number, the program tries to store that number in an array element number[100].
However, there is no such array element. There are only 100 items in the array, and the
index of the last item is 99. The attempt to use number[100] generates an exception of type
ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException. Exceptions of this type are a common source of run-time
errors in programs that use arrays.
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 127
0 1 2 3 4 5 6
0 13 7 33 54 -5 -1 92
1 -3 0 8 42 18 0 67
2 44 78 90 79 -5 72 22
3 43 -6 17 100 1 -12 12
4 2 0 58 58 36 21 87
This 5-by-7 grid contains a total of 35 elements. The rows in a 2D array are numbered 0, 1, 2,
. . . , up to the number of rows minus one. Similarly, the columns are numbered from zero up
to the number of columns minus one. Each individual element in the array can be picked out
by specifying its row number and its column number. (The illustration shown here is not what
the array actually looks like in the computer’s memory, but it does show the logical structure
of the array.)
In Java, the syntax for two-dimensional arrays is similar to the syntax for one-dimensional
arrays, except that an extra index is involved, since picking out an element requires both a row
number and a column number. For example, if A is a 2D array of int, then A[3][2] would be
the element in row 3, column 2. That would pick out the number 17 in the array shown above.
The type for A would be given as int[ ][ ], with two pairs of empty brackets. To declare the array
variable and create the array, you could say,
int[][] A;
A = new int[5][7];
The second line creates a 2D array with 5 rows and 7 columns. Two-dimensional arrays are
often processed using nested for loops. For example, the following code segment will print out
the elements of A in neat columns:
int row, col; // loop-control-variables for accessing rows and columns in A
for ( row = 0; row < 5; row++ ) {
for ( col = 0; col < 7; col++ ) {
System.out.printf( "%7d", A[row][col] );
}
System.out.println();
}
The base type of a 2D array can be anything, so you can have arrays of type double[ ][ ],
String[ ][ ], and so on.
There are some natural uses for 2D arrays. For example, a 2D array can be used to store the
contents of the board in a game such as chess or checkers. And an example in Subsection 4.7.3
uses a 2D array to hold the colors of a grid of colored squares. But sometimes two-dimensional
arrays are used in problems in which the grid is not so visually obvious. Consider a company
that owns 25 stores. Suppose that the company has data about the profit earned at each store
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 128
for each month in the year 2022. If the stores are numbered from 0 to 24, and if the twelve
months from January 2022 through December 2022 are numbered from 0 to 11, then the profit
data could be stored in an array, profit, created as follows:
double[][] profit;
profit = new double[25][12];
profit[3][2] would be the amount of profit earned at store number 3 in March, and more
generally, profit[storeNum][monthNum] would be the amount of profit earned in store number
storeNum in month number monthNum (where the numbering, remember, starts from zero).
Let’s assume that the profit array has already been filled with data. This data can be
processed in a lot of interesting ways. For example, the total profit for the company—for the
whole year from all its stores—can be calculated by adding up all the entries in the array:
double totalProfit; // Company’s total profit in 2022.
int store, month; // variables for looping through the stores and the months
totalProfit = 0;
for ( store = 0; store < 25; store++ ) {
for ( month = 0; month < 12; month++ )
totalProfit += profit[store][month];
}
Sometimes it is necessary to process a single row or a single column of an array, not the
entire array. For example, to compute the total profit earned by the company in December,
that is, in month number 11, you could use the loop:
double decemberProfit;
int storeNum;
decemberProfit = 0.0;
for ( storeNum = 0; storeNum < 25; storeNum++ ) {
decemberProfit += profit[storeNum][11];
}
Two-dimensional arrays are sometimes useful, but they are much less common than one-
dimensional arrays. Java actually allows arrays of even higher dimension, but they are only
rarely encountered in practice.
used in other contexts besides text-based, command-line-style programs. You will see that a
knowledge of programming-in-the-small applies to writing the guts of any subroutine, not just
main().
Hello World
height
Assuming that the drawing area is 800-by-500 pixels, the rectangle in the upper left of the
picture would have, approximately, width 200, height 150, and upper left corner at coordinates
(50,50).
∗ ∗ ∗
Drawing in Java is done using a graphics context. A graphics context is an object. As an
object, it can include subroutines and data. Among the subroutines in a graphics context are
routines for drawing basic shapes such as lines, rectangles, ovals, and text. (When text appears
on the screen, the characters have to be drawn there by the computer, just like the computer
draws any other shapes.) Among the data in a graphics context are the color and font that
are currently selected for drawing. (A font determines the style and size of characters.) One
other piece of data in a graphics context is the “drawing surface” on which the drawing is done.
Different graphics context objects can draw to different drawing surfaces. For us, the drawing
surface will be the content area of a window, not including its border or title bar.
There are two ways to draw a shape in Swing: You can fill the shape, meaning you can
set the color of each of the pixels inside the shape. Or you can draw the shape, meaning that
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 130
you set the color of the pixels that lie along the border of the shape. Some shapes, such as a
line, can only be drawn. A Swing graphics context keeps track of the color that will be used
for filling and drawing shapes. Drawing a shape is like dragging a pen along the border of the
shape. The properties of that pen (such as its size and whether it produces a solid line or a
dashed line) are properties of the graphics context.
A graphics context is represented by a variable. The type for the variable is Graphics (just
like the type for a string variable is String ). The variable is often named g, but the name of the
variable is of course up to the programmer. Here are a few of the subroutines that are available
in a graphics context g. Note that all numerical parameter values are of type int.
• g.setColor(c), is called to set the color to be used for drawing. The parameter, c is an
object belonging to a class named Color. There are about a dozen constants representing
standard colors that can be used as the parameter in this subroutine. The standard colors
include Color.BLACK, Color.WHITE, Color.LIGHT GRAY, Color.RED, Color.GREEN, and
Color.BLUE. (Later, we will see that it is also possible to create new colors.) For example,
if you want to draw in red, you would say “g.setColor(Color.RED);”. The specified
color is used for all subsequent drawing operations up until the next time g.setColor()
is called.
• g.drawLine(x1,y1,x2,y2) draws a line from the point with coordinates (x1,y1) to the
point with coordinates (x2,y2).
• g.drawRect(x,y,w,h) draws the outline of a rectangle with vertical and horizontal sides.
The parameters x, y, w, and h must be integers or integer-valued expressions. This
subroutine draws the outline of the rectangle whose top-left corner is x pixels from the
left edge of the drawing area and y pixels down from the top. The width of the rectangle
is w pixels, and the height is h pixels. The color that is used is black, unless a different
color has been set by calling g.setColor().
• g.fillRect(x,y,w,h) is similar to g.drawRect() except that it fills in the inside of the
rectangle instead of drawing an outline.
• g.drawOval(x,y,w,h) draws the outline of an oval. The oval just fits inside the rectangle
that would be drawn by g.drawRect(x,y,w,h). To get a circle, use the same values for
w and for h.
• g.fillOval(x,y,w,h) is similar to g.drawOval() except that it fills in the inside of the
oval instead of drawing an outline.
This is enough information to draw some pictures using Java graphics. To start with
something simple, let’s say that we want to draw a set of ten parallel lines, something like this:
Let’s say that the lines are 200 pixels long and that the distance from each line to the next
is 10 pixels, and let’s put the start of the first line at the pixel with coordinates (100,50). To
draw one line, we just have to call g.drawLine(x1,y1,x2,y2) with appropriate values for the
parameters. Now, all the lines start at x -coordinate 100, so we can use the constant 100 as
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 131
the value for x1. Since the lines are 200 pixels long, we can use the constant 300 as the value
for x2. The y-coordinates of the lines are different, but we can see that both endpoints of a
line have the same y-coordinates, so we can use a single variable as the value for y1 and for
y2. Using y as the name of that variable, the command for drawing one of the lines becomes
g.drawLine(100,y,300,y). The value of y is 50 for the top line and increases by 10 each time
we move down from one line to the next. We just need to make sure that y takes on the correct
sequence of values. We can use a for loop that counts from 1 to 10:
int y; // y-coordinate for the line
int i; // loop control variable
y = 50; // y starts at 50 for the first line
for ( i = 1; i <= 10; i++ ) {
g.drawLine( 100, y, 300, y );
y = y + 10; // increase y by 10 before drawing the next line.
}
Alternatively, we could use y itself as the loop control variable, noting that the value of y for
the last line is 140:
int y;
for ( y = 50; y <= 140; y = y + 10 )
g.drawLine( 100, y, 300, y );
If we wanted the lines to be blue, we could do that by calling g.setColor(Color.BLUE) before
drawing them. If we just draw the lines without setting the color, they will be black.
For something a little more complicated, let’s draw a large number of randomly colored,
randomly positioned, filled circles. Since we only know a few colors, I will randomly select the
color to be red, green, blue, or yellow. That can be done with a simple switch statement, similar
to the ones in Section 3.6:
switch ( (int)(4*Math.random()) ) {
case 0 -> g.setColor( Color.RED );
case 1 -> g.setColor( Color.GREEN );
case 2 -> g.setColor( Color.BLUE );
case 3 -> g.setColor( Color.YELLOW );
}
I will choose the center points of the circles at random. Let’s say that the width of the
drawing area is given by a variable, width. Then we want a random value in the range 0 to
width-1 for the horizontal position of the center. Similarly, the vertical position of the center
will be a random value in the range 0 to height-1. That leaves the size of the circle to be
determined; I will make the radius of each circle equal to 50 pixels. We can draw the circle with
a statement of the form g.fillOval(x,y,w,h). However, in this command, x and y are not
the coordinates of the center of the circle; they are the upper left corner of a rectangle drawn
around the circle. To get values for x and y, we have to move back from the center of the circle
by 50 pixels, an amount equal to the radius of the circle. The parameters w and h give the
width and height of the rectangle, which have to be twice the radius, or 100 pixels in this case.
Taking all this into account, here is a code segment for drawing a random circle:
centerX = (int)(width*Math.random());
centerY = (int)(height*Math.random());
g.fillOval( centerX - 50, centerY - 50, 100, 100 );
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 132
This code comes after the color-setting code given above. In the end, I found that the picture
looks better if I also draw a black outline around each filled circle, so I added this code at the
end:
g.setColor( Color.BLACK );
g.drawOval( centerX - 50, centerY - 50, 100, 100 );
Finally, to get a large number of circles, I put all of the above code into a for loop that runs
for 500 executions. Here’s a typical drawing from the program, shown at reduced size:
This is the first subroutine definition that you have seen, other than main(), but you will
learn all about defining subroutines in the next chapter. The first line of the definition makes
available certain values that are used in the subroutine: the graphics context g and the width
and height of the drawing area. These values come from outside the subroutine, but the
subroutine can use them. The point here is that to draw something, you just have to fill in the
inside of the subroutine, just as you write a program by filling in the inside of main().
The subroutine definition still has to go inside a class that defines the program. In this case,
the class is named SimpleGraphicsStarter, and the complete program is available in the sample
source code file SimpleGraphicsStarter.java. You can run that program to see the drawing. You
can use this sample program as a starting point for drawing your own pictures.
There’s a lot in the program that you won’t understand. To make your own drawing, all you
have to do is erase the inside of the drawPicture() routine in the source code and substitute
your own drawing code. You don’t need to understand the rest.
(By the way, you might notice that the main() subroutine uses the word static in its
definition, but drawPicture() does not. This has to do with the fact that drawPicture is a
subroutine in an object rather than in a class. The difference between static and non-static
subroutines is important but not something that we need to worry about for the time being. It
will become important for us in Chapter 5.)
3.9.3 Animation
We can extend the idea of drawing pictures to making animations. A computer animation is
simply a sequence of individual pictures, displayed quickly one after the other. If the change
from each picture to the next is small, the user will perceive the sequence of images as a
continuous animation. Each picture in the animation is called a frame. The sample program
SimpleAnimationStarter.java can be used as a starting point for writing animations. It contains
a subroutine named drawFrame() that draws one frame in an animation. You can create an
animation by filling in the definition of this subroutine. In addition to the graphics context
and the width and height of the drawing area, you can use the value of two other variables in
your code: frameNumber and elapsedSeconds. The drawFrame subroutine will automatically
be called about 60 times per second. The variable frameNumber takes on the values 0, 1, 2,
3, . . . in successive calls to the subroutine, and the value of elapsedSeconds is the number of
seconds that the animation has been running. By using either of these variables in your code,
you can draw a different picture each time drawFrame() is called, and the user will see the
series of pictures as an animation.
As an example of animation, we look at drawing a set of nested rectangles. The rectangles
will shrink towards the center of the drawing, giving an illusion of infinite motion. One frame
from the animation looks like this:
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 134
Consider how to draw a picture like this one. The rectangles can be drawn with a while
loop, which draws the rectangles starting from the one on the outside and moving in. Think
about what variables will be needed and how they change from one iteration of the while loop to
the next. Each time through the loop, the rectangle that is drawn is smaller than the previous
one and is moved down and over a bit. The difference between two rectangles is in their sizes
and in the coordinates of their upper left corners. We need variables to represent the width
and height of the rectangle, which I call rectWidth and rectHeight. The x and y-coordinates
of the upper left corner are the same, and they can be represented by the same variable. I call
that variable inset, since it is the amount by which the edges of the rectangle are inset from
the edges of the drawing area. The width and height decrease from one rectangle to the next,
while the inset increases. The while loop ends when either the width or the height becomes
less than or equal to zero. In general outline, the algorithm for drawing the rectangles in one
frame is
Set the amount of inset for the first rectangle
Set the width and height for the first rectangle
Set the drawing color to black
while the width and height are both greater than zero:
draw a rectangle (using the g.drawRect subroutine)
increase the inset (to move the next rectangle over and down)
decrease the width and height (to make the next rectangle smaller)
In my program, each rectangle is 15 pixels away from the rectangle that surrounds it, so the
inset is increased by 15 each time through the while loop. The rectangle shrinks by 15 pixels
on the left and by 15 pixels on the right, so the width of the rectangle shrinks by 30 before
drawing the next rectangle. The height also shrinks by 30 pixels each time through the loop.
The pseudocode is then easy to translate into Java, except that we need to know what
initial values to use for the inset, width, and height of the first rectangle. To figure that out,
we have to think about the fact that the picture is animated, so that what we draw will depend
in some way on the frame number. From one frame to the next frame of the animation, the
top-left corner of the outer rectangle moves over and down; that is, the inset for the outer
rectangle increases from one frame to the next. We can make this happen by setting the inset
for frame number 0 to 0, the inset for frame number 1 to 1, and so on. But that can’t go on
forever, or eventually all the rectangles would disappear. In fact, when the animation gets to
frame 15, a new rectangle should appear at the outside of the drawing area—but it’s not really
a “new rectangle,” it’s just that the inset for the outer rectangle goes back to zero. So, as the
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 135
animation proceeds, the inset should go through the sequence of values 0, 1, 2, . . . , 14 over and
over. We can accomplish that very easily by setting
inset = frameNumber % 15;
Finally, note that the first rectangle that is drawn in a frame fills the drawing area except for
a border of size inset around the outside of the rectangle. This means that the width of the
first rectangle is the width of the drawing area minus two times the inset, and similarly for the
height. Here, then is the drawFrame() subroutine for the moving rectangle example:
public void drawFrame(Graphics g, int frameNumber,
double elapsedSeconds, int width, int height) {
int inset; // Gap between edges of drawing area and outer rectangle.
int rectWidth, rectHeight; // The size of one of the rectangles.
g.setColor(Color.BLACK); // Draw the rectangle outlines in black.
inset = frameNumber % 15;
rectWidth = width - 2*inset;
rectHeight = height - 2*inset;
while (rectWidth >= 0 && rectHeight >= 0) {
g.drawRect(inset, inset, rectWidth, rectHeight);
inset += 15; // rectangles are 15 pixels apart
rectWidth -= 30;
rectHeight -= 30;
}
}
You can find the full source code for the program is in the sample program MovingRects.java.
Take a look! It’s a neat effect.
Exercises 136
1. How many times do you have to roll a pair of dice before they come up snake eyes? You (solution)
could do the experiment by rolling the dice by hand. Write a computer program that
simulates the experiment. The program should report the number of rolls that it makes
before the dice come up snake eyes. (Note: “Snake eyes” means that both dice show a
value of 1.) Exercise 2.2 explained how to simulate rolling a pair of dice.
2. Which integer between 1 and 10000 has the largest number of divisors, and how many (solution)
divisors does it have? Write a program to find the answers and print out the results. It is
possible that several integers in this range have the same, maximum number of divisors.
Your program only has to print out one of them. An example in Subsection 3.4.2 discussed
divisors. The source code for that example is CountDivisors.java.
You might need some hints about how to find a maximum value. The basic idea is
to go through all the integers, keeping track of the largest number of divisors that you’ve
seen so far. Also, keep track of the integer that had that number of divisors.
3. Write a program that will evaluate simple expressions such as 17 + 3 and 3.14159 * 4.7. (solution)
The expressions are to be typed in by the user. The input always consists of a number,
followed by an operator, followed by another number. The operators that are allowed are
+, -, *, and /. You can read the numbers with TextIO.getDouble() and the operator
with TextIO.getChar(). Your program should read an expression, print its value, read
another expression, print its value, and so on. The program should end when the user
enters 0 as the first number on the line.
4. Write a program that reads one line of input text and breaks it up into words. The (solution)
words should be output one per line. A word is defined to be a sequence of letters. Any
characters in the input that are not letters should be discarded. For example, if the user
inputs the line
He said, "That’s not a good idea."
then the output of the program should be
He
said
That
s
not
a
good
idea
An improved version of the program would list “that’s” as a single word. An apostrophe
can be considered to be part of a word if there is a letter on each side of the apostrophe.
To test whether a character is a letter, you might use (ch >= ’a’ && ch <= ’z’) ||
(ch >= ’A’ && ch <= ’Z’). However, this only works in English and similar languages.
A better choice is to call the standard function Character.isLetter(ch), which returns
a boolean value of true if ch is a letter and false if it is not. This works for any Unicode
character.
Exercises 137
5. Suppose that a file contains information about sales figures for a company in various cities. (solution)
Each line of the file contains a city name, followed by a colon (:) followed by the data for
that city. The data is a number of type double. However, for some cities, no data was
available. In these lines, the data is replaced by a comment explaining why the data is
missing. For example, several lines from the file might look like:
San Francisco: 19887.32
Chicago: no report received
New York: 298734.12
Write a program that will compute and print the total sales from all the cities together.
The program should also report the number of cities for which data was not available.
The name of the file is “sales.dat”.
To complete this program, you’ll need one fact about file input with TextIO that was
not covered in Subsection 2.4.4. Since you don’t know in advance how many lines there
are in the file, you need a way to tell when you have gotten to the end of the file. When
TextIO is reading from a file, the function TextIO.eof() can be used to test for end of
file. This boolean-valued function returns true if the file has been entirely read and
returns false if there is more data to read in the file. This means that you can read the
lines of the file in a loop while (TextIO.eof() == false).... The loop will end when
all the lines of the file have been read.
Suggestion: For each line, read and ignore characters up to the colon. Then read the
rest of the line into a variable of type String. Try to convert the string into a number, and
use try..catch to test whether the conversion succeeds.
6. Exercise 3.2 asked you to find the number in the range 1 to 10000 that has the largest (solution)
number of divisors. You only had to print out one such number. Revise the program so
that it will print out all numbers that have the maximum number of divisors. Use an array
as follows: As you count the divisors for each number, store each count in an array. Then
at the end of the program, you can go through the array and print out all the numbers
that have the maximum count. The output from the program should look something like
this:
Among integers between 1 and 10000,
The maximum number of divisors was 64
Numbers with that many divisors include:
7560
9240
7. An example in Subsection 3.8.3 tried to answer the question, How many random people do (solution)
you have to select before you find a duplicate birthday? The source code for that program
can be found in the file BirthdayProblem.java. Here are some related questions:
• How many random people do you have to select before you find three people who
share the same birthday? (That is, all three people were born on the same day in
the same month, but not necessarily in the same year.)
• Suppose you choose 365 people at random. How many different birthdays will they
have? (The number could theoretically be anywhere from 1 to 365).
• How many different people do you have to check before you’ve found at least one
person with a birthday on each of the 365 days of the year?
Exercises 138
Write three programs to answer these questions. Each of your programs should
simulate choosing people at random and checking their birthdays. (In each case, ignore
the possibility of leap years.)
8. Write a GUI program that draws a checkerboard. Base your solution on the sample pro- (solution)
gram SimpleGraphicsStarter.java You will draw the checkerboard in the drawPicture()
subroutine, after erasing the code that it already contains.
The checkerboard should be 400-by-400 pixels. You can change the size of the
drawing area in SimpleGraphicsStarter.java by modifying the line in main() that says
drawingArea.setPreferredSize(new Dimension(800,600)) to change the numbers to
400 instead of 800 and 600. A checkerboard contains 8 rows and 8 columns of squares. If
the size of the drawing area is 400, that means that each square should be 50-by-50 pixels.
The squares are red and black (or whatever other colors you choose). Here is a tricky way
to determine whether a given square should be red or black: The rows and columns can
be thought of as numbered from 0 to 7. If the row number of the square and the column
number of the square are either both even or both odd, then the square is red. Otherwise,
it is black. Note that a square is just a rectangle in which the height is equal to the width,
so you can use the subroutine g.fillRect() to draw the squares. Here is a reduced-size
image of the checkerboard that you want to draw:
9. Often, some element of an animation repeats over and over, every so many frames. (solution)
Sometimes, the repetition is “cyclic,” meaning that at the end it jumps back to the start.
Sometimes the repetition is “oscillating,” like a back-and-forth motion where the second
half is the same as the first half played in reverse.
Write an animation that demonstrates both cyclic and oscillating motions at various
speeds. For cyclic motion, you can use a square that moves across the drawing area, then
jumps back to the start, and then repeats the same motion over and over. For oscillating
motion, you can do something similar, but the square should move back and forth between
the two edges of the drawing area; that is, it moves left-to-right during the first half of
the animation and then backwards from right-to-left during the second half. To write the
program, you can start with a copy of the sample program SimpleAnimationStarter.java.
A cyclic motion has to repeat every N frames for some value of N. What you draw in
some frame of the animation depends on the frameNumber. The frameNumber just keeps
increasing forever. To implement cyclic motion, what you really want is a “cyclic frame
Exercises 139
Quiz on Chapter 3
(answers)
1. What is an algorithm?
2. Explain briefly what is meant by “pseudocode” and how is it useful in the development
of algorithms.
3. What is a block statement? How are block statements used in Java programs?
4. What is the main difference between a while loop and a do..while loop?
7. Write a for loop that will print out all the multiples of 3 from 3 to 36, that is: 3 6 9 12
15 18 21 24 27 30 33 36.
8. Fill in the following main() routine so that it will ask the user to enter an integer, read
the user’s response, and tell the user whether the number entered is even or odd. (You can
use TextIO.getInt() to read the integer. Recall that an integer n is even if n % 2 == 0.)
public static void main(String[] args) {
// Fill in the body of this subroutine!
}
9. Write a code segment that will print out two different random integers selected from the
range 1 to 10. All possible outputs should have the same probability. Hint: You can easily
select two random numbers, but you have to account for the fact that the two numbers
that you pick might be the same.
10. Suppose that s1 and s2 are variables of type String, whose values are expected to be
string representations of values of type int. Write a code segment that will compute and
print the integer sum of those values, or will print an error message if the values cannot
successfully be converted into integers. (Use a try..catch statement.)
11. Show the exact output that would be produced by the following main() routine:
public static void main(String[] args) {
int N;
N = 1;
while (N <= 32) {
N = 2 * N;
System.out.println(N);
}
}
12. Show the exact output produced by the following main() routine:
Quiz 141
13. What output is produced by the following program segment? Why? (Recall that
name.charAt(i) is the i-th character in the string, name.)
String name;
int i;
boolean startWord;
name = "Richard M. Nixon";
startWord = true;
for (i = 0; i < name.length(); i++) {
if (startWord)
System.out.println(name.charAt(i));
if (name.charAt(i) == ’ ’)
startWord = true;
else
startWord = false;
}
14. Suppose that numbers is an array of type int[ ]. Write a code segment that will count and
output the number of times that the number 42 occurs in the array.
15. Define the range of an array of numbers to be the maximum value in the array minus
the minimum value. Suppose that raceTimes is an array of type double[ ]. Write a code
segment that will find and print the range of raceTimes.
Chapter 4
One way to break up a complex program into manageable pieces is to use subroutines.
A subroutine consists of the instructions for carrying out a certain task, grouped together and
given a name. Elsewhere in the program, that name can be used as a stand-in for the whole set
of instructions. As a computer executes a program, whenever it encounters a subroutine name,
it executes all the instructions necessary to carry out the task associated with that subroutine.
Subroutines can be used over and over, at different places in the program. A subroutine
can even be used inside another subroutine. This allows you to write simple subroutines and
then use them to help write more complex subroutines, which can then be used in turn in other
subroutines. In this way, very complex programs can be built up step-by-step, where each step
in the construction is reasonably simple.
Subroutines in Java can be either static or non-static. This chapter covers static subroutines.
Non-static subroutines, which are used in true object-oriented programming, will be covered in
the next chapter.
143
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 144
The contract of a subroutine says, essentially, “Here is what you have to do to use me,
and here is what I will do for you, guaranteed.” When you write a subroutine, the comments
that you write for the subroutine should make the contract very clear. (I should admit that
in practice, subroutines’ contracts are often inadequately specified, much to the regret and
annoyance of the programmers who have to use them.)
For the rest of this chapter, I turn from general ideas about black boxes and subroutines
in general to the specifics of writing and using subroutines in Java. But keep the general ideas
and principles in mind. They are the reasons that subroutines exist in the first place, and they
are your guidelines for using them. This should be especially clear in Section 4.7, where I will
discuss subroutines as a tool in program development.
You should keep in mind that subroutines are not the only example of black boxes in
programming. For example, a class is also a black box. We’ll see that a class can have a
“public” part, representing its interface, and a “private” part that is entirely inside its hidden
implementation. All the principles of black boxes apply to classes as well as to subroutines.
∗ ∗ ∗
Subsection 3.1.4 introduced the idea of “control abstraction” to express the fact that a Java
control structure lets the user work on a higher level than machine language, hiding the details
of the process in the CPU that implements the control structure.
In a similar way, we say that a subroutine is a procedural abstraction. The interface of
a subroutine is an abstraction that you can use to carry out some procedure without worrying
about the details of how the procedure is actually implemented. This is just another, fancier
way of saying that the subroutine can be used as a black box, but it brings us back to abstraction
as a central concept in computer science.
An important aspect of abstraction in general is information hiding . An abstraction hides
information about what is behind the abstraction, in its implementation. Information hiding by
control abstractions is what makes it possible to use the same Java control structures on different
types of CPU, with different underlying machine language implementations. Information hiding
by procedural abstractions is what makes it possible for the inside of a subroutine to be changed
without affecting the programs in which the subroutine is used. Again, this is just another term
for the black box principle.
subroutines themselves become members of the objects. Non-static subroutines only become
relevant when you are working with objects. The distinction between static and non-static also
applies to variables and to other things that can occur in class definitions. This chapter will
deal with static subroutines and static variables almost exclusively. We’ll turn to non-static
stuff and to object-oriented programming in the next chapter.
A subroutine that is in a class or object is often called a method , and “method” is the
term that most people prefer for subroutines in Java. I will start using the term “method”
occasionally, but I will continue to prefer the more general term “subroutine” in this chapter,
at least for static subroutines. However, you should start thinking of the terms “method”
and “subroutine” as being essentially synonymous as far as Java is concerned. Other terms
that you might see used to refer to subroutines are “procedures” and “functions.” (I generally
use the term “function” only for subroutines that compute and return a value, but in some
programming languages, it is used to refer to subroutines in general.)
channel number is an integer, the type of the parameter would be int, and the declaration of
the changeChannel() method might look like
public void changeChannel(int channelNum) { ... }
This declaration specifies that changeChannel() has a parameter named channelNum of type
int. However, channelNum does not yet have any particular value. A value for channelNum is
provided when the subroutine is called; for example: changeChannel(17);
The parameter list in a subroutine can be empty, or it can consist of one or more parameter
declarations of the form htypei hparameter-namei. If there are several declarations, they are
separated by commas. Note that each declaration can name only one parameter. For example,
if you want two parameters of type double, you have to say “double x, double y”, rather
than “double x, y”.
Parameters are covered in more detail in the next section.
Here are a few examples of subroutine definitions, leaving out the statements that define
what the subroutines do:
public static void playGame() {
// "public" and "static" are modifiers; "void" is the
// return-type; "playGame" is the subroutine-name;
// the parameter-list is empty.
. . . // Statements that define what playGame does go here.
}
int getNextN(int N) {
// There are no modifiers; "int" is the return-type;
// "getNextN" is the subroutine-name; the parameter-list
// includes one parameter whose name is "N" and whose
// type is "int".
. . . // Statements that define what getNextN does go here.
}
static boolean lessThan(double x, double y) {
// "static" is a modifier; "boolean" is the
// return-type; "lessThan" is the subroutine-name;
// the parameter-list includes two parameters whose names are
// "x" and "y", and the type of each of these parameters
// is "double".
. . . // Statements that define what lessThan does go here.
}
In the second example given here, getNextN is a non-static method, since its definition does
not include the modifier “static”—and so it’s not an example that we should be looking at in
this chapter! The other modifier shown in the examples is “public”. This modifier indicates
that the method can be called from anywhere in a program, even from outside the class where
the method is defined. There is another modifier, “private”, which indicates that the method
can be called only from inside the same class. The modifiers public and private are called
access specifiers. If no access specifier is given for a method, then by default, that method
can be called from anywhere in the package that contains the class, but not from outside that
package. (You will learn more about packages later in this chapter, in Section 4.6.) There
is one other access modifier, protected, which will only become relevant when we turn to
object-oriented programming in Chapter 5.
Note, by the way, that the main() routine of a program follows the usual syntax rules for
a subroutine. In
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 148
If the user gets the number after six guesses or fewer, the user wins the game. After each game,
the user has the option of continuing with another game.
Since playing one game can be thought of as a single, coherent task, it makes sense to write
a subroutine that will play one guessing game with the user. The main() routine will use a
loop to call the playGame() subroutine over and over, as many times as the user wants to play.
We approach the problem of designing the playGame() subroutine the same way we write a
main() routine: Start with an outline of the algorithm and apply stepwise refinement. Here is
a short pseudocode algorithm for a guessing game routine:
Pick a random number
while the game is not over:
Get the user’s guess
Tell the user whether the guess is high, low, or correct.
The test for whether the game is over is complicated, since the game ends if either the user
makes a correct guess or the number of guesses is six. As in many cases, the easiest thing to
do is to use a “while (true)” loop and use break to end the loop whenever we find a reason
to do so. Also, if we are going to end the game after six guesses, we’ll have to keep track of the
number of guesses that the user has made. Filling out the algorithm gives:
Let computersNumber be a random number between 1 and 100
Let guessCount = 0
while (true):
Get the user’s guess
Count the guess by adding 1 to guess count
if the user’s guess equals computersNumber:
Tell the user he won
break out of the loop
if the number of guesses is 6:
Tell the user he lost
break out of the loop
if the user’s guess is less than computersNumber:
Tell the user the guess was low
else if the user’s guess is higher than computersNumber:
Tell the user the guess was high
With variable declarations added and translated into Java, this becomes the definition of the
playGame() routine. A random integer between 1 and 100 can be computed as (int)(100 *
Math.random()) + 1. I’ve cleaned up the interaction with the user to make it flow better.
static void playGame() {
int computersNumber; // A random number picked by the computer.
int usersGuess; // A number entered by user as a guess.
int guessCount; // Number of guesses the user has made.
computersNumber = (int)(100 * Math.random()) + 1;
// The value assigned to computersNumber is a randomly
// chosen integer between 1 and 100, inclusive.
guessCount = 0;
System.out.println();
System.out.print("What is your first guess? ");
while (true) {
usersGuess = TextIO.getInt(); // Get the user’s guess.
guessCount++;
if (usersGuess == computersNumber) {
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 150
declaration of a member variable in this chapter will include the modifier static. They might
also be marked as public or private. For example:
static String usersName;
public static int numberOfPlayers;
private static double velocity, time;
A static member variable that is not declared to be private can be accessed from outside
the class where it is defined, as well as inside. When it is used in some other class, it must be
referred to with a compound identifier of the form hclass-namei.hvariable-namei. For example,
the System class contains the public static member variable named out, and you use this variable
in your own classes by referring to System.out. Similarly, Math.PI is a public static member
variable in the Math class. If numberOfPlayers is a public static member variable in a class
named Poker, then code in the Poker class would refer to it simply as numberOfPlayers, while
code in another class would refer to it as Poker.numberOfPlayers.
As an example, let’s add a couple of static member variables to the GuessingGame class that
we wrote earlier in this section. We add a variable named gamesPlayed to keep track of how
many games the user has played and another variable named gamesWon to keep track of the
number of games that the user has won. The variables are declared as static member variables:
static int gamesPlayed;
static int gamesWon;
In the playGame() routine, we always add 1 to gamesPlayed, and we add 1 to gamesWon if the
user wins the game. At the end of the main() routine, we print out the values of both variables.
It would be impossible to do the same thing with local variables, since both subroutines need
to access the variables, and local variables exist in only one subroutine. Furthermore, global
variables keep their values between one subroutine call and the next. Local variables do not; a
local variable gets a new value each time that the subroutine that contains it is called.
When you declare a local variable in a subroutine, you have to assign a value to that variable
before you can do anything with it. Member variables, on the other hand are automatically
initialized with a default value. The default values are the same as those that are used when
initializing the elements of an array: For numeric variables, the default value is zero; for boolean
variables, the default is false; for char variables, it’s the character that has Unicode code
number zero; and for objects, such as Strings, the default initial value is the special value null.
Since they are of type int, the static member variables gamesPlayed and gamesWon
automatically get zero as their initial value. This happens to be the correct initial value for a
variable that is being used as a counter. You can, of course, assign a value to a variable at the
beginning of the main() routine if you are not satisfied with the default initial value, or if you
want to make the initial value more explicit.
Here’s the revised version of GuessingGame.java. The changes from the above version are
shown in italic:
import textio.TextIO;
public class GuessingGame2 {
static int gamesPlayed; // The number of games played.
static int gamesWon; // The number of games won.
public static void main(String[] args) {
gamesPlayed = 0;
gamesWon = 0; // This is actually redundant, since 0 is
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 153
∗ ∗ ∗
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 154
(By the way, notice that in my example programs, I didn’t mark the static subroutines or
variables as being public or private. You might wonder what it means to leave out both
modifiers. Recall that global variables and subroutines with no access modifier can be used
anywhere in the same package as the class where they are defined, but not in other packages.
Classes that don’t declare a package are in the default package. So, any class in the default
package would have access to gamesPlayed, gamesWon, and playGame()—and that includes
most of the classes in this book. In fact, it is considered to be good practice to make member
variables and subroutines private, unless there is a reason for doing otherwise. (But then
again, it’s also considered good practice to avoid using the default package.))
4.3 Parameters
If a subroutine is a black box, then a parameter is something that provides a mechanism
for passing information from the outside world into the box. Parameters are part of the interface
of a subroutine. They allow you to customize the behavior of a subroutine to adapt it to a
particular situation.
As an analogy, consider a thermostat—a black box whose task it is to keep your house
at a certain temperature. The thermostat has a parameter, namely the dial that is used to
set the desired temperature. The thermostat always performs the same task: maintaining a
constant temperature. However, the exact task that it performs—that is, which temperature
it maintains—is customized by the setting on its dial.
above example. And there are parameters that are used in subroutine call statements, such
as the K in the statement “print3NSequence(K);”. Parameters in a subroutine definition are
called formal parameters or dummy parameters. The parameters that are passed to a
subroutine when it is called are called actual parameters or arguments. When a subroutine
is called, the actual parameters in the subroutine call statement are evaluated and the values
are assigned to the formal parameters in the subroutine’s definition. Then the body of the
subroutine is executed.
A formal parameter must be a name, that is, a simple identifier. A formal parameter is very
much like a variable, and—like a variable—it has a specified type such as int, boolean, String, or
double[ ]. An actual parameter is a value, and so it can be specified by any expression, provided
that the expression computes a value of the correct type. The type of the actual parameter must
be one that could legally be assigned to the formal parameter with an assignment statement.
For example, if the formal parameter is of type double, then it would be legal to pass an int as
the actual parameter since ints can legally be assigned to doubles. When you call a subroutine,
you must provide one actual parameter for each formal parameter in the subroutine’s definition.
Consider, for example, a subroutine
static void doTask(int N, double x, boolean test) {
// statements to perform the task go here
}
This subroutine might be called with the statement
doTask(17, Math.sqrt(z+1), z >= 10);
When the computer executes this statement, it has essentially the same effect as the block of
statements:
{
int N; // Allocate memory locations for the formal parameters.
double x;
boolean test;
N = 17; // Assign 17 to the first formal parameter, N.
x = Math.sqrt(z+1); // Compute Math.sqrt(z+1), and assign it to
// the second formal parameter, x.
test = (z >= 10); // Evaluate "z >= 10" and assign the resulting
// true/false value to the third formal
// parameter, test.
// statements to perform the task go here
}
(There are a few technical differences between this and “doTask(17,Math.sqrt(z+1),z>=10);”
—besides the amount of typing—because of questions about scope of variables and what
happens when several variables or parameters have the same name.)
Beginning programming students often find parameters to be surprisingly confusing. Calling
a subroutine that already exists is not a problem—the idea of providing information to the
subroutine in a parameter is clear enough. Writing the subroutine definition is another
matter. A common beginner’s mistake is to assign values to the formal parameters at the
beginning of the subroutine, or to ask the user to input their values. This represents a
fundamental misunderstanding. By the time the computer starts executing the statements
in the subroutine, the formal parameters have already been assigned initial values! The
computer automatically assigns values to the formal parameters before it starts executing the
code inside the subroutine. The values come from the actual parameters in the subroutine call
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 157
statement. Remember that a subroutine is not independent. It is called by some other routine,
and it is the subroutine call statement’s responsibility to provide appropriate values for the
parameters.
4.3.3 Overloading
In order to call a subroutine legally, you need to know its name, you need to know how many
formal parameters it has, and you need to know the type of each parameter. This information is
called the subroutine’s signature. The signature of the subroutine doTask, used as an example
above, can be expressed as: doTask(int,double,boolean). Note that the signature does not
include the names of the parameters; in fact, if you just want to use the subroutine, you don’t
even need to know what the formal parameter names are, so the names are not part of the
interface.
Java is somewhat unusual in that it allows two different subroutines in the same class to
have the same name, provided that their signatures are different. When this happens, we say
that the name of the subroutine is overloaded because it has several different meanings. The
computer doesn’t get the subroutines mixed up. It can tell which one you want to call by the
number and types of the actual parameters that you provide in the subroutine call statement.
You have already seen overloading used with System.out. This object includes many different
methods named println, for example. These methods all have different signatures, such as:
println(int) println(double)
println(char) println(boolean)
println()
The computer knows which of these subroutines you want to use based on the type of
the actual parameter that you provide. System.out.println(17) calls the subroutine with
signature println(int), while System.out.println(’A’) calls the subroutine with signature
println(char). Of course all these different subroutines are semantically related, which is
why it is acceptable programming style to use the same name for them all. But as far as the
computer is concerned, printing out an int is very different from printing out a char, which is
different from printing out a boolean, and so forth—so that each of these operations requires
a different subroutine.
Note, by the way, that the signature does not include the subroutine’s return type. It is
illegal to have two subroutines in the same class that have the same signature but that have
different return types. For example, it would be a syntax error for a class to contain two
subroutines defined as:
int getln() { ... }
double getln() { ... }
This is why in the TextIO class, the subroutines for reading different types are not all named
getln(). In a given class, there can only be one routine that has the name getln with no
parameters. So, the input routines in TextIO are distinguished by having different names, such
as getlnInt() and getlnDouble().
break them up into subtasks—is the other side of programming with subroutines. We’ll return
to the question of program design in Section 4.7.
As a first example, let’s write a subroutine to compute and print out all the divisors of a
given positive integer. The integer will be a parameter to the subroutine. Remember that the
syntax of any subroutine is:
hmodifiers i hreturn-type i hsubroutine-name i ( hparameter-list i ) {
hstatements i
}
Writing a subroutine always means filling out this format. In this case, the statement of the
problem implies that there is one parameter, of type int, that represents the “given integer”
whose divisors are to be printed. And it tells us what the statements in the body of the
subroutine should do. Since we are only working with static subroutines for now, we’ll need
to use static as a modifier. We could add an access modifier (public or private), but in
the absence of any instructions, I’ll leave it out. Since we are not told to return a value, the
return type is void. Since no names are specified, we’ll have to make up names for the formal
parameter and for the subroutine itself. I’ll use N for the parameter and printDivisors for
the subroutine name. The subroutine will look like
static void printDivisors( int N ) {
hstatements i
}
and all we have left to do is to write the statements that make up the body of the routine. This
is not difficult. Just remember that you have to write the body assuming that N already has
a value! The algorithm is: “For each possible divisor D in the range from 1 to N, if D evenly
divides N, then print D.” Written in Java, this becomes:
/**
* Print all the divisors of N.
* We assume that N is a positive integer.
*/
static void printDivisors( int N ) {
int D; // One of the possible divisors of N.
System.out.println("The divisors of " + N + " are:");
for ( D = 1; D <= N; D++ ) {
if ( N % D == 0 ) // Does D evenly divide N?
System.out.println(D);
}
}
I’ve added a comment before the subroutine definition indicating the contract of the
subroutine—that is, what it does and what assumptions it makes. The contract includes the
assumption that N is a positive integer. It is up to the caller of the subroutine to make sure
that this assumption is satisfied.
As a second short example, consider the problem: Write a private subroutine named
printRow. It should have a parameter ch of type char and a parameter N of type int. The
subroutine should print out a line of text containing N copies of the character ch.
Here, we are told the name of the subroutine and the names of the two parameters, and we
are told that the subroutine is private, so we don’t have much choice about the first line of
the subroutine definition. The task in this case is pretty simple, so the body of the subroutine
is easy to write. The complete subroutine is given by
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 159
/**
* Write one line of output containing N copies of the
* character ch. If N <= 0, an empty line is output.
*/
private static void printRow( char ch, int N ) {
int i; // Loop-control variable for counting off the copies.
for ( i = 1; i <= N; i++ ) {
System.out.print( ch );
}
System.out.println();
}
Note that in this case, the contract makes no assumption about N, but it makes it clear what
will happen in all cases, including the unexpected case that N <= 0.
Finally, let’s do an example that shows how one subroutine can build on another. Let’s write
a subroutine that takes a String as a parameter. For each character in the string, it should
print a line of output containing 25 copies of that character. It should use the printRow()
subroutine defined above to produce the output.
Again, we get to choose a name for the subroutine and a name for the parameter. I’ll call
the subroutine printRowsFromString and the parameter str. The algorithm is pretty clear:
For each position i in the string str, call printRow(str.charAt(i),25) to print one line of
the output that contains 25 copies of character number i from the string. So, we get:
/**
* For each character in str, write a line of output
* containing 25 copies of that character.
*/
private static void printRowsFromString( String str ) {
int i; // Loop-control variable for counting off the chars.
for ( i = 0; i < str.length(); i++ ) {
printRow( str.charAt(i), 25 );
}
}
We could then use printRowsFromString in a main() routine such as
public static void main(String[] args) {
String inputLine; // Line of text input by user.
System.out.print("Enter a line of text: ");
inputLine = TextIO.getln();
System.out.println();
printRowsFromString( inputLine );
}
Of course, the three routines, main(), printRowsFromString(), and printRow(), would
have to be collected together inside the same class. The program is rather useless, but it does
demonstrate the use of subroutines. You’ll find the program in the file RowsOfChars.java, if
you want to take a look.
and enclosed in a pair of square brackets. To tell it which array to print, the subroutine would
have a parameter of type int[ ]:
static void printValuesInList( int[] list ) {
System.out.print(’[’);
int i;
for ( i = 0; i < list.length; i++ ) {
if ( i > 0 )
System.out.print(’,’); // No comma in front of list[0]
System.out.print(list[i]);
}
System.out.println(’]’);
}
To use this subroutine, you need an actual array. Here is a legal, though not very realistic, code
segment that creates an array just to pass it as an argument to the subroutine:
int[] numbers;
numbers = new int[3];
numbers[0] = 42;
numbers[1] = 17;
numbers[2] = 256;
printValuesInList( numbers );
The output produced by the last statement would be [42,17,256].
int i;
for ( i = 0; i < args.length; i++ )
System.out.println(" " + args[i]);
}
} // end main()
} // end class CLDemo
Note that the parameter, args, can be an array of length zero. This just means that the user
did not include any command-line arguments when running the program.
In practice, command-line arguments are often used to pass the names of files to a program.
For example, consider the following program for making a copy of a text file. It does this
by copying one line at a time from the original file to the copy, using TextIO. The function
TextIO.eof() is a boolean-valued function that is true if the end of the input file has been
reached.
input textio.TextIO;
/**
* Requires two command line arguments, which must be file names. The
* first must be the name of an existing file. The second is the name
* of a file to be created by the program. The contents of the first file
* are copied into the second. WARNING: If the second file already
* exists when the program is run, its previous contents will be lost!
* This program only works for plain text files.
*/
public class CopyTextFile {
public static void main( String[] args ) {
if (args.length < 2 ) {
System.out.println("Two command-line arguments are required!");
System.exit(1);
}
TextIO.readFile( args[0] ); // Open the original file for reading.
TextIO.writeFile( args[1] ); // Open the copy file for writing.
int lineCount; // Number of lines copied
lineCount = 0;
while ( TextIO.eof() == false ) {
// Read one line from the original file and write it to the copy.
String line;
line = TextIO.getln();
TextIO.putln(line);
lineCount++;
}
System.out.printf( "%d lines copied from %s to %s%n",
lineCount, args[0], args[1] );
}
}
Since most programs are run in a GUI environment these days, command-line arguments
aren’t as important as they used to be. But at least they provide a nice example of how array
parameters can be used.
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 162
type of the parameter is one of the primitive types—things are more complicated in the case of
arrays and objects, as we’ll see later).
Things are different when a subroutine uses a variable that is defined outside the subroutine.
That variable exists independently of the subroutine, and it is accessible to other parts of the
program as well. Such a variable is said to be global to the subroutine, as opposed to the
local variables defined inside the subroutine. A global variable can be used in the entire class
in which it is defined and, if it is not private, in other classes as well. Changes made to a
global variable can have effects that extend outside the subroutine where the changes are made.
You’ve seen how this works in the last example in the previous section, where the values of the
global variables, gamesPlayed and gamesWon, are computed inside a subroutine and are used
in the main() routine.
It’s not always bad to use global variables in subroutines, but you should realize that the
global variable then has to be considered part of the subroutine’s interface. The subroutine
uses the global variable to communicate with the rest of the program. This is a kind of sneaky,
back-door communication that is less visible than communication done through parameters,
and it risks violating the rule that the interface of a black box should be straightforward and
easy to understand. So before you use a global variable in a subroutine, you should consider
whether it’s really necessary.
I don’t advise you to take an absolute stand against using global variables inside subroutines.
There is at least one good reason to do it: If you think of the class as a whole as being a kind
of black box, it can be very reasonable to let the subroutines inside that box be a little sneaky
about communicating with each other, if that will make the class as a whole look simpler from
the outside.
as a regular subroutine, except that you have to specify the value that is to be returned by the
subroutine. This is done with a return statement, which has the following syntax:
return hexpression i ;
Such a return statement can only occur inside the definition of a function, and the type of
the hexpressioni must match the return type that was specified for the function. (More exactly,
it must be an expression that could legally be assigned to a variable whose type is specified
by the return type of the function.) When the computer executes this return statement,
it evaluates the expression, terminates execution of the function, and uses the value of the
expression as the returned value of the function.
For example, consider the function definition
static double pythagoras(double x, double y) {
// Computes the length of the hypotenuse of a right
// triangle, where the sides of the triangle are x and y.
return Math.sqrt( x*x + y*y );
}
Suppose the computer executes the statement “totalLength = 17 + pythagoras(12,5);”.
When it gets to the term pythagoras(12,5), it assigns the actual parameters 12 and 5 to
the formal parameters x and y in the function. In the body of the function, it evaluates
Math.sqrt(12.0*12.0 + 5.0*5.0), which works out to 13.0. This value is “returned” by the
function, so the 13.0 essentially replaces the function call in the assignment statement, which
then has the same effect as the statement “totalLength = 17+13.0 ”. The return value is
added to 17, and the result, 30.0, is stored in the variable, totalLength.
Note that a return statement does not have to be the last statement in the function
definition. At any point in the function where you know the value that you want to return, you
can return it. Returning a value will end the function immediately, skipping any subsequent
statements in the function. However, a function must definitely return some value (or throw
an exception), no matter what path the execution of the function takes through the code.
You can use a return statement inside an ordinary subroutine, one with declared return
type “void”. Since a void subroutine does not return a value, the return statement does not
include an expression; it simply takes the form “return;”. The effect of this statement is to
terminate execution of the subroutine and return control back to the point in the program from
which the subroutine was called. This can be convenient if you want to terminate execution
somewhere in the middle of the subroutine, but return statements are optional in non-function
subroutines. In a function, on the other hand, a return statement, with expression, is always
required.
Note that a return inside a loop will end the loop as well as the subroutine that contains
it. Similarly, a return in a switch statement breaks out of the switch statement as well as
the subroutine. So, you will sometimes use return in contexts where you are used to seeing a
break.
∗ ∗ ∗
Here are a few more examples of functions. The first one computes a letter grade
corresponding to a given numerical grade, on a typical grading scale:
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 166
/**
* Returns the letter grade corresponding to the numerical
* grade that is passed to this function as a parameter.
*/
static char letterGrade(int numGrade) {
if (numGrade >= 90)
return ’A’; // 90 or above gets an A
else if (numGrade >= 80)
return ’B’; // 80 to 89 gets a B
else if (numGrade >= 65)
return ’C’; // 65 to 79 gets a C
else if (numGrade >= 50)
return ’D’; // 50 to 64 gets a D
else
return ’F’; // anything else gets an F
} // end of function letterGrade
The type of the return value of letterGrade() is char. Functions can return values of any
type at all. Here’s a function whose return value is of type boolean. It demonstrates some
interesting programming points, so you should read the comments:
/**
* This function returns true if N is a prime number. A prime number
* is an integer greater than 1 that is not divisible by any positive
* integer, except itself and 1. If N has any divisor, D, in the range
* 1 < D < N, then it has a divisor in the range 2 to Math.sqrt(N), namely
* either D itself or N/D. So we only test possible divisors from 2 to
* Math.sqrt(N).
*/
static boolean isPrime(int N) {
int divisor; // A number we will test to see whether it evenly divides N.
if (N <= 1)
return false; // No number <= 1 is a prime.
int maxToTry; // The largest divisor that we need to test.
maxToTry = (int)(Math.sqrt(N) + 0.001);
// We will try to divide N by numbers between 2 and maxToTry.
// If N is not evenly divisible by any of these numbers, then
// N is prime. (Note that since Math.sqrt(N) is defined to
// return a value of type double, the value must be typecast
// to type int before it can be assigned to maxToTry. I added
// the 0.001 because computations with double values are not
// exact, and I worry that, for example, Math.sqrt(49) might
// be computed as 6.999... instead of as 7.0.)
for (divisor = 2; divisor <= maxToTry; divisor++) {
if ( N % divisor == 0 ) // Test if divisor evenly divides N.
return false; // If so, we know N is not prime.
// No need to continue testing!
}
// If we get to this point, N must be prime. Otherwise,
// the function would already have been terminated by
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 167
/**
* print3NSequence prints a 3N+1 sequence to standard output, using
* startingValue as the initial value of N. It also prints the number
* of terms in the sequence. The value of the parameter, startingValue,
* must be a positive integer.
*/
static void print3NSequence(int startingValue) {
int N; // One of the terms in the sequence.
int count; // The number of terms found.
int onLine; // The number of terms that have been output
// so far on the current line.
N = startingValue; // Start the sequence with startingValue;
count = 1; // We have one term so far.
System.out.println("The 3N+1 sequence starting from " + N);
System.out.println();
System.out.printf("%8d", N); // Print initial term, using 8 characters.
onLine = 1; // There’s now 1 term on current output line.
while (N > 1) {
N = nextN(N); // compute next term
count++; // count this term
if (onLine == 5) { // If current output line is full
System.out.println(); // ...then output a carriage return
onLine = 0; // ...and note that there are no terms
// on the new line.
}
System.out.printf("%8d", N); // Print this term in an 8-char column.
onLine++; // Add 1 to the number of terms on this line.
}
System.out.println(); // end current line of output
System.out.println(); // and then add a blank line
System.out.println("There were " + count + " terms in the sequence.");
} // end of print3NSequence
/**
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 169
You should read this program carefully and try to understand how it works.
can do with other values, such as assign a function to a variable, pass a function as a parameter
to a subroutine, return a function as the value of subroutine, or even make an array of functions.
A programming language that allows you to do all those things with functions is said to have
“first-class functions” or “functions as first-class objects.”
In fact, you can do all of those things with Java lambda expressions. Java’s notation is
different from the one used by Alonzo Church, and in spite of the name “lambda expression”
it does not even use the word lambda. In Java, the lambda expression for a squaring function
like the one above can be written
x -> x*x
The operator -> is what makes this a lambda expression. The dummy parameter for the function
is on the left of the operator, and the expression that computes the value of the function is on
the right. You might see an expression like this one being passed as an actual parameter to a
subroutine, assigned to a variable, or returned by a function.
So are functions now first-class in Java? I’m not quite sure. There are some cool things that
can be done in other languages but can’t be done in Java. For example, in Java we can assign
the above expression to a variable named, say, sqr, but we can’t then use sqr as if it actually is
a function. For example, we can’t say sqr (42). The problem, really, is that Java is a strongly
typed language; to have a variable named sqr, we must declare that variable and give it a type.
But what sort of type would be appropriate for a value that is a function? The answer in Java
is something called a functional interface, which we turn to next.
But first one more note: Lambda expressions in Java can actually represent arbitrary
subroutines, not just functions. Nevertheless, it is the term “function” that is usually associated
with them, rather than “subroutine” or “method.”
I will use these three functional interfaces for examples in this section.
”Interfaces” in Java can be much more complicated than functional interfaces. You will
learn more about them in Section 5.7. But it is only functional interfaces that are relevant
to lambda expressions: a functional interface provides a template for a subroutine that might
be represented by a lambda expression. The name of a functional interface is a type, just as
String and double are types. That is, it can be used to declare variables and parameters and
to specify the return type of a function. When a type is a functional interface, a value for that
type can be given as a lambda expression.
When a lambda expression has two parameters, the parentheses are not optional. Here is
an example of using the ArrayProcessor interface, which also demonstrates a lambda expression
with a multiline definition:
ArrayProcessor concat;
concat = (A,n) -> { // parentheses around (A,n) are required!
String str;
str = "";
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++)
str += A[i];
System.out.println(str);
}; // The semicolon marks the end of the assignment statement;
// it is not part of the lambda expression.
String[] nums;
nums = new String[4];
nums[0] = "One";
nums[1] = "Two";
nums[2] = "Three";
nums[3] = "Four";
for (int i = 1; i < nums.length; i++) {
concat.process( nums, i );
}
This will print out
One
OneTwo
OneTwoThree
OneTwoThreeFour
Things get more interesting when a lambda expression is used as an actual parameter, which
is the most common use in practice. For example, suppose that the following function is defined:
/**
* For a function f, compute f(start) + f(start+1) + ... + f(end).
* The value of end should be >= the value of start.
*/
static double sum( FunctionR2R f, int start, int end ) {
double total = 0;
for (int n = start; n <= end; n++) {
total = total + f.valueAt( n );
}
return total;
}
Note that since f is a value of type FunctionR2R, the value of f at n is actually written as
f.valueAt(n). When the function sum is called, the first parameter can be given as a lambda
expression that matches the type FunctionR2R. For example:
System.out.print("The sum of n squared for n from 1 to 100 is ");
System.out.println( sum( x -> x*x, 1, 100 ) );
System.out.print("The sum of 2 raised to the power n, for n from 1 to 10 is ");
System.out.println( sum( num -> Math.pow(2,num), 1, 10 ) );
As another example, suppose that we have a subroutine that performs a given task several
times. The task can be specified as a value of type Runnable:
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 173
More generally, a lambda expression that simply calls an existing static method can be
written as a method reference of the form
hclassname i :: hmethod-name i
Furthermore, this notation extends to methods that are in objects rather than classes. For
example, if str is a String, then str contains the method str.length(). The method reference
str::length could be used as a lambda expression of type SupplyInt, where SupplyInt is the
functional interface
public interface SupplyInt {
int get( );
}
4.6.1 Toolboxes
Someone who wanted to program for the original Macintosh computers—and to produce
programs that look and behave the way users expected them to—had to deal with the
“Macintosh Toolbox,” a collection of well over a thousand different subroutines. There were
routines for opening and closing windows, for drawing geometric figures and text to windows,
for adding buttons to windows, and for responding to mouse clicks on the window. There
were other routines for creating menus and for reacting to user selections from menus. Aside
from the user interface, there were routines for opening files and reading data from them, for
communicating over a network, for sending output to a printer, for handling communication
between programs, and in general for doing all the standard things that a computer has to do.
Microsoft Windows provides its own set of subroutines for programmers to use, and they are
quite a bit different from the subroutines used on the Mac. Linux has several different GUI
toolboxes for the programmer to choose from.
The analogy of a “toolbox” is a good one to keep in mind. Every programming project
involves a mixture of innovation and reuse of existing tools. A programmer is given a set of
tools to work with, starting with the set of basic tools that are built into the language: things
like variables, assignment statements, if statements, and loops. To these, the programmer can
add existing toolboxes full of routines that have already been written for performing certain
tasks. These tools, if they are well-designed, can be used as true black boxes: They can be called
to perform their assigned tasks without worrying about the particular steps they go through to
accomplish those tasks. The innovative part of programming is to take all these tools and apply
them to some particular project or problem (word-processing, keeping track of bank accounts,
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 175
processing image data from a space probe, Web browsing, computer games, . . . ). This is called
applications programming .
A software toolbox is a kind of black box, and it presents a certain interface to the
programmer. This interface is a specification of what routines are in the toolbox, what
parameters they use, and what tasks they perform. This information constitutes the API ,
or Application Programming Interface, associated with the toolbox. The API is the
abstraction through which you access the functionality of the software in the toolbox. The
Macintosh API is a specification of all the routines available in the Macintosh Toolbox. A
company that makes some hardware device—say a card for connecting a computer to a
network—might publish an API for that device consisting of a list of routines that programmers
can call in order to communicate with and control the device. Scientists who write a set of
routines for doing some kind of complex computation—such as solving “differential equations,”
say—would provide an API to allow others to use those routines without understanding the
details of the computations they perform.
∗ ∗ ∗
The Java programming language is supplemented by a large, standard API. You’ve seen
part of this API already, in the form of mathematical subroutines such as Math.sqrt(), the
String data type and its associated routines, and the System.out.print() routines. The
standard Java API includes routines for working with graphical user interfaces, for network
communication, for reading and writing files, and more. It’s tempting to think of these routines
as being part of the Java language, but they are technically subroutines that have been written
and made available for use in Java programs.
Java is platform-independent. That is, the same program can run on platforms as diverse
as MacOS, Windows, Linux, and others. The same Java API must work on all these platforms.
But notice that it is the interface that is platform-independent; the implementation of some
parts of the API varies from one platform to another. A Java system on a particular computer
includes implementations of all the standard API routines. A Java program includes only calls
to those routines. When the Java interpreter executes a program and encounters a call to one
of the standard routines, it will pull up and execute the implementation of that routine which
is appropriate for the particular platform on which it is running. This is a very powerful idea.
It is the power of abstraction. It means that you only need to learn one API to program for a
wide variety of platforms.
contained within java, its full name is actually java.util. This package contains a variety
of utility classes, including the Scanner class that was discussed in Subsection 2.4.6. The
java package includes several other subpackages, such as java.io, which provides facilities
for input/output, and java.net, which deals with network communication. The most basic
package is called java.lang. This package contains fundamental classes such as String, Math,
Integer, and Double.
It might be helpful to look at a graphical representation of the levels of nesting in the java
package, its subpackages, the classes in those subpackages, and the subroutines in those classes.
This is not a complete picture, since it shows only a very few of the many items in each element:
j"#"
l ! u i
M S HJKL
s nn
NOPQLR
r @B CEFG@
S T
I D
Similarly, the package javax contains the package javax.swing that contains classes
representing GUI components such as buttons and input boxes. And javax.swing in turn
contains a package javax.swing.event that contains classes for working with events such as
key presses and mouse clicks.
The standard Java API includes thousands of classes in hundreds of packages. Many of
the classes are rather obscure or very specialized, but you might want to browse through the
documentation to see what is available. As I write this, the documentation for the complete
basic API for Java 8 can be found at
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/
See the subsection about “modules,” below, for a discussion of changes that were made the
language after Java 8 and for links to the documentation for Java 17. However, for the purposes
of this textbook, you will probably find that the Java 8 documentation is easier to use, and the
information that it provides is still relevant.
Even an expert programmer won’t be familiar with the entire Java API, or even a majority
of it. In this book, you’ll only encounter several dozen classes, and those will be sufficient for
writing a wide variety of programs.
the type. For example, suppose that you want to declare a variable named rectColor of type
Color. You could say:
java.awt.Color rectColor;
This is just an ordinary variable declaration of the form “htype-namei hvariable-namei;”. Of
course, using the full name of every class can get tiresome, and you will hardly ever see full
names like this used in a program. Java makes it possible to avoid using the full name of a
class by importing the class. If you put
import java.awt.Color;
at the beginning of a Java source code file, then, in the rest of the file, you can abbreviate the
full name java.awt.Color to just the simple name of the class, which is Color. Note that the
import line comes at the start of a file (after the package statement, if there is one) and is
not inside any class. Although it is sometimes referred to as a statement, it is more properly
called an import directive since it is not a statement in the usual sense. The import directive
“import java.awt.Color” would allow you to say
Color rectColor;
to declare the variable. Note that the only effect of the import directive is to allow you to use
simple class names instead of full “package.class” names. You aren’t really importing anything
substantial; if you leave out the import directive, you can still access the class—you just have
to use its full name. There is a shortcut for importing all the classes from a given package. For
example, you can import all the classes from java.util by saying
import java.util.*;
The “*” is a wildcard that matches every class in the package. (However, it does not match
subpackages; for example, you cannot import the entire contents of all the subpackages of the
java package by saying import java.*.)
Some programmers think that using a wildcard in an import statement is bad style, since
it can make a large number of class names available that you are not going to use and might
not even know about. They think it is better to explicitly import each individual class that
you want to use. In my own programming, I often use wildcards to import all the classes from
the most relevant packages, and use individual imports when I am using just one or two classes
from a given package.
A program that works with networking might include the line “import java.net.*;”, while
one that reads or writes files might use “import java.io.*;”. But when you start importing
lots of packages in this way, you have to be careful about one thing: It’s possible for two classes
that are in different packages to have the same name. For example, both the java.awt package
and the java.util package contain a class named List. If you import both java.awt.* and
java.util.*, the simple name List will be ambiguous. If you try to declare a variable of
type List, you will get a compiler error message about an ambiguous class name. You can
still use both classes in your program: Use the full name of the class, either java.awt.List or
java.util.List. Another solution, of course, is to use import to import the individual classes
you need, instead of importing entire packages.
Because the package java.lang is so fundamental, all the classes in java.lang are
automatically imported into every program. It’s as if every program began with the statement
“import java.lang.*;”. This is why we have been able to use the class name String instead
of java.lang.String, and Math.sqrt() instead of java.lang.Math.sqrt(). It would still,
however, be perfectly legal to use the longer forms of the names.
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 178
Programmers can create new packages. Suppose that you want some classes that you are
writing to be in a package named utilities. Then the source code files that defines those
classes must begin with the line
package utilities;
This would come even before any import directive in that file. Furthermore, the source code
file would be placed in a folder with the same name as the package, “utilities” in this example.
And a class that is in a subpackage must be in a subfolder. For example, a class in a package
named utilities.net would be in folder named “net” inside a folder named “utilities”. A
class that is in a package automatically has access to other classes in the same package; that
is, a class doesn’t have to import classes from the package in which it is defined.
In projects that define large numbers of classes, it makes sense to organize those classes
into packages. It also makes sense for programmers to create new packages as toolboxes that
provide functionality and APIs for dealing with areas not covered in the standard Java API.
(And in fact such “toolmaking” programmers often have more prestige than the applications
programmers who use their tools.)
However, with just a couple of exceptions such as class TextIO in package textio, the classes
written for this book are not in packages. For the purposes of this book, you need to know
about packages mainly so that you will be able to import TextIO and classes from the standard
packages. The standard packages are always available to the programs that you write. You
might wonder where the standard classes are actually located. Again, that can depend to some
extent on the version of Java that you are using, but they will be part of the installed JDK.
Although we won’t be creating packages explicitly, every class is actually part of a package.
If a class is not specifically placed in a package, then it is put in something called the default
package, which has no name. Almost all the examples that you see in this book are in the
default package.
a small part of the standard runtime. Modularization makes it possible to construct smaller,
custom JREs that contain only the modules that are required by an application. The JDK
includes a jlink command for making custom runtimes, which can include modules that define
an application as well as the standard modules that are required to run that application.
That runtime can then be distributed as a standalone application that can be executed even
by people who have not installed a JDK on their computer. But just as for the JDK itself,
different versions of the custom runtime will be needed for Windows, for MacOS, and for Linux.
Furthermore, when security updates are made to the JDK, they are not automatically applied
to custom runtimes, so the application developer takes on the responsibility of updating custom
runtimes. Once again, this is really only useful for fairly large applications.
In a JDK for Java 9 or later, compiled class files from the standard modules are stored
together in a file named modules inside a directory named lib in the main JDK directory. This
is a so-called “jimage file,” and there is a command-line tool named jimage for working with
such files. If you use the jlink tool to create a custom runtime, part of what it does is to
create a custom modules file containing just the modules that are needed by the runtime. In
the JDK 17 on my Linux computer, modules is a 127 megabyte file containing 26401 classes
in 835 packages in 70 modules. The JDK directory also has a subdirectory named jmods that
contains the modules in another form. However, it is not required for compiling and running
programs and, as far as I can tell, is meant mostly for use by jlink.
Modules in the JDK include, for example, java.base (which contains the basic modules such
as java.lang and java.util) and java.desktop (which include packages for the Swing GUI
toolkit). The API documentation for modular versions of Java is divided into modules, then
into packages, and finally into classes. This makes the documentation harder to browse than
in older versions of Java. However, the documentation web site does have an effective search
feature. As I write this, the documentation for Java 17:
https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/17/docs/api/index.html
A class can be defined outside of any module, and it is possible for that class to use packages
from modules, provided that those packages are exported by the modules where they are defined.
In particular, a programmer can use classes from the JDK without ever thinking about modules
or knowing that they exist. This applies to all the programs in this book.
Aside from the basic background information in this section, this textbook does not cover
modules.
4.6.5 Javadoc
To use an API effectively, you need good documentation for it. The documentation for most
Java APIs is prepared using a system called Javadoc. For example, this system is used to
prepare the documentation for Java’s standard packages. And almost everyone who creates a
toolbox in Java publishes Javadoc documentation for it.
Javadoc documentation is prepared from special comments that are placed in the Java
source code file. Recall that one type of Java comment begins with /* and ends with */. A
Javadoc comment takes the same form, but it begins with /** rather than simply /*. You have
already seen comments of this form in many of the examples in this book.
Note that a Javadoc comment must be placed just before the subroutine that it is
commenting on. This rule is always followed. You can have Javadoc comments for subroutines,
for member variables, and for classes. The Javadoc comment always immediately precedes
the thing it is commenting on.
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 180
Like any comment, a Javadoc comment is ignored by the computer when the file is compiled.
But there is a tool called javadoc that reads Java source code files, extracts any Javadoc
comments that it finds, and creates a set of Web pages containing the comments in a nicely
formatted, interlinked form. By default, javadoc will only collect information about public
classes, subroutines, and member variables, but it allows the option of creating documentation
for non-public things as well. If javadoc doesn’t find any Javadoc comment for something, it
will construct one, but the comment will contain only basic information such as the name and
type of a member variable or the name, return type, and parameter list of a subroutine. This
is syntactic information. To add information about semantics and pragmatics, you have to
write a Javadoc comment.
As an example, you can look at the documentation Web page for TextIO. The documentation
page was created by applying the javadoc tool to the source code file, TextIO.java. If you
have downloaded the on-line version of this book, the documentation can be found in the
TextIO Javadoc directory, or you can find a link to it in the on-line version of this section.
In a Javadoc comment, the *’s at the start of each line are optional. The javadoc tool
will remove them. In addition to normal text, the comment can contain certain special codes.
For one thing, the comment can contain HTML mark-up commands. HTML is the language
that is used to create web pages, and Javadoc comments are meant to be shown on web pages.
The javadoc tool will copy any HTML commands in the comments to the web pages that it
creates. The book will not teach you HTML, but as an example, you can add <p> to indicate
the start of a new paragraph. (Generally, in the absence of HTML commands, blank lines and
extra spaces in the comment are ignored. Furthermore, the characters & and < have special
meaning in HTML and should not be used in Javadoc comments except with those meanings;
they can be written as & and <.)
In addition to HTML commands, Javadoc comments can include doc tags, which are
processed as commands by the javadoc tool. A doc tag has a name that begins with the
character @. I will only discuss four tags: @author, @param, @return, and @throws. The
@author tag can be used only for a class, and should be followed by the name of the author.
The other three tags are used in Javadoc comments for a subroutine to provide information
about its parameters, its return value, and the exceptions that it might throw. These tags
must be placed at the end of the comment, after any description of the subroutine itself. The
syntax for using them is:
@param hparameter-name i hdescription-of-parameter i
@return hdescription-of-return-value i
@throws hexception-class-name i hdescription-of-exception i
The hdescriptionsi can extend over several lines. The description ends at the next doc tag or at
the end of the comment. You can include a @param tag for every parameter of the subroutine
and a @throws for as many types of exception as you want to document. You should have
a @return tag only for a non-void subroutine. These tags do not have to be given in any
particular order.
Here is an example that doesn’t do anything exciting but that does use all three types of
doc tag:
/**
* This subroutine computes the area of a rectangle, given its width
* and its height. The length and the width should be positive numbers.
* @param width the length of one side of the rectangle
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 181
Note that the static import directive requires a hpackage-namei, even for classes in the
standard package java.lang. One consequence of this is that you can’t do a static import from
a class in the default package.
/**
* Sets the color of one of the rectangles in the window.
*
* Precondition: row and col are in the valid range of row and column numbers,
* and r, g, and b are in the range 0 to 255, inclusive.
* Postcondition: The color of the rectangle in row number row and column
* number col has been set to the color specified by r, g,
* and b. r gives the amount of red in the color with 0
* representing no red and 255 representing the maximum
* possible amount of red. The larger the value of r, the
* more red in the color. g and b work similarly for the
* green and blue color components.
*/
public static void setColor(int row, int col, int r, int g, int b)
/**
* Gets the red component of the color of one of the rectangles.
*
* Precondition: row and col are in the valid range of row and column numbers.
* Postcondition: The red component of the color of the specified rectangle is
* returned as an integer in the range 0 to 255 inclusive.
*/
public static int getRed(int row, int col)
/**
* Like getRed, but returns the green component of the color.
*/
public static int getGreen(int row, int col)
/**
* Like getRed, but returns the blue component of the color.
*/
public static int getBlue(int row, int col)
/**
* Tests whether the mosaic window is currently open.
*
* Precondition: None.
* Postcondition: The return value is true if the window is open when this
* function is called, and it is false if the window is
* closed.
*/
public static boolean isOpen()
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 185
/**
* Inserts a delay in the program (to regulate the speed at which the colors
* are changed, for example).
*
* Precondition: milliseconds is a positive integer.
* Postcondition: The program has paused for at least the specified number
* of milliseconds, where one second is equal to 1000
* milliseconds.
*/
public static void delay(int milliseconds)
Remember that these subroutines are static members of the Mosaic class, so when they are
called from outside Mosaic, the name of the class must be included as part of the name of the
routine. For example, we’ll have to use the name Mosaic.open rather than simply open.
You’ll notice that the comments on the subroutine don’t specify what happens when the
preconditions are not met. Although a subroutine is not really obligated by its contract to
do anything particular in that case, it would be good to know what happens. For example,
if the precondition, “row and col are in the valid range of row and column numbers,” on
the setColor() or getRed() routine is violated, an IllegalArgumentException will be thrown.
Knowing that fact would allow you to write programs that catch and handle the exception,
and it would be good to document it with a @throws doc tag in the Javadoc comment. Other
questions remain about the behavior of the subroutines. For example, what happens if you call
Mosaic.open() and there is already a mosaic window open on the screen? (In fact, the old one
will be closed, and a new one will be created..) It’s difficult to fully document the behavior of
a piece of software—sometimes, you just have to experiment or look at the full source code.
∗ ∗ ∗
My idea for a program is to use the Mosaic class as the basis for a neat animation. I want
to fill the window with randomly colored squares, and then randomly change the colors in a
loop that continues as long as the window is open. “Randomly change the colors” could mean
a lot of different things, but after thinking for a while, I decide it would be interesting to have
a “disturbance” that wanders randomly around the window, changing the color of each square
that it encounters. Here’s a picture showing what the contents of the window might look like
at one point in time:
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 186
With basic routines for manipulating the window as a foundation, I can turn to the specific
problem at hand. A basic outline for my program is
Open a Mosaic window
Fill window with random colors
Move around, changing squares at random
Filling the window with random colors seems like a nice coherent task that I can work on
separately, so let’s decide to write a separate subroutine to do it. The third step can be
expanded a bit more, into the steps: Start in the middle of the window, then keep moving
to new squares and changing the color of those squares. This should continue as long as the
mosaic window is still open. Thus we can refine the algorithm to:
Open a Mosaic window
Fill window with random colors
Set the current position to the middle square in the window
As long as the mosaic window is open:
Randomly change color of the square at the current position
Move current position up, down, left, or right, at random
I need to represent the current position in some way. That can be done with two int variables
named currentRow and currentColumn that hold the row number and the column number of
the square where the disturbance is currently located. I’ll use 16 rows and 20 columns of squares
in my mosaic, so setting the current position to be in the center means setting currentRow to 8
and currentColumn to 10. I already have a subroutine, Mosaic.open(), to open the window.
To keep the main routine simple, I decide that I will write two more subroutines of my own to
carry out the two tasks in the while loop. The algorithm can then be written in Java as:
Mosaic.open(16,20,25,25)
fillWithRandomColors();
currentRow = 8; // Middle row, halfway down the window.
currentColumn = 10; // Middle column.
while ( Mosaic.isOpen() ) { // Program ends when user closes the window.
changeToRandomColor(currentRow, currentColumn);
randomMove();
}
With the proper wrapper, this is essentially the main() routine of my program. It turns out I
decided to make one small modification after running the completed program: To prevent the
animation from running too fast, I added the line “Mosaic.delay(10);” to the while loop.
The main() routine is taken care of, but to complete the program, I still have to write the
subroutines fillWithRandomColors(), changeToRandomColor(int,int), and randomMove().
Writing each of these subroutines is a separate, small task. The fillWithRandomColors()
routine is defined by the postcondition that “each of the rectangles in the mosaic has been
changed to a random color.” Pseudocode for an algorithm to accomplish this task can be given
as:
For each row:
For each column:
set the square in that row and column to a random color
“For each row” and “for each column” can be implemented as for loops. We’ve already
planned to write a subroutine changeToRandomColor that can be used to set the color. (The
possibility of reusing subroutines in several places is one of the big payoffs of using them!) So,
fillWithRandomColors() can be written in proper Java as:
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 187
currentColumn--;
if (currentColumn < 0)
currentColumn = 19;
}
}
} // end fillWithRandomColors
/**
* Changes one square to a new randomly selected color.
* Precondition: The specified rowNum and colNum are in the valid range
* of row and column numbers.
* Postcondition: The square in the specified row and column has
* been set to a random color.
* @param rowNum the row number of the square, counting rows down
* from 0 at the top
* @param colNum the column number of the square, counting columns over
* from 0 at the left
*/
static void changeToRandomColor(int rowNum, int colNum) {
int red = (int)(256*Math.random()); // Choose random levels in range
int green = (int)(256*Math.random()); // 0 to 255 for red, green,
int blue = (int)(256*Math.random()); // and blue color components.
Mosaic.setColor(rowNum,colNum,red,green,blue);
} // end changeToRandomColor
/**
* Move the disturbance.
* Precondition: The global variables currentRow and currentColumn
* are within the legal range of row and column numbers.
* Postcondition: currentRow or currentColumn is changed to one of the
* neighboring positions in the grid -- up, down, left, or
* right from the current position. If this moves the
* position outside of the grid, then it is moved to the
* opposite edge of the grid.
*/
static void randomMove() {
int directionNum; // Randomly set to 0, 1, 2, or 3 to choose direction.
directionNum = (int)(4*Math.random());
switch (directionNum) {
case 0 -> { // move up
currentRow--;
if (currentRow < 0) // CurrentRow is outside the mosaic;
currentRow = 15; // move it to the opposite edge.
}
case 1 -> { // move right
currentColumn++;
if (currentColumn >= 20)
currentColumn = 0;
}
case 2 -> { // move down
currentRow++;
if (currentRow >= 16)
currentRow = 0;
}
case 3 -> { // move left
currentColumn--;
if (currentColumn < 0)
currentColumn = 19;
}
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 190
}
} // end randomMove
} // end class RandomMosaicWalk
{
int i;
for ( i = 0; i < 10; i++ ) {
System.out.println(i);
}
}
A member variable can also be initialized at the point where it is declared, just as for a
local variable. For example:
public class Bank {
private static double interestRate = 0.05;
private static int maxWithdrawal = 200;
.
. // More variables and subroutines.
.
}
A static member variable is created as soon as the class is loaded by the Java interpreter, and
the initialization is also done at that time. In the case of member variables, this is not simply
an abbreviation for a declaration followed by an assignment statement. Declaration statements
are the only type of statement that can occur outside of a subroutine. Assignment statements
cannot, so the following is illegal:
public class Bank {
private static double interestRate;
interestRate = 0.05; // ILLEGAL:
. // Can’t be outside a subroutine!:
.
.
Because of this, declarations of member variables often include initial values. In fact, as
mentioned in Subsection 4.2.4, if no initial value is provided for a member variable, then a
default initial value is used. For example, when declaring an integer member variable, count,
“static int count;” is equivalent to “static int count = 0;”.
Even array variables can be initialized. An array contains several elements, not just a single
value. To initialize an array variable, you can provide a list of values, separated by commas,
and enclosed between a pair of braces. For example:
int[] smallPrimes = { 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29 };
In this statement, an array of int of length 10 is created and filled with the values in the list.
The length of the array is determined by the number of items in the list.
Note that this syntax for initializing arrays cannot be used in assignment statements. It
can only be used in a declaration statement at the time when the array variable is declared.
It is also possible to initialize an array variable with an array created using the new operator
(which can also be used in assignment statements). For example:
String[] nameList = new String[100];
but in that case, of course, all the array elements will have their default value.
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 192
.
}
.
. // More variables and subroutines.
.
} // end Game
In the statements that make up the body of the playGame() subroutine, the name “count”
refers to the local variable. In the rest of the Game class, “count” refers to the member
variable (unless hidden by other local variables or parameters named count). However, the
member variable named count can also be referred to by the full name Game.count. Usually,
the full name is only used outside the class where count is defined. However, there is no
rule against using it inside the class. The full name, Game.count, can be used inside the
playGame() subroutine to refer to the member variable instead of the local variable. So, the
full scope rule is that the scope of a static member variable includes the entire class in which
it is defined, but where the simple name of the member variable is hidden by a local variable
or formal parameter name, the member variable must be referred to by its full name of the
form hclassNamei.hvariableNamei. (Scope rules for non-static members are similar to those
for static members, except that, as we shall see, non-static members cannot be used in static
subroutines.)
The scope of a formal parameter of a subroutine is the block that makes up the body of the
subroutine. The scope of a local variable extends from the declaration statement that defines
the variable to the end of the block in which the declaration occurs. As noted above, it is
possible to declare a loop control variable of a for loop in the for statement, as in “for (int
i=0; i < 10; i++)”. The scope of such a declaration is considered as a special case: It is
valid only within the for statement and does not extend to the remainder of the block that
contains the for statement.
It is not legal to redefine the name of a formal parameter or local variable within its scope,
even in a nested block. For example, this is not allowed:
void badSub(int y) {
int x;
while (y > 0) {
int x; // ERROR: x is already defined.
.
.
.
}
}
In many languages, this would be legal; the declaration of x in the while loop would hide
the original declaration. It is not legal in Java; however, once the block in which a variable is
declared ends, its name does become available for reuse in Java. For example:
void goodSub(int y) {
while (y > 10) {
int x;
.
.
.
// The scope of x ends here.
}
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 197
while (y > 0) {
int x; // OK: Previous declaration of x has expired.
.
.
.
}
}
You might wonder whether local variable names can hide subroutine names. This can’t
happen, for a reason that might be surprising. There is no rule that variables and subroutines
have to have different names. The computer can always tell whether a name refers to a variable
or to a subroutine, because a subroutine name is always followed by a left parenthesis. It’s
perfectly legal to have a variable called count and a subroutine called count in the same class.
(This is one reason why I often write subroutine names with parentheses, as when I talk about
the main() routine. It’s a good idea to think of the parentheses as part of the name.) Even
more is true: It’s legal to reuse class names to name variables and subroutines. The syntax
rules of Java guarantee that the computer can always tell when a name is being used as a class
name. A class name is a type, and so it can be used to declare variables and formal parameters
and to specify the return type of a function. This means that you could legally have a class
called Insanity in which you declare a function
static Insanity Insanity( Insanity Insanity ) { ... }
The first Insanity is the return type of the function. The second is the function name, the
third is the type of the formal parameter, and the fourth is the name of the formal parameter.
However, please remember that not everything that is possible is a good idea!
Exercises 198
1. To “capitalize” a string means to change the first letter of each word in the string to upper (solution)
case (if it is not already upper case). For example, a capitalized version of “Now is the time
to act!” is “Now Is The Time To Act!”. Write a subroutine named printCapitalized
that will print a capitalized version of a string to standard output. The string to be printed
should be a parameter to the subroutine. Test your subroutine with a main() routine that
gets a line of input from the user and applies the subroutine to it.
Note that a letter is the first letter of a word if it is not immediately preceded in the
string by another letter. Recall from Exercise 3.4 that there is a standard boolean-valued
function Character.isLetter(char) that can be used to test whether its parameter is a
letter. There is another standard char-valued function, Character.toUpperCase(char),
that returns a capitalized version of the single character passed to it as a parameter. That
is, if the parameter is a letter, it returns the upper-case version. If the parameter is not a
letter, it just returns a copy of the parameter.
2. The hexadecimal digits are the ordinary, base-10 digits ’0’ through ’9’ plus the letters ’A’ (solution)
through ’F’. In the hexadecimal system, these digits represent the values 0 through 15,
respectively. Write a function named hexValue that uses a switch statement to find the
hexadecimal value of a given character. The character is a parameter to the function, and
its hexadecimal value is the return value of the function. You should count lower case
letters ’a’ through ’f’ as having the same value as the corresponding upper case letters.
If the parameter is not one of the legal hexadecimal digits, return -1 as the value of the
function.
A hexadecimal integer is a sequence of hexadecimal digits, such as 34A7, ff8, 174204, or
FADE. If str is a string containing a hexadecimal integer, then the corresponding base-10
integer can be computed as follows:
value = 0;
for ( i = 0; i < str.length(); i++ )
value = value*16 + hexValue( str.charAt(i) );
Of course, this is not valid if str contains any characters that are not hexadecimal digits.
Write a program that reads a string from the user. If all the characters in the string are
hexadecimal digits, print out the corresponding base-10 value. If not, print out an error
message.
3. Write a function that simulates rolling a pair of dice until the total on the dice comes up (solution)
to be a given number. The number that you are rolling for is a parameter to the function.
The number of times you have to roll the dice is the return value of the function. The
parameter should be one of the possible totals: 2, 3, . . . , 12. The function should throw
an IllegalArgumentException if this is not the case. Use your function in a program that
computes and prints the number of rolls it takes to get snake eyes. (Snake eyes means
that the total showing on the dice is 2.)
4. This exercise builds on Exercise 4.3. Every time you roll the dice repeatedly, trying to (solution)
get a given total, the number of rolls it takes can be different. The question naturally
arises, what’s the average number of rolls to get a given total? Write a function that
performs the experiment of rolling to get a given total 10000 times. The desired total is
Exercises 199
a parameter to the subroutine. The average number of rolls is the return value. Each
individual experiment should be done by calling the function you wrote for Exercise 4.3.
Now, write a main program that will call your function once for each of the possible totals
(2, 3, ..., 12). It should make a table of the results, something like:
Total On Dice Average Number of Rolls
------------- -----------------------
2 35.8382
3 18.0607
. .
. .
5. This exercise asks you to write a few lambda expressions and a function that returns a (solution)
lambda expression as its value. Suppose that a function interface ArrayProcessor is defined
as
public interface ArrayProcessor {
double apply( double[] array );
}
Write a class that defines four public static final variables of type ArrayProcessor
that process an array in the following ways: find the maximum value in the array, find the
minimum value in an array, find the sum of the values in the array, and find the average
of the values in the array. In each case, the value of the variable should be given by a
lambda expression. The class should also define a function
public static ArrayProcessor counter( double value ) { ...
This function should return an ArrayProcessor that counts the number of times that value
occurs in an array. The return value should be given as a lambda expression.
The class should have a main() routine that tests your work. The program that you
write for this exercise will need access to the file ArrayProcessor.java, which defines the
functional interface.
6. The sample program RandomMosaicWalk.java from Section 4.7 shows a “disturbance” (solution)
that wanders around a grid of colored squares. When the disturbance visits a square,
the color of that square is changed. Here’s an idea for a variation on that program. In
the new version, all the squares start out with the default color, black. Every time the
disturbance visits a square, a small amount is added to the green component of the color
of that square. The result will be a visually interesting effect, as the path followed by the
disturbance gradually turns a brighter and brighter green.
Write a subroutine that will add 25 to the green component of one of the squares in the
mosaic. (But don’t let the green component go over 255, since that’s the largest legal value
for a color component.) The row and column numbers of the square should be given as
parameters to the subroutine. Recall that you can discover the current green component
of the square in row r and column c with the function call Mosaic.getGreen(r,c). Use
your subroutine as a substitute for the changeToRandomColor() subroutine in the program
RandomMosaicWalk2.java. (This is the improved version of the program from Section 4.8
that uses named constants for the number of rows, number of columns, and square size.)
Set the number of rows and the number of columns to 80. Set the square size to 5.
By default, the rectangles in the mosaic have a “3D” appearance and a gray border
that makes them look nicer in the random walk program. But for this program, you
Exercises 200
want to turn off that effect. To do so, call Mosaic.setUse3DEffect(false) in the main
program.
Don’t forget that you will need Mosaic.java and MosaicCanvas.java to compile and run
your program, since they define non-standard classes that are required by the program.
7. For this exercise, you will do something even more interesting with the Mosaic class that (solution)
was discussed in Section 4.7. (Again, don’t forget that you will need Mosaic.java and
MosaicCanvas.java to compile and run your program.)
The program that you write for this exercise should start by filling a mosaic with
random colors. Then repeat the following until the user closes the mosaic window: Select
one of the rectangles in the mosaic at random. Then select one of the neighboring
rectangles—above it, below it, to the left of it, or to the right of it. Copy the color
of the originally selected rectangle to the selected neighbor, so that the two rectangles
now have the same color.
As this process is repeated over and over, it becomes more and more likely that
neighboring squares will have the same color. The result is to build up larger color
patches. On the other hand, once the last square of a given color disappears, there is
no way for that color to ever reappear. (Extinction is forever!) If you let the program run
long enough, eventually the entire mosaic will be one uniform color.
8. Write a program that administers a basic addition quiz to the user. There should be (solution)
ten questions. Each question is a simple addition problem such as 17 + 42, where the
numbers in the problem are chosen at random (and are not too big). The program should
ask the user all ten questions and get the user’s answers. After asking all the questions, the
user should print each question again, with the user’s answer. If the user got the answer
right, the program should say so; if not, the program should give the correct answer. At
the end, tell the user their score on the quiz, where each correct answer counts for ten
points.
The program should use three subroutines, one to create the quiz, one to administer
the quiz, and one to grade the quiz. It can use three arrays, with three global variables
of type int[ ], to refer to the arrays. The first array holds the first number from every
question, the second holds the second number from every questions, and the third holds
the user’s answers.
Quiz 201
Quiz on Chapter 4
(answers)
1. A “black box” has an interface and an implementation. Explain what is meant by the
terms interface and implementation.
3. Briefly explain how subroutines can be useful in the top-down design of programs.
4. Discuss the concept of parameters. What are parameters for? What is the difference
between formal parameters and actual parameters?
5. Give two different reasons for using named constants (declared with the final modifier).
8. Suppose that SupplyInt is a functional interface that defines the method public int get().
Write a lambda expression of type SupplyInt that gets a random integer in the range 1 to
6 inclusive. Write another lambda expression of type SupplyInt that gets an int by asking
the user to enter an integer and then returning the user’s response.
9. Write a subroutine named “stars” that will output a line of stars to standard output. (A
star is the character “*”.) The number of stars should be given as a parameter to the
subroutine. Use a for loop. For example, the command “stars(20)” would output
********************
10. Write a main() routine that uses the subroutine that you wrote for Question 7 to output
10 lines of stars with 1 star in the first line, 2 stars in the second line, and so on, as shown
below.
*
**
***
****
*****
******
*******
********
*********
**********
Quiz 202
11. Write a function named countChars that has a String and a char as parameters. The
function should count the number of times the character occurs in the string, and it should
return the result as the value of the function.
12. Write a subroutine with three parameters of type int. The subroutine should determine
which of its parameters is smallest. The value of the smallest parameter should be returned
as the value of the subroutine.
13. Write a function that finds the average of the first N elements of an array of type double.
The array and N are parameters to the subroutine.
14. Explain the purpose of the following function, and explain how it works:
static int[] stripZeros( int[] list ) {
int count = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < list.length; i++) {
if ( list[i] != 0 )
count++;
}
int[] newList;
newList = new int[count];
int j = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < list.length; i++) {
if ( list[i] != 0 ) {
newList[j] = list[i];
j++;
}
}
return newList;
}
Chapter 5
Whereas a subroutine represents a single task, an object can encapsulate both data (in
the form of instance variables) and a number of different tasks or “behaviors” related to that
data (in the form of instance methods). Therefore objects provide another, more sophisticated
type of structure that can be used to help manage the complexity of large programs.
The first four sections of this chapter introduce the basic things you need to know to work
with objects and to define simple classes. The remaining sections cover more advanced topics;
you might not understand them fully the first time through. In particular, Section 5.5 covers the
most central ideas of object-oriented programming: inheritance and polymorphism. However,
in this textbook, we will generally use these ideas in a limited form, by creating independent
classes and building on existing classes rather than by designing entire hierarchies of classes
from scratch.
203
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 204
often referred to as methods. Now that we are starting to use objects, I will be using the term
“method” more often than “subroutine.”
class UVWXYata
name:
age:
An important point is that the static member variables are part of the representation of
the class in memory. Their full names, UserData.name and UserData.age, use the name of
the class, since they are part of the class. When we use class UserData to represent the user
of the program, there can only be one user, since we only have memory space to store data
about one user. Note that the class, UserData, and the variables it contains exist as long as
the program runs. (That is essentially what it means to be “static.”) Now, consider a similar
class that includes some non-static variables:
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 205
class PlayerData {
static int playerCount;
String name;
int age;
}
I’ve also included a static variable in the PlayerData class. Here, the static variable
playerCount is stored as part of the representation of the class in memory. Its full name
is PlayerData.playerCount, and there is only one of it, which exists as long as the program
runs. However, the other two variables in the class definition are non-static. There is no such
variable as PlayerData.name or PlayerData.age, since non-static variables do not become
part of the class itself. But the PlayerData class can be used to create objects. There can be
many objects created using the class, and each one will have its own variables called name and
age. This is what it means for the non-static parts of the class to be a template for objects:
Every object gets its own copy of the non-static part of the class. We can visualize the situation
in the computer’s memory after several objects have been created like this:
class PlayerData
playerCount: 3
(constructor)
instanceof PlayerData
name: age:
age:
instanceof PlayerData
name:
age:
Note that the static variable playerCount is part of the class, and there is only one copy.
On the other hand, every object contains a name and an age. An object that is created from
a class is called an instance of that class, and as the picture shows, every object “knows”
which class was used to create it. I’ve shown class PlayerData as containing something called a
“constructor;” the constructor is a subroutine that creates objects.
Now there can be many “players,” because we can make new objects to represent new
players on demand. A program might use the PlayerData class to store information about
multiple players in a game. Each player has a name and an age. When a player joins the game,
a new PlayerData object can be created to represent that player. If a player leaves the game,
the PlayerData object that represents that player can be destroyed. A system of objects in
the program is being used to dynamically model what is happening in the game. You can’t
do this with static variables! “Dynamic” is the opposite of “static.”
∗ ∗ ∗
An object that is created using a class is said to be an instance of that class. We will
sometimes say that the object belongs to the class. The variables that the object contains are
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 206
called instance variables. The methods (that is, subroutines) that the object contains are
called instance methods. For example, if the PlayerData class, as defined above, is used to
create an object, then that object is an instance of the PlayerData class, and name and age
are instance variables in the object.
My examples here don’t include any methods, but methods work similarly to variables.
Static methods are part of the class; non-static, or instance, methods become part of objects
created from the class. It’s not literally true that each object contains its own copy of the actual
compiled code for an instance method. But logically an instance method is part of the object,
and I will continue to say that the object “contains” the instance method.
Note that you should distinguish between the source code for the class, and the class itself
(in memory). The source code determines both the class and the objects that are created from
that class. The “static” definitions in the source code specify the things that are part of the
class itself (in the computer’s memory), whereas the non-static definitions in the source code
specify things that will become part of every instance object that is created from the class.
By the way, static member variables and static member subroutines in a class are sometimes
called class variables and class methods, since they belong to the class itself, rather than
to instances of that class.
As you can see, the static and the non-static portions of a class are very different things and
serve very different purposes. Many classes contain only static members, or only non-static,
and we will see only a few examples of classes that contain a mixture of the two.
Student std;
However, declaring a variable does not create an object! This is an important point, which is
related to this Very Important Fact:
You should think of objects as floating around independently in the computer’s memory. In
fact, there is a special portion of memory called the heap where objects live. Instead of holding
an object itself, a variable holds the information necessary to find the object in memory. This
information is called a reference or pointer to the object. In effect, a reference to an object
is the address of the memory location where the object is stored. When you use a variable of
object type, the computer uses the reference in the variable to find the actual object.
In a program, objects are created using an operator called new, which creates an object and
returns a reference to that object. (In fact, the new operator calls a special subroutine called
a “constructor” in the class.) For example, assuming that std is a variable of type Student,
declared as above, the assignment statement
std = new Student();
would create a new object which is an instance of the class Student, and it would store a
reference to that object in the variable std. The value of the variable is a reference, or pointer,
to the object. The object itself is somewhere in the heap. It is not quite true, then, to say that
the object is the “value of the variable std” (though sometimes it is hard to avoid using this
terminology). It is certainly not at all true to say that the object is “stored in the variable
std.” The proper terminology is that “the variable std refers to or points to the object,”
and I will try to stick to that terminology as much as possible. If I ever say something like “std
is an object,” you should read it as meaning “std is a variable that refers to an object.”
So, suppose that the variable std refers to an object that is an instance of class Student.
That object contains instance variables name, test1, test2, and test3. These instance
variables can be referred to as std.name, std.test1, std.test2, and std.test3. This follows
the usual naming convention that when B is part of A, then the full name of B is A.B. For
example, a program might include the lines
System.out.println("Hello, " + std.name + ". Your test grades are:");
System.out.println(std.test1);
System.out.println(std.test2);
System.out.println(std.test3);
This would output the name and test grades from the object to which std refers. Similarly,
std can be used to call the getAverage() instance method in the object by saying
std.getAverage(). To print out the student’s average, you could say:
System.out.println( "Your average is " + std.getAverage() );
More generally, you could use std.name any place where a variable of type String is legal.
You can use it in expressions. You can assign a value to it. You can even use it to call subroutines
from the String class. For example, std.name.length() is the number of characters in the
student’s name.
It is possible for a variable like std, whose type is given by a class, to refer to no object at
all. We say in this case that std holds a null pointer or null reference. The null pointer is
written in Java as: null. You can store a null reference in the variable std by saying
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 208
std = null;
null is an actual value that is stored in the variable, not a pointer to something else. It is not
correct to say that the variable “points to null”; in fact, the variable is null. For example, you
can test whether the value of std is null by testing
if (std == null) . . .
If the value of a variable is null, then it is, of course, illegal to refer to instance variables
or instance methods through that variable—since there is no object, and hence no instance
variables to refer to! For example, if the value of the variable std is null, then it would be
illegal to refer to std.test1. If your program attempts to use a null pointer illegally in this
way, the result is an error called a null pointer exception. When this happens while the
program is running, an exception of type NullPointerException is thrown.
Let’s look at a sequence of statements that work with objects:
Student std, std1, // Declare four variables of
std2, std3; // type Student.
std = new Student(); // Create a new object belonging
// to the class Student, and
// store a reference to that
// object in the variable std.
std1 = new Student(); // Create a second Student object
// and store a reference to
// it in the variable std1.
std2 = std1; // Copy the reference value in std1
// into the variable std2.
std3 = null; // Store a null reference in the
// variable std3.
std.name = "John Smith"; // Set values of some instance variables.
std1.name = "Mary Jones";
// (Other instance variables have default
// initial values of zero.)
After the computer executes these statements, the situation in the computer’s memory looks
like this:
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 209
std:
std1:
std2:
std3: null
name: name:
[^`[bd 0 test1: 0
[^`[ed 0 test2: 0
[^`[fd 0 test3: 0
g^[hverage() getAverage()
In this picture, when a variable contains a reference to an object, the value of that variable is
shown as an arrow pointing to the object. Note, by the way, that the Strings are objects! The
variable std3, with a value of null, doesn’t point anywhere. The arrows from std1 and std2
both point to the same object. This illustrates a Very Important Point:
When the assignment “std2 = std1;” was executed, no new object was created. Instead, std2
was set to refer to the very same object that std1 refers to. This is to be expected, since the
assignment statement just copies the value that is stored in std1 into std2, and that value
is a pointer, not an object. But this has some consequences that might be surprising. For
example, std1.name and std2.name are two different names for the same variable, namely
the instance variable in the object that both std1 and std2 refer to. After the string "Mary
Jones" is assigned to the variable std1.name, it is also true that the value of std2.name is
"Mary Jones". There is a potential for a lot of confusion here, but you can help protect yourself
from it if you keep telling yourself, “The object is not in the variable. The variable just holds
a pointer to the object.”
You can test objects for equality and inequality using the operators == and !=, but
here again, the semantics are different from what you are used to. When you make a
test “if (std1 == std2)”, you are testing whether the values stored in std1 and std2
are the same. But the values that you are comparing are references to objects; they are
not objects. So, you are testing whether std1 and std2 refer to the same object. This
is fine, if it’s what you want to do. But sometimes, what you want to check is whether
the instance variables in the objects have the same values. To do that, you would need to
ask whether “std1.test1 == std2.test1 && std1.test2 == std2.test2 && std1.test3
== std2.test3 && std1.name.equals(std2.name)”.
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 210
I’ve remarked previously that Strings are objects, and I’ve shown the strings "Mary Jones"
and "John Smith" as objects in the above illustration. (Strings are special objects, treated
by Java in a special way, and I haven’t attempted to show the actual internal structure of the
String objects.) Since strings are objects, a variable of type String can only hold a reference
to a string, not the string itself. This explains why using the == operator to test strings for
equality is not a good idea. Suppose that greeting is a variable of type String, and that
it refers to the string "Hello". Then would the test greeting == "Hello" be true? Well,
maybe, maybe not. The variable greeting and the String literal "Hello" each refer to a string
that contains the characters H-e-l-l-o. But the strings could still be different objects, that just
happen to contain the same characters; in that case, greeting == "Hello" would be false.
The function greeting.equals("Hello") tests whether greeting and "Hello" contain the
same characters, which is almost certainly the question you want to ask. The expression
greeting == "Hello" tests whether greeting and "Hello" contain the same characters
stored in the same memory location. (Of course, a String variable such as greeting
can also contain the special value null, and it would make sense to use the == operator to test
whether “greeting == null”.)
∗ ∗ ∗
The fact that variables hold references to objects, not objects themselves, has a couple of
other consequences that you should be aware of. They follow logically, if you just keep in mind
the basic fact that the object is not stored in the variable. The object is somewhere else; the
variable points to it.
Suppose that a variable that refers to an object is declared to be final. This means that
the value stored in the variable can never be changed, once the variable has been initialized.
The value stored in the variable is a reference to the object. So the variable will continue to
refer to the same object as long as the variable exists. However, this does not prevent the data
in the object from changing. The variable is final, not the object. It’s perfectly legal to say
final Student stu = new Student();
stu.name = "John Doe"; // Change data in the object;
// The value stored in stu is not changed!
// It still refers to the same object.
Next, suppose that obj is a variable that refers to an object. Let’s consider what happens
when obj is passed as an actual parameter to a subroutine. The value of obj is assigned to
a formal parameter in the subroutine, and the subroutine is executed. The subroutine has no
power to change the value stored in the variable, obj. It only has a copy of that value. However,
the value is a reference to an object. Since the subroutine has a reference to the object, it can
change the data stored in the object. After the subroutine ends, obj still points to the same
object, but the data stored in the object might have changed. Suppose x is a variable of type
int and stu is a variable of type Student. Compare:
void dontChange(int z) { void change(Student s) {
z = 42; s.name = "Fred";
} }
The lines: The lines:
x = 17; stu.name = "Jane";
dontChange(x); change(stu);
System.out.println(x); System.out.println(stu.name);
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 211
5.2.2 Constructors
Objects are created with the operator, new. For example, a program that wants to use a
PairOfDice object could say:
PairOfDice dice; // Declare a variable of type PairOfDice.
dice = new PairOfDice(); // Construct a new object and store a
// reference to it in the variable.
In this example, “new PairOfDice()” is an expression that allocates memory for the object,
initializes the object’s instance variables, and then returns a reference to the object. This
reference is the value of the expression, and that value is stored by the assignment statement
in the variable, dice. So, after the assignment statement is executed, dice refers to the newly
created object. Part of this expression, “PairOfDice()”, looks like a subroutine call, and that
is no accident. It is, in fact, a call to a special type of subroutine called a constructor . This
might puzzle you, since there is no such subroutine in the class definition. However, every class
has at least one constructor. If the programmer doesn’t write a constructor definition in a class,
then the system will provide a default constructor for that class. This default constructor
does nothing beyond the basics: allocate memory and initialize instance variables. If you want
more than that to happen when an object is created, you can include one or more constructors
in the class definition.
The definition of a constructor looks much like the definition of any other subroutine, with
three exceptions. A constructor does not have any return type (not even void). The name
of the constructor must be the same as the name of the class in which it is defined. And the
only modifiers that can be used on a constructor definition are the access modifiers public,
private, and protected. (In particular, a constructor can’t be declared static.)
However, a constructor does have a subroutine body of the usual form, a block of statements.
There are no restrictions on what statements can be used. And a constructor can have a list
of formal parameters. In fact, the ability to include parameters is one of the main reasons for
using constructors. The parameters can provide data to be used in the construction of the
object. For example, a constructor for the PairOfDice class could provide the values that are
initially showing on the dice. Here is what the class would look like in that case:
public class PairOfDice {
public int die1; // Number showing on the first die.
public int die2; // Number showing on the second die.
public PairOfDice(int val1, int val2) {
// Constructor. Creates a pair of dice that
// are initially showing the values val1 and val2.
die1 = val1; // Assign specified values
die2 = val2; // to the instance variables.
}
public void roll() {
// Roll the dice by setting each of the dice to be
// a random number between 1 and 6.
die1 = (int)(Math.random()*6) + 1;
die2 = (int)(Math.random()*6) + 1;
}
} // end class PairOfDice
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 216
The constructor is declared as “public PairOfDice(int val1, int val2) ...”, with
no return type and with the same name as the name of the class. This is how the Java
compiler recognizes a constructor. The constructor has two parameters, and values for these
parameters must be provided when the constructor is called. For example, the expression
“new PairOfDice(3,4)” would create a PairOfDice object in which the values of the instance
variables die1 and die2 are initially 3 and 4. Of course, in a program, the value returned by
the constructor should be used in some way, as in
PairOfDice dice; // Declare a variable of type PairOfDice.
dice = new PairOfDice(1,1); // Let dice refer to a new PairOfDice
// object that initially shows 1, 1.
Now that we’ve added a constructor to the PairOfDice class, we can no longer create an
object by saying “new PairOfDice()”! The system provides a default constructor for a class
only if the class definition does not already include a constructor. In this version of PairOfDice,
there is only one constructor in the class, and it requires two actual parameters. However,
this is not a big problem, since we can add a second constructor to the class, one that has
no parameters. In fact, you can have as many different constructors as you want, as long as
their signatures are different, that is, as long as they have different numbers or types of formal
parameters. In the PairOfDice class, we might have a constructor with no parameters which
produces a pair of dice showing random numbers:
public class PairOfDice {
public int die1; // Number showing on the first die.
public int die2; // Number showing on the second die.
public PairOfDice() {
// Constructor. Rolls the dice, so that they initially
// show some random values.
roll(); // Call the roll() method to roll the dice.
}
public PairOfDice(int val1, int val2) {
// Constructor. Creates a pair of dice that
// are initially showing the values val1 and val2.
die1 = val1; // Assign specified values
die2 = val2; // to the instance variables.
}
public void roll() {
// Roll the dice by setting each of the dice to be
// a random number between 1 and 6.
die1 = (int)(Math.random()*6) + 1;
die2 = (int)(Math.random()*6) + 1;
}
} // end class PairOfDice
Now we have the option of constructing a PairOfDice object either with “new PairOfDice()”
or with “new PairOfDice(x,y)”, where x and y are int-valued expressions.
This class, once it is written, can be used in any program that needs to work with
one or more pairs of dice. None of those programs will ever have to use the obscure
incantation “(int)(Math.random()*6)+1”, because it’s done inside the PairOfDice class. And
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 217
the programmer, having once gotten the dice-rolling thing straight will never have to worry
about it again. Here, for example, is a main program that uses the PairOfDice class to count
how many times two pairs of dice are rolled before the two pairs come up showing the same
value. This illustrates once again that you can create several instances of the same class:
public class RollTwoPairs {
public static void main(String[] args) {
PairOfDice firstDice; // Refers to the first pair of dice.
firstDice = new PairOfDice();
PairOfDice secondDice; // Refers to the second pair of dice.
secondDice = new PairOfDice();
int countRolls; // Counts how many times the two pairs of
// dice have been rolled.
int total1; // Total showing on first pair of dice.
int total2; // Total showing on second pair of dice.
countRolls = 0;
do { // Roll the two pairs of dice until totals are the same.
firstDice.roll(); // Roll the first pair of dice.
total1 = firstDice.die1 + firstDice.die2; // Get total.
System.out.println("First pair comes up " + total1);
secondDice.roll(); // Roll the second pair of dice.
total2 = secondDice.die1 + secondDice.die2; // Get total.
System.out.println("Second pair comes up " + total2);
countRolls++; // Count this roll.
System.out.println(); // Blank line.
} while (total1 != total2);
System.out.println("It took " + countRolls
+ " rolls until the totals were the same.");
} // end main()
} // end class RollTwoPairs
∗ ∗ ∗
Constructors are subroutines, but they are subroutines of a special type. They are certainly
not instance methods, since they don’t belong to objects. Since they are responsible for creating
objects, they exist before any objects have been created. They are more like static member
subroutines, but they are not and cannot be declared to be static. In fact, according to the
Java language specification, they are technically not members of the class at all! In particular,
constructors are not referred to as “methods.”
Unlike other subroutines, a constructor can only be called using the new operator, in an
expression that has the form
new hclass-name i ( hparameter-list i )
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 218
where the hparameter-listi is possibly empty. I call this an expression because it computes and
returns a value, namely a reference to the object that is constructed. Most often, you will store
the returned reference in a variable, but it is also legal to use a constructor call in other ways,
for example as a parameter in a subroutine call or as part of a more complex expression. Of
course, if you don’t save the reference in a variable, you won’t have any way of referring to the
object that was just created.
A constructor call is more complicated than an ordinary subroutine or function call. It is
helpful to understand the exact steps that the computer goes through to execute a constructor
call:
1. First, the computer gets a block of unused memory in the heap, large enough to hold an
object of the specified type.
2. It initializes the instance variables of the object. If the declaration of an instance variable
specifies an initial value, then that value is computed and stored in the instance variable.
Otherwise, the default initial value is used.
3. The actual parameters in the constructor, if any, are evaluated, and the values are assigned
to the formal parameters of the constructor.
4. The statements in the body of the constructor, if any, are executed.
5. A reference to the object is returned as the value of the constructor call.
The end result of this is that you have a reference to a newly constructed object.
∗ ∗ ∗
For another example, let’s rewrite the Student class that was used in Section 1. I’ll add a
constructor, and I’ll also take the opportunity to make the instance variable, name, private.
public class Student {
private String name; // Student’s name.
public double test1, test2, test3; // Grades on three tests.
public Student(String theName) {
// Constructor for Student objects;
// provides a name for the Student.
// The name can’t be null.
if ( theName == null )
throw new IllegalArgumentException("name can’t be null");
name = theName;
}
public String getName() {
// Getter method for reading the value of the private
// instance variable, name.
return name;
}
public double getAverage() {
// Compute average test grade.
return (test1 + test2 + test3) / 3;
}
} // end of class Student
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 219
An object of type Student contains information about some particular student. The
constructor in this class has a parameter of type String, which specifies the name of that
student. Objects of type Student can be created with statements such as:
std = new Student("John Smith");
std1 = new Student("Mary Jones");
In the original version of this class, the value of name had to be assigned by a program after it
created the object of type Student. There was no guarantee that the programmer would always
remember to set the name properly. In the new version of the class, there is no way to create
a Student object except by calling the constructor, and that constructor automatically sets the
name. Furthermore, the constructor makes it impossible to have a student object whose name is
null. The programmer’s life is made easier, and whole hordes of frustrating bugs are squashed
before they even have a chance to be born.
Another type of guarantee is provided by the private modifier. Since the instance variable,
name, is private, there is no way for any part of the program outside the Student class to get at
the name directly. The program sets the value of name, indirectly, when it calls the constructor.
I’ve provided a getter function, getName(), that can be used from outside the class to find out
the name of the student. But I haven’t provided any setter method or other way to change the
name. Once a student object is created, it keeps the same name as long as it exists.
Note that it would be legal, and good style, to declare the variable name to be “final”
in this class. An instance variable can be final provided it is either assigned a value in its
declaration or is assigned a value in every constructor in the class. It is illegal to assign a value
to a final instance variable, except inside a constructor.
∗ ∗ ∗
Let’s take this example a little farther to illustrate one more aspect of classes: What happens
when you mix static and non-static in the same class? In that case, it’s legal for an instance
method in the class to use static member variables or call static member subroutines. An object
knows what class it belongs to, and it can refer to static members of that class. But there is
only one copy of the static member, in the class itself. Effectively, all the objects share one
copy of the static member.
As an example, consider a version of the Student class to which I’ve added an ID for each
student and a static member called nextUniqueID. Although there is an ID variable in each
student object, there is only one nextUniqueID variable.
public class Student {
private String name; // Student’s name.
public double test1, test2, test3; // Grades on three tests.
private int ID; // Unique ID number for this student.
private static int nextUniqueID = 0;
// keep track of next available unique ID number
Student(String theName) {
// Constructor for Student objects; provides a name for the Student,
// and assigns the student a unique ID number.
name = theName;
nextUniqueID++;
ID = nextUniqueID;
}
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 220
for the program ever to use the object again! It might as well not exist. In fact, the memory
occupied by the object should be reclaimed to be used for another purpose.
Java uses a procedure called garbage collection to reclaim memory occupied by objects
that are no longer accessible to a program. It is the responsibility of the system, not the
programmer, to keep track of which objects are “garbage.” In the above example, it was very
easy to see that the Student object had become garbage. Usually, it’s much harder. If an object
has been used for a while, there might be several references to the object stored in several
variables. The object doesn’t become garbage until all those references have been dropped.
In some other programming languages, it’s the programmer’s responsibility to delete the
garbage. Unfortunately, keeping track of memory usage is very error-prone, and many serious
program bugs are caused by such errors. A programmer might accidently delete an object even
though there are still references to that object. This is called a dangling pointer error , and
it leads to problems when the program tries to access an object that is no longer there. Another
type of error is a memory leak , where a programmer neglects to delete objects that are no
longer in use. This can lead to filling memory with objects that are completely inaccessible,
and the program might run out of memory even though, in fact, large amounts of memory are
being wasted.
Because Java uses garbage collection, such errors are simply impossible. Garbage collection
is an old idea and has been used in some programming languages since the 1960s. You might
wonder why all languages don’t use garbage collection. In the past, it was considered too slow
and wasteful. However, research into garbage collection techniques combined with the incredible
speed of modern computers have combined to make garbage collection feasible. Programmers
should rejoice.
A string can be built up from smaller pieces using the + operator, but this is not always
efficient. If str is a String and ch is a character, then executing the command “str =
str + ch;” involves creating a whole new string that is a copy of str, with the value of
ch appended onto the end. Copying the string takes some time. Building up a long string
letter by letter would require a surprising amount of processing. The class StringBuilder makes
it possible to be efficient about building up a long string from a number of smaller pieces. To
do this, you must make an object belonging to the StringBuilder class. For example:
StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
(This statement both declares the variable builder and initializes it to refer to a newly created
StringBuilder object. Combining declaration with initialization was covered in Subsection 4.8.1
and works for objects just as it does for primitive types.)
Like a String, a StringBuilder contains a sequence of characters. However, it is possible
to add new characters onto the end of a StringBuilder without continually making copies
of the data that it already contains. If x is a value of any type and builder is the variable
defined above, then the command builder.append(x) will add x, converted into a string
representation, onto the end of the data that was already in the builder. This can be done more
efficiently than copying the data every time something is appended. A long string can be built
up in a StringBuilder using a sequence of append() commands. When the string is complete,
the function builder.toString() will return a copy of the string in the builder as an ordinary
value of type String. The StringBuilder class is in the standard package java.lang, so you can
use its simple name without importing it.
A number of useful classes are collected in the package java.util. For example, this
package contains classes for working with collections of objects. We will study such collection
classes extensively in Chapter 10. And we have already encountered java.util.Scanner in
Subsection 2.4.6. Another class in this package, java.util.Date, is used to represent times.
When a Date object is constructed without parameters, the result represents the current date
and time, so an easy way to display this information is:
System.out.println( new Date() );
Of course, since it is in the package java.util, in order to use the Date class in
your program, you must make it available by importing it with one of the statements
“import java.util.Date;” or “import java.util.*;” at the beginning of your program.
(See Subsection 4.6.3 for a discussion of packages and import.)
I will also mention the class java.util.Random. An object belonging to this class is a
source of random numbers (or, more precisely pseudorandom numbers). The standard function
Math.random() uses one of these objects behind the scenes to generate its random numbers.
An object of type Random can generate random integers, as well as random real numbers. If
randGen is created with the command:
Random randGen = new Random();
and if N is a positive integer, then randGen.nextInt(N) generates a random integer in the range
from 0 to N-1. For example, this makes it a little easier to roll a pair of dice. Instead of saying
“die1 = (int)(6*Math.random())+1;”, one can say “die1 = randGen.nextInt(6)+1;”.
(Since you also have to import the class java.util.Random and create the Random object,
you might not agree that it is actually easier.) An object of type Random can also be used to
generate so-called Gaussian distributed random real numbers.
Some of Java’s standard classes are used in GUI programming. You will encounter many of
them in Chapter 6. Here, I will mention only the class Color, from the package java.awt, so
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 223
that I can use it in the next example. A Color object represents a color that can be used for
drawing. In Section 3.9, you encountered color constants such as Color.RED. These constants
are final static member variables in the Color class, and their values are objects of type Color. It
is also possible to create new color objects. Class Color has a constructor new Color(r,g,b,a),
which takes four int parameters to specify the red, green, and blue components of the color,
plus an “alpha” component that says how transparent the color is. The parameters must be in
the range 0 to 255. For example, a value of 0 for r means that the color contains no red, while
a value of 255 means that the color contains the maximum possible amount of red. When you
draw with a partially transparent color, the background shows through the color to some extent.
A larger value of the fourth parameter gives a color that is less transparent and more opaque.
There are a few other color constructors, including one that omits the alpha component and
produces fully opaque colors.
A Color object has only a few instance methods that you are likely to use. Mainly, there
are functions like getRed() to get the individual color components of the color. There are no
“setter” methods to change the color components. In fact, a Color is an immutable object,
meaning that all of its instance variables are final and cannot be changed after the object is
created. Strings are another example of immutable objects, and we will make some of our own
later in this chapter.
The main point of all this, again, is that many problems have already been solved, and the
solutions are available in Java’s standard classes. If you are faced with a task that looks like
it should be fairly common, it might be worth looking through a Java reference to see whether
someone has already written a class that you can use.
The version of toString that is defined in Object just returns the name of the class that
the object belongs to, concatenated with a code number called the hash code of the object;
this is not very useful. When you create a class, you can write a new toString() method for
it, which will replace the inherited version. For example, we might add the following method
to any of the PairOfDice classes from the previous section:
/**
* Return a String representation of a pair of dice, where die1
* and die2 are instance variables containing the numbers that are
* showing on the two dice.
*/
public String toString() {
if (die1 == die2)
return "double " + die1;
else
return die1 + " and " + die2;
}
If dice refers to a PairOfDice object, then dice.toString() will return strings such as
“3 and 6”, “5 and 1”, and “double 2”, depending on the numbers showing on the dice. This
method would be used automatically to convert dice to type String in a statement such as
System.out.println( "The dice came up " + dice );
so this statement might output, “The dice came up 5 and 1” or “The dice came up double 2”.
You’ll see another example of a toString() method in the next section.
A disk in this program can be represented as an object. A disk has properties—color, location,
and size—that can be instance variables in the object. As for instance methods, we need to think
about what we might want to do with a disk. An obvious candidate is that we need to be able to
draw it, so we can include an instance method draw(g), where g is a graphics context that will
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 225
be used to do the drawing. The class can also include one or more constructors. A constructor
initializes the object. It’s not always clear what data should be provided as parameters to the
constructor. In this case, as an example, the constructor’s parameters specify the location and
size for the circle, but the constructor makes up a color using random values for the red, green,
and blue components. Here’s the complete class:
import java.awt.Color;
import java.awt.Graphics;
/**
* A simple class that holds the size, color, and location of a colored disk,
* with a method for drawing the circle in a graphics context. The circle
* is drawn as a filled oval, with a black outline.
*/
public class CircleInfo {
public int radius; // The radius of the circle.
public int x,y; // The location of the center of the circle.
public Color color; // The color of the circle.
/**
* Create a CircleInfo with a given location and radius and with a
* randomly selected, semi-transparent color.
* @param centerX The x coordinate of the center.
* @param centerY The y coordinate of the center.
* @param rad The radius of the circle.
*/
public CircleInfo( int centerX, int centerY, int rad ) {
x = centerX;
y = centerY;
radius = rad;
int red = (int)(256*Math.random());
int green = (int)(256*Math.random());
int blue = (int)(256*Math.random());
color = new Color(red,green,blue,100);
}
/**
* Draw the disk in graphics context g, with a black outline.
*/
public void draw( Graphics g ) {
g.setColor( color );
g.fillOval( x - radius, y - radius, 2*radius, 2*radius );
g.setColor( Color.BLACK );
g.drawOval( x - radius, y - radius, 2*radius, 2*radius );
}
}
It would probably be better style to write getters and setters for the instance variables, but to
keep things simple, I made the variables public.
The main program for my animation is a class GrowingCircleAnimation. The program uses
100 disks, each one represented by an object of type CircleInfo. To make that manageable, the
program uses an array of objects. The array variable is an instance variable in the class:
private CircleInfo[] circleData; // holds the data for all 100 circles
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 226
Note that it is not static. GUI programming generally uses objects rather than static variables
and methods. Basically, this is because we can imagine having several GrowingCircleAnimations
going on at the same time, each with its own array of disks. Each animation would be
represented by an object, and each object will need to have its own circleData instance
variable. If circleData were static, there would only be one array and all the animations
would show exactly the same thing.
The array must be created and filled with data. The array is created using
new CircleInfo[100], and then 100 objects of type CircleInfo are created to fill the array.
The new objects are created with random locations and sizes. In the program, this is done
before drawing the first frame of the animation. Here is the code, where width and height are
the size of the drawing area:
circleData = new CircleInfo[100]; // create the array
for (int i = 0; i < circleData.length; i++) { // create the objects
circleData[i] = new CircleInfo(
(int)(width*Math.random()),
(int)(height*Math.random()),
(int)(100*Math.random()) );
}
In each frame, the radius of the disk is increased and the disk is drawn using the code
circleData[i].radius++;
circleData[i].draw(g);
These statements look complicated, so let’s unpack them. Now, circleData[i] is an element
of the array circleData. That means that it is a variable of type CircleInfo. This variable
refers to an object of type CircleInfo, which contains a public instance variable named radius.
This means that circleData[i].radius is the full name for that variable. Since it is a
variable of type int, we can use the ++ operator to increment its value. So the effect of
circleData[i].radius++ is to increase the radius of the circle by one. The second line of
code is similar, but in that statement, circleData[i].draw is an instance method in the
CircleInfo object. The statement circleData[i].draw(g) calls that instance method with a
parameter g that represents the graphics context that is being used for drawing.
The source code example GrowingCircleAnimation.java contains the full source code for the
program, if you are interested. Since the program uses class CircleInfo, you will also need a copy
of CircleInfo.java in order to compile and run the program.
and concepts can recur in many problems, a well-designed class is likely to be reusable without
modification in a variety of projects.
Furthermore, in an object-oriented programming language, it is possible to make subclasses
of an existing class. This makes classes even more reusable. If a class needs to be customized,
a subclass can be created, and additions or modifications can be made in the subclass without
making any changes to the original class. This can be done even if the programmer doesn’t
have access to the source code of the class and doesn’t know any details of its internal, hidden
implementation.
∗ ∗ ∗
The PairOfDice class in the previous section is already an example of a generalized software
component, although one that could certainly be improved. The class represents a single,
coherent concept, “a pair of dice.” The instance variables hold the data relevant to the state
of the dice, that is, the number showing on each of the dice. The instance method represents
the behavior of a pair of dice, that is, the ability to be rolled. This class would be reusable in
many different programming projects.
On the other hand, the Student class from the previous section is not very reusable. It
seems to be crafted to represent students in a particular course where the grade will be based
on three tests. If there are more tests or quizzes or papers, it’s useless. If there are two people
in the class who have the same name, we are in trouble (one reason why numerical student ID’s
are often used). Admittedly, it’s much more difficult to develop a general-purpose student class
than a general-purpose pair-of-dice class. But this particular Student class is good only as an
example in a programming textbook.
∗ ∗ ∗
A large programming project goes through a number of stages, starting with specification
of the problem to be solved, followed by analysis of the problem and design of a program
to solve it. Then comes coding , in which the program’s design is expressed in some actual
programming language. This is followed by testing and debugging of the program. After that
comes a long period of maintenance, which means fixing any new problems that are found
in the program and modifying it to adapt it to changing requirements. Together, these stages
form what is called the software life cycle. (In the real world, the ideal of consecutive stages
is seldom if ever achieved. During the analysis stage, it might turn out that the specifications
are incomplete or inconsistent. A problem found during testing requires at least a brief return
to the coding stage. If the problem is serious enough, it might even require a new design.
Maintenance usually involves redoing some of the work from previous stages. . . .)
Large, complex programming projects are only likely to succeed if a careful, systematic
approach is adopted during all stages of the software life cycle. The systematic approach to
programming, using accepted principles of good design, is called software engineering . The
software engineer tries to efficiently construct programs that verifiably meet their specifications
and that are easy to modify if necessary. There is a wide range of “methodologies” that can
be applied to help in the systematic design of programs. (Most of these methodologies seem to
involve drawing little boxes to represent program components, with labeled arrows to represent
relationships among the boxes.)
We have been discussing object orientation in programming languages, which is relevant to
the coding stage of program development. But there are also object-oriented methodologies for
analysis and design. The question in this stage of the software life cycle is, How can one discover
or invent the overall structure of a program? As an example of a rather simple object-oriented
approach to analysis and design, consider this advice: Write down a description of the problem.
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 228
Underline all the nouns in that description. The nouns should be considered as candidates for
becoming classes or objects in the program design. Similarly, underline all the verbs. These
are candidates for methods. This is your starting point. Further analysis might uncover the
need for more classes and methods, and it might reveal that subclassing can be used to take
advantage of similarities among classes.
This is perhaps a bit simple-minded. (This is not a software engineering textbook.) But
the idea is clear and the general approach can be effective: Analyze the problem to discover the
concepts that are involved, and create classes to represent those concepts. The design should
arise from the problem itself, and you should end up with a program whose structure reflects
the structure of the problem in a natural way.
itself should know how many cards it has left, so the program should just be able to ask the
deck object. We can make this possible by specifying another instance method, cardsLeft(),
that returns the number of cards remaining in the deck. This leads to a full specification of all
the subroutines in the Deck class:
Constructor and instance methods in class Deck:
/**
* Constructor. Create an unshuffled deck of cards.
*/
public Deck()
/**
* Put all the used cards back into the deck,
* and shuffle it into a random order.
*/
public void shuffle()
/**
* As cards are dealt from the deck, the number of
* cards left decreases. This function returns the
* number of cards that are still left in the deck.
*/
public int cardsLeft()
/**
* Deals one card from the deck and returns it.
* @throws IllegalStateException if no more cards are left.
*/
public Card dealCard()
This is everything you need to know in order to use the Deck class. Of course, it doesn’t tell us
how to write the class. This has been an exercise in design, not in coding. You can look at the
source code, Deck.java, if you want. It should not be a surprise that the class includes an array
of Cards as an instance variable, but there are a few things you might not understand at this
point. Of course, you can use the class in your programs as a black box, without understanding
the implementation.
We can do a similar analysis for the Hand class. When a hand object is first created, it
has no cards in it. An addCard() instance method will add a card to the hand. This method
needs a parameter of type Card to specify which card is being added. For the removeCard()
method, a parameter is needed to specify which card to remove. But should we specify the
card itself (“Remove the ace of spades”), or should we specify the card by its position in the
hand (“Remove the third card in the hand”)? Actually, we don’t have to decide, since we can
allow for both options. We’ll have two removeCard() instance methods, one with a parameter
of type Card specifying the card to be removed and one with a parameter of type int specifying
the position of the card in the hand. (Remember that you can have two methods in a class
with the same name, provided they have different numbers or types of parameters.) Since a
hand can contain a variable number of cards, it’s convenient to be able to ask a hand object
how many cards it contains. So, we need an instance method getCardCount() that returns
the number of cards in the hand. When I play cards, I like to arrange the cards in my hand so
that cards of the same value are next to each other. Since this is a generally useful thing to be
able to do, we can provide instance methods for sorting the cards in the hand. Here is a full
specification for a reusable Hand class:
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 230
If the card is the queen of hearts, either of these will print out “Your card is the Queen of
Hearts”.
Here is the complete Card class, which can also be found in Card.java. This class is general
enough to be highly reusable, so the work that went into designing, writing, and testing it pays
off handsomely in the long run.
/**
* An object of type Card represents a playing card from a
* standard Poker deck, including Jokers. The card has a suit, which
* can be spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs, or joker. A spade, heart,
* diamond, or club has one of the 13 values: ace, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,
* 8, 9, 10, jack, queen, or king. Note that "ace" is considered to be
* the smallest value. A joker can also have an associated value;
* this value can be anything and can be used to keep track of several
* different jokers.
*/
public class Card {
public final static int SPADES = 0; // Codes for the 4 suits, plus Joker.
public final static int HEARTS = 1;
public final static int DIAMONDS = 2;
public final static int CLUBS = 3;
public final static int JOKER = 4;
public final static int ACE = 1; // Codes for the non-numeric cards.
public final static int JACK = 11; // Cards 2 through 10 have their
public final static int QUEEN = 12; // numerical values for their codes.
public final static int KING = 13;
/**
* This card’s suit, one of the constants SPADES, HEARTS, DIAMONDS,
* CLUBS, or JOKER. The suit cannot be changed after the card is
* constructed.
*/
private final int suit;
/**
* The card’s value. For a normal card, this is one of the values
* 1 through 13, with 1 representing ACE. For a JOKER, the value
* can be anything. The value cannot be changed after the card
* is constructed.
*/
private final int value;
/**
* Creates a Joker, with 1 as the associated value. (Note that
* "new Card()" is equivalent to "new Card(1,Card.JOKER)".)
*/
public Card() {
suit = JOKER;
value = 1;
}
/**
* Creates a card with a specified suit and value.
* @param theValue the value of the new card. For a regular card (non-joker),
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 233
* the value must be in the range 1 through 13, with 1 representing an Ace.
* You can use the constants Card.ACE, Card.JACK, Card.QUEEN, and Card.KING.
* For a Joker, the value can be anything.
* @param theSuit the suit of the new card. This must be one of the values
* Card.SPADES, Card.HEARTS, Card.DIAMONDS, Card.CLUBS, or Card.JOKER.
* @throws IllegalArgumentException if the parameter values are not in the
* permissible ranges
*/
public Card(int theValue, int theSuit) {
if (theSuit != SPADES && theSuit != HEARTS && theSuit != DIAMONDS &&
theSuit != CLUBS && theSuit != JOKER)
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Illegal playing card suit");
if (theSuit != JOKER && (theValue < 1 || theValue > 13))
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Illegal playing card value");
value = theValue;
suit = theSuit;
}
/**
* Returns the suit of this card.
* @returns the suit, which is one of the constants Card.SPADES,
* Card.HEARTS, Card.DIAMONDS, Card.CLUBS, or Card.JOKER
*/
public int getSuit() {
return suit;
}
/**
* Returns the value of this card.
* @return the value, which is one of the numbers 1 through 13, inclusive for
* a regular card, and which can be any value for a Joker.
*/
public int getValue() {
return value;
}
/**
* Returns a String representation of the card’s suit.
* @return one of the strings "Spades", "Hearts", "Diamonds", "Clubs"
* or "Joker".
*/
public String getSuitAsString() {
switch ( suit ) {
case SPADES: return "Spades";
case HEARTS: return "Hearts";
case DIAMONDS: return "Diamonds";
case CLUBS: return "Clubs";
default: return "Joker";
}
}
/**
* Returns a String representation of the card’s value.
* @return for a regular card, one of the strings "Ace", "2",
* "3", ..., "10", "Jack", "Queen", or "King". For a Joker, the
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 234
another prediction. This continues until the user makes an incorrect prediction. The number
of correct predictions is the user’s score.
My program has a static method that plays one game of HighLow. The main() routine lets
the user play several games of HighLow. At the end, it reports the user’s average score.
I won’t go through the development of the algorithms used in this program, but I encourage
you to read it carefully and make sure that you understand how it works. Note in particular
that the subroutine that plays one game of HighLow returns the user’s score in the game as its
return value. This gets the score back to the main program, where it is needed. Here is the
program:
import textio.TextIO;
/**
* This program lets the user play HighLow, a simple card game
* that is described in the output statement at the beginning of
* the main() routine. After the user plays several games,
* the user’s average score is reported.
*/
public class HighLow {
/**
* Lets the user play one game of HighLow, and returns the
* user’s score in that game. The score is the number of
* correct guesses that the user makes.
*/
private static int play() {
Deck deck = new Deck(); // Get a new deck of cards, and
// store a reference to it in
// the variable, deck.
Card currentCard; // The current card, which the user sees.
Card nextCard; // The next card in the deck. The user tries
// to predict whether this is higher or lower
// than the current card.
int correctGuesses ; // The number of correct predictions the
// user has made. At the end of the game,
// this will be the user’s score.
char guess; // The user’s guess. ’H’ if the user predicts that
// the next card will be higher, ’L’ if the user
// predicts that it will be lower.
deck.shuffle(); // Shuffle the deck into a random order before
// starting the game.
correctGuesses = 0;
currentCard = deck.dealCard();
System.out.println("The first card is the " + currentCard);
while (true) { // Loop ends when user’s prediction is wrong.
/* Get the user’s prediction, ’H’ or ’L’ (or ’h’ or ’l’). */
System.out.print("Will the next card be higher (H) or lower (L)? ");
do {
guess = TextIO.getlnChar();
guess = Character.toUpperCase(guess);
if (guess != ’H’ && guess != ’L’)
System.out.print("Please respond with H or L: ");
} while (guess != ’H’ && guess != ’L’);
/* Get the next card and show it to the user. */
nextCard = deck.dealCard();
System.out.println("The next card is " + nextCard);
/* Check the user’s prediction. */
if (nextCard.getValue() == currentCard.getValue()) {
System.out.println("The value is the same as the previous card.");
System.out.println("You lose on ties. Sorry!");
break; // End the game.
}
else if (nextCard.getValue() > currentCard.getValue()) {
if (guess == ’H’) {
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 237
through getter methods. However, if we think it possible that PairOfDice will be used to create
subclasses, we might want to make it possible for subclasses to change the numbers on the dice.
For example, a GraphicalDice subclass that draws the dice might want to change the numbers
at other times besides when the dice are rolled. In that case, we could make die1 and die2
protected, which would allow the subclass to change their values without making them public
to the rest of the world. (An even better idea would be to define protected setter methods for
the variables. A setter method could, for example, ensure that the value that is being assigned
to the variable is in the legal range 1 through 6.)
class A {|}~~
(superclass)
kmoqq v
wqxykmoqqz
{|}~~
In Java, to create a class named “B” as a subclass of a class named “A”, you would write
class B extends A {
.
. // additions to, and modifications of,
. // stuff inherited from class A
.
}
Several classes can be declared as subclasses of the same superclass. The subclasses, which
might be referred to as “sibling classes,” share some structures and behaviors—namely, the ones
they inherit from their common superclass. The superclass expresses these shared structures
and behaviors. In the diagram shown on the right above, classes B, C, and D are sibling classes.
Inheritance can also extend over several “generations” of classes. This is shown in the diagram,
where class E is a subclass of class D which is itself a subclass of class A. In this case, class E
is considered to be a subclass of class A, even though it is not a direct subclass. This whole set
of classes forms a small class hierarchy .
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 241
ehicle
The Vehicle class would include instance variables such as registrationNumber and owner and
instance methods such as transferOwnership(). These are variables and methods common
to all vehicles. The three subclasses of Vehicle—Car, Truck, and Motorcycle—could then be
used to hold variables and methods specific to particular types of vehicles. The Car class
might add an instance variable numberOfDoors, the Truck class might have numberOfAxles,
and the Motorcycle class could have a boolean variable hasSidecar. (Well, it could in theory
at least, even if it might give a chuckle to the people at the Department of Motor Vehicles.)
The declarations of these classes in a Java program would look, in outline, like this (although
they are likely to be defined in separate files and declared as public classes):
class Vehicle {
int registrationNumber;
Person owner; // (Assuming that a Person class has been defined!)
void transferOwnership(Person newOwner) {
. . .
}
. . .
}
class Car extends Vehicle {
int numberOfDoors;
. . .
}
class Truck extends Vehicle {
int numberOfAxles;
. . .
}
class Motorcycle extends Vehicle {
boolean hasSidecar;
. . .
}
Suppose that myCar is a variable of type Car that has been declared and initialized with the
statement
Car myCar = new Car();
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 242
The practical effect of this in our example is that an object of type Car can be assigned to a
variable of type Vehicle. That is, it would be legal to say
Vehicle myVehicle = myCar;
or even
Vehicle myVehicle = new Car();
After either of these statements, the variable myVehicle holds a reference to a Vehicle object
that happens to be an instance of the subclass, Car. The object “remembers” that it is in fact
a Car, and not just a Vehicle. Information about the actual class of an object is stored as part
of that object. It is even possible to test whether a given object belongs to a given class, using
the instanceof operator. The test:
if (myVehicle instanceof Car) ...
determines whether the object referred to by myVehicle is in fact a car.
On the other hand, the assignment statement
myCar = myVehicle; // ERROR!
would be illegal because myVehicle could potentially refer to other types of vehicles that are
not cars. This is similar to a problem we saw previously in Subsection 2.5.6: The computer
will not allow you to assign an int value to a variable of type short, because not every int is a
short. Similarly, it will not allow you to assign a value of type Vehicle to a variable of type Car
because not every vehicle is a car. As in the case of ints and shorts, the solution here is to use
type-casting. If, for some reason, you happen to know that myVehicle does in fact refer to a
Car, you can use the type cast (Car)myVehicle to tell the computer to treat myVehicle as if
it were actually of type Car. So, you could say
myCar = (Car)myVehicle;
and you could even refer to ((Car)myVehicle).numberOfDoors. (The parentheses are
necessary because of precedence. The “.” has higher precedence than the type-cast, so
(Car)myVehicle.numberOfDoors would be read as (Car)(myVehicle.numberOfDoors), an
attempt to type-cast the int myVehicle.numberOfDoors into a Vehicle, which is impossible.)
As an example of how this could be used in a program, suppose that you want to print out
relevant data about the Vehicle referred to by myVehicle. If it’s a Car, you will want to print
out the car’s numberOfDoors, but you can’t say myVehicle.numberOfDoors, since there is no
numberOfDoors in the Vehicle class. But you could say:
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 243
System.out.println("Vehicle Data:");
System.out.println("Registration number: "
+ myVehicle.registrationNumber);
if (myVehicle instanceof Car) {
System.out.println("Type of vehicle: Car");
Car myCar;
myCar = (Car)myVehicle; // Type-cast to get access to numberOfDoors!
System.out.println("Number of doors: " + myCar.numberOfDoors);
}
else if (myVehicle instanceof Truck) {
System.out.println("Type of vehicle: Truck");
Truck myTruck;
myTruck = (Truck)myVehicle; // Type-cast to get access to numberOfAxles!
System.out.println("Number of axles: " + myTruck.numberOfAxles);
}
else if (myVehicle instanceof Motorcycle) {
System.out.println("Type of vehicle: Motorcycle");
Motorcycle myCycle;
myCycle = (Motorcycle)myVehicle; // Type-cast to get access to hasSidecar!
System.out.println("Has a sidecar: " + myCycle.hasSidecar);
}
Note that for object types, when the computer executes a program, it checks whether
type-casts are valid. So, for example, if myVehicle refers to an object of type Truck, then
the type cast (Car)myVehicle would be an error. When this happens, an exception of type
ClassCastException is thrown. This check is done at run time, not compile time, because the
actual type of the object referred to by myVehicle is not known when the program is compiled.
The code above avoids ClassCastExceptions by using instanceof to test the type of the variable
before doing a type cast.
∗ ∗ ∗
In Java 17, the previous example can also be written using one of the more obscure new
language features, known as pattern matching for instanceof. Pattern matching makes
it possible to include declaration and initialization of a variable in an instanceof test. For
example,
if (myVehicle instanceof Car myCar) {
System.out.println("Type of vehicle: Car");
System.out.println(Number of doors: " + myCar.numberOfDoors);
}
If the test succeeds, then the variable myCar is created and automatically assigned the value
(Car)myVehicle. The scope of the variable is limited to the body of the if statement.
5.5.4 Polymorphism
As another example, consider a program that deals with shapes drawn on the screen. Let’s say
that the shapes include rectangles, ovals, and roundrects of various colors. (A “roundrect” is
just a rectangle with rounded corners.)
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 244
Three classes, Rectangle, Oval, and RoundRect, could be used to represent the three types of
shapes. These three classes would have a common superclass, Shape, to represent features that
all three shapes have in common. The Shape class could include instance variables to represent
the color, position, and size of a shape, and it could include instance methods for changing the
values of those properties. Changing the color, for example, might involve changing the value
of an instance variable, and then redrawing the shape in its new color:
class Shape {
Color color; // (must be imported from package java.awt)
void setColor(Color newColor) {
// Method to change the color of the shape.
color = newColor; // change value of instance variable
redraw(); // redraw shape, which will appear in new color
}
void redraw() {
// method for drawing the shape
? ? ? // what commands should go here?
}
. . . // more instance variables and methods
} // end of class Shape
Now, you might see a problem here with the method redraw(). The problem is that each
different type of shape is drawn differently. The method setColor() can be called for any type
of shape. How does the computer know which shape to draw when it executes the redraw()
command in the setColor() method? Informally, we can answer the question like this: The
computer executes redraw() by asking the shape to redraw itself. Every shape object knows
what it has to do to redraw itself.
In practice, this means that each of the specific shape classes has its own redraw() method:
class Rectangle extends Shape {
void redraw() {
. . . // commands for drawing a rectangle
}
. . . // possibly, more methods and variables
}
class Oval extends Shape {
void redraw() {
. . . // commands for drawing an oval
}
. . . // possibly, more methods and variables
}
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 245
BeveledRects
To implement beveled rectangles, I can write a new subclass, BeveledRect, of class Shape
and give it its own redraw() method. Automatically, code that I wrote previously—such as
the statement someShape.redraw()—can now suddenly start drawing beveled rectangles, even
though the beveled rectangle class didn’t exist when I wrote the statement!
∗ ∗ ∗
In the statement “someShape.redraw();”, the redraw message is sent to the object
someShape. Look back at the method in the Shape class for changing the color of a shape:
void setColor(Color newColor) {
color = newColor; // change value of instance variable
redraw(); // redraw shape, which will appear in new color
}
A redraw message is sent here, but which object is it sent to? Well, the setColor method is
itself a message that was sent to some object. The answer is that the redraw message is sent to
that same object, the one that received the setColor message. If that object is a rectangle,
then it contains a redraw() method for drawing rectangles, and that is the one that is executed.
If the object is an oval, then the redraw() method from the Oval class is executed. This is what
you should expect, but it means that the “redraw();” statement in the setColor() method
does not necessarily call the redraw() method in the Shape class! The redraw() method that
is executed could be in any subclass of Shape. This is just another case of polymorphism.
is not abstract is said to be concrete. You can create objects belonging to a concrete class,
but not to an abstract class. A variable whose type is given by an abstract class can only refer
to objects that belong to concrete subclasses of the abstract class.
Similarly, we say that the redraw() method in class Shape is an abstract method , since
it is never meant to be called. In fact, there is nothing for it to do—any actual redrawing is
done by redraw() methods in the subclasses of Shape. The redraw() method in Shape has
to be there. But it is there only to tell the computer that all Shapes understand the redraw
message. As an abstract method, it exists merely to specify the common interface of all the
actual, concrete versions of redraw() in the subclasses. There is no reason for the abstract
redraw() in class Shape to contain any code at all.
Shape and its redraw() method are semantically abstract. You can also tell the computer,
syntactically, that they are abstract by adding the modifier “abstract” to their definitions.
For an abstract method, the block of code that gives the implementation of an ordinary method
is replaced by a semicolon. An implementation must then be provided for the abstract method
in any concrete subclass of the abstract class. Here’s what the Shape class would look like as
an abstract class:
public abstract class Shape {
Color color; // color of shape.
void setColor(Color newColor) {
// method to change the color of the shape
color = newColor; // change value of instance variable
redraw(); // redraw shape, which will appear in new color
}
abstract void redraw();
// abstract method---must be defined in
// concrete subclasses
. . . // more instance variables and methods
} // end of class Shape
Once you have declared the class to be abstract, it becomes illegal to try to create actual
objects of type Shape, and the computer will report a syntax error if you try to do so.
Note, by the way, that the Vehicle class discussed above would probably also be an abstract
class. There is no way to own a vehicle as such—the actual vehicle has to be a car or a truck
or a motorcycle, or some other “concrete” type of vehicle.
∗ ∗ ∗
Recall from Subsection 5.3.2 that a class that is not explicitly declared to be a subclass of
some other class is automatically made a subclass of the standard class Object. That is, a class
declaration with no “extends” part such as
public class myClass { . . .
is exactly equivalent to
public class myClass extends Object { . . .
This means that class Object is at the top of a huge class hierarchy that includes every
other class. (Semantically, Object is an abstract class, in fact the most abstract class of all.
Curiously, however, it is not declared to be abstract syntactically, which means that you can
create objects of type Object. However, there is not much that you can do with them.)
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 248
Since every class is a subclass of Object, a variable of type Object can refer to any object
whatsoever, of any type. Similarly, an array of type Object[ ] can hold objects of any type.
∗ ∗ ∗
The sample source code file ShapeDraw.java uses an abstract Shape class and an array of
type Shape[ ] to hold a list of shapes. You might want to look at this file, even though you
won’t be able to understand all of it at this time. Even the definitions of the shape classes are
somewhat different from those that I have described in this section. (For example, the draw()
method has a parameter of type Graphics. This parameter is required because all drawing in
Java requires a graphics context.) I’ll return to similar examples in later chapters when you
know more about GUI programming. However, it would still be worthwhile to look at the
definition of the Shape class and its subclasses in the source code. You might also check how
an array is used to hold the list of shapes. Here is a scaled-down screenshot from the program:
If you run the ShapeDraw program, you can click one of the buttons along the bottom to
add a shape to the picture. The new shape will appear in the upper left corner of the drawing
area. The color of the shape is given by the “pop-up menu” of colors below the drawing area.
Once a shape is on the screen, you can drag it around with the mouse. A shape will maintain
the same front-to-back order with respect to other shapes on the screen, even while you are
dragging it. However, you can move a shape out in front of all the other shapes if you hold
down the shift key as you click on it.
In the program, the only time when the actual class of a shape is used is when that shape is
added to the screen. Once the shape has been created, it is manipulated entirely as an abstract
shape. The routine that implements dragging, for example, works with variables of type Shape
and makes no reference to any of its subclasses. As the shape is being dragged, the dragging
routine just calls the shape’s draw method each time the shape has to be drawn, so it doesn’t
have to know how to draw the shape or even what type of shape it is. The object is responsible
for drawing itself. If I wanted to add a new type of shape to the program, I would define a
new subclass of Shape, add another button, and program the button to add the correct type of
shape to the screen. No other changes in the programming would be necessary.
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 249
Instance variables and instance methods also have simple names. The simple name of such
an instance member can be used in instance methods in the class where the instance member
is defined (but not in static methods). Instance members also have full names—but remember
that an instance variable or instance method is actually contained in an object rather than in
a class, and each object has its own version. A full name of an instance member starts with
a reference to the object that contains the instance member. For example, if std is a variable
that refers to an object of type Student, then std.test1 could be a full name for an instance
variable named test1 that is contained in that object.
But when we are working inside a class and use a simple name to refer to an instance variable
like test1, where is the object that contains the variable? The solution to this riddle is simple:
Suppose that a reference to “test1” occurs in the definition of some instance method. The
method is part of some particular object of type Student. When that method gets executed,
the occurrence of the name “test1” refers to the test1 variable in that same object. (This
is why simple names of instance members cannot be used in static methods—when a static
method is executed, it is not part of an object, and hence there are no instance members in
sight!)
This leaves open the question of full names for instance members inside the same class
where they are defined. We need a way to refer to “the object that contains this method.” Java
defines a special variable named this for just this purpose. The variable this can be used in
the source code of an instance method to refer to the object that contains the method. This
intent of the name, “this,” is to refer to “this object,” the one right here that this very method
is in. If var is an instance variable in the same object as the method, then “this.var” is a
full name for that variable. If otherMethod() is an instance method in the same object, then
this.otherMethod() could be used to call that method. Whenever the computer executes an
instance method, it automatically sets the variable this to refer to the object that contains the
method.
(Some object oriented languages use the name “self” instead of “this.” Here, an object is seen
as an entity that receives messages and responds by performing some action. From the point
of view of that entity, an instance variable such as self.name refers to the entity’s own name,
something that is part of the entity itself. Calling an instance method such as self.redraw()
is like saying “message to self: redraw!”)
One common use of this is in constructors. For example:
public class Student {
private String name; // Name of the student.
public Student(String name) {
// Constructor. Create a student with specified name.
this.name = name;
}
.
. // More variables and methods.
.
}
In the constructor, the instance variable called name is hidden by a formal parameter that is also
called “name.” However, the instance variable can still be referred to by its full name, which
is this.name. In the assignment statement “this.name = name”, the “name” on the right is
the formal parameter, and the value of that formal parameter is being assigned to the instance
variable, this.name. This is considered to be acceptable style: There is no need to dream up
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 251
cute new names for formal parameters that are just used to initialize instance variables. You
can use the same name for the parameter as for the instance variable.
There are other uses for this. Sometimes, when you are writing an instance method, you
need to pass the object that contains the method to a subroutine, as an actual parameter. In
that case, you can use this as the actual parameter. For example, if you wanted to print out
a string representation of the object, you could say “System.out.println(this);”. Or you
could assign the value of this to another variable in an assignment statement. You can store it
in an array. In fact, you can do anything with this that you could do with any other variable,
except change its value. (Consider it to be a final variable.)
the one with no parameters, will be called automatically. (And if no such constructor exists in
the superclass, the compiler will consider it to be a syntax error.)
You can use the special variable this in exactly the same way to call another constructor
in the same class. That is, the very first line of a constructor can look like a subroutine call
with “this” as the name of the subroutine. The result is that the body of another constructor
in the same class is executed. This can be very useful since it can save you from repeating the
same code in several different constructors. As an example, consider MosaicCanvas.java, which
was used indirectly in Section 4.7. A MosaicCanvas represents a grid of colored rectangles. It
has a constructor with four parameters:
public MosaicCanvas(int rows, int columns,
int preferredBlockWidth, int preferredBlockHeight)
This constructor provides several options and does a lot of initialization. I wanted to provide
easier-to-use constructors with fewer options, but all the initialization still has to be done. The
class also contains these constructors:
public MosaicCanvas() {
this(42,42);
}
public MosaicCanvas(int rows, int columns) {
this(rows,columns,16,16);
}
Each of these constructors exists just to call another constructor, while providing constant
values for some of the parameters. For example, this(42,42) calls the second constructor
listed here, while that constructor in turn calls the main, four-parameter constructor. That
main constructor is eventually called in all cases, so that all the essential initialization gets
done in every case.
5.7 Interfaces
Some object-oriented programming languages, such as C++, allow a class to extend two or
more superclasses. This is called multiple inheritance. In the illustration below, for example,
class E is shown as having both class A and class B as direct superclasses, while class F has
three direct superclasses.
class A
Such multiple inheritance is not allowed in Java. The designers of Java wanted to keep the
language reasonably simple, and felt that the benefits of multiple inheritance were not worth the
cost in increased complexity. However, Java does have a feature that can be used to accomplish
many of the same goals as multiple inheritance: interfaces. We have already encountered
“functional interfaces” in Section 4.5 in connection with lambda expressions. A functional
interface specifies a single method. However, interfaces can be much more complicated than
that, and they have many other uses.
You are not likely to need to write your own interfaces until you get to the point of writing
fairly complex programs. However, there are several interfaces that are used in important ways
in Java’s standard packages, and you will need to learn how to use them.
This discussion has been about the syntax rules for interfaces. But of course, an
interface also has a semantic component. That is, the person who creates the interface
intends for the methods that it defines to have some specific meaning. The interface definition
should include comments to express that meaning, and classes that implement the interface
should take that meaning into account. The Java compiler, however, can only check the syntax;
it can’t enforce the meaning. For example, the stroke() method in an object that implements
Strokeable is presumably meant to draw a graphical representation of the object by stroking it
(that is, by dragging a pen along its outline), but the compiler can only check that the stroke()
method exists in the object.
Strokeable[] listOfFigures;
listOfFigures = new Strokeable[10];
listOfFigures[0] = new Line();
listOfFigures[1] = new Circle();
listOfFigures[2] = new Line();
.
.
.
Every element of the array will then have a stroke() method, so that we can say things like
listOfFigures[i].stroke(g).
From outside the containing class, however, an inner class has to be referred to using a name
of the form hvariableNamei.hNestedClassNamei, where hvariableNamei is a variable that refers
to the object that contains the inner class. In order to create an object that belongs to an inner
class, you must first have an object that belongs to the containing class. (When working inside
the class, the object “this” is used implicitly.)
Looking at an example will help, and will hopefully convince you that inner classes are
really very natural. Consider a class that represents poker games. This class might include a
nested class to represent the players of the game. The structure of the PokerGame class could
be:
public class PokerGame { // Represents a game of poker.
class Player { // Represents one of the players in this game.
.
.
.
} // end class Player
private Deck deck; // A deck of cards for playing the game.
private int pot; // The amount of money that has been bet.
.
.
.
} // end class PokerGame
If game is a variable of type PokerGame, then, conceptually, game contains its own copy of
the Player class. In an instance method of a PokerGame object, a new Player object would
be created by saying “new Player()”, just as for any other class. (A Player object could be
created outside the PokerGame class with an expression such as “game.new Player()”. Again,
however, this is rare.) The Player object will have access to the deck and pot instance variables
in the PokerGame object. Each PokerGame object has its own deck and pot and Players.
Players of that poker game use the deck and pot for that game; players of another poker game
use the other game’s deck and pot. That’s the effect of making the Player class non-static: it
associates any Player object with some particular PokerGame object and gives it access to the
instance variables for that particular game. This is the most natural way for players to behave.
A Player object represents a player of one particular poker game. If Player were an independent
class or a static nested class, on the other hand, it would represent the general idea of a poker
player, independent of a particular poker game.
This constructor defines a new class, without giving it a name. At run time, it creates an
object that belongs to that class. This form of the new operator can be used in any statement
where a regular “new” could be used. The intention of this expression is to create: “a new object
belonging to a class that is the same as hsuperclass-or-interfacei but with these hmethods-and-
variablesi added.” The effect is to create a uniquely customized object, just at the point in
the program where you need it. Note that it is possible to base an anonymous class on an
interface, rather than a class. In this case, the anonymous class must implement the interface
by defining all the methods that are declared in the interface. If an interface is used as a base,
the hparameter-listi must be empty. Otherwise, it can contain parameters for a constructor in
the hsuperclassi.
For now, we will look at one not-very-plausible example. Suppose that Drawable is an
interface defined as:
public interface Drawable {
public void draw(Graphics g);
}
Suppose that we want a Drawable object that draws a filled, red, 100-pixel square. Rather than
defining a new, separate class and then using that class to create the object, we can use an
anonymous class to create the object in one statement:
Drawable redSquare = new Drawable() {
public void draw(Graphics g) {
g.setColor(Color.RED);
g.fillRect(10,10,100,100);
}
};
Then redSquare refers to an object that implements Drawable and that draws a red square
when its draw() method is called. By the way, the semicolon at the end of the statement is not
part of the class definition; it’s the semicolon that is required at the end of every declaration
statement.
Anonymous classes are often used for actual parameters. For example, consider the following
simple method, which draws a Drawable in two different graphics contexts:
void drawTwice( Graphics g1, Graphics g2, Drawable figure ) {
figure.draw(g1);
figure.draw(g2);
}
When calling this method, the third parameter can be created using an anonymous inner class.
For example:
drawTwice( firstG, secondG, new Drawable() {
void draw(Graphics g) {
g.fillOval(10,10,100,100);
}
} );
When a Java class is compiled, each anonymous nested class will produce a separate
class file. If the name of the main class is MainClass, for example, then the names of the
class files for the anonymous nested classes will be MainClass$1.class, MainClass$2.class,
MainClass$3.class, and so on.
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 262
Of course, in this example, Drawable is a functional interface, and we could use lambda
expressions (Section 4.5) instead of anonymous classes. The last example could then be written
simply
drawTwice( firstG, secondG, g -> g.fillOval(10,10,100,100) );
and redSquare could be defined as
Drawable redSquare = g -> {
g.setFill(Color.RED);
g.fillRect(10,10,100,100);
};
This approach has the advantage that it does not create an extra .class file. However, lambda
expressions can only be used with functional interfaces, while anonymous classes can be used
with any interface or class.
}
The local variable n is effectively final and therefore can be used in the lambda expression.
On the other hand, it would have been illegal to use the variable i directly in the lambda
expression, since i is not effectively final; its value is changed when i++ is executed. Note also
that this example could be written using an anonymous class instead of a lambda expression:
FunctionR2R[] multipliers = new FunctionR2R[100];
for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
int n = i;
multipliers[i] = new FunctionR2R() {
public double valueAt(double x) {
return n * x;
}
};
}
Exercises 264
1. In all versions of the PairOfDice class in Section 5.2, the instance variables die1 and die2 (solution)
are declared to be public. They really should be private, so that they would be protected
from being changed from outside the class. Write another version of the PairOfDice class
in which the instance variables die1 and die2 are private. Your class will need “getter”
methods that can be used to find out the values of die1 and die2. (The idea is to protect
their values from being changed from outside the class, but still to allow the values to be
read.) Include other improvements in the class, including at least a toString() method.
Test your class with a short program that counts how many times a pair of dice is rolled,
before the total of the two dice is equal to two.
numbers have been entered, print out each of the six statistics that are available from
calc.
3. This problem uses the PairOfDice class from Exercise 5.1 and the StatCalc class from (solution)
Exercise 5.2.
The program in Exercise 4.4 performs the experiment of counting how many times a
pair of dice is rolled before a given total comes up. It repeats this experiment 10000 times
and then reports the average number of rolls. It does this whole process for each possible
total (2, 3, . . . , 12).
Redo that exercise. But instead of just reporting the average number of rolls, you
should also report the standard deviation and the maximum number of rolls. Use a
PairOfDice object to represent the dice. Use a StatCalc object to compute the statistics.
(You’ll need a new StatCalc object for each possible total, 2, 3, . . . , 12. You can use a
new pair of dice if you want, but it’s not required.)
4. The BlackjackHand class from Subsection 5.5.1 is an extension of the Hand class (solution)
from Section 5.4. The instance methods in the Hand class are discussed in that
section. In addition to those methods, BlackjackHand includes an instance method,
getBlackjackValue(), which returns the value of the hand for the game of Blackjack.
For this exercise, you will also need the Deck and Card classes from Section 5.4.
A Blackjack hand typically contains from two to six cards. Write a program to test the
BlackjackHand class. You should create a BlackjackHand object and a Deck object. Pick
a random number between 2 and 6. Deal that many cards from the deck and add them to
the hand. Print out all the cards in the hand, and then print out the value computed for
the hand by getBlackjackValue(). Repeat this as long as the user wants to continue.
In addition to TextIO.java, your program will depend on Card.java, Deck.java,
Hand.java, and BlackjackHand.java.
5. Write a program that lets the user play Blackjack. The game will be a simplified version (solution)
of Blackjack as it is played in a casino. The computer will act as the dealer. As in
the previous exercise, your program will need the classes defined in Card.java, Deck.java,
Hand.java, and BlackjackHand.java. (This is the longest and most complex program that
has come up so far in the exercises.)
You should first write a subroutine in which the user plays one game. The subroutine
should return a boolean value to indicate whether the user wins the game or not. Return
true if the user wins, false if the dealer wins. The program needs an object of class
Deck and two objects of type BlackjackHand, one for the dealer and one for the user.
The general object in Blackjack is to get a hand of cards whose value is as close to 21 as
possible, without going over. The game goes like this.
• First, two cards are dealt into each player’s hand. If the dealer’s hand has a value of
21 at this point, then the dealer wins. Otherwise, if the user has 21, then the user
wins. (This is called a “Blackjack”.) Note that the dealer wins on a tie, so if both
players have Blackjack, then the dealer wins.
• Now, if the game has not ended, the user gets a chance to add some cards to her
hand. In this phase, the user sees her own cards and sees one of the dealer’s two
cards. (In a casino, the dealer deals himself one card face up and one card face down.
All the user’s cards are dealt face up.) The user makes a decision whether to “Hit”,
Exercises 266
which means to add another card to her hand, or to “Stand”, which means to stop
taking cards.
• If the user Hits, there is a possibility that the user will go over 21. In that case, the
game is over and the user loses. If not, then the process continues. The user gets to
decide again whether to Hit or Stand.
• If the user Stands, the game will end, but first the dealer gets a chance to draw cards.
The dealer only follows rules, without any choice. The rule is that as long as the
value of the dealer’s hand is less than or equal to 16, the dealer Hits (that is, takes
another card). The user should see all the dealer’s cards at this point. Now, the
winner can be determined: If the dealer has gone over 21, the user wins. Otherwise,
if the dealer’s total is greater than or equal to the user’s total, then the dealer wins.
Otherwise, the user wins.
Two notes on programming: At any point in the subroutine, as soon as you know who
the winner is, you can say “return true;” or “return false;” to end the subroutine
and return to the main program. To avoid having an overabundance of variables in your
subroutine, remember that a function call such as userHand.getBlackjackValue() can
be used anywhere that a number could be used, including in an output statement or in
the condition of an if statement.
Write a main program that lets the user play several games of Blackjack. To make
things interesting, give the user 100 dollars, and let the user make bets on the game. If
the user loses, subtract the bet from the user’s money. If the user wins, add an amount
equal to the bet to the user’s money. End the program when the user wants to quit or
when she runs out of money.
6. Exercise 4.8 asked you to write a program that administers a 10-question addition quiz. (solution)
Rewrite that program so that it uses the following class to represent addition questions:
public class AdditionQuestion {
private int a, b; // The numbers in the problem.
public AdditionQuestion() { // constructor
a = (int)(Math.random() * 50 + 1);
b = (int)(Math.random() * 50);
}
public String getQuestion() {
return "What is " + a + " + " + b + " ?";
}
public int getCorrectAnswer() {
return a + b;
}
}
7. Rewrite the program from the previous exercise so that it administers a quiz with several (solution)
different kinds of questions. In the previous exercise, you used a class to represent addition
questions. For this exercise, you will use the following interface, or an equivalent abstract
class, to represent the more general idea of a question that has an integer as its answer:
Exercises 267
Quiz on Chapter 5
(answers)
1. Object-oriented programming uses classes and objects. What are classes and what are
objects? What is the relationship between classes and objects?
2. Explain carefully what null means in Java, and why this special value is necessary.
4. Suppose that Kumquat is the name of a class and that fruit is a variable of type Kumquat.
What is the meaning of the statement “fruit = new Kumquat();”? That is, what does
the computer do when it executes this statement? (Try to give a complete answer. The
computer does several things.)
7. Modify the following class so that the two instance variables are private and there is a
getter method and a setter method for each instance variable:
public class Player {
String name;
int score;
}
8. Explain why the class Player that is defined in the previous question has an instance
method named toString(), even though no definition of this method appears in the
definition of the class.
10. Java uses “garbage collection” for memory management. Explain what is meant here by
garbage collection. What is the alternative to garbage collection?
11. What is an abstract class, and how can you recognize an abstract class in Java?
13. For this problem, you should write a very simple but complete class. The class represents
a counter that counts 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, . . . . The name of the class should be Counter. It has
one private instance variable representing the value of the counter. It has two instance
methods: increment() adds one to the counter value, and getValue() returns the current
counter value. Write a complete definition for the class, Counter.
14. This problem uses the Counter class from the previous question. The following program
segment is meant to simulate tossing a coin 100 times. It should use two Counter objects,
headCount and tailCount, to count the number of heads and the number of tails. Fill in
the blanks so that it will do so:
Quiz 269
15. Explain why it can never make sense to test “if (obj.equals(null))”.
Chapter 6
Computer users today expect to interact with their computers using a graphical user
interface (GUI). Java can be used to write sophisticated GUI programs.
GUI programs differ from traditional “straight-through” programs that you have encoun-
tered in the first few chapters of this book. One big difference is that GUI programs are
event-driven. That is, user actions such as clicking on a button or pressing a key on the
keyboard generate events, and the program must respond to these events as they occur.
Event-driven programming builds on all the skills you have learned in the first five chapters
of this text. You need to be able to write the methods that respond to events. Inside those
methods, you are doing the kind of programming-in-the-small that was covered in Chapter 2
and Chapter 3. And of course, objects are everywhere in GUI programming. Events are
objects. Colors and fonts are objects. GUI components such as buttons and menus are objects.
Events are handled by instance methods contained in objects. In Java, GUI programming is
object-oriented programming.
This chapter covers the basics of GUI programming. The discussion will continue in
Chapter 13 with more details and with more advanced techniques.
This edition of this textbook covers GUI programming using the Swing GUI toolkit,
which is a standard part of Java and has been included in the JDK since Java 2.
An alternative edition covers JavaFX instead of Swing. That edition can be found at
https://math.hws.edu/javanotes9. The only really significant differences between the two edi-
tions are in this chapter and in Chapter 13.
271
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 272
programming—programming that tells them how to draw themselves on the screen and how to
respond to events such as being clicked on by the user.
A GUI program doesn’t have to be immensely complex. We can, for example, write a very
simple GUI “Hello World” program that says “Hello” to the user, but does it by opening a
window where the greeting is displayed:
import javax.swing.JOptionPane;
public class HelloWorldGUI1 {
public static void main(String[] args) {
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog( null, "Hello World!" );
}
}
When this program is run, a window appears on the screen that contains the message
“Hello World!”. The window also contains an “OK” button for the user to click after reading
the message. When the user clicks this button, the window closes and the program ends. This
program can be placed in a file named HelloWorldGUI1.java, compiled, and run using the java
command on the command line just like any other Java program.
Now, this program is already doing some pretty fancy stuff. It creates a window, it draws
the contents of that window, and it handles the event that is generated when the user clicks
the button. The reason the program was so easy to write is that all the work is done by
showMessageDialog(), a static method in the built-in class JOptionPane. (Note that the
source code “imports” the class javax.swing.JOptionPane to make it possible to refer to the
JOptionPane class using its simple name. See Subsection 4.6.3 for information about importing
classes from Java’s standard packages.)
If you want to display a message to the user in a GUI program, this is a good way to do it:
Just use a standard class that already knows how to do the work! And in fact, JOptionPane is
regularly used for just this purpose (but as part of a larger program, usually). Of course, if you
want to do anything serious in a GUI program, there is a lot more to learn. To give you an idea
of the types of things that are involved, we’ll look at a short GUI program that does the same
things as the previous program—open a window containing a message and an OK button, and
respond to a click on the button by ending the program—but does it all by hand instead of by
using the built-in JOptionPane class. Mind you, this is not a good way to write the program,
but it will illustrate some important aspects of GUI programming in Java.
Here is the source code for the program. You are not expected to understand it yet. I
will explain how it works below, but it will take the rest of the chapter before you will really
understand completely. In this section, you will just get a brief overview of GUI programming.
import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.event.*;
import javax.swing.*;
public class HelloWorldGUI2 {
private static class HelloWorldDisplay extends JPanel {
public void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
super.paintComponent(g);
g.drawString( "Hello World!", 20, 30 );
}
}
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 273
The parameter (the string “GUI test”) in the constructor specifies the title that will be displayed
in the titlebar of the window. This line creates the window object, but the window itself is not
yet visible on the screen. Before making the window visible, some of its properties are set with
these statements:
window.setContentPane(content);
window.setSize(250,100);
window.setLocation(100,100);
The first line here sets the content of the window. (The content itself was created earlier in the
main program.) The second line says that the window will be 250 pixels wide and 100 pixels
high. The third line says that the upper left corner of the window will be 100 pixels over from
the left edge of the screen and 100 pixels down from the top. Once all this has been set up, the
window is actually made visible on the screen with the command:
window.setVisible(true);
It might look as if the program ends at that point, and, in fact, the main() routine does end.
However, the window is still on the screen and the program as a whole does not end until the
user clicks the OK button. Once the window was opened, a new thread was created to manage
the graphical user interface, and that thread continues to run even after main() has finished.
∗ ∗ ∗
The content that is displayed in a JFrame is called its content pane. (In addition to its
content pane, a JFrame can also have a menu bar, which is a separate thing that I will talk
about later.) A basic JFrame already has a blank content pane; you can either add things
to that pane or you can replace the basic content pane entirely. In my sample program,
the line window.setContentPane(content) replaces the original blank content pane with a
different component. (Remember that a “component” is just a visual element of a graphical
user interface.) In this case, the new content is a component of type JPanel.
JPanel is another of the fundamental classes in Swing. The basic JPanel is, again, just
a blank rectangle. There are two ways to make a useful JPanel: The first is to add other
components to the panel; the second is to draw something in the panel. Both of these
techniques are illustrated in the sample program. In fact, you will find two JPanels in the
program: content, which is used to contain other components, and displayPanel, which is
used as a drawing surface.
Let’s look more closely at displayPanel. This variable is of type HelloWorldDisplay, which
is a static nested class inside the HelloWorldGUI2 class. (Nested classes were introduced in
Section 5.8.) This class defines just one instance method, paintComponent(), which overrides
a method of the same name in the JPanel class:
private static class HelloWorldDisplay extends JPanel {
public void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
super.paintComponent(g);
g.drawString( "Hello World!", 20, 30 );
}
}
The paintComponent() method is called by the system when a component needs to be painted
on the screen. In the JPanel class, the paintComponent method simply fills the panel with
the panel’s background color. The paintComponent() method in HelloWorldDisplay begins
by calling super.paintComponent(g). This calls the version of paintComponent() that is
defined in the superclass, JPanel; that is, it fills the panel with the background color. (See
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 275
Subsection 5.6.2 for a discussion of the special variable super.) Then it calls g.drawString()
to paint the string “Hello World!” onto the panel. The net result is that whenever a
HelloWorldDisplay is shown on the screen, it displays the string “Hello World!”.
We will often use JPanels in this way, as drawing surfaces. Usually, when we do this, we will
define a class that is a subclass of JPanel and we will write a paintComponent method in that
class to draw the desired content in the panel. The subclass of JPanel can be defined either as
a separate class in its own file or as a nested class. In simple cases, I will tend to use a nested
class for the convenience.
As an example, consider the OK button in the sample program. When the user clicks the
button, an event is generated. This event is represented by an object belonging to the class
ActionEvent. The event that is generated is associated with the button; we say that the button
is the source of the event. The listener object in this case is an object belonging to the class
ButtonHandler, which is defined as a nested class inside HelloWorldGUI2 :
private static class ButtonHandler implements ActionListener {
public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
System.exit(0);
}
}
This class implements the ActionListener interface—a requirement for listener objects that
handle events from buttons. (Interfaces were introduced in Section 5.7.) The event-handling
method is named actionPerformed, as specified by the ActionListener interface. This method
contains the code that is executed when the user clicks the button; in this case, the code is
simply a call to System.exit(), which will terminate the program.
There is one more ingredient that is necessary to get the event from the button to the
listener object: The listener object must register itself with the button as an event listener.
This is done with the statement:
okButton.addActionListener(listener);
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 277
This statement tells okButton that when the user clicks the button, the ActionEvent that is
generated should be sent to listener. Without this statement, the button has no way of
knowing that there is something that would like to listen for events from the button.
This example shows a general technique for programming the behavior of a GUI: Write
classes that include event-handling methods. Create objects that belong to these classes and
register them as listeners with the objects that will actually detect or generate the events. When
an event occurs, the listener is notified, and the code that you wrote in one of its event-handling
methods is executed. At first, this might seem like a very roundabout and complicated way to
get things done, but as you gain experience with it, you will find that it is very flexible and
that it goes together very well with object oriented programming.
Now, in fact, ActionListener is a functional interface, since it defines just one method, and
it can be used to define lambda expressions (see Section 4.5). This means that we could use a
lambda expression as the event handler for an action event. In the sample program, we could
eliminate the nested subclass ButtonHandler and the variable listener of type ButtonHandler
and set up the event handling with the statement
okButton.addActionListener( e -> System.exit(0) );
The parameter e is required, even though its value is not used, because the function defined
by the ActionListener interface requires a parameter. See HelloWorldGUI3.java for a complete
program that uses this technique. Unfortunately, lambda expressions cannot be used for all
event handling in Swing, since most interfaces in Swing are not functional interfaces.
This section has introduced some of the fundamentals of GUI programming with Swing.
We will spend the rest of the chapter exploring them in more detail.
To create a drawing surface, you should define a subclass of JPanel and provide a custom
paintComponent() method. Create an object belonging to this class and use it in your
program. When the time comes for your component to be drawn on the screen, the system
will call its paintComponent() to do the drawing. That is, the code that you put into the
paintComponent() method will be executed whenever the panel needs to be drawn on the
screen; by writing this method, you determine the picture that will be displayed in the panel.
Note that you are not likely to call a paintComponent() method any more than you are likely
to call a main() routine. The system calls the method. You write the method to say what will
happen when the system calls it.
Note that the paintComponent() method has a parameter of type Graphics. The Graphics
object will be provided by the system when it calls your method. You need this object to
do the actual drawing. To do any drawing at all in Java, you need a graphics context. A
graphics context is an object belonging to the class java.awt.Graphics. Instance methods
are provided in this class for drawing shapes, text, and images. Any given Graphics object
can draw to only one location. In this chapter, that location will always be a GUI component
belonging to some subclass of JPanel. The Graphics class is an abstract class, which means
that it is impossible to create a graphics context directly, with a constructor. There are actually
two ways to get a graphics context for drawing on a component: First of all, of course, when
the paintComponent() method of a component is called by the system, the parameter to that
method is a graphics context for drawing on the component. Second, every component has
an instance method called getGraphics(). This method is a function that returns a graphics
context that can be used for drawing on the component outside its paintComponent() method.
The official line is that you should not do this, and I will almost always avoid it. But I have
found it convenient to use getGraphics() in a few examples. (Note that if g is a graphics
context created with getGraphics(), it is good form to call g.dispose() when finished using
it. This releases any operating system resources that might be held by g.)
The paintComponent() method in the JPanel class simply fills the panel with the panel’s
background color. When defining a subclass of JPanel for use as a drawing surface, you will
usually want to fill the panel with the background color before drawing other content onto
the panel (although it is not necessary to do this if the drawing commands in the method
cover the background of the component completely). This is traditionally done with a call to
super.paintComponent(g), so most paintComponent() methods that you write will have the
form:
public void paintComponent(g) {
super.paintComponent(g);
. . . // Draw the content of the component.
}
∗ ∗ ∗
In general, a component should do all drawing operations in its paintComponent() method.
What happens if, in the middle of some other method, you realize that the content of the
component needs to be changed? You should not call paintComponent() directly to make the
change. Instead, you have to inform the system that the component needs to be redrawn, and
let the system do its job by calling paintComponent(). You do this by calling the component’s
repaint() method. The method
public void repaint();
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 279
is defined in the Component class, and so can be used with any component. You should call
repaint() to inform the system that the component needs to be redrawn. It is important to
understand that the repaint() method returns immediately, without doing any painting itself.
The system will call the component’s paintComponent() method later, as soon as it gets a
chance to do so, after processing other pending events if there are any. It is even possible that
many calls to repaint() will all be handled by one call to paintComponent(), if the calls to
repaint() occur in a very short time span.
Note that the system can also call paintComponent() for other reasons. It is called when
the component first appears on the screen. It will also be called if the size of the component
changes, which can happen when the user resizes the window that contains the component.
This means that paintComponent() should be capable of redrawing the complete content of
the component on demand. As you will see, however, some of our early examples will not be
able to do this correctly.
This means that, to work properly, the paintComponent() method must be smart enough
to correctly redraw the component at any time. To make this possible, a program should store
data in its instance variables about the state of the component. These variables should contain
all the information necessary to redraw the component completely. The paintComponent()
method should use the data in these variables to decide what to draw. When the program
wants to change the content of the component, it should not simply draw the new content.
It should change the values of the relevant variables and call repaint(). When the system
calls paintComponent(), that method will use the new values of the variables and will draw
the component with the desired modifications. This might seem a roundabout way of doing
things. Why not just draw the modifications directly? There are at least two reasons. First of
all, it really does turn out to be easier to get things right if all drawing is done in one method.
Second, even if you could directly draw the modifications, you would still have to save enough
information about the modifications to enable paintComponent() to redraw the component
correctly on demand.
You will see how all this works in practice as we work through examples in the rest of this
chapter. For now, we will spend the rest of this section looking at how to get some actual
drawing done.
6.2.1 Coordinates
The screen of a computer is a grid of little squares called pixels. The color of each pixel can be
set individually, and drawing on the screen just means setting the colors of individual pixels.
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(0,0). The x coordinate increases from left to right, and the y coordinate increases from top
to bottom. The illustration shows a 20-pixel by 12-pixel component (with very large pixels). A
small line, rectangle, and oval are shown as they would be drawn by coloring individual pixels.
(Note that, properly speaking, the coordinates don’t belong to the pixels but to the grid lines
between them.)
For any component, you can find out the size of the rectangle that it occupies by calling
the instance methods getWidth() and getHeight(), which return the number of pixels in the
horizontal and vertical directions, respectively. In general, it’s not a good idea to assume that
you know the size of a component, since the size is often set by a layout manager and can
even change if the component is in a window and that window is resized by the user. This
means that it’s good form to check the size of a component before doing any drawing on that
component. For example, you can use a paintComponent() method that looks like:
public void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
super.paintComponent(g);
int width = getWidth(); // Find out the width of this component.
int height = getHeight(); // Find out its height.
. . . // Draw the content of the component.
}
Of course, your drawing commands will have to take the size into account. That is, they
will have to use (x,y) coordinates that are calculated based on the actual height and width of
the component. (However, if you are sure that you know the size, using constants for the width
and height can make the drawing easier.)
6.2.2 Colors
You will probably want to use some color when you draw. Java is designed to work with
the RGB color system. An RGB color is specified by three numbers that give the level
of red, green, and blue, respectively, in the color. A color in Java is an object of the class,
java.awt.Color. You can construct a new color by specifying its red, blue, and green
components. For example,
Color myColor = new Color(r,g,b);
There are two constructors that you can call in this way. In the one that I almost always
use, r, g, and b are integers in the range 0 to 255. In the other, they are numbers of
type float in the range 0.0F to 1.0F. (Recall that a literal of type float is written with
an “F” to distinguish it from a double number.) Often, you can avoid constructing new
colors altogether, since the Color class defines several named constants representing common
colors: Color.WHITE, Color.BLACK, Color.RED, Color.GREEN, Color.BLUE, Color.CYAN,
Color.MAGENTA, Color.YELLOW, Color.PINK, Color.ORANGE, Color.LIGHT GRAY, Color.GRAY,
and Color.DARK GRAY. (There are older, alternative names for these constants that use lower
case rather than upper case constants, such as Color.red instead of Color.RED, but the upper
case versions are preferred because they follow the convention that constant names should be
upper case.)
An alternative to RGB is the HSB color system. In the HSB system, a color is specified by
three numbers called the hue, the saturation, and the brightness. The hue is the basic color,
ranging from red through orange through all the other colors of the rainbow. The brightness is
pretty much what it sounds like. A fully saturated color is a pure color tone. Decreasing the
saturation is like mixing white or gray paint into the pure color. In Java, the hue, saturation
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 281
and brightness are always specified by values of type float in the range from 0.0F to 1.0F.
Instead of a constructor, the Color class has a static member function named getHSBColor
for creating HSB colors. To create the color with HSB values given by h, s, and b, you can say:
Color myColor = Color.getHSBColor(h,s,b);
For example, to make a color with a random hue that is as bright and as saturated as possible,
you could use:
Color randomColor = Color.getHSBColor( (float)Math.random(), 1.0F, 1.0F );
The type cast is necessary because the value returned by Math.random() is of type double,
and Color.getHSBColor() requires values of type float. (By the way, you might ask why
RGB colors are created using a constructor while HSB colors are created using a static member
function. The problem is that we would need two different constructors, both of them with
three parameters of type float. Unfortunately, this is impossible. You can have two constructors
only if the number of parameters or the parameter types differ.)
The RGB system and the HSB system are just different ways of describing the same set of
colors. It is possible to translate between one system and the other. The best way to understand
the color systems is to experiment with them. (The sample program SimpleColorChooser.java
lets you do that. You won’t understand the source code at this time, but you can run it to play
with color selection or to find the RGB or HSB values for the color that want.)
Java also makes it possible to use translucent (partially transparent) colors. The degree of
transparency is given by a fourth color component, usually called the “alpha” component. The
constructor new Color(r,g,b,a) creates an RGB color with a fourth parameter to specify the
alpha component. Transparency was already used in the example in Subsection 5.3.3.
∗ ∗ ∗
One of the properties of a Graphics object is the current drawing color, which is used for
all drawing of shapes and text. If g is a graphics context, you can change the current drawing
color for g using the method g.setColor(c), where c is a Color. For example, if you want
to draw in green, you would just say g.setColor(Color.GREEN) before doing the drawing.
The graphics context continues to use the color until you explicitly change it with another
setColor() command. If you want to know what the current drawing color is, you can call the
function g.getColor(), which returns an object of type Color. This can be useful if you want
to change to another drawing color temporarily and then restore the previous drawing color.
Every component has an associated foreground color and background color . Generally,
the component is filled with the background color before anything else is drawn (although some
components are “transparent,” meaning that the background color is ignored). When a new
graphics context is created for a component, the current drawing color is set to the foreground
color. Note that the foreground color and background color are properties of the component,
not of a graphics context.
The foreground and background colors of a component can be set by calling instance
methods component.setForeground(color) and component.setBackground(color), which
are defined in the Component class and therefore are available for use with any component. This
can be useful even for standard components, if you want them to use colors that are different
from the defaults.
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 282
6.2.3 Fonts
A font represents a particular size and style of text. The same character will appear different
in different fonts. In Java, a font is characterized by a font name, a style, and a size. The
available font names are system dependent, but you can always use the following four strings as
font names: “Serif”, “SansSerif”, “Monospaced”, and “Dialog”. (A “serif” is a little decoration
on a character, such as a short horizontal line at the bottom of the letter i. “SansSerif” means
“without serifs.” “Monospaced” means that all the characters in the font have the same width.
The “Dialog” font is the one that is typically used in dialog boxes.)
The style of a font is specified using named constants that are defined in the Font class.
You can specify the style as one of the four values:
• Font.PLAIN,
• Font.ITALIC,
• Font.BOLD, or
• Font.BOLD + Font.ITALIC.
The size of a font is an integer. Size typically ranges from about 9 to 36, although larger
sizes can also be used. The size of a font is usually about equal to the height of the largest
characters in the font, in pixels, but this is not an exact rule. The size of the default font is 12.
Java uses the class named java.awt.Font for representing fonts. You can construct a new
font by specifying its font name, style, and size in a constructor:
Font plainFont = new Font("Serif", Font.PLAIN, 12);
Font bigBoldFont = new Font("SansSerif", Font.BOLD, 24);
Every graphics context has a current font, which is used for drawing text. You can change
the current font with the setFont() method. For example, if g is a graphics context and
bigBoldFont is a font, then the command g.setFont(bigBoldFont) will set the current font
of g to bigBoldFont. The new font will be used for any text that is drawn after the setFont()
command is given. You can find out the current font of g by calling the method g.getFont(),
which returns an object of type Font.
Every component also has an associated font. It can be set with the instance method
component.setFont(font), which is defined in the Component class. When a graphics context
is created for drawing on a component, the graphic context’s current font is set equal to the
font of the component.
6.2.4 Shapes
The Graphics class includes a large number of instance methods for drawing various shapes,
such as lines, rectangles, and ovals. The shapes are specified using the (x,y) coordinate system
described above. They are drawn in the current drawing color of the graphics context. The
current drawing color is set to the foreground color of the component when the graphics context
is created, but it can be changed at any time using the setColor() method.
Some drawing methods were already listed in Subsection 3.9.1. Here, I describe those
methods in more detail and add a few more. With all these commands, any drawing that is
done outside the boundaries of the component is ignored. Note that all these methods are in
the Graphics class, so they all must be called through an object of type Graphics. It is shown
here as g, but of course the name of the graphics context is up to the programmer.
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 283
• g.drawString(String str, int x, int y) — Draws the text given by the string str.
The string is drawn using the current color and font of the graphics context. x specifies
the x-coordinate of the left end of the string. y is the y-coordinate of the baseline of the
string. The baseline is a horizontal line on which the characters rest. Some parts of the
characters, such as the tail on a y or g, extend below the baseline.
• g.drawLine(int x1, int y1, int x2, int y2) — Draws a line from the point
(x1,y1) to the point (x2,y2). The line is drawn as if with a pen that extends one pixel to
the right and one pixel down from the (x,y) point where the pen is located. For example,
if g refers to an object of type Graphics, then the command g.drawLine(x,y,x,y), which
corresponds to putting the pen down at a point, colors the single pixel with upper left
corner at the point (x,y). Remember that coordinates really refer to the lines between
the pixels.
• g.drawRect(int x, int y, int width, int height) — Draws the outline of a rect-
angle. The upper left corner is at (x,y), and the width and height of the rectangle are
as specified. If width equals height, then the rectangle is a square. If the width or the
height is negative, then nothing is drawn. The rectangle is drawn with the same pen
that is used for drawLine(), which colors pixels one pixel to the right and below the
geometric line. This means that the actual width of the rectangle as drawn is width+1,
since the drawing extends one pixel past the right edge of the rectangle, and similarly for
the height. For example, if you want to draw a rectangle around the edges of the com-
ponent, you can say “g.drawRect(0, 0, getWidth()-1, getHeight()-1);”. If you use
“g.drawRect(0, 0, getWidth(), getHeight());”, then the right and bottom edges of
the rectangle will be drawn outside the component and will not appear on the screen.
• g.drawOval(int x, int y, int width, int height) — Draws the outline of an oval.
The oval is one that just fits inside the rectangle specified by x, y, width, and height. If
width equals height, the oval is a circle.
• g.drawRoundRect(int x, int y, int width, int height, int xdiam, int ydiam) —
Draws the outline of a rectangle with rounded corners. The basic rectangle is specified by
x, y, width, and height, but the corners are rounded. The degree of rounding is given by
xdiam and ydiam. The corners are arcs of an ellipse with horizontal diameter xdiam and
vertical diameter ydiam. A typical value for xdiam and ydiam is 16, but the value used
should really depend on how big the rectangle is.
• g.draw3DRect(int x, int y, int width, int height, boolean raised) — Draws
the outline of a rectangle that is supposed to have a three-dimensional effect, as if it is
raised from the screen or pushed into the screen. The basic rectangle is specified by x, y,
width, and height. The raised parameter tells whether the rectangle seems to be raised
from the screen or pushed into it. The 3D effect is achieved by using brighter and darker
versions of the drawing color for different edges of the rectangle. The documentation
recommends setting the drawing color equal to the background color before using this
method. The effect won’t work well for some colors.
• g.drawArc(int x, int y, int width, int height, int startAngle, int arcAngle)
— Draws part of the oval that just fits inside the rectangle specified by x, y, width, and
height. The part drawn is an arc that extends arcAngle degrees from a starting angle
at startAngle degrees. Angles are measured with 0 degrees at the 3 o’clock position (the
positive direction of the horizontal axis). Positive angles are measured counterclockwise
from zero, and negative angles are measured clockwise. To get an arc of a circle, make
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 284
6.2.5 Graphics2D
All drawing in Java is done through an object of type Graphics. The Graphics class provides
basic commands for such things as drawing shapes and text and for selecting a drawing color.
These commands are adequate in many cases, but they fall far short of what’s needed in a
serious computer graphics program. Java has another class, Graphics2D, that provides a larger
set of drawing operations. Graphics2D is a sub-class of Graphics, so all the methods from the
Graphics class are also available in a Graphics2D.
The paintComponent() method of a JComponent gives you a graphics context of type
Graphics that you can use for drawing on the component. In fact, the graphics context actually
belongs to the sub-class Graphics2D, and can be type-cast to gain access to the advanced
Graphics2D drawing methods:
public void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
super.paintComponent(g);
Graphics2D g2;
g2 = (Graphics2D)g;
.
. // Draw on the component using g2.
.
}
I mention Graphics2D here for completeness. I will cover some important aspects of
Graphics2D in Section 13.2, but a full treatment is more than we will have time for in this
book. However, there are two simple applications that I would like to start using now, without
explaining how they work. If g2 is a variable of type Graphics2D, as in the paintComponent()
method above, then the intimidating-looking command
g2.setRenderingHint( RenderingHints.KEY ANTIALIASING,
RenderingHints.VALUE ANTIALIAS ON );
turns on antialiasing in the graphics context. Aliasing is a jagged appearance that can be seen
when shapes are drawn using pixels. Antialiasing tries to reduce the jaggedness. It can make
diagonal lines and the outlines of ovals look much nicer. It can also improve the appearance of
text. Another useful command is
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 285
6.2.6 An Example
Let’s use some of the material covered in this section to write a subclass of JPanel for use as a
drawing surface. All the drawing will be done in the paintComponent() method of the panel
class. The panel will draw multiple copies of a message on a black background. Each copy of
the message is in a random color. Five different fonts are used, with different sizes and styles.
The message can be specified in the constructor; if the default constructor is used, the message
is the string “Java!”. The panel works OK no matter what its size.
There is one problem with the way this class works. When the panel’s paintComponent()
method is called, it chooses random colors, fonts, and locations for the messages. The
information about which colors, fonts, and locations are used is not stored anywhere. The
next time paintComponent() is called, it will make different random choices and will draw a
different picture. If you resize a window containing the panel, the picture will be continually
redrawn as the size of the window is changed! To avoid that, you would store enough information
about the picture in instance variables to enable the paintComponent() method to draw the
same picture each time it is called.
The source code for the panel class is shown below. I use an instance variable called message
to hold the message that the panel will display. There are five instance variables of type Font
that represent different sizes and styles of text. These variables are initialized in the constructor
and are used in the paintComponent() method.
The paintComponent() method for the panel simply draws 25 copies of the message. For
each copy, it chooses one of the five fonts at random, and it uses g.setFont() to select that
font for drawing. It creates a random HSB color and uses g.setColor() to select that color
for drawing. It then chooses random (x,y) coordinates for the location of the message. The x
coordinate gives the horizontal position of the left end of the string. The formula used for the
x coordinate is “-50 + (int)(Math.random() * (width+40))”. This gives a random integer
in the range from -50 to width-10. This makes it possible for the string to extend beyond the
left edge or the right edge of the panel. Similarly, the formula for y allows the string to extend
beyond the top and bottom.
Here is the complete source code for the RandomStringsPanel:
import java.awt.*;
import javax.swing.JPanel;
/**
* This panel displays 25 copies of a message. The color and
* position of each message is selected at random. The font
* of each message is randomly chosen from among five possible
* fonts. The messages are displayed on a black background.
* Note: The style of drawing used here is poor, because every
* time the paintComponent() method is called, new random values are
* used. This means that a different picture will be drawn each time.
*/
public class RandomStringsPanel extends JPanel {
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 286
This class is defined by the file RandomStrings.java. You can compile and run the program, as
long as the RandomStringsPanel class is also available.
The main routine is not logically a part of the panel class. It is just one way of using
a panel. However, it’s possible to include main() as part of the panel class, even if it
doesn’t logically belong there. This makes it possible to run the panel class as a program,
and it has the advantage of keeping everything in one file. For an example, you can look
at RandomStringsPanelWithMain.java, which is identical to the original class except for the
addition of a main() routine. Although it is not great style, I will often take a similar approach
in future examples.
I am not going to discuss the details of using JFrame here, but you can look ahead and find
them in Subsection 6.7.3. You won’t completely understand my main() routines until you read
that section.
Any object can act as an event listener, provided that it implements the appropriate
interface. A component can listen for the events that it itself generates. A panel can listen for
events from components that are contained in the panel. A special class can be created just
for the purpose of defining a listening object. Many people consider it to be good form to use
anonymous inner classes to define listening objects (see Subsection 5.8.3), and named nested
classes can also be appropriate. You will see all of these patterns in examples in this textbook.
import java.awt.Component;
import java.awt.event.MouseEvent;
import java.awt.event.MouseListener;
import javax.swing.JFrame;
/**
* Displays a window that shows 25 copies of the string "Java!" in
* random colors, fonts, and positions. The content of the window
* is an object of type RandomStringsPanel. When the user clicks
* the window, the content of the window is repainted, with the
* strings in newly selected random colors, fonts, and positions.
*/
public class ClickableRandomStrings {
public static void main(String[] args) {
JFrame window = new JFrame("Click Me to Redraw!");
RandomStringsPanel content = new RandomStringsPanel();
content.addMouseListener( new RepaintOnClick() );
window.setContentPane(content);
window.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT ON CLOSE);
window.setLocation(120,70);
window.setSize(350,250);
window.setVisible(true);
}
private static class RepaintOnClick implements MouseListener {
public void mousePressed(MouseEvent evt) {
Component source = (Component)evt.getSource();
source.repaint();
}
public void mouseClicked(MouseEvent evt) { }
public void mouseReleased(MouseEvent evt) { }
public void mouseEntered(MouseEvent evt) { }
public void mouseExited(MouseEvent evt) { }
}
} end class ClickableRandomStrings
to a mouse event differently when the user is holding down a modifier key. The boolean-
valued instance methods evt.isShiftDown(), evt.isControlDown(), evt.isAltDown(), and
evt.isMetaDown() can be called to test whether the modifier keys are pressed.
You might also want to have different responses depending on whether the user presses
the left mouse button, the middle mouse button, or the right mouse button. For events
triggered by a mouse button, you can determine which button was pressed or released by
calling evt.getButton(), which returns one of the integer constants MouseEvent.BUTTON1,
MouseEvent.BUTTON2, or MouseEvent.BUTTON3 for the first, second, and third mouse buttons
(usually, the left, middle, and right buttons). For computers that use a trackpad or single-
button mouse, buttons might be emulated in some way, for example by tapping a trackpad
with two fingers. For events such as mouseEntered and mouseExited that are not triggered by
buttons, evt.getButton() returns MouseEvent.NOBUTTON.
As an example, consider a JPanel that does the following: Clicking on the panel with the
left mouse button will place a red rectangle on the panel at the point where the mouse was
clicked. Clicking with the right mouse button will place a blue oval on the panel. Holding
down the Shift key while clicking will clear the panel by removing all the shapes that have been
placed. You can try the sample program SimpleStamper.java. Here is what the panel looks like
after some shapes have been added:
There are several ways to write this example. There could be a separate class to handle
mouse events, as in the previous example. However, in this case, I decided to let the panel itself
respond to mouse events. Any object can be a mouse listener, as long as it implements the
MouseListener interface. In this case, the panel class implements the MouseListener interface,
so the object that represents the main panel of the program can be the mouse listener for the
program. The constructor for the panel class contains the statement
addMouseListener(this);
which is equivalent to saying this.addMouseListener(this), since addMouseListener() is an
instance method in the JPanel object represented by this. Now, the ordinary way to register a
mouse listener is to say X.addMouseListener(Y) where Y is the listener and X is the component
that will generate the mouse events. In the statement this.addMouseListener(this), both
roles are played by this; that is, “this object” (the panel) is generating mouse events and is
also listening for those events. Although this might seem a little strange, you should get used
to seeing things like this. In a large program, however, it’s usually a better idea to write a
separate class to do the listening in order to have a more organized division of responsibilities.
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 294
The source code for the panel class is shown below. I have included a main() routine to
allow the class to be run as a program, as discussed in Subsection 6.2.7. You should check how
the instance methods in the MouseEvent object are used. You can also check for the Four Steps
of Event Handling (“import java.awt.event.*”, “implements MouseListener”, definitions
for the event-handling methods, and “addMouseListener”):
import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.event.*;
import javax.swing.*;
/**
* A simple demonstration of MouseEvents. Shapes are drawn
* on a black background when the user clicks the panel. If
* the user Shift-clicks, the panel is cleared. If the user
* right-clicks the panel, a blue oval is drawn. Otherwise,
* when the user clicks, a red rectangle is drawn. The contents of
* the panel are not persistent. For example, they might disappear
* if the panel is resized.
* This class has a main() routine to allow it to be run as an application.
*/
public class SimpleStamper extends JPanel implements MouseListener {
public static void main(String[] args) {
JFrame window = new JFrame("Simple Stamper");
SimpleStamper content = new SimpleStamper();
window.setContentPane(content);
window.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT ON CLOSE);
window.setLocation(120,70);
window.setSize(450,350);
window.setVisible(true);
}
// ----------------------------------------------------------------------
/**
* This constructor simply sets the background color of the panel to be black
* and sets the panel to listen for mouse events on itself.
*/
public SimpleStamper() {
setBackground(Color.BLACK);
addMouseListener(this);
}
/**
* Since this panel has been set to listen for mouse events on itself,
* this method will be called when the user clicks the mouse on the panel.
* This method is part of the MouseListener interface.
*/
public void mousePressed(MouseEvent evt) {
if ( evt.isShiftDown() ) {
// The user was holding down the Shift key. Just repaint the panel.
// Since this class does not define a paintComponent() method, the
// method from the superclass, JPanel, is called. That method simply
// fills the panel with its background color, which is black. The
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 295
// The next four empty routines are required by the MouseListener interface.
// They don’t do anything in this class, so their definitions are empty.
public void mouseEntered(MouseEvent evt) { }
public void mouseExited(MouseEvent evt) { }
public void mouseClicked(MouseEvent evt) { }
public void mouseReleased(MouseEvent evt) { }
} // end class SimpleStamper
Note, by the way, that this class violates the rule that all drawing should be done
in a paintComponent() method. The rectangles and ovals are drawn directly in the
mousePressed() routine. To make this possible, I need to obtain a graphics context by saying
“g = getGraphics()”. After using g for drawing, I call g.dispose() to inform the operating
system that I will no longer be using g for drawing. I do not advise doing this type of direct
drawing if it can be avoided, but you can see that it does work in this case.
common reason to do so is to implement dragging . Dragging occurs when the user moves the
mouse while holding down a mouse button.
The methods for responding to mouse motion events are defined in an interface named
MouseMotionListener. This interface specifies two event-handling methods:
public void mouseDragged(MouseEvent evt);
public void mouseMoved(MouseEvent evt);
The mouseDragged method is called if the mouse is moved while a button on the mouse
is pressed. If the mouse is moved while no mouse button is down, then mouseMoved is called
instead. The parameter, evt, is an object of type MouseEvent, which contains the x and y
coordinates of the mouse’s location, as usual. As long as the user continues to move the mouse,
one of these methods will be called over and over. (So many events are generated that it would
be inefficient for a program to hear them all, if it doesn’t want to do anything in response. This is
why the mouse motion event-handlers are defined in a separate interface from the other mouse
events: You can listen for the mouse events defined in MouseListener without automatically
hearing all mouse motion events as well.)
If you want your program to respond to mouse motion events, you must create an object
that implements the MouseMotionListener interface, and you must register that object to listen
for events. The registration is done by calling a component’s addMouseMotionListener()
method. The object will then listen for mouseDragged and mouseMoved events associated with
that component. In most cases, the listener object will also implement the MouseListener
interface so that it can respond to the other mouse events as well.
(To get a better idea of how mouse events work, you should try the sample program
SimpleTrackMouse.java. This program responds to any of the seven different kinds of mouse
events by displaying the coordinates of the mouse, the type of event, and a list of the modifier
keys that are down (Shift, Control, Meta, and Alt). You can experiment with the program to
see what happens as you do various things with the mouse. I also encourage you to read the
source code. You should now be familiar with all the techniques that it uses.)
It is interesting to look at what a program needs to do in order to respond to
dragging operations. In general, the response involves three methods: mousePressed(),
mouseDragged(), and mouseReleased(). The dragging gesture starts when the user presses a
mouse button, it continues while the mouse is dragged, and it ends when the user releases the
button. This means that the programming for the response to one dragging gesture must be
spread out over the three methods! Furthermore, the mouseDragged() method can be called
many times as the mouse moves. To keep track of what is going on between one method call
and the next, you need to set up some instance variables. In many applications, for example, in
order to process a mouseDragged event, you need to remember the previous coordinates of the
mouse. You can store this information in two instance variables prevX and prevY of type int.
It can also be useful to save the starting coordinates, where the original mousePressed event
occurred, in instance variables. And I suggest having a boolean variable, dragging, which is
set to true while a dragging gesture is being processed. This is necessary because in many
applications, not every mousePressed event starts a dragging operation to which you want to
respond. The mouseDragged and mouseReleased methods can use the value of dragging to
check whether a drag operation is actually in progress. You might need other instance variables
as well, but in general outline, a class that handles mouse dragging looks like this:
import java.awt.event.*;
public class MouseDragHandler implements MouseListener, MouseMotionListener {
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 297
private int startX, startY; // Point where the original mousePress occurred.
private int prevX, prevY; // Most recently processed mouse coords.
private boolean dragging; // Set to true when dragging is in process.
. . . // other instance variables for use in dragging
public void mousePressed(MouseEvent evt) {
if ( we-want-to-start-dragging ) {
dragging = true;
startX = evt.getX(); // Remember starting position.
startY = evt.getY();
prevX = startX; // Remember most recent coords.
prevY = startY;
.
. // Other processing.
.
}
}
public void mouseDragged(MouseEvent evt) {
if ( dragging == false ) // First, check if we are
return; // processing a dragging gesture.
int x = evt.getX(); // Current position of Mouse.
int y = evt.getY();
.
. // Process a mouse movement from (prevX, prevY) to (x,y).
.
prevX = x; // Remember the current position for the next call.
prevY = y;
}
public void mouseReleased(MouseEvent evt) {
if ( dragging == false ) // First, check if we are
return; // processing a dragging gesture.
dragging = false; // We are done dragging.
.
. // Other processing and clean-up.
.
}
}
As an example, let’s look at a typical use of dragging: allowing the user to sketch a curve
by dragging the mouse. This example also shows many other features of graphics and mouse
processing. In the program, you can draw a curve by dragging the mouse on a large white
drawing area, and you can select a color for drawing by clicking on one of several colored
rectangles to the right of the drawing area. The complete source code can be found in
SimplePaint.java. Here is a picture of the program after some drawing has been done:
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 298
I will discuss a few aspects of the source code here, but I encourage you to read it carefully
in its entirety. There are lots of informative comments in the source code.
The panel for this example is designed to work for any reasonable size, that is, unless the
panel is too small. This means that coordinates are computed in terms of the actual width
and height of the panel. (The width and height are obtained by calling getWidth() and
getHeight().) This makes things quite a bit harder than they would be if we assumed some
particular fixed size for the panel. Let’s look at some of these computations in detail. For
example, the large white drawing area extends from y = 3 to y = height - 3 vertically and
from x = 3 to x = width - 56 horizontally. These numbers are needed in order to interpret
the meaning of a mouse click. They take into account a gray border around the panel and the
color palette along the right edge of the panel. The gray border is 3 pixels wide. The colored
rectangles are 50 pixels wide. Together with the 3-pixel border around the panel and a 3-pixel
divider between the drawing area and the colored rectangles, this adds up to put the right edge
of the drawing area 56 pixels from the right edge of the panel.
A white square labeled “CLEAR” occupies a 50-by-50 pixel region beneath the colored
rectangles on the right edge of the panel. Allowing for this square, we can figure out how
much vertical space is available for the seven colored rectangles, and then divide that space
by 7 to get the vertical space available for each rectangle. This quantity is represented by a
variable, colorSpace. Out of this space, 3 pixels are used as spacing between the rectangles, so
the height of each rectangle is colorSpace - 3. The top of the N-th rectangle is located
(N*colorSpace + 3) pixels down from the top of the panel, assuming that we count the
rectangles starting with zero. This is because there are N rectangles above the N-th rectangle,
each of which uses colorSpace pixels. The extra 3 is for the border at the top of the panel.
After all that, we can write down the command for drawing the N-th rectangle:
g.fillRect(width - 53, N*colorSpace + 3, 50, colorSpace - 3);
That was not easy! But it shows the kind of careful thinking and precision graphics that are
sometimes necessary to get good results.
The mouse in this program is used to do three different things: Select a color, clear the
drawing, and draw a curve. Only the third of these involves dragging, so not every mouse
click will start a dragging operation. The mousePressed() method has to look at the (x,y)
coordinates where the mouse was clicked and decide how to respond. If the user clicked on
the CLEAR rectangle, the drawing area is cleared by calling repaint(). If the user clicked
somewhere in the strip of colored rectangles, the corresponding color is selected for drawing.
This involves computing which color the user clicked on, which is done by dividing the y
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 299
coordinate by colorSpace. Finally, if the user clicked on the drawing area, a drag operation is
initiated. In this case, a boolean variable, dragging, is set to true so that the mouseDragged
and mouseReleased methods will know that a curve is being drawn. The code for this follows
the general form given above. The actual drawing of the curve is done in the mouseDragged()
method, which draws a line from the previous location of the mouse to its current location.
Some effort is required to make sure that the line does not extend beyond the white drawing area
of the panel. This is not automatic, since as far as the computer is concerned, the border and
the color bar are part of the drawing surface. If the user drags the mouse outside the drawing
area while drawing a line, the mouseDragged() routine changes the x and y coordinates to
make them lie within the drawing area.
To see how this works in a real example, let’s write another version of the ClickableRandomStrings
program from Subsection 6.3.2. This version uses an anonymous class based on MouseAdapter
to handle mouse events:
import java.awt.Component;
import java.awt.event.MouseAdapter;
import java.awt.event.MouseEvent;
import java.awt.event.MouseListener;
import javax.swing.JFrame;
public class ClickableRandomStrings2 {
public static void main(String[] args) {
JFrame window = new JFrame("Random Strings");
RandomStringsPanel content = new RandomStringsPanel();
content.addMouseListener( new MouseAdapter() {
// Register a mouse listener that is defined by an anonymous subclass
// of MouseAdapter. This replaces the RepaintOnClick class that was
// used in the original version.
public void mousePressed(MouseEvent evt) {
Component source = (Component)evt.getSource();
source.repaint();
}
} );
window.setContentPane(content);
window.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT ON CLOSE);
window.setLocation(100,75);
window.setSize(300,240);
window.setVisible(true);
}
}
Anonymous inner classes can be used for other purposes besides event handling. For
example, suppose that you want to define a subclass of JPanel to represent a drawing surface.
The subclass will only be used once. It will redefine the paintComponent() method, but will
make no other changes to JPanel. It might make sense to define the subclass as an anonymous
inner class. You will see this pattern used in some future examples.
its paintComponent() method is called, and the response to a timer event is simply to call
repaint(), which in turn triggers a call to paintComponent. The work of the program is done
in a subclass of JPanel, which starts like this:
import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.event.*;
import javax.swing.*;
public class RandomArt extends JPanel {
/**
* The constructor creates a timer with a delay time of four seconds
* (4000 milliseconds), and with a lambda expression of type
* ActionListener that responds to an event by repainting this
* panel. It also starts the timer running.
*/
public RandomArt() {
RepaintAction action = new RepaintAction();
Timer timer = new Timer(4000, e -> repaint() );
timer.start();
}
/**
* The paintComponent() method fills the panel with a random shade of
* gray and then draws one of three types of random "art". The type
* of art to be drawn is chosen at random.
*/
public void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
.
. // The rest of the class is omitted
.
You can find the full source code for this class in the file RandomArt.java. An alternative
version that uses a nested class to define the action listener, instead of a lambda expression,
can be found in RandomArtWithNestedClass.java.
Later in this section, we will use a timer to drive the animation in a simple computer game.
colored border around the edge of a component when it has the input focus, as I do in the
examples given later in this section.
If comp is any component, and you would like it to have the input focus, you can
call requestFocusInWindow(), which should work as long as the window that contains the
component is active and there is only one component that is requesting focus. In some cases,
when there is only one component involved, it is enough to call this method once, just after
opening the window, and the component will retain the focus for the rest of the program. (Note
that there is also a requestFocus() method that might work even when the window is not
active, but the newer method requestFocusInWindow() is preferred in most cases.)
In a typical user interface, the user can choose to give the focus to a component by clicking
on that component with the mouse. And pressing the tab key will often move the focus from
one component to another. This is handled automatically by the components involved, without
any programming on your part. However, some components do not automatically request the
input focus when the user clicks on them. To solve this problem, a program can register
a mouse listener with the component to detect user clicks. In response to a user click, the
mousePressed() method should call requestFocusInWindow() for the component. This is
true, in particular, for JPanels that are used as drawing surfaces, since JPanel objects do not
receive the input focus automatically.
As our first example of processing key events, we look at a simple program in which the user
moves a square up, down, left, and right by pressing arrow keys. When the user hits the ’R’, ’G’,
’B’, or ’K’ key, the color of the square is set to red, green, blue, or black, respectively. Of course,
none of these key events are delivered to the panel unless it has the input focus. The panel in
the program changes its appearance when it has the input focus: When it does, a cyan-colored
border is drawn around the panel; when it does not, a gray-colored border is drawn. The
complete source code for this example can be found in the file KeyboardAndFocusDemo.java.
I will discuss some aspects of it below. After reading this section, you should be able to
understand the source code in its entirety. I suggest running the program to see how it works.
In Java, keyboard event objects belong to a class called KeyEvent. An object that needs to
listen for KeyEvents must implement the interface named KeyListener. Furthermore, the object
must be registered with a component by calling the component’s addKeyListener() method.
The registration is done with the command “component.addKeyListener(listener);” where
listener is the object that is to listen for key events, and component is the object that will
generate the key events (when it has the input focus). It is possible for component and listener
to be the same object. All this is, of course, directly analogous to what you learned about mouse
events in the previous section. The KeyListener interface defines the following methods, which
must be included in any class that implements KeyListener :
public void keyPressed(KeyEvent evt);
public void keyReleased(KeyEvent evt);
public void keyTyped(KeyEvent evt);
Java makes a careful distinction between the keys that you press and the characters that
you type. There are lots of keys on a keyboard: letter keys, number keys, modifier keys such as
Control and Shift, arrow keys, page up and page down keys, keypad keys, function keys, and
so on. In some cases, such as the shift key, pressing a key does not type a character. On the
other hand, typing a character sometimes involves pressing several keys. For example, to type
an uppercase ’A’, you have to press the Shift key and then press the A key before releasing the
Shift key. On my Mac OS computer, I can type an accented e, by holding down the Option
key, pressing the E key, releasing the Option key, and pressing E again. Only one character
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 304
was typed, but I had to perform three key-presses and I had to release a key at the right time.
In Java, there are three types of KeyEvent. The types correspond to pressing a key, releasing a
key, and typing a character. The keyPressed method is called when the user presses a key, the
keyReleased method is called when the user releases a key, and the keyTyped method is called
when the user types a character (whether that’s done with one key press or several). Note that
one user action, such as pressing the E key, can be responsible for two events, a keyPressed
event and a keyTyped event. Typing an upper case ’A’ can generate two keyPressed events,
two keyReleased events, and one keyTyped event.
Usually, it is better to think in terms of two separate streams of events, one consisting of
keyPressed and keyReleased events and the other consisting of keyTyped events. For some
applications, you want to monitor the first stream; for other applications, you want to monitor
the second one. Of course, the information in the keyTyped stream could be extracted from
the keyPressed/keyReleased stream, but it would be difficult (and also system-dependent
to some extent). Some user actions, such as pressing the Shift key, can only be detected as
keyPressed events. I used to have a computer solitaire game that highlighted every card that
could be moved, when I held down the Shift key. You can do something like that in Java by
highlighting the cards when the Shift key is pressed and removing the highlight when the Shift
key is released.
There is one more complication. Usually, when you hold down a key on the keyboard, that
key will auto-repeat. This means that it will generate multiple keyPressed events with just
one keyReleased at the end of the sequence. It can also generate multiple keyTyped events.
For the most part, this will not affect your programming, but you should not expect every
keyPressed event to have a corresponding keyReleased event.
Every key on the keyboard has an integer code number. When the keyPressed or
keyReleased method is called, the parameter, evt, contains the code of the key that was
pressed or released. The code can be obtained by calling the function evt.getKeyCode().
Rather than asking you to memorize a table of code numbers, Java provides a named constant
for each key. These constants are defined in the KeyEvent class. For example the constant for the
shift key is KeyEvent.VK SHIFT. If you want to test whether the key that the user pressed is the
Shift key, you could say “if (evt.getKeyCode() == KeyEvent.VK SHIFT)”. The key codes
for the four arrow keys are KeyEvent.VK LEFT, KeyEvent.VK RIGHT, KeyEvent.VK UP, and
KeyEvent.VK DOWN. Other keys have similar codes. (The “VK” stands for “Virtual Keyboard”.
In reality, different keyboards use different key codes, but Java translates the actual codes from
the keyboard into its own “virtual” codes. Your program only sees these virtual key codes, so
it will work with various keyboards on various platforms without modification.)
In the case of a keyTyped event, you want to know which character was typed. This
information can be obtained from the parameter, evt, in the keyTyped method by calling
the function evt.getKeyChar(). This function returns a value of type char representing the
character that was typed.
In the KeyboardAndFocusDemo program, I use the keyPressed routine to respond when the
user presses one of the arrow keys. The program includes instance variables, squareLeft and
squareTop, that give the position of the upper left corner of the movable square. When the
user presses one of the arrow keys, the keyPressed routine modifies the appropriate instance
variable and calls repaint() to redraw the panel with the square in its new position. Note
that the values of squareLeft and squareTop are restricted so that the square never moves
outside the white area of the panel:
/**
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 305
* This is called each time the user presses a key while the panel has
* the input focus. If the key pressed was one of the arrow keys,
* the square is moved (except that it is not allowed to move off the
* edge of the panel, allowing for a 3-pixel border).
*/
public void keyPressed(KeyEvent evt) {
int key = evt.getKeyCode(); // keyboard code for the pressed key
if (key == KeyEvent.VK LEFT) { // left-arrow key; move the square left
squareLeft -= 8;
if (squareLeft < 3)
squareLeft = 3;
repaint();
}
else if (key == KeyEvent.VK RIGHT) { // right-arrow key; move the square right
squareLeft += 8;
if (squareLeft > getWidth() - 3 - SQUARE SIZE)
squareLeft = getWidth() - 3 - SQUARE SIZE;
repaint();
}
else if (key == KeyEvent.VK UP) { // up-arrow key; move the square up
squareTop -= 8;
if (squareTop < 3)
squareTop = 3;
repaint();
}
else if (key == KeyEvent.VK DOWN) { // down-arrow key; move the square down
squareTop += 8;
if (squareTop > getHeight() - 3 - SQUARE SIZE)
squareTop = getHeight() - 3 - SQUARE SIZE;
repaint();
}
} // end keyPressed()
Color changes—which happen when the user types the characters ’R’, ’G’, ’B’, and ’K’, or
the lower case equivalents—are handled in the keyTyped method. I won’t include it here, since
it is so similar to the keyPressed method. Finally, to complete the KeyListener interface, the
keyReleased method must be defined. In the sample program, the body of this method is
empty since the program does nothing in response to keyReleased events.
any FocusListeners that have been registered with the component. When it loses the focus, it
calls the listener’s focusLost() method.
In the sample KeyboardAndFocusDemo program, the response to a focus event is simply
to redraw the panel. The paintComponent() method checks whether the panel has the input
focus by calling the boolean-valued function hasFocus(), which is defined in the Component
class, and it draws a different picture depending on whether or not the panel has the input
focus. The net result is that the appearance of the panel changes when the panel gains or loses
focus. The methods from the FocusListener interface are defined simply as:
public void focusGained(FocusEvent evt) {
// The panel now has the input focus.
repaint(); // will redraw with a new message and a cyan border
}
public void focusLost(FocusEvent evt) {
// The panel has now lost the input focus.
repaint(); // will redraw with a new message and a gray border
}
The other aspect of handling focus is to make sure that the panel actually gets the focus.
In this case, I called requestFocusInWindow() for the panel in the program’s main() routine,
just after opening the window. This approach works because there is only one component in
the window, and it should have focus as long as the window is active. If the user clicks over
to another window while using the program, the window becomes inactive and the panel loses
focus temporarily, but gets is back when the user clicks back to the program window.
There are still decisions to be made about the overall structure of the program. In this case,
I decided to use a nested class named Listener to define an object that listens for both focus
and key events. In the constructor for the panel, I create an object of type Listener and register
it to listen for both key events and focus events from the panel. See the source code for full
details.
In the KeyboardAndFocusDemo program, shown above, the state of the program is recorded
in the instance variables squareColor, squareLeft, and squareTop. These state variables are
used in the paintComponent() method to decide how to draw the panel. Their values are
changed in the two key-event-handling methods.
In the rest of this section, we’ll look at another example, where the state plays an even
bigger role. In this example, the user plays a simple arcade-style game by pressing the arrow
keys. The program is defined in the source code file SubKiller.java. As usual, it would be a
good idea to compile and run the program as well as read the full source code. Here is a picture:
The program shows a black “submarine” near the bottom of the panel. While the panel
has the input focus, this submarine moves back and forth erratically near the bottom. Near
the top, there is a blue “boat.” You can move this boat back and forth by pressing the left and
right arrow keys. Attached to the boat is a red “bomb” (or “depth charge”). You can drop
the bomb by hitting the down arrow key. The objective is to blow up the submarine by hitting
it with the bomb. If the bomb falls off the bottom of the screen, you get a new one. If the
submarine explodes, a new sub is created and you get a new bomb. Try it! Make sure to hit
the sub at least once, so you can see the explosion.
Let’s think about how this game can be programmed. First of all, since we are doing object-
oriented programming, I decided to represent the boat, the depth charge, and the submarine
as objects. Each of these objects is defined by a separate nested class inside the main panel
class, and each object has its own state which is represented by the instance variables in the
corresponding class. I use variables boat, bomb, and sub in the panel class to refer to the boat,
bomb, and submarine objects.
Now, what constitutes the “state” of the program? That is, what things change from time
to time and affect the appearance or behavior of the program? Of course, the state includes the
positions of the boat, submarine, and bomb, so those objects have instance variables to store
the positions. Anything else, possibly less obvious? Well, sometimes the bomb is falling, and
sometimes it’s not. That is a difference in state. Since there are two possibilities, I represent
this aspect of the state with a boolean variable in the bomb object, bomb.isFalling. Sometimes
the submarine is moving left and sometimes it is moving right. The difference is represented
by another boolean variable, sub.isMovingLeft. Sometimes, the sub is exploding. This is
also part of the state, and it is represented by a boolean variable, sub.isExploding. However,
the explosions require a little more thought. An explosion is something that takes place over
a series of frames. While an explosion is in progress, the sub looks different in each frame,
as the size of the explosion increases. Also, I need to know when the explosion is over so
that I can go back to moving and drawing the sub as usual. So, I use an integer variable,
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 308
sub.explosionFrameNumber to record how many frames have been drawn since the explosion
started; the value of this variable is used only when an explosion is in progress.
How and when do the values of these state variables change? Some of them seem to change
on their own: For example, as the sub moves left and right, the state variables that specify
its position change. Of course, these variables are changing because of an animation, and that
animation is driven by a timer. Each time an event is generated by the timer, some of the state
variables have to change to get ready for the next frame of the animation. The changes are
made by the action listener that listens for events from the timer. The boat, bomb, and sub
objects each contain an updateForNextFrame() method that updates the state variables of the
object to get ready for the next frame of the animation. The action listener for the timer calls
these methods with the statements
boat.updateForNewFrame();
bomb.updateForNewFrame();
sub.updateForNewFrame();
The action listener also calls repaint(), so that the panel will be redrawn to reflect its new
state. There are several state variables that change in these update methods, in addition to
the position of the sub: If the bomb is falling, then its y-coordinate increases from one frame
to the next. If the bomb hits the sub, then the isExploding variable of the sub changes to
true, and the isFalling variable of the bomb becomes false. The isFalling variable also
becomes false when the bomb falls off the bottom of the screen. If the sub is exploding, then
its explosionFrameNumber increases from one frame to the next, and when it reaches a certain
value, the explosion ends and isExploding is reset to false. At random times, the sub switches
between moving to the left and moving to the right. Its direction of motion is recorded in the
sub’s isMovingLeft variable. The sub’s updateForNewFrame() method includes these lines to
change the value of isMovingLeft at random times:
if ( Math.random() < 0.04 )
isMovingLeft = ! isMovingLeft;
There is a 1 in 25 chance that Math.random() will be less than 0.04, so the statement
“isMovingLeft = ! isMovingLeft” is executed in one in every twenty-five frames, on average.
The effect of this statement is to reverse the value of isMovingLeft, from false to true or from
true to false. That is, the direction of motion of the sub is reversed.
In addition to changes in state that take place from one frame to the next, a few state
variables change when the user presses certain keys. In the program, this is checked in a
method that responds to user keystrokes. If the user presses the left or right arrow key, the
position of the boat is changed. If the user presses the down arrow key, the bomb changes
from not-falling to falling. This is coded in the keyPressed()method of a KeyListener that is
registered to listen for key events on the panel; that method reads as follows:
public void keyPressed(KeyEvent evt) {
int code = evt.getKeyCode(); // which key was pressed.
if (code == KeyEvent.VK LEFT) {
// Move the boat left. (If this moves the boat out of the frame, its
// position will be adjusted in the boat.updateForNewFrame() method.)
boat.centerX -= 15;
}
else if (code == KeyEvent.VK RIGHT) {
// Move the boat right. (If this moves boat out of the frame, its
// position will be adjusted in the boat.updateForNewFrame() method.)
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 309
boat.centerX += 15;
}
else if (code == KeyEvent.VK DOWN) {
// Start the bomb falling, if it is not already falling.
if ( bomb.isFalling == false )
bomb.isFalling = true;
}
}
Note that it’s not necessary to call repaint() in this method, since this panel shows an
animation that is constantly being redrawn anyway. Any changes in the state will become
visible to the user as soon as the next frame is drawn. At some point in the program, I have
to make sure that the user does not move the boat off the screen. I could have done this in
keyPressed(), but I choose to check for this in another routine, in the boat object, since it
makes sense for the boat object to be responsible for keeping itself on screen.
The program uses four listeners, to respond to action events from the timer, key events from
the user, focus events, and mouse events. In this program, the user must click the panel to start
the game. The game is programmed to run as long as the panel has the input focus. In this
example, the program does not automatically request the focus; the user has to do it. When
the user clicks the panel, the mouse listener requests the input focus and the game begins. The
timer runs only when the panel has the input focus; this is programmed by having the focus
listener start the timer when the panel gains the input focus and stop the timer when the panel
loses the input focus. All four listeners are created in the constructor of the SubKillerPanel
class, one using a lambda expression and the others using anonymous inner classes.
I encourage you to read the source code in SubKiller.java. Although a few points are
tricky, you should with some effort be able to read and understand the entire program. Try to
understand the program in terms of state machines. Note how the state of each of the three
objects in the program changes in response to events from the timer and from the user.
While it’s not at all sophisticated as arcade games go, the SubKiller game does use some
interesting programming. And it nicely illustrates how to apply state-machine thinking in
event-oriented programming.
button, the button changes to its regular appearance. To implement this, it is necessary to
respond to mouse exit or mouse drag events. Furthermore, on many platforms, a button can
receive the input focus. The button changes appearance when it has the focus. If the button
has the focus and the user presses the space bar, the button is triggered. This means that the
button must respond to keyboard and focus events as well.
Fortunately, you don’t have to program any of this, provided you use an object belonging
to the standard class javax.swing.JButton. A JButton object draws itself and processes
mouse, keyboard, and focus events on its own. You only hear from the JButton when the
user triggers it by clicking on it or pressing the space bar while the button has the input
focus. When this happens, the JButton object creates an event object belonging to the class
java.awt.event.ActionEvent. The event object is sent to any registered listeners to tell them
that the button has been pushed. Your program gets only the information it needs—the fact
that a button was pushed.
∗ ∗ ∗
The standard components that are defined as part of the Swing graphical user interface
API are defined by subclasses of the class JComponent, which is itself a subclass of Component.
(Note that this includes the JPanel class that we have already been working with extensively.)
Many useful methods are defined in the Component and JComponent classes and so can be used
with any Swing component. We begin by looking at a few of these methods. Suppose that comp
is a variable that refers to some JComponent. Then the following methods can be used:
• comp.getWidth() and comp.getHeight() are functions that give the current size of the
component, in pixels. One warning: When a component is first created, its size is zero.
The size will be set later, probably by a layout manager. A common mistake is to check
the size of a component before that size has been set, such as in a constructor.
• comp.setEnabled(true) and comp.setEnabled(false) can be used to enable and disable
the component. When a component is disabled, its appearance might change, and the user
cannot do anything with it. There is a boolean-valued function, comp.isEnabled() that
you can call to discover whether the component is enabled.
• comp.setVisible(true) and comp.setVisible(false) can be called to hide or show the
component.
• comp.setFont(font) sets the font that is used for text displayed on the component. See
Subsection 6.2.3 for a discussion of fonts.
• comp.setBackground(color) and comp.setForeground(color) set the background and
foreground colors for the component. See Subsection 6.2.2.
• comp.setOpaque(true) tells the component that the area occupied by the component
should be filled with the component’s background color before the content of the
component is painted. By default, only JLabels are non-opaque. A non-opaque, or
“transparent”, component ignores its background color and simply paints its content over
the content of its container. This usually means that it inherits the background color from
its container.
• comp.setToolTipText(string) sets the specified string as a “tool tip” for the component.
The tool tip is displayed if the mouse cursor is in the component and the mouse is not
moved for a few seconds. The tool tip should give some information about the meaning
of the component or how to use it.
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 311
6.5.1 JButton
An object of class JButton is a push button that the user can click to trigger some action.
You’ve already seen buttons used in Section 6.1, but we consider them in much more detail
here. To use any component effectively, there are several aspects of the corresponding class
that you should be familiar with. For JButton, as an example, I list these aspects explicitly:
• Constructors: The JButton class has a constructor that takes a string as a parameter.
This string becomes the text displayed on the button. For example: stopGoButton =
new JButton("Go"). This creates a button object that will display the text, “Go” (but
remember that the button must still be added to a container before it can appear on the
screen).
• Events: When the user clicks on a button, the button generates an event of type
ActionEvent. This event is sent to any listener that has been registered with the button
as an ActionListener.
• Listeners: An object that wants to handle events generated by buttons must implement
the ActionListener interface. This interface defines just one method, “public void
actionPerformed(ActionEvent evt)”, which is called to notify the object of an action
event.
• Registration of Listeners: In order to actually receive notification of an event from a
button, an ActionListener must be registered with the button. This is done with the but-
ton’s addActionListener() method. For example: stopGoButton.addActionListener(
buttonHandler );
• Event methods: When actionPerformed(evt) is called by the button, the parameter,
evt, contains information about the event. This information can be retrieved by calling
methods in the ActionEvent class. In particular, evt.getActionCommand() returns a
String giving the command associated with the button. By default, this command is the
text that is displayed on the button, but it is possible to set it to some other string. The
method evt.getSource() returns a reference to the object that produced the event, that
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 312
is, to the JButton that was pressed. The return value is of type Object, not JButton,
because other types of components can also produce ActionEvents.
• Component methods: Several useful methods are defined in the JBut-
ton class, in addition to the standard Component methods. For example,
stopGoButton.setText("Stop") changes the text displayed on the button to “Stop”.
And stopGoButton.setActionCommand("sgb") changes the action command associated
with this button for action events. The setEnabled() and setText() methods are par-
ticularly useful for giving the user information about what is going on in the program.
A disabled button is better than a button that gives an obnoxious error message such as
“Sorry, you can’t click on me now!”
6.5.2 JLabel
JLabel is certainly the simplest type of component. An object of type JLabel exists just to
display a line of text. The text cannot be edited by the user, although it can be changed by
your program. The constructor for a JLabel specifies the text to be displayed:
JLabel message = new JLabel("Hello World!");
There is another constructor that specifies where in the label the text is located, if there is
extra space. The possible alignments are given by the constants JLabel.LEFT, JLabel.CENTER,
and JLabel.RIGHT. For example,
JLabel message = new JLabel("Hello World!", JLabel.CENTER);
creates a label whose text is centered in the available space. You can change the text displayed
in a label by calling the label’s setText() method:
message.setText("Goodbye World!");
Since the JLabel class is a subclass of JComponent, you can use methods such as
setForeground() and setFont() with labels. If you want the background color to have any
effect, you should call setOpaque(true) on the label, since otherwise the JLabel might not fill
in its background. For example:
JLabel message = new JLabel("Hello World!", JLabel.CENTER);
message.setForeground(Color.RED); // Display red text...
message.setBackground(Color.BLACK); // on a black background...
message.setFont(new Font("Serif",Font.BOLD,18)); // in a big bold font.
message.setOpaque(true); // Make sure background is filled in.
6.5.3 JCheckBox
A JCheckBox is a component that has two states: selected or unselected. The user can change
the state of a check box by clicking on it. The state of a checkbox is represented by a boolean
value that is true if the box is selected and is false if the box is unselected. A checkbox has
a label, which is specified when the box is constructed:
JCheckBox showTime = new JCheckBox("Show Current Time");
Usually, it’s the user who sets the state of a JCheckBox, but you can also set the state
programmatically. The current state of a checkbox is set using its setSelected(boolean)
method. For example, if you want the checkbox showTime to be checked, you would say
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 313
modifying the text, you can call setEditable(false). Call the same method with a parameter
of true to make the input component user-editable again.
The user can only type into a text component when it has the input focus. The user can
give the input focus to a text component by clicking it with the mouse, but sometimes it is
useful to give the input focus to a text field programmatically. You can do this by calling its
requestFocusInWindow() method. For example, when I discover an error in the user’s input,
I usually call requestFocusInWindow() on the text field that contains the error. This helps
the user see where the error occurred and lets the user start typing the correction immediately.
By default, there is no space between the text in a text component and the edge of the
component, which usually doesn’t look very good. You can use the setMargin() method of
the component to add some blank space between the edge of the component and the text.
This method takes a parameter of type java.awt.Insets which contains four integer instance
variables that specify the margins on the top, left, bottom, and right edge of the component.
For example,
textComponent.setMargin( new Insets(5,5,5,5) );
adds a five-pixel margin between the text in textComponent and each edge of the component.
∗ ∗ ∗
The JTextField class has a constructor
public JTextField(int columns)
where columns is an integer that specifies the number of characters that should be visible in the
text field. This is used to determine the preferred width of the text field. (Because characters
can be of different sizes and because the preferred width is not always respected, the actual
number of characters visible in the text field might not be equal to columns.) You don’t have to
specify the number of columns; for example, you might use the text field in a context where it
will expand to fill whatever space is available. In that case, you can use the default constructor
JTextField(), with no parameters. You can also use the following constructors, which specify
the initial contents of the text field:
public JTextField(String contents);
public JTextField(String contents, int columns);
The constructors for a JTextArea are
public JTextArea()
public JTextArea(int rows, int columns)
public JTextArea(String contents)
public JTextArea(String contents, int rows, int columns)
The parameter rows specifies how many lines of text should be visible in the text area. This
determines the preferred height of the text area, just as columns determines the preferred width.
However, the text area can actually contain any number of lines; the text area can be scrolled
to reveal lines that are not currently visible. It is common to use a JTextArea as the CENTER
component of a BorderLayout. In that case, it is less useful to specify the number of lines and
columns, since the TextArea will expand to fill all the space available in the center area of the
container.
The JTextArea class adds a few useful methods to those inherited from JTextComponent.
For example, the instance method append(moreText), where moreText is of type String, adds
the specified text at the end of the current content of the text area. (When using append()
or setText() to add text to a JTextArea, line breaks can be inserted in the text by using the
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 315
newline character, ’\n’.) And setLineWrap(wrap), where wrap is of type boolean, tells what
should happen when a line of text is too long to be displayed in the text area. If wrap is true,
then any line that is too long will be “wrapped” onto the next line; if wrap is false, the line will
simply extend outside the text area, and the user will have to scroll the text area horizontally
to see the entire line. The default value of wrap is false.
Since it might be necessary to scroll a text area to see all the text that it contains, you might
expect a text area to come with scroll bars. Unfortunately, this does not happen automatically.
To get scroll bars for a text area, you have to put the JTextArea inside another component,
called a JScrollPane. This can be done as follows:
JTextArea inputArea = new JTextArea();
JScrollPane scroller = new JScrollPane( inputArea );
The scroll pane provides scroll bars that can be used to scroll the text in the text area. The
scroll bars will appear only when needed, that is when the size of the text exceeds the size of
the text area. Note that when you want to put the text area into a container, you should add
the scroll pane, not the text area itself, to the container. See the program TextAreaDemo.java
for a very short example of using a text area in a scroll pane.
∗ ∗ ∗
When the user is typing in a JTextField and presses return, an ActionEvent is generated.
If you want to respond to such events, you can register an ActionListener with the text field,
using the text field’s addActionListener() method. (Since a JTextArea can contain multiple
lines of text, pressing return in a text area does not generate an event; it simply begins a new
line of text.)
JTextField has a subclass, JPasswordField, which is identical except that it does not reveal
the text that it contains. The characters in a JPasswordField are all displayed as asterisks (or
some other fixed character). A password field is, obviously, designed to let the user enter a
password without showing that password on the screen.
Text components are actually quite complex, and I have covered only their most basic
properties here. I will return to the topic of text components in Chapter 13.
6.5.5 JSlider
A JSlider provides a way for the user to select an integer value from a range of possible values.
The user does this by dragging a “knob” along a bar. A slider can, optionally, be decorated
with tick marks and with labels. This picture, from the sample program SliderDemo.java, shows
three sliders with different decorations and with different ranges of values:
Here, the second slider is decorated with tick marks, and the third one is decorated with labels.
It’s possible for a single slider to have both types of decorations.
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 316
The most commonly used constructor for JSliders specifies the start and end of the range
of values for the slider and its initial value when it first appears on the screen:
public JSlider(int minimum, int maximum, int value)
If the parameters are omitted, the values 0, 100, and 50 are used. By default, a slider is horizon-
tal, but you can make it vertical by calling its method setOrientation(JSlider.VERTICAL).
The current value of a JSlider can be read at any time with its getValue() method, which
returns a value of type int. If you want to change the value, you can do so with the method
setValue(n), which takes a parameter of type int.
If you want to respond immediately when the user changes the value of a slider, you can
register a listener with the slider. JSliders, unlike other components we have seen, do not
generate ActionEvents. Instead, they generate events of type ChangeEvent. ChangeEvent and
related classes are defined in the package javax.swing.event rather than java.awt.event, so
if you want to use ChangeEvents, you should import javax.swing.event.* at the beginning
of your program. You must also define some object to implement the ChangeListener interface,
and you must register the change listener with the slider by calling its addChangeListener()
method. A ChangeListener must provide a definition for the method:
public void stateChanged(ChangeEvent evt)
This method will be called whenever the value of the slider changes. Note that it will be called
when you change the value with the setValue() method, as well as when the user changes
the value. In the stateChanged() method, you can call evt.getSource() to find out which
object generated the event. If you want to know whether the user generated the change event
by dragging the knob on the slider, call the slider’s getValueIsAdjusting() method, which
returns a boolean value.
Using tick marks on a slider is a two-step process: Specify the interval between the tick
marks, and tell the slider that the tick marks should be displayed. There are actually two
types of tick marks, “major” tick marks and “minor” tick marks. You can have one or
the other or both. Major tick marks are a bit longer than minor tick marks. The method
setMinorTickSpacing(i) indicates that there should be a minor tick mark every i units along
the slider. The parameter is an integer. (The spacing is in terms of values on the slider, not
pixels.) For the major tick marks, there is a similar command, setMajorTickSpacing(i).
Calling these methods is not enough to make the tick marks appear. You also have to call
setPaintTicks(true). For example, the second slider in the above illustration was created
and configured using the commands:
slider2 = new JSlider(); // (Uses default min, max, and value.)
slider2.addChangeListener(this);
slider2.setMajorTickSpacing(25);
slider2.setMinorTickSpacing(5);
slider2.setPaintTicks(true);
Labels on a slider are handled similarly. You have to specify the labels and tell the slider to
paint them. Specifying labels is a tricky business, but the JSlider class has a method to simplify
it. You can create a set of labels and add them to a slider named sldr with the command:
sldr.setLabelTable( sldr.createStandardLabels(i) );
where i is an integer giving the spacing between the labels. To arrange for the labels to be
displayed, call setPaintLabels(true). For example, the third slider in the above illustration
was created and configured with the commands:
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 317
In this picture, a large panel holds two smaller panels. Each of the two smaller panels in turn
holds three components.
The components in a container must be “laid out,” which means setting their sizes and
positions. It’s possible to program the layout yourself, but layout is ordinarily done by a
layout manager . A layout manager is an object associated with a container that implements
some policy for laying out the components in that container. Different types of layout manager
implement different policies. In this section, we will cover the three most common types of
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 318
layout manager, and then we will look at several programming examples that use components
and layout.
Every container has a default layout manager and has an instance method, setLayout(),
that takes a parameter of type LayoutManager. That method can be used to specify a different
layout manager for the container. Components are added to a container by calling an instance
method named add() in the container object. There are actually several versions of the add()
method, with different parameter lists. Different versions of add() are appropriate for different
layout managers, as we will see below.
Note that since the five buttons will not fit in a single row across the panel, they are arranged
in two rows. In each row, the buttons are grouped together and are centered in the row. The
buttons were added to the panel using the statements:
panel.add(button1);
panel.add(button2);
panel.add(button3);
panel.add(button4);
panel.add(button5);
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 319
When a container uses a layout manager, the layout manager is ordinarily responsible for
computing the preferred size of the container (although a different preferred size could be
set by calling the container’s setPreferredSize method). A FlowLayout prefers to put its
components in a single row, so the preferred width is the total of the preferred widths of all
the components, plus the horizontal gaps between the components. The preferred height is the
maximum preferred height of all the components.
∗ ∗ ∗
A BorderLayout layout manager is designed to display one large, central component, with up
to four smaller components arranged around the edges of the central component. If a container,
cntr, is using a BorderLayout, then a component, comp, should be added to the container using
a statement of the form
cntr.add( comp, borderLayoutPosition );
where borderLayoutPosition specifies what position the component should occupy in the
layout and is given as one of the constants BorderLayout.CENTER, BorderLayout.NORTH,
BorderLayout.SOUTH, BorderLayout.EAST, or BorderLayout.WEST. The meaning of the five
positions is shown in this diagram:
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est
East
Center
å
ãßäáâ
Note that a border layout can contain fewer than five components, so that not all five of the
possible positions need to be filled. It would be very unusual, however, to have no center
component.
A BorderLayout sets the sizes of its components as follows: The NORTH and SOUTH components
(if present) are shown at their preferred heights, but their width is set equal to the full width of
the container. The EAST and WEST components are shown at their preferred widths, but their
height is set to the height of the container, minus the space occupied by the NORTH and SOUTH
components. Finally, the CENTER component takes up any remaining space. The preferred
size of the CENTER component is ignored when the layout is done, but it is taken into account
when the preferred size of the container as a whole is computed. You should make sure that
the components that you put into a BorderLayout are suitable for the positions that they will
occupy. A horizontal slider or text field, for example, would work well in the NORTH or SOUTH
position, but wouldn’t make much sense in the EAST or WEST position.
The default constructor, new BorderLayout(), leaves no space between components. If you
would like to leave some space, you can specify horizontal and vertical gaps in the constructor
of the BorderLayout object. For example, if you say
panel.setLayout(new BorderLayout(5,7));
then the layout manager will insert horizontal gaps of 5 pixels between components and vertical
gaps of 7 pixels between components. The background color of the container will show through
in these gaps. The default layout for the original content pane that comes with a JFrame is a
BorderLayout with no horizontal or vertical gap.
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 320
∗ ∗ ∗
Finally, we consider the GridLayout layout manager. A grid layout lays out components in
a grid containing rows and columns of equal sized rectangles. This illustration shows how the
components would be arranged in a grid layout with 4 rows and 3 columns:
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If a container uses a GridLayout, the appropriate add method for the container takes a single
parameter of type Component (for example: cntr.add(comp)). Components are added to the
grid in the order shown; that is, each row is filled from left to right before going on the next
row.
The constructor for a GridLayout takes the form “new GridLayout(R,C)”, where R is the
number of rows and C is the number of columns. If you want to leave horizontal gaps of H pixels
between columns and vertical gaps of V pixels between rows, use “new GridLayout(R,C,H,V)”
instead.
When you use a GridLayout, it’s probably good form to add just enough components to fill
the grid. However, this is not required. In fact, as long as you specify a non-zero value for the
number of rows, then the number of columns is essentially ignored. The system will use just as
many columns as are necessary to hold all the components that you add to the container. If you
want to depend on this behavior, you should probably specify zero as the number of columns.
You can also specify the number of rows as zero. In that case, you must give a non-zero number
of columns. The system will use the specified number of columns, with just as many rows as
necessary to hold the components that are added to the container.
Horizontal grids, with a single row, and vertical grids, with a single column, are very
common. For example, suppose that button1, button2, and button3 are buttons and that
you’d like to display them in a horizontal row in a panel. If you use a horizontal grid for the
panel, then the buttons will completely fill that panel and will all be the same size. The panel
can be created as follows:
JPanel buttonBar = new JPanel();
buttonBar.setLayout( new GridLayout(1,3) );
// (Note: The "3" here is pretty much ignored, and
// you could also say "new GridLayout(1,0)".
// To leave gaps between the buttons, you could use
// "new GridLayout(1,0,5,5)".)
buttonBar.add(button1);
buttonBar.add(button2);
buttonBar.add(button3);
You might find this button bar to be more attractive than the one that uses the default
FlowLayout layout manager.
6.6.2 Borders
We have seen how to leave gaps between the components in a container, but what if you would
like to leave a border around the outside of the container? This problem is not handled by
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 321
layout managers. Instead, borders in Swing are represented by objects. A Border object can be
added to any JComponent, not just to containers. Borders can be more than just empty space.
The class javax.swing.BorderFactory contains a large number of static methods for creating
border objects. For example, the function
BorderFactory.createLineBorder(Color.BLACK)
returns an object that represents a one-pixel wide black line around the outside of a component.
If comp is a JComponent, a border can be added to comp using its setBorder() method. For
example:
comp.setBorder( BorderFactory.createLineBorder(Color.BLACK) );
Once a border has been set for a JComponent, the border is drawn automatically, without
any further effort on the part of the programmer. The border is drawn along the edges of the
component, just inside its boundary. The layout manager of a JPanel or other container will
take the space occupied by the border into account. The components that are added to the
container will be displayed in the area inside the border. I don’t recommend using a border on
a JPanel that is being used as a drawing surface. However, if you do this, you should take the
border into account. If you draw in the area occupied by the border, that part of your drawing
will be covered by the border.
Here are some of the static methods that can be used to create borders:
• BorderFactory.createEmptyBorder(top,left,bottom,right) — leaves an empty bor-
der around the edges of a component. Nothing is drawn in this space, so the background
color of the component will appear in the area occupied by the border. The parameters
are integers that give the width of the border along the top, left, bottom, and right edges
of the component. This is actually very useful when used on a JPanel that contains other
components. It puts some space between the components and the edge of the panel. It
can also be useful on a JLabel, which otherwise would not have any space between the
text and the edge of the label.
• BorderFactory.createLineBorder(color,thickness) — draws a line around all four
edges of a component. The first parameter is of type Color and specifies the color of the
line. The second parameter is an integer that specifies the thickness of the border, in
pixels. If the second parameter is omitted, a line of thickness 1 is drawn.
• BorderFactory.createMatteBorder(top,left,bottom,right,color) — is similar to
createLineBorder, except that you can specify individual thicknesses for the top, left,
bottom, and right edges of the component.
• BorderFactory.createEtchedBorder() — creates a border that looks like a groove
etched around the boundary of the component. The effect is achieved using lighter and
darker shades of the component’s background color, and it does not work well with every
background color.
• BorderFactory.createLoweredBevelBorder()—gives a component a three-dimensional
effect that makes it look like it is lowered into the computer screen. As with an
EtchedBorder, this only works well for certain background colors.
• BorderFactory.createRaisedBevelBorder()—similar to a LoweredBevelBorder, but
the component looks like it is raised above the computer screen.
• BorderFactory.createTitledBorder(title)—creates a border with a title. The title is
a String, which is displayed in the upper left corner of the border.
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 322
There are many other methods in the BorderFactory class, most of them providing
variations of the basic border styles given here. The following illustration shows six components
with six different border styles. The text in each component is the command that created the
border for that component:
(The source code for the program that produced this picture can be found in BorderDemo.java.)
6.6.3 SliderAndButtonDemo
Now that we have looked at components and layouts, it’s time to put them together into some
complete programs. We start with a simple demo that uses a JLabel, three JButtons, and a
couple of JSliders, all laid out in a GridLayout, as shown in this picture:
The sliders in this program control the foreground and background color of the label, and the
buttons control its font style. Writing this program is a matter of creating the components,
laying them out, and programming listeners to respond to events from the sliders and
buttons. My program is defined as a subclass of JPanel that implements ChangeListener and
ActionListener, so that the panel itself can act as the listener for change events from the sliders
and action events from the buttons. In the constructor, the six components are created and
configured, a GridLayout is installed as the layout manager for the panel, and the components
are added to the panel:
/* Create the display label, with properties to match the
values of the sliders and with a default BOLD font. */
displayLabel = new JLabel("Hello World!", JLabel.CENTER);
displayLabel.setOpaque(true);
displayLabel.setBackground( new Color(100,100,100) );
displayLabel.setForeground( Color.RED );
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 323
/* Set the layout for the panel, and add the six components.
Use a GridLayout with 3 rows and 2 columns, and with
5 pixels between components. */
setLayout(new GridLayout(3,2,5,5));
add(displayLabel);
add(plainButton);
add(bgColorSlider);
add(italicButton);
add(fgColorSlider);
add(boldButton);
The class also defines the methods required by the ActionListener and ChangeListener
interfaces. The actionPerformed() method is called when the user clicks one of the buttons.
This method changes the font in the JLabel, where the font depends on which button was
clicked. To determine which button was clicked, the method uses evt.getActionCommand(),
which returns the text from the button:
public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent evt) {
String cmd = evt.getActionCommand();
if (cmd.equals("Plain Font")) {
displayLabel.setFont( new Font("Serif", Font.PLAIN, 30) );
}
else if (cmd.equals("Italic Font")) {
displayLabel.setFont( new Font("Serif", Font.ITALIC, 30) );
}
else if (cmd.equals("Bold Font")) {
displayLabel.setFont( new Font("Serif", Font.BOLD, 30) );
}
}
And the stateChanged() method, which is called when the user manipulates one of the sliders,
uses the value on the slider to compute a new foreground or background color for the label.
The method checks evt.getSource() to determine which slider was changed:
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 324
This example uses a panel with a GridLayout that has four rows and one column. In this case,
the layout is created with the statement:
setLayout(new GridLayout(4,1,3,3));
which allows a 3-pixel gap between the rows where the gray background color of the panel is
visible.
The first row of the grid layout actually contains two components, a JLabel displaying the
text “x =” and a JTextField. A grid layout can only have one component in each position. In
this case, the component in the first row is a JPanel; it is a subpanel that is nested inside the
main panel. This subpanel in turn contains the label and text field. This can be programmed
as follows:
xInput = new JTextField("0", 10); // Create a text field sized to hold 10 chars.
JPanel xPanel = new JPanel(); // Create the subpanel.
xPanel.add( new JLabel(" x = ")); // Add a label to the subpanel.
xPanel.add(xInput); // Add the text field to the subpanel
add(xPanel); // Add the subpanel to the main panel.
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 325
The subpanel uses the default FlowLayout layout manager, so the label and text field are simply
placed next to each other in the subpanel at their preferred size, and are centered in the
subpanel.
Similarly, the third row of the grid layout is a subpanel that contains four buttons. In this
case, the subpanel uses a GridLayout with one row and four columns, so that the buttons are
all the same size and completely fill the subpanel.
One other point of interest in this example is the actionPerformed() method that responds
when the user clicks one of the buttons. This method must retrieve the user’s numbers from
the text fields, perform the appropriate arithmetic operation on them (depending on which
button was clicked), and set the text of the JLabel (named answer) to represent the result.
However, the contents of the text fields can only be retrieved as strings, and these strings must
be converted into numbers. If the conversion fails, the label is set to display an error message:
public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent evt) {
double x, y; // The numbers from the input boxes.
try {
String xStr = xInput.getText();
x = Double.parseDouble(xStr);
}
catch (NumberFormatException e) {
// The string xStr is not a legal number.
answer.setText("Illegal data for x.");
xInput.requestFocusInWindow();
return;
}
try {
String yStr = yInput.getText();
y = Double.parseDouble(yStr);
}
catch (NumberFormatException e) {
// The string yStr is not a legal number.
answer.setText("Illegal data for y.");
yInput.requestFocusInWindow();
return;
}
/* Perform the operation based on the action command from the
button. The action command is the text displayed on the button.
Note that division by zero produces an error message. */
String op = evt.getActionCommand();
if (op.equals("+"))
answer.setText( "x + y = " + (x+y) );
else if (op.equals("-"))
answer.setText( "x - y = " + (x-y) );
else if (op.equals("*"))
answer.setText( "x * y = " + (x*y) );
else if (op.equals("/")) {
if (y == 0)
answer.setText("Can’t divide by zero!");
else
answer.setText( "x / y = " + (x/y) );
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 326
}
} // end actionPerformed()
The complete source code for this example can be found in SimpleCalc.java.
This is just an example of using a null layout; it doesn’t do anything, except that clicking the
buttons changes the text of the label. (We will use this example in Section 7.6 as a starting
point for a checkers game.)
The panel in this program is defined by the class NullLayoutDemo, which is created as a
subclass of JPanel. The four components are created and added to the panel in the constructor.
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 327
Then the setBounds() method of each component is called to set the size and position of the
component:
public NullLayoutDemo() {
setLayout(null); // I will do the layout myself!
setBackground(new Color(0,120,0)); // A dark green background.
setBorder( BorderFactory.createEtchedBorder() );
setPreferredSize( new Dimension(520,420) );
/* Create the components and add them to this panel. If you
don’t add them to a container, they won’t appear, even if
you set their bounds! */
board = new Checkerboard();
// (Checkerboard is a subclass of JPanel, defined below as a static
// nested class inside the main class.)
add(board);
newGameButton = new JButton("New Game");
newGameButton.addActionListener(this);
add(newGameButton);
resignButton = new JButton("Resign");
resignButton.addActionListener(this);
add(resignButton);
message = new JLabel("Click \"New Game\" to begin.");
message.setForeground( new Color(100,255,100) ); // Light green.
message.setFont(new Font("Serif", Font.BOLD, 14));
add(message);
/* Set the position and size of each component by calling
its setBounds() method. */
board.setBounds(20,20,324,324);
newGameButton.setBounds(370, 120, 120, 30);
resignButton.setBounds(370, 200, 120, 30);
message.setBounds(20, 370, 380, 30);
} // end constructor
It’s fairly easy in this case to get a reasonable layout. It’s much more difficult to do your own
layout if you want to allow for changes of size. In that case, you have to respond to changes in
the container’s size by recomputing the sizes and positions of all the components that it contains.
If you want to respond to changes in a container’s size, you can register an appropriate listener
with the container. Any component generates an event of type ComponentEvent when its size
changes (and also when it is moved, hidden, or shown). You can register a ComponentListener
with the container and respond to resize events by recomputing the sizes and positions of
all the components in the container. Consult a Java reference for more information about
ComponentEvents. However, my real advice is that if you want to allow for changes in the
container’s size, try to find a layout manager to do the work for you.
The complete source code for this example is in NullLayoutDemo.java.
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 328
The complete source code for the panel can be found in the file HighLowGUI.java. I encourage
you to compile and run it. Remember that you also need Card.java, Deck.java, and Hand.java,
since they define classes that are used in the program.
The overall structure of the main panel in this example should be reasonably clear: It
has three buttons in a subpanel at the bottom of the main panel and a large drawing surface
that displays the cards and a message. (The cards and message are not components in this
example; they are drawn using the graphics context in the panel’s paintComponent() method.)
The main panel uses a BorderLayout. The drawing surface occupies the CENTER position of the
border layout. The subpanel that contains the buttons occupies the SOUTH position of the
border layout, and the other three positions of the borderlayout are empty.
The drawing surface is defined by a nested class named CardPanel, which is subclass of
JPanel. I have chosen to let the drawing surface object do most of the work of the game: It
listens for events from the three buttons and responds by taking the appropriate actions. The
main panel is defined by HighLowGUI itself, which is also a subclass of JPanel. The constructor
of the HighLowGUI class creates all the other components, sets up event handling, and lays out
the components:
public HighLowGUI() { // The constructor.
setBackground( new Color(130,50,40) );
setLayout( new BorderLayout(3,3) ); // BorderLayout with 3-pixel gaps.
CardPanel board = new CardPanel(); // Where the cards are drawn.
add(board, BorderLayout.CENTER);
JPanel buttonPanel = new JPanel(); // The subpanel that holds the buttons.
buttonPanel.setBackground( new Color(220,200,180) );
add(buttonPanel, BorderLayout.SOUTH);
JButton higher = new JButton( "Higher" );
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 329
}
deck = new Deck(); // Create the deck and hand to use for this game.
hand = new Hand();
deck.shuffle();
hand.addCard( deck.dealCard() ); // Deal the first card into the hand.
message = "Is the next card higher or lower?";
gameInProgress = true;
repaint();
} // end doNewGame()
The doHigher() and doLower() methods are almost identical to each other (and could
probably have been combined into one method with a parameter, if I were more clever). Let’s
look at the doHigher() routine. This is called when the user clicks the “Higher” button. This
only makes sense if a game is in progress, so the first thing doHigher() should do is check the
value of the state variable gameInProgress. If the value is false, then doHigher() should just
set up an error message. If a game is in progress, a new card should be added to the hand and
the user’s prediction should be tested. The user might win or lose at this time. If so, the value
of the state variable gameInProgress must be set to false because the game is over. In any
case, the board is repainted to show the new state. Here is the doHigher() method:
/**
* Called when the user clicks the "Higher" button.
* Check the user’s prediction. Game ends if user guessed
* wrong or if the user has made three correct predictions.
*/
void doHigher() {
if (gameInProgress == false) {
// If the game has ended, it was an error to click "Higher",
// So set up an error message and abort processing.
message = "Click \"New Game\" to start a new game!";
repaint();
return;
}
hand.addCard( deck.dealCard() ); // Deal a card to the hand.
int cardCt = hand.getCardCount();
Card thisCard = hand.getCard( cardCt - 1 ); // Card just dealt.
Card prevCard = hand.getCard( cardCt - 2 ); // The previous card.
if ( thisCard.getValue() < prevCard.getValue() ) {
gameInProgress = false;
message = "Too bad! You lose.";
}
else if ( thisCard.getValue() == prevCard.getValue() ) {
gameInProgress = false;
message = "Too bad! You lose on ties.";
}
else if ( cardCt == 4) { // The hand is full, after three correct guesses.
gameInProgress = false;
message = "You win! You made three correct guesses.";
}
else {
message = "Got it right! Try for " + cardCt + ".";
}
repaint();
} // end doHigher()
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 331
The paintComponent() method of the CardPanel class uses the values in the state variables
to decide what to draw. It displays the string stored in the message variable. It draws each
of the cards in the hand. There is one little tricky bit: If a game is in progress, it draws an
extra face-down card, which is not in the hand, to represent the next card in the deck. Drawing
the cards requires some care and computation. I wrote a method, “void drawCard(Graphics
g, Card card, int x, int y)”, which draws a card with its upper left corner at the point
(x,y). The paintComponent() routine decides where to draw each card and calls this routine
to do the drawing. You can check out all the details in the source code, HighLowGUI.java.
(The playing cards used in this program are not very impressive. A version of the program
with images that actually look like cards can be found in Subsection 13.1.3.)
The source code for the program is in the file MosaicDraw.java. The program also requires
MosaicCanvas.java and MosaicDrawController.java. You will want to try it out!
As the user clicks-and-drags the mouse in the large drawing area of this program, it leaves
a trail of little colored squares. There is some random variation in the color of the squares.
(This is meant to make the picture look a little more like a real mosaic, which is a picture made
out of small colored stones in which there would be some natural color variation.) There is
a menu bar above the drawing area. The “Control” menu contains commands for filling and
clearing the drawing area, along with a few options that affect the appearance of the picture.
The “Color” menu lets the user select the color that will be used when the user draws. The
“Tools” menu affects the behavior of the mouse. Using the default “Draw” tool, the mouse
leaves a trail of single squares. Using the “Draw 3x3” tool, the mouse leaves a swath of colored
squares that is three squares wide. There are also “Erase” tools, which let the user set squares
back to their default black color.
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 332
The drawing area of the program is a panel that belongs to the MosaicCanvas class, a
subclass of JPanel that is defined in MosaicCanvas.java. MosaicCanvas is a highly reusable
class for representing mosaics of colored rectangles. It was also used behind the scenes in
the sample program in Subsection 4.7.3. The MosaicCanvas class does not directly support
drawing on the mosaic, but it does support setting the color of each individual square. The
MosaicDraw program installs a mouse listener on the MosaicCanvas; the mouse listener responds
to mousePressed and mouseDragged events on the canvas by setting the color of the square that
contains the mouse. This is a nice example of applying a listener to an object to do something
that was not programmed into the object itself.
The file MosaicDraw.java is a simple class that contains only the main() routine for the pro-
gram. Most of the programming for MosaicDraw can be found in MosaicDrawController.java.
(It might have gone into the MosaicCanvas class, if I had not decided to use that pre-existing
class in unmodified form.) It is the MosaicDrawController class that creates a MosaicCanvas
object and adds a mouse listener to it. It also creates the menu bar that is shown at the top
of the program, and it implements all the commands in the menu bar. It has an instance
method getMosaicCanvas() that returns a reference to the MosaicCanvas that it has created,
and it has another instance method getMenuBar() that returns a menu bar for the program.
These methods are used to obtain the canvas and menu bar so that they can be added to the
program’s window.
I urge you to study MosaicDrawController.java and MosaicDraw.java. I will not be
discussing all aspects of the code here, but you should be able to understand it all after reading
this section. As for MosaicCanvas.java, it uses some techniques that you would not understand
at this point, but I encourage you to at least read the comments in that file to learn about the
API for MosaicCanvas.
symmetric pattern. And the third checkbox menu item shows and hides the “grouting” in the
mosaic; the grouting is the gray lines that are drawn around each of the little squares in the
mosaic. The menu item that corresponds to the “Use Randomness” option in the “Control”
menu could be set up with the statements:
JMenuItem useRandomnessToggle = new JCheckBoxMenuItem("Use Randomness");
useRandomnessToggle.addActionListener(listener); // Set up a listener.
useRandomnessToggle.setSelected(true); // Randomness is initially turned on.
controlMenu.add(useRandomnessToggle); // Add the menu item to the menu.
In my program, the “Use Randomness” JCheckBoxMenuItem corresponds to a boolean-
valued instance variable named useRandomness in the MosaicDrawController class. This variable
is part of the state of the controller object. Its value is tested whenever the user draws
one of the squares, to decide whether or not to add a random variation to the color of the
square. When the user selects the “Use Randomness” command from the menu, the state of the
JCheckBoxMenuItem is reversed, from selected to not-selected or from not-selected to selected.
The ActionListener for the menu item checks whether the menu item is selected or not, and it
changes the value of useRandomness to match. Note that selecting the menu command does
not have any immediate effect on the picture that is shown in the window. It just changes
the state of the program so that future drawing operations on the part of the user will have a
different effect. The “Use Symmetry” option in the “Control” menu works in much the same
way. The “Show Grouting” option is a little different. Selecting the “Show Grouting” option
does have an immediate effect: The picture is redrawn with or without the grouting, depending
on the state of the menu item.
My program uses a single ActionListener to respond to all of the menu items in all the menus.
This is not a particularly good design, but it is easy to implement for a small program like this
one, and it keeps all of the programming for responding to the menu items in the same place.
The actionPerformed() method of the listener object uses the statement
String command = evt.getActionCommand();
to get the action command of the source of the event; this will be the text of the menu item.
The listener tests the value of command to determine which menu item was selected by the user.
In the case when the menu item is a JCheckBoxMenuItem, the listener must check the
state of the menu item. The listener can get its hands on the menu item object by calling
evt.getSource(). Since the return value of getSource() is of type Object, the return value
must be type-cast to the correct type. Here, for example, is the code that handles the “Use
Randomness” command:
if (command.equals("Use Randomness")) {
// Set the value of useRandomness depending on the menu item’s state.
JCheckBoxMenuItem toggle = (JCheckBoxMenuItem)evt.getSource();
useRandomness = toggle.isSelected();
}
(The actionPerformed() method uses a rather long if..then..else statement to check all
the possible action commands. It might be more natural and efficient use a switch statement
with command as the selector and all the possible action commands as cases.)
∗ ∗ ∗
In addition to menu items, a menu can contain lines that separate the menu items into
groups. In the MosaicDraw program, the “Control” menu contains such a separator. A JMenu
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 335
has an instance method addSeparator() that can be used to add a separator to the menu. For
example, the separator in the “Control” menu was created with the statement:
controlMenu.addSeparator();
A menu can also contain a submenu. The name of the submenu appears as an item in the
main menu. When the user moves the mouse over the submenu name, the submenu pops up.
(There is no example of this in the MosaicDraw program.) It is very easy to do this in Java:
You can add one JMenu to another JMenu using a statement such as mainMenu.add(submenu),
and it becomes a submenu.
6.7.2 Dialogs
One of the commands in the “Color” menu of the MosaicDraw program is “Custom Color. . . ”.
When the user selects this command, a new window appears where the user can select a color.
This window is an example of a dialog or dialog box . A dialog is a type of window that is
generally used for short, single purpose interactions with the user. For example, a dialog box
can be used to display a message to the user, to ask the user a question, to let the user select a
file to be opened, or to let the user select a color. In Swing, a dialog box is represented by an
object belonging to the class JDialog or to a subclass.
The JDialog class is very similar to JFrame and is used in much the same way. Like a
frame, a dialog box is a separate window. Unlike a frame, however, a dialog is not completely
independent. Every dialog is associated with a frame (or another dialog), which is called
its parent window . The dialog box is dependent on its parent. For example, if the parent is
closed, the dialog box will also be closed. It is possible to create a dialog box without specifying
a parent, but in that case an invisible frame is created by the system to serve as the parent.
Dialog boxes can be either modal or modeless. When a modal dialog is created, its parent
frame is blocked. That is, the user will not be able to interact with the parent until the dialog
box is closed. Modeless dialog boxes do not block their parents in the same way, so they seem
a lot more like independent windows. In practice, modal dialog boxes are easier to use and are
much more common than modeless dialogs. All the examples we will look at are modal.
Aside from having a parent, a JDialog can be created and used in the same way as a
JFrame. However, I will not give any examples here of using JDialog directly. Swing has many
convenient methods for creating common types of dialog boxes. For example, the color choice
dialog that appears when the user selects the “Custom Color” command in the MosaicDraw
program belongs to the class JColorChooser, which is a subclass of JDialog. The JColorChooser
class has a static method that makes color choice dialogs very easy to use:
Color JColorChooser.showDialog(Component parentComp,
String title, Color initialColor)
When you call this method, a dialog box appears that allows the user to select a color. The
first parameter specifies the parent of the dialog; the parent window of the dialog will be the
window (if any) that contains parentComp; this parameter can be null and it can itself be a
frame or dialog object. The second parameter is a string that appears in the title bar of the
dialog box. And the third parameter, initialColor, specifies the color that is selected when
the color choice dialog first appears. The dialog has a sophisticated interface that allows the
user to select a color. When the user presses an “OK” button, the dialog box closes and the
selected color is returned as the value of the method. The user can also click a “Cancel” button
or close the dialog box in some other way; in that case, null is returned as the value of the
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 336
method. This is a modal dialog, and showDialog() does not return until the user dismisses
the dialog box in some way. By using this predefined color chooser dialog, you can write one
line of code that will let the user select an arbitrary color. Swing also has a JFileChooser class
that makes it almost as easy to show a dialog box that lets the user select a file to be opened
or saved.
∗ ∗ ∗
The JOptionPane class includes a variety of methods for making simple dialog boxes that
are variations on three basic types: a “message” dialog, a “confirm” dialog, and an “input”
dialog. (The variations allow you to provide a title for the dialog box, to specify the icon that
appears in the dialog, and to add other components to the dialog box. I will only cover the
most basic forms here.)
A message dialog simply displays a message string to the user. The user (hopefully) reads
the message and dismisses the dialog by clicking the “OK” button. A message dialog can be
shown by calling the static method:
void JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(Component parentComp, String message)
The message can be more than one line long. Lines in the message should be separated by
newline characters, \n. New lines will not be inserted automatically, even if the message is very
long. For example, assuming that the special variable this refers to a Component:
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog( this, "This program is about to crash!\n"
+ "Sorry about that.");
An input dialog displays a question or request and lets the user type in a string as a response.
You can show an input dialog by calling:
String JOptionPane.showInputDialog(Component parentComp, String question)
Again, parentComp can be null, and the question can include newline characters. The dialog
box will contain an input box, an “OK” button, and a “Cancel” button. If the user clicks
“Cancel”, or closes the dialog box in some other way, then the return value of the method is
null. If the user clicks “OK”, then the return value is the string that was entered by the user.
Note that the return value can be an empty string (which is not the same as a null value), if
the user clicks “OK” without typing anything in the input box. If you want to use an input
dialog to get a numerical value from the user, you will have to convert the return value into a
number (see Subsection 3.7.2). As an example,
String name;
name = JOptionPanel.showInputDialog(null, "Hi! What’s your name?");
if (name == null)
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "Well, I’ll call you Grumpy.");
else
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "Pleased to meet you, " + name);
Finally, a confirm dialog presents a question and three response buttons: “Yes”, “No”, and
“Cancel”. A confirm dialog can be shown by calling:
int JOptionPane.showConfirmDialog(Component parentComp, String question)
The return value tells you the user’s response. It is one of the following constants:
• JOptionPane.YES OPTION — the user clicked the “Yes” button
• JOptionPane.NO OPTION — the user clicked the “No” button
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 337
work correctly if every component in the window has a correct preferred size. This is only a
problem in two cases: when a panel is used as a drawing surface and when a panel is used as
a container with a null layout manager. In both these cases there is no way for the system to
determine the correct preferred size automatically, and you should set a preferred size by hand.
For example:
panel.setPreferredSize( new Dimension(400, 250) );
The last two lines in the constructor position the window so that it is exactly centered on
the screen. The line
Dimension screensize = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getScreenSize();
determines the size of the screen. The size of the screen is screensize.width pixels
in the horizontal direction and screensize.height pixels in the vertical direction. The
setLocation() method of the frame sets the position of the upper left corner of the frame on
the screen. The expression “screensize.width - getWidth()” is the amount of horizontal
space left on the screen after subtracting the width of the window. This is divided by 2 so that
half of the empty space will be to the left of the window, leaving the other half of the space to
the right of the window. Similarly, half of the extra vertical space is above the window, and
half is below.
Note that the constructor has created the window and set its size and position, but that
at the end of the constructor, the window is not yet visible on the screen. (More exactly, the
constructor has created the window object, but the visual representation of that object on the
screen has not yet been created.) To show the window on the screen, it will be necessary to
call its instance method, window.setVisible(true).
In addition to the constructor, the MosaicDraw class includes a main() routine. This makes
it possible to run MosaicDraw as a stand-alone application. (The main() routine, as a static
method, has nothing to do with the function of a MosaicDraw object, and it could (and perhaps
should) be in a separate class.) The main() routine creates a MosaicDraw and makes it visible
on the screen. It also calls
window.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT ON CLOSE);
which means that the program will end when the user closes the window. Note that this is
not done in the constructor because doing it there would make MosaicDraw less flexible. It is
possible, for example, to write a program that lets the user open multiple MosaicDraw windows.
In that case, we don’t want to shut down the whole program just because the user has closed
one of the windows. There are other possible values for the default close operation of a window:
• JFrame.DO NOTHING ON CLOSE — the user’s attempts to close the window by clicking its
close box will be ignored, except that it will generate a WindowEvent. A program can
listen for this event and take any action it wants when the user attempts to close the
window.
• JFrame.HIDE ON CLOSE — when the user clicks its close box, the window will be hidden
just as if window.setVisible(false) were called. The window can be made visible again
by calling window.setVisible(true). This is the value that is used if you do not specify
another value by calling setDefaultCloseOperation.
• JFrame.DISPOSE ON CLOSE — the window is closed and any operating system resources
used by the window are released. It is not possible to make the window visible again.
(This is the proper way to permanently get rid of a window without ending the program.
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 339
You can accomplish the same thing programmatically by calling the instance method
window.dispose().)
complicated if your classes and resources are not in the default package. In that case, the files
must be in subdirectories of the directory in which you issue the jar command, and you have
to include the path to the file in the name. For example: textio/TextIO.class on MacOS
and Linux, or textio\TextIO.class on Windows.)
Making an executable jar file on the command line is only a little more complicated. There
has to be some way of specifying which class contains the main() routine. This can be done
by adding the -e option to the command, with a value giving the full name of the class that is
to be executed when the jar file is run. For example, if the name of the class is MyMainClass,
then the jar file could be created with:
jar -c -f JarFileName.jar -e MyMainClass *.class
For a program defined in two packages, grapher.ui and grapher.util, with a main class
defined in the file Main.java in package grapher.ui, the command would become
jar -c -f Grapher.jar -e grapher.ui.Main grapher/ui/*.class grapher/util/*.class
except that on Windows, the slashes would be replaced by backslashes.
(The options -c, -f, and -e are abbreviations for the longer forms --create, --file, and
--main-class, and you can use the longer forms, if you prefer clarity to brevity.)
6.7.5 jpackage
You can collect the class files and resource files for a program into a jar file, and you can give
that jar file to someone who would like to use your program. However, that person will still
need to have Java installed on their computer—something that is really not very likely these
days, unless that person is a Java developer. A possible solution is to bundle a Java virtual
machine along with your program. The Java Development Kit includes the jpackage command
to make that possible.
The jpackage command can create an installer that will install your program along with as
much Java support as is needed to run it. It has some significant limitations. It can only make
an installer for the type of computer and operating system that you are using; for example, it
is not possible to use jpackage on Linux to make an installer for Windows. And the files that
it makes are very large, since they have to include large parts of a Java execution environment.
So jpackage is really meant for packaging large, serious applications. But if you want to try it,
here is a basic example, using only a few of the options that are available for jpackage. For the
example, I made an installer for the network poker game from Subsection 12.5.4. This might
also help you understand how to work with packages in general.
To use jpackage, you need a jar file that contains the classes and resource files for
your program. The poker game uses classes from the packages netgame.common and
netgame.fivecarddraw, plus a resource image file cards.png in netgame.fivecarddraw. To
make the jar file, I first compiled the java files by giving the following command in the directory
that contained the netgame directory:
javac netgame/common/*.java netgame/fivecarddraw/*.java
and then created a jar file, Poker.jar, with this command, typed all on one line:
jar -c -f Poker.jar netgame/common/*.class netgame/fivecarddraw/*.class
netgame/fivecarddraw/cards.png
It is important to include the image resource file along with the class files. (Note that on
Windows, the slashes, “/”, would be replaced by backslashes, “\”.)
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 341
I moved Poker.jar to a new directory. Working in that new directory, I used the following
jpackage command, again typed all on one line:
jpackage --input . --main-jar Poker.jar
--main-class netgame.fivecarddraw.Main --name NetPoker
The value for the --input option is a period, which represents the current working directory;
it could be replaced by a path to the directory that contains Poker.jar. The value for the
--main-class option is the full name of the class that contains the main program; this option
is not needed if the jar file is executable. The value of the --name option is used to name the
installer and to name the executable file that it will install.
When used on my computer, running Linux Mint, this produced a file named
netpoker 1.0-1 amd64.deb that I could then install in the usual way. It installed the poker
executable as /opt/netpoker/bin/NetPoker.
On MacOS 10.15, using the JDK from adoptium.net (see Subsection 2.6.1), I found that
jpackage was installed as part of the JDK, but it was not made available on the command-line.
I was able to define it myself as an alias:
alias jpackage=
"/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/temurin-17.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/jpackage"
Again, type this all on one line. With that done, I used the same commands as given above.
The result was a .dmg file containing a program, netpoker.app, that could be run by double-
clicking. (The jpackage command might be properly set up in newer versions of MacOS.)
The jpackage command should also work on Windows, but it requires something called the
“WiX toolset” in addition to the JDK. I have not tried it.
Exercises 342
1. In the SimpleStamper example from Subsection 6.3.3, a rectangle or oval is drawn on (solution)
the panel when the user clicks the mouse. Except, when the user shift-clicks, the panel
is cleared instead. Modify this class so that the modified version will continue to draw
figures as the user drags the mouse. That is, the mouse will leave a trail of figures as the
user drags. However, if the user shift-clicks, the panel should simply be cleared and no
figures should be drawn even if the user drags the mouse after shift-clicking. Here is a
picture of my solution:
The source code for the original program is SimpleStamper.java. See the discussion
of dragging in Subsection 6.3.4. (Note that the original version uses a black background,
with a black border around each shape. That didn’t work well with a lot of closely spaced
shapes, so the new version uses a white background.)
If you want to make the problem a little more challenging, when drawing shapes during
a drag operation, make sure that the shapes that are drawn are at least, say, 5 pixels apart.
To implement this, you have to keep track of the position of the last shape that was drawn.
2. Write a program that shows a small red square and a small blue square. The user should be (solution)
able to drag either square with the mouse. (You’ll need an instance variable to remember
which square the user is dragging.) The user can drag the square out of the panel if she
wants; if she does this, there is no way to get it back.
Note that for this exercise, you should do all the drawing in the paintComponent()
method (as indeed you should whenever possible).
3. Write a program that shows a pair of dice. When the user clicks on the panel where (solution)
the dice are drawn, the dice should be rolled (that is, the dice should be assigned newly
computed random values). Each die should be drawn as a square showing from 1 to 6
dots. Since you have to draw two dice, its a good idea to write a subroutine, “void
drawDie(Graphics g, int val, int x, int y)”, to draw a die at the specified (x,y)
coordinates. The second parameter, val, specifies the value that is showing on the die.
Assume that the size of the panel is 100 by 100 pixels. Here is a picture of the panel that
displays the dice:
Exercises 343
4. In Exercise 6.3, you wrote a pair-of-dice panel where the dice are rolled when the user (solution)
clicks on the panel. Now make a pair-of-dice program in which the user rolls the dice
by clicking a button. The button should appear under the panel that shows the dice.
Also make the following change: When the dice are rolled, instead of just showing the
new value, show a short animation during which the values on the dice are changed in
every frame. The animation is supposed to make the dice look more like they are actually
rolling.
5. In Exercise 3.8, you drew a checkerboard. For this exercise, write a program where the (solution)
user can select a square by clicking on it. (Use a JPanel for the checkerboard.) Highlight
the selected square by drawing a colored border around it. When the program starts,
no square is selected. When the user clicks on a square that is not currently selected, it
becomes selected (and the previously selected square, if any, is unselected). If the user
clicks the square that is selected, it becomes unselected. Assume that the size of the panel
is exactly 320 by 320 pixels, so that each square on the checkerboard is 40 by 40 pixels.
Here is my checkerboard, shown at half-size, with the square in row 3, column 3 selected:
6. For this exercise, you should modify the SubKiller game from Subsection 6.4.4. You can (solution)
start with the existing source code, from the file SubKiller.java. Modify the game so it
keeps track of the number of hits and misses and displays these quantities. That is, every
time the depth charge blows up the sub, the number of hits goes up by one. Every time
the depth charge falls off the bottom of the screen without hitting the sub, the number of
misses goes up by one. There is room at the top of the panel to display these numbers.
To do this exercise, you only have to add a half-dozen lines to the source code. But you
have to figure out what they are and where to add them. To do this, you’ll have to read
the source code closely enough to understand how it works.
7. Exercise 5.2 involved a class, StatCalc.java, that could compute some statistics of a set (solution)
of numbers. Write a GUI program that uses the StatCalc class to compute and display
Exercises 344
statistics of numbers entered by the user. The panel will have an instance variable of
type StatCalc that does the computations. The panel should include a JTextField where
the user enters a number. It should have four labels that display four statistics for the
numbers that have been entered: the number of numbers, the sum, the mean, and the
standard deviation. Every time the user enters a new number, the statistics displayed on
the labels should change. The user enters a number by typing it into the JTextField and
pressing return. There should be a “Clear” button that clears out all the data. This means
creating a new StatCalc object and resetting the displays on the labels. My panel also has
an “Enter” button that does the same thing as pressing the return key in the JTextField.
(Recall that a JTextField generates an ActionEvent when the user presses return, so your
panel should register itself to listen for ActionEvents from the JTextField as well as the
buttons.) Here is a picture of my solution to this problem:
8. Write a program that has a JTextArea where the user can enter some text. Then program (solution)
should have a button such that when the user clicks on the button, the panel will count
the number of lines in the user’s input, the number of words in the user’s input, and the
number of characters in the user’s input. This information should be displayed on three
labels. Recall that if textInput is a JTextArea, then you can get the contents of the
JTextArea by calling the function textInput.getText(). This function returns a String
containing all the text from the text area. The number of characters is just the length
of this String. Lines in the String are separated by the new line character, ’\n’, so the
number of lines is just the number of new line characters in the String, plus one. Words
are a little harder to count. Exercise 3.4 has some advice about finding the words in a
String. Essentially, you want to count the number of characters that are first characters
in words. Don’t forget to put your JTextArea in a JScrollPane, and add the scroll pane to
the container, not the text area. Scrollbars should appear when the user types more text
than will fit in the available area. Here is a picture of my solution:
Exercises 345
10. Write a GUI Blackjack program that lets the user play a game of Blackjack, with the (solution)
computer as the dealer. The program should draw the user’s cards and the dealer’s cards,
just as was done for the graphical HighLow card game in Subsection 6.6.6. You can use
the source code for that game, HighLowGUI.java, for some ideas about how to write
your Blackjack game. The structures of the HighLow panel and the Blackjack panel are
very similar. You will certainly want to use the drawCard() method from the HighLow
program.
You can find a description of the game of Blackjack in Exercise 5.5. Add the following
rule to that description: If a player takes five cards without going over 21, that player wins
immediately. This rule is used in some casinos. For your program, it means that you only
have to allow room for five cards. You should assume that the panel is just wide enough
to show five cards, and that it is tall enough show the user’s hand and the dealer’s hand.
Note that the design of a GUI Blackjack game is very different from the design of the
text-oriented program that you wrote for Exercise 5.5. The user should play the game by
clicking on “Hit” and “Stand” buttons. There should be a “New Game” button that can
be used to start another game after one game ends. You have to decide what happens
when each of these buttons is pressed. You don’t have much chance of getting this right
unless you think in terms of the states that the game can be in and how the state can
change.
Your program will need the classes defined in Card.java, Hand.java, Deck.java, and
BlackjackHand.java.
The next exercise has a picture of a blackjack game that you can use a guide, except
that the version for this exercise does not allow betting.
11. In the Blackjack game from Exercise 6.10, the user can click on the “Hit”, “Stand”, and (solution)
“NewGame” buttons even when it doesn’t make sense to do so. It would be better if
the buttons were disabled at the appropriate times. The “New Game” button should
be disabled when there is a game in progress. The “Hit” and “Stand” buttons should be
disabled when there is not a game in progress. The instance variable gameInProgress tells
whether or not a game is in progress, so you just have to make sure that the buttons are
properly enabled and disabled whenever this variable changes value. I strongly advise
writing a subroutine that can be called whenever it is necessary to set the value of
the gameInProgress variable. Then the subroutine can take responsibility for enabling
and disabling the buttons. Recall that if bttn is a variable of type JButton, then
Exercises 347
Quiz on Chapter 6
(answers)
1. Programs written for a graphical user interface have to deal with “events.” Explain what
is meant by the term event. Give at least two different examples of events, and discuss
how a program might respond to those events.
3. Java has a standard class called JPanel. Discuss two ways in which JPanels can be used.
4. Draw the picture that will be produced by the following paintComponent() method:
public static void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
super.paintComponent(g);
for (int i=10; i <= 210; i = i + 50)
for (int j = 10; j <= 210; j = j + 50)
g.drawLine(i,10,j,60);
}
5. Suppose you would like a panel that displays a green square inside a red circle, as
illustrated. Write a paintComponent() method for the panel class that will draw the
image.
6. Java has a standard class called MouseEvent. What is the purpose of this class? What
does an object of type MouseEvent do?
7. One of the main classes in Swing is the JComponent class. What is meant by a component?
What are some examples?
9. Consider the illustration of nested panels from the beginning of Section 6.6. What type
of layout manager is being used for each of the three panels in that picture?
12. How is the preferred size of a component set, and how is it used?
Chapter 7
Computers get a lot of their power from working with data structures. A data
structure is an organized collection of related data. An object is a data structure, combined
usually with some methods, but this type of data structure—consisting of a fairly small
number of named instance variables—is just the beginning. In many cases, programmers
build complicated data structures by hand, by linking objects together. We’ll look at these
custom-built data structures in Chapter 9. This chapter looks at more basic data structures.
There is one type of data structure that is so important and so basic that it is built into every
programming language: the array.
You have already encountered arrays in Section 3.8 and Subsection 5.1.4. We continue the
study of arrays in this chapter, including some new details of their use and some additional
array-processing techniques. In particular, we will look at the important topic of algorithms
for searching and sorting an array in Section 7.5.
An array has a fixed size that can’t be changed after the array is created. But in many
cases, it is useful to have a data structure that can grow and shrink as necessary. In Section 7.3,
we will look at a standard class, ArrayList, that represents such a data structure.
An array is a numbered sequence of items, all of the same type. A record is another kind of
standard data structure. Like an array, a record consists of a sequence of items, but in a record,
the items are referred to by name instead of by number, and the items can be of different types.
Any object in Java can be thought of as a record in this sense, but Java 17 introduced records
explicitly into the language as a special kind of class with certain restrictions. We will look at
record classes in Section 7.4.
349
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 350
its length. The length of an array A is A.length. The length of an array can’t be changed after
the array is created. The elements of the array A are A[0], A[1], . . . , A[A.length-1]. An
attempt to refer to an array element with an index outside the range from zero to A.length-1
causes an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException.
Arrays in Java are objects, so an array variable can only refer to an array; it does not
contain the array. The value of an array variable can also be null. In that case, it does
not refer to any array, and an attempt to refer to an array element such as A[i] will cause a
NullPointerException. Arrays are created using a special form of the new operator. For example,
int[] A = new int[10];
creates a new array with base type int and length 10, and it sets the variable A to refer to the
newly created array.
in the loop; it cannot be a variable that already exists outside the loop.) When this loop is
executed, each value from the array is assigned to item in turn and the body of the loop is
executed for each value. Thus, the above loop is exactly equivalent to:
for ( int index = 0; index < itemArray.length; index++ ) {
BaseType item;
item = itemArray[index]; // Get one of the values from the array
.
. // process the item
.
}
For example, if A is an array of type int[ ], then we could print all the values from A with
the for-each loop:
for ( int item : A )
System.out.println( item );
and we could add up all the positive integers in A with:
int sum = 0; // This will be the sum of all the positive numbers in A.
for ( int item : A ) {
if (item > 0)
sum = sum + item;
}
I also note that the use of var for declaring local variables, which was introduced in
Subsection 4.8.2, applies to the loop control variable in a for-each loop. So, instead of
“for (BaseType item : itemArray)”, we could write “for (var item : itemArray)”. The
type of the variable is deduced from the base type of the array. This syntax becomes more useful
when dealing with more complicated types.
The for-each loop is not always appropriate. For example, there is no simple way to use
it to process the items in just a part of an array, or to process the elements in reverse order.
However, it does make the code a little simpler when you do want to process all the values, in
order. since it eliminates any need to use array indices.
But it’s important to note that a for-each loop processes the values in the array, not the
elements (where an element means the actual memory location that is part of the array and
that holds the value). For example, consider the following incorrect attempt to fill an array of
integers with 17’s:
int[] intList = new int[10];
for ( int item : intList ) { // INCORRECT! DOES NOT MODIFY THE ARRAY!
item = 17;
}
The assignment statement item = 17 assigns the value 17 to the loop control variable, item.
However, this has nothing to do with the array. When the body of the loop is executed, the
value from one of the elements of the array is copied into item. The statement item = 17
replaces that copied value but has no effect on the array element from which it was copied; the
value in the array is not changed. The loop is equivalent to
int[] intList = new int[10];
for ( int i = 0; i < intList.length; i++ ) {
int item = intList[i];
item = 17;
}
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 352
which certainly does not change the value of any element in the array.
As an example, consider a method that can draw a polygon through any number of points.
The points are given as values of type Point, where an object of type Point has two instance
variables, x and y, of type int. In this case, the method has one ordinary parameter—the
graphics context that will be used to draw the polygon—in addition to the variable arity
parameter. Remember that inside the definition of the method, the parameter points becomes
an array of Points:
public static void drawPolygon(Graphics g, Point... points) {
if (points.length > 1) { // (Need at least 2 points to draw anything.)
for (int i = 0; i < points.length - 1; i++) {
// Draw a line from i-th point to (i+1)-th point
g.drawLine( points[i].x, points[i].y, points[i+1].x, points[i+1].y );
}
// Now, draw a line back to the starting point.
g.drawLine( points[points.length-1].x, points[points.length-1].y,
points[0].x, points[0].y );
}
}
When this method is called, the subroutine call statement must have one actual parameter of
type Graphics, which can be followed by any number of actual parameters of type Point.
For a final example, let’s look at a method that strings together all of the values in a list of
strings into a single, long string. This example uses a for-each loop to process the array:
public static String concat( String... values ) {
StringBuilder buffer; // Use StringBuilder for more efficient concatenation.
buffer = new StringBuilder(); // Start with an empty StringBuilder.
for ( String str : values ) { // A "for each" loop for processing the values.
buffer.append(str); // Add string to the buffer.
}
return buffer.toString(); // return the contents of the buffer
}
Given this method definition, the method call concat("Hello", "World") would return the
string “HelloWorld”, and concat() would return an empty string. Since a variable arity method
can also accept an array as actual parameter, we could also call concat(lines) where lines
is of type String[ ]. This would concatenate all the elements of the array into a single string.
The second parameter in a call to createMenu is an array of strings. The array that is passed
as an actual parameter could be created in place, using the new operator. For example, we can
use the following statement to create an entire File menu:
Menu fileMenu = createMenu( "File",
new String[] { "New", "Open", "Close", null, "Quit" } );
This should convince you that being able to create and use an array “in place” in this way can
be very convenient, in the same way that anonymous inner classes are convenient. (However,
this example could have been done even more conveniently if createMenu() had been written
as a variable arity method!)
By the way, it is perfectly legal to use the “new BaseType[] { ... }” syntax instead of
the array initializer syntax in the declaration of an array variable. For example, instead of
saying:
int[] primes = { 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19 };
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 355
break;
}
}
This type of error can be even more insidious when working with partially full arrays (see
Subsection 3.8.4), where usually only part of the array is in use, and a counter is used to keep
track of how many spaces in the array are used. With a partially full array, the problem is
not looking beyond the end of the array, but looking beyond the part of the array that is in
use. When your program tries to look beyond the end of an array, at least the program will
crash to let you know that there is a problem. With a partially full array, the problem can go
undetected.
∗ ∗ ∗
For the next example, let’s continue with partially full arrays. We have seen how to add
an item to a partially full array, but suppose that we also want to be able to remove items?
Suppose that you write a game program, and that players can join the game and leave the game
as it progresses. As a good object-oriented programmer, you probably have a class named Player
to represent the individual players in the game. A list of all players who are currently in the
game could be stored in an array, playerList, of type Player[ ]. Since the number of players can
change, you will follow the partially full array pattern, and you will need a variable, playerCt,
to record the number of players currently in the game. Assuming that there will never be more
than 10 players in the game, you could declare the variables as:
Player[] playerList = new Player[10]; // Up to 10 players.
int playerCt = 0; // At the start, there are no players.
After some players have joined the game, playerCt will be greater than 0, and
the player objects representing the players will be stored in the array elements
playerList[0], playerList[1], . . . , playerList[playerCt-1]. Note that the array ele-
ment playerList[playerCt] is not in use: Besides being the number of items in the array,
playerCt is also the index of the next open spot in the array. The procedure for adding a new
player, newPlayer, to the game is simple:
playerList[playerCt] = newPlayer; // Put new player in next
// available spot.
playerCt++; // And increment playerCt to count the new player.
But deleting a player from the game is a little harder, since you don’t want to leave a “hole”
in the array where the deleted player used to be. Suppose you want to delete the player at
index k in playerList. The number of players goes down by one, so one fewer space is used
in the array. If you are not worried about keeping the players in any particular order, then
one way to delete player number k is to move the player from the last occupied position in the
array into position k and then to decrement the value of playerCt:
playerList[k] = playerList[playerCt - 1];
playerCt--;
The player previously in position k has been replaced and is no longer in the array, so we have
deleted that player from the list. The player previously in position playerCt - 1 is now in
the array twice. But it’s only in the occupied or valid part of the array once, since playerCt
has decreased by one. Remember that every element of the array has to hold some value, but
only the values in positions 0 through playerCt - 1 will be looked at or processed in any way.
You can set playerList[playerCt] = null, which could free up the deleted Player object
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 357
for garbage collection, but that is not necessary to correctly delete the player from the list of
(active) players. (By the way, you should think about what happens if the player that is being
deleted is in the last position in the list. The code does still work in this case. What exactly
happens?)
Suppose that when deleting the player in position k, you’d like to keep the remaining players
in the same order. (Maybe because they take turns in the order in which they are stored in the
array.) To do this, all the players in positions k+1 and following must move up one position in
the array. Player k+1 replaces player k, who is out of the game. Player k+2 fills the spot left
open when player k+1 is moved. And so on. The code for this is
for (int i = k+1; i < playerCt; i++) {
playerList[i-1] = playerList[i];
}
playerCt--;
Here is an illustration of the two ways of deleting an item from a partially full array. Here,
player “C” is being deleted:
playerList playerList
ô õ A playerCt ô õ A
playerCt
ñ ñ
ó
C Alternativelyú ýüü
C ò
öo delete "C" f÷øù
the arrayú ûüýþÿ÷, ò ÿ e ÿùs that ò E
drops f÷øù r ø o E follow C in the E ó
ýa ÿ ùoves ý÷÷ýþ ýa ùøÿ
ó û øaÿ ûace.
ó
into the space
wÿ÷ÿ , ed to be. D ÷ÿûüýÿ ,
∗ ∗ ∗
This leaves open the question of what happens when a partially full array becomes full, but
you still want to add more items to it? We can’t change the size of the array—but we can make
a new, bigger array and copy the data from the old array into the new array. But what does it
mean to copy an array in the first place?
Suppose that A and B are array variables, with the same base type, and that A already refers
to an array. Suppose that we want B to refer to a copy of A. The first thing to note is that the
assignment statement
B = A;
does not make a copy of A. Arrays are objects, and an array variable can only hold a pointer
to an array. The assignment statement copies the pointer from A into B, and the result is that
A and B now point to the same array. For example, A[0] and B[0] are just different names for
exactly the same array element. To make B refer to a copy of A, we need to make an entirely
new array and copy all the items from A into B. Let’s say that A and B are of type double[ ].
Then to make a copy of A, we can say
double[] B;
B = new double[A.length]; // Make a new array with the same length as A.
for ( int i = 0; i < A.length; i++ ) {
B[i] = A[i];
}
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 358
To solve the problem of adding to a partially full array that has become full, we just need
to make a new array that is bigger than the existing array. The usual choice is to make a
new array twice as big as the old. We need to meet one more requirement: At the end, the
variable that referred to the old array must now point to the new array. That variable is what
gives us access to the data, and in the end, the data is in the new array. Fortunately, a simple
assignment statement will make the variable point to the correct array. Let’s suppose that we
are using playerList and playerCt to store the players in a game, as in the example above,
and we want to add newPlayer to the game. Here is how we can do that even if the playerList
array is full:
if ( playerCt == playerList.length ) {
// The number of players is already equal to the size of the array.
// The array is full. Make a new array that has more space.
Player[] temp; // A variable to point to the new array.
temp = new Player[ 2*playerList.length ]; // Twice as big as the old array.
for ( int i = 0; i < playerList.length; i++ ) {
temp[i] = playerList[i]; // Copy item from old array into new array.
}
playerList = temp; // playerList now points to the new, bigger array.
}
// At this point, we know that there is room in the array for newPlayer.
playerList[playerCt] = newPlayer;
playerCt++;
After the new array has been created, there is no longer any variable that points to the old
array, so it will be garbage collected.
playerList[k] = playerList[playerCt-1];
playerCt--;
if ( playerCt < playerList.length/4 ) {
// More than 3/4 of the spaces are empty. Cut the array size in half.
playerList = Arrays.copyOf( playerList, playerList.length/2 );
}
I should mention that class Arrays actually contains a bunch of copyOf methods, one for
each of the primitive types and one for objects. I should also note that when an array of objects
is copied, it is only pointers to objects that are copied into the new array. The contents of the
objects are not copied. This is the usual rule for assignment of pointers.
If what you want is a simple copy of an array, with the same size as the original, there is
an even easier way to do it. Every array has an instance method named clone() that makes
a copy of the array. To get a copy of an int array, A, for example, you can simply say
int[] B = A.clone();
∗ ∗ ∗
The Arrays class contains other useful methods. I’ll mention a few of them. As with
Arrays.copyOf, there are actually multiple versions of all of these methods, for different array
types.
• Arrays.fill( array, value ) — Fill an entire array with a specified value. The type
of value must be compatible with the base type of the array. For example, assuming
that numlist is an array of type double[ ], then Arrays.fill(numlist,17) will set every
element of numlist to have the value 17.
• Arrays.fill( array, fromIndex, toIndex, value ) — Fills part of the array with
value, starting at index number fromIndex and ending with index number toIndex-1.
Note that toIndex itself is not included.
• Arrays.toString( array ) — A function that returns a String containing all the values
from array, separated by commas and enclosed between square brackets. The values in
the array are converted into strings in the same way they would be if they were printed
out.
• Arrays.sort( array ) — Sorts the entire array. To sort an array means to rearrange
the values in the array so that they are in increasing order. This method works for arrays
of String and arrays of primitive type values (except for boolean, which would be kind of
silly). But it does not work for all arrays, since it must be meaningful to compare any two
values in the array, to see which is “smaller.” We will discuss array-sorting algorithms in
Section 7.5.
• Arrays.sort( array, fromIndex, toIndex ) — Sorts just the elements from
array[fromIndex] up to array[toIndex-1]
• Arrays.binarySearch( array, value ) — Searches for value in the array. The array
must already be sorted into increasing order. This is a function that returns an int. If
the value is found in the array, the return value is the index of an element that contains
that value. If the value does not occur in the array, the return value is -1. We will discuss
the binary search algorithm in Section 7.5.
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 360
}
To store the data for multiple copies of the message, I use an array of type StringData[ ]. The
array is declared as an instance variable, with the name stringData:
StringData[] stringData;
Of course, the value of stringData is null until an actual array is created and assigned to
it. The array has to be created and filled with data. Furthermore, each element of the array
is an object of type StringData which has to be created before it can be used. The following
subroutine creates the array and fills it with random data:
private void createStringData() {
stringData = new StringData[25];
for (int i = 0; i < 25; i++) {
stringData[i] = new StringData();
stringData[i].x = getWidth() * Math.random();
stringData[i].y = getHeight() * Math.random();
stringData[i].dx = 1 + 3*Math.random();
if (Math.random() < 0.5) // 50% chance that dx is negative
stringData[i].dx = -stringData[i].dx;
stringData[i].dy = 1 + 3*Math.random();
if (Math.random() < 0.5) // 50% chance that dy is negative
stringData[i].dy = -stringData[i].dy;
stringData[i].color = Color.getHSBColor( (float)Math.random(), 1, 1 );
stringData[i].font = fonts[ (int)(5*Math.random()) ];
}
}
This method is called in the start() method. It is also called to make new random data
when the user clicks a button. The strings can now be drawn using a for loop such as:
for (int i = 0; i < 25; i++) {
g.setColor( stringData[i].color );
g.setFont( stringData[i].font );
g.drawString( MESSAGE, (int)stringData[i].x, (int)stringData[i]. y );
}
But in fact, in my program, I used an equivalent for-each loop, which might be easier to
understand:
for ( StringData data : stringData ) {
g.setColor( data.color );
g.setFont( data.font);
g.drawString( MESSAGE, (int)data.x, (int)data.y );
}
In this loop, the loop control variable, data, holds a copy of one of the values from the array.
That value is a reference to an object of type StringData, which has instance variables named
color, font, x, and y. Once again, the use of a for-each loop has eliminated the need to work
with array indices.
As for how the animation is done, you can check out the full source code. Animation was
discussed in Subsection 6.4.1.
∗ ∗ ∗
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 362
RandomStringsWithArray uses one other array of objects. The font for a given copy of the
message is chosen at random from a set of five possible fonts. In the original version, there
were five variables of type Font to represent the fonts. The variables were named font1, font2,
font3, font4, and font5. To select one of these fonts at random, a switch statement could
be used:
Font randomFont; // One of the 5 fonts, chosen at random.
int rand; // A random integer in the range 0 to 4.
fontNum = (int)(Math.random() * 5);
switch (fontNum) {
case 0 -> randomFont = font1;
case 1 -> randomFont = font2;
case 2 -> randomFont = font3;
case 3 -> randomFont = font4;
case 4 -> randomFont = font5;
}
In the new version of the program, the five fonts are stored in an array, which is named fonts.
This array is declared as a static final member variable of type Font[ ]:
private final static Font[] fonts = new Font[] { // The five fonts
new Font("Serif", Font.BOLD, 20),
new Font("Monospace", Font.BOLD | Font.ITALIC, 28),
new Font("SansSerif", Font.PLAIN, 32),
new Font("Dialog", Font.ITALIC, 40),
new Font("Serif", Font.BOLD | Font.ITALIC, 60)
};
This makes it much easier to select one of the fonts at random. It can be done with the
statements
Font randomFont; // One of the 5 fonts, chosen at random.
int fontIndex; // A random number in the range 0 to 4.
fontIndex = (int)(Math.random() * 5);
randomFont = fonts[ fontIndex ];
In fact, the preceding four lines can be replaced by the single line
Font randomFont = fonts[ (int)(Math.random() * 5) ];
The switch statement has been replaced by a single line of code. This is a very typical
application of arrays. Note that this example uses the random access property: We can pick
an array index at random and go directly to the array element at that index.
Here is another example of the same sort of thing. Months are often stored as numbers 1, 2,
3, . . . , 12. Sometimes, however, these numbers have to be translated into the names January,
February, . . . , December. The translation can be done very easily with an array. The array
can be declared and initialized as
static String[] monthName = { "January", "February", "March",
"April", "May", "June",
"July", "August", "September",
"October", "November", "December" };
If mnth is a variable that holds one of the integers 1 through 12, then monthName[mnth-1] is the
name of the corresponding month. We need the “-1” because months are numbered starting
from 1, while array elements are numbered starting from 0. Simple array indexing does the
translation for us!
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 363
/**
* Returns the number of items currently in the array.
*/
public int size() {
return itemCt;
}
/**
* Adds a new item to the end of the array. The size increases by one.
*/
public void add(int item) {
if (itemCt == items.length)
items = Arrays.copyOf( items, 2*items.length );
items[itemCt] = item;
itemCt++;
}
/**
* Removes the item at a given index in the array. The size of the array
* decreases by one. Items following the removed item are moved up one
* space in the array.
* Throws ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException if the index is not valid.
*/
public void remove(int index) {
if ( index < 0 || index >= itemCt )
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException("Illegal index, " + index);
for (int j = index+1; j < itemCt; j++)
items[j-1] = items[j];
itemCt--;
}
} // end class DynamicArrayOfInt
Everything here should be clear, except possibly why the original size of the items array is 8. In
fact, the number 8 is arbitrary and has no effect on the functionality of the class. Any positive
integer would work, but it doesn’t make sense for the array to start off very big. The array will
grow as needed if the number of items turns out to be large.
The example ReverseInputNumbers.java used a partially full array of int to print a list
of input numbers in the reverse of the order in which they are input. In that program, an
ordinary array of length 100 was used to hold the numbers. In any given run of the program,
the size of the array could be much too large, or it could be too small, resulting in an exception.
The program can now be written using a DynamicArrayOfInt, which will adapt itself to any
reasonable number of inputs. For the program, see ReverseWithDynamicArray.java. It’s a
silly program, but the principle holds in any application where the amount of data cannot be
predicted in advance: The size of a dynamic data structure can adapt itself to any amount of
data, limited only by the amount of memory available to the program.
This is a nice example, but there is a real problem with it. Suppose that we want to have a
dynamic array of String. We can’t use a DynamicArrayOfInt object to hold strings, so it looks
like we need to write a whole new class, DynamicArrayOfString. If we want a dynamic array to
store players in a game, we would need a class DynamicArrayOfPlayer. And so on. It looks like
we have to write a dynamic array class for every possible type of data! That can’t be right! In
fact, Java has a solution to this problem, a standard class that implements dynamic arrays and
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 365
can work with any type of data. The class is called ArrayList, and we’ll see how it works in the
next section.
7.3 ArrayList
As we have just seen in Subsection 7.2.4, we can easily encode the dynamic array pattern
into a class, but it looks like we need a different class for each data type. In fact, Java has a
feature called “parameterized types” that makes it possible to avoid the multitude of classes,
and Java has a single class named ArrayList that implements the dynamic array pattern for all
data types that are defined as classes (but not, directly, for primitive types).
a syntax error, and the program will not compile. However, note that objects belonging to
a subclass of T can be added to the list, since objects belonging to a subclass of T are still
considered to be of type T. Thus, if class Shape has subclasses Rectangle, Oval and RounRect,
then a variable of type ArrayList<Shape> can be used to hold objects of type Rectangle, Oval,
and RoundRect. (Of course, this is the same way arrays work: An array of type T[ ] can hold
objects belonging to any subclass of T.) Similarly, if T is an interface, then any object that
implements interface T can be added to the list.
An object of type ArrayList<T> has all of the instance methods that you would expect in
a dynamic array implementation. Here are some of the most useful. Suppose that list is a
variable of type ArrayList<T>. Then we have:
• list.size() — This function returns the current size of the list, that is, the number of
items currently in the list. The only valid positions in the list are numbers in the range
0 to list.size()-1. Note that the size can be zero. A call to the default constructor
new ArrayList<T>() creates a list of size zero.
• list.add(obj) — Adds an object onto the end of the list, increasing the size by 1. The
parameter, obj, can refer to an object of type T, or it can be null.
• list.get(N) — This function returns the value stored at position N in the list. The
return type of this function is T. N must be an integer in the range 0 to list.size()-1.
If N is outside this range, an error of type IndexOutOfBoundsException occurs. Calling
this function is similar to referring to A[N] for an array, A, except that you can’t use
list.get(N) on the left side of an assignment statement.
• list.set(N, obj) — Assigns the object, obj, to position N in the ArrayList, replacing the
item previously stored at position N. The parameter obj must be of type T. The integer
N must be in the range from 0 to list.size()-1. A call to this function is equivalent to
the command A[N] = obj for an array A.
• list.clear() — Removes all items from the list, setting its size to zero.
• list.remove(N) — For an integer, N, this removes the N-th item in the ArrayList. N must
be in the range 0 to list.size()-1. Any items in the list that come after the removed
item are moved up one position. The size of the list decreases by 1. This method returns
the removed item.
• list.remove(obj) — If the specified object occurs somewhere in the list, it is removed
from the list. Any items in the list that come after the removed item are moved up one
position. The size of the ArrayList decreases by 1. If obj occurs more than once in the
list, only the first copy is removed. If obj does not occur in the list, nothing happens; this
is not an error. This method returns a boolean value that says whether or not an item
was actually removed.
• list.indexOf(obj) — A function that searches for the object, obj, in the list. If the
object is found in the list, then the first position number where it is found is returned. If
the object is not found, then -1 is returned.
For the last two methods listed here, obj is compared to an item in the list by calling
obj.equals(item), unless obj is null. This means, for example, that strings are tested for
equality by checking the contents of the strings, not their location in memory.
Java comes with several parameterized classes representing different data structures. Those
classes make up the Java Collection Framework . Here we consider only ArrayList, but we
will return to this important topic in much more detail in Chapter 10.
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 367
By the way, ArrayList can also be used as a non-parametrized type. This means that you
can declare variables and create objects of type ArrayList such as
ArrayList list = new ArrayList();
The effect of this is similar to declaring list to be of type ArrayList<Object>. That is, list can
hold any object that belongs to a subclass of Object. Since every class is a subclass of Object,
this means that any object can be stored in list.
int in a context that requires an object of type Integer, the int will automatically be wrapped
in an Integer object. If you say
Integer answer = 42;
the computer will silently read this as if it were
Integer answer = Integer.valueOf(42);
This is called autoboxing . It works in the other direction, too. For example, if d refers to an
object of type Double, you can use d in a numerical expression such as 2*d. The double value
inside d is automatically unboxed and multiplied by 2. Autoboxing and unboxing also apply
to subroutine calls. For example, you can pass an actual parameter of type int to a subroutine
that has a formal parameter of type Integer, and vice versa. In fact, autoboxing and unboxing
make it possible in many circumstances to ignore the difference between primitive types and
objects.
This is true in particular for parameterized types. Although there is no such thing as
“ArrayList<int>”, there is ArrayList<Integer>. An ArrayList<Integer> holds objects of type Integer,
but any object of type Integer really just represents an int value in a rather thin wrapper.
Suppose that we have an object of type ArrayList<Integer>:
ArrayList<Integer> integerList;
integerList = new ArrayList<Integer>();
Then we can, for example, add an object to integerList that represents the number 42:
integerList.add( Integer.valueOf(42) );
but because of autoboxing, we can actually say
integerList.add( 42 );
and the compiler will automatically wrap 42 in an object of type Integer before adding it to the
list. Similarly, we can say
int num = integerList.get(3);
The value returned by integerList.get(3) is of type Integer but because of unboxing, the
compiler will automatically convert the return value into an int, as if we had said
int num = integerList.get(3).intValue();
So, in effect, we can pretty much use integerList as if it were a dynamic array of int rather
than a dynamic array of Integer. Of course, a similar statement holds for lists of other wrapper
classes such as ArrayList<Double> and ArrayList<Character>.
There is one issue that sometimes causes problems: A list can hold null values, and a null
does not correspond to any primitive type value. This means, for example, that the statement
“int num = integerList.get(3);” can produce a null pointer exception in the case where
integerList.get(3) returns null. Unless you are sure that all the values in your list are
non-null, you need to take this possibility into account.
import textio.TextIO;
import java.util.ArrayList;
/**
* Reads a list of non-zero numbers from the user, then prints
* out the input numbers in the reverse of the order in which
* the were entered. There is no limit on the number of inputs.
*/
public class ReverseWithArrayList {
public static void main(String[] args) {
ArrayList<Integer> list;
list = new ArrayList<Integer>();
System.out.println("Enter some non-zero integers. Enter 0 to end.");
while (true) {
System.out.print("? ");
int number = TextIO.getlnInt();
if (number == 0)
break;
list.add(number);
}
System.out.println();
System.out.println("Your numbers in reverse are:");
for (int i = list.size() - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
System.out.printf("%10d%n", list.get(i));
}
}
}
As illustrated in this example, ArrayLists are commonly processed using for loops, in much
the same way that arrays are processed. for example, the following loop prints out all the items
for a variable namelist of type ArrayList<String>:
for ( int i = 0; i < namelist.size(); i++ ) {
String item = namelist.get(i);
System.out.println(item);
}
You can also use for-each loops with ArrayLists, so this example could also be written
for ( String item : namelist ) {
System.out.println(item);
}
When working with wrapper classes, the loop control variable in the for-each loop can be
a primitive type variable. This works because of unboxing. For example, if numbers is of type
ArrayList<Double>, then the following loop can be used to add up all the values in the list:
double sum = 0;
for ( double num : numbers ) {
sum = sum + num;
}
This will work as long as none of the items in the list are null. If there is a possibility of null
values, then you will want to use a loop control variable of type Double and test for nulls. For
example, to add up all the non-null values in the list:
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 370
double sum;
for ( Double num : numbers ) {
if ( num != null ) {
sum = sum + num; // Here, num is SAFELY unboxed to get a double.
}
}
∗ ∗ ∗
For a more complete and useful example, we will look at the program SimplePaint2.java.
This is a much improved version of SimplePaint.java from Subsection 6.3.4. In the new program,
the user can sketch curves in a drawing area by clicking and dragging with the mouse. The user
can select the drawing color using a menu. The background color of the drawing area can also
be selected using a menu. And there is a “Control” menu that contains several commands: An
“Undo” command, which removes the most recently drawn curve from the screen, a “Clear”
command that removes all the curves, and a “Use Symmetry” checkbox that turns a symmetry
feature on and off. Curves that are drawn by the user when the symmetry option is on are
reflected horizontally and vertically to produce a symmetric pattern. (Symmetry is there just
to look pretty.)
Unlike the original SimplePaint program, this new version uses a data structure to store
information about the picture that has been drawn by the user. When the user selects a new
background color, the canvas is filled with the new background color, and all of the curves that
were there previously are redrawn on the new background. To do that, we need to store enough
data to redraw all of the curves. Similarly, the Undo command is implemented by deleting the
data for most recently drawn curve, and then redrawing the entire picture using the remaining
data.
The data structure that we need is implemented using ArrayLists. The main data for an
individual curve consists of a list of the points on the curve. This data is stored in an object of
type ArrayList<Point>. (Point is standard class in package java.awt: A Point can be constructed
from two int values, giving the (x,y) coordinates of the point. And a Point object, pt, has
instance variables x and y representing the coordinates of the point.) But in addition to a list
of points on a curve, to redraw the curve, we also need to know its color, and we need to know
whether the symmetry option should be applied to the curve. All the data that is needed to
redraw the curve is grouped into an object of type CurveData that is defined as a nested class
in the program:
private static class CurveData {
Color color; // The color of the curve.
boolean symmetric; // Are horizontal and vertical reflections also drawn?
ArrayList<Point> points; // The points on the curve.
}
However, a picture can contain many curves, not just one, so to store all the data necessary to
redraw the entire picture, we need a list of objects of type CurveData. For this list, the program
uses an ArrayList, curves, declared as
ArrayList<CurveData> curves = new ArrayList<CurveData>();
Here we have a list of objects, where each object contains a list of points as part of its data!
Let’s look at a few examples of processing this data structure. When the user clicks the mouse
on the drawing surface, it’s the start of a new curve, and a new CurveData object must be
created to represent that curve. The instance variables in the new CurveData object must
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 371
also be initialized. Here is the code from the mousePressed() routine that does this, where
currentCurve is a global variable of type CurveData:
currentCurve = new CurveData(); // Create a new CurveData object.
currentCurve.color = currentColor; // The color of a curve is taken from an
// instance variable that represents the
// currently selected drawing color.
currentCurve.symmetric = useSymmetry; // The "symmetric" property of the curve
// is also copied from the current value
// of an instance variable, useSymmetry.
currentCurve.points = new ArrayList<Point>(); // A new point list object.
As the user drags the mouse, new points are added to currentCurve, and line segments of the
curve are drawn between points as they are added. When the user releases the mouse, the curve
is complete, and it is added to the list of curves by calling
curves.add( currentCurve );
When the user changes the background color or selects the “Undo” command, the picture
has to be redrawn. The program has a paintComponent() method that completely redraws the
picture. That method uses the data in the list of CurveData to draw all the curves. The basic
structure is a for-each loop that processes the data for each individual curve in turn. This has
the form:
for ( CurveData curve : curves ) {
.
. // Draw the curve represented by the object, curve, of type CurveData.
.
}
In the body of this loop, curve.points is a variable of type ArrayList<Point> that holds the
list of points on the curve. The i-th point on the curve can be obtained by calling the get()
method of this list: curve.points.get(i). This returns a value of type Point which has
instance variables named x and y. We can refer directly to the x-coordinate of the i-th point
as:
curve.points.get(i).x
This might seem rather complicated, but it’s a nice example of a complex name that specifies
a path to a desired piece of data: Go to the object, curve. Inside curve, go to points. Inside
points, get the i-th item. And from that item, get the x coordinate . Here is the complete
definition of the method that redraws the picture:
public void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
super.paintComponent(g);
Graphics2D g2 = (Graphics2D)g;
g2.setRenderingHint(RenderingHints.KEY ANTIALIASING,
RenderingHints.VALUE ANTIALIAS ON);
for ( CurveData curve : curves) {
g.setColor(curve.color);
for (int i = 1; i < curve.points.size(); i++) {
// Draw a line segment from point number i-1 to point number i.
int x1 = curve.points.get(i-1).x;
int y1 = curve.points.get(i-1).y;
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 372
int x2 = curve.points.get(i).x;
int y2 = curve.points.get(i).y;
g.drawLine(x1,y1,x2,y2);
if (curve.symmetric) {
// Also draw the horizontal and vertical reflections
// of the line segment.
int w = getWidth();
int h = getHeight();
g.drawLine(w-x1,y1,w-x2,y2);
g.drawLine(x1,h-y1,x2,h-y2);
g.drawLine(w-x1,h-y1,w-x2,h-y2);
}
}
}
} // end paintComponent()
I have mostly been interested here in discussing how the program uses ArrayList, but I
encourage you to read the full source code, SimplePaint2.java, and to try out the program.
In addition to serving as an example of using parameterized types, it also serves as another
example of creating and using menus. You should be able to understand the entire program.
7.4 Records
Some programming languages have two basic kinds of built-in data structures: arrays and
records. An array consists of a sequence of items, where individual items are referred to by
their numerical position in the sequence. In a record, on the other hand, the positions in the
data structure have names instead of numbers. The items in a record are called its “fields,”
and the names for the items are “field names.” A field is accessed using its field name. We
recognize records as similar to objects, with the fields in a record playing the same role as
instance variables in an object, but records existed before object-oriented programming. The
actual word “record” is used in programming languages such as Pascal and Cobol. The C
programming language uses the term “struct” for the same idea. The “record” terminology
might have originated with databases, which are just large, organized collections of data, where
a record is a (typically small) set of related data items, and a database is a collection of records.
In Java, classes can be used to represent records, but the term “record” has not traditionally
been used. However, in Java 17, records have become an official part of the language in the form
of a special kind of class. Java records are not really equivalent to records in other languages,
since a record in Java is immutable, that is, its content cannot be modified after the record is
created. However, they are similar to other records is that they are fairly simple containers for
named fields.
This is a class definition for a record class named FullName that has two instance variables of
type String named firstName and lastName. These instance variables are the fields of the
record. The “{ }” at the end of the definition is an empty class body. Note that the instance
variables in a record class are listed in parentheses after the class name. The syntax is the same
as the syntax for a list of formal parameters in a method definition, but the meaning is very
different. A record of type FullName—that is, an instance of the record class—is created in the
usual way, with the new operator. For example,
FullName fname = new FullName("Jane", "Doe");
This statement calls a constructor that has one parameter for each field of the record, whose
effect is simply to provide a value for each field. Note that this constructor was not explicitly
defined in the class. It is called the canonical constructor for the record class, and it is
provided automatically by the compiler. In fact, many things are added implicitly to a record
class definition by the compiler. The simple record definition of FullName, given above, is
essentially equivalent to the following regular class definition:
public final class FullName {
private final String firstName;
private final String lastName;
public FullName( String firstName, String lastName ) {
this.firstName = firstName;
this.lastName = lastName;
}
public firstName() {
return firstName;
}
public lastName() {
return lastName;
}
public String toString() {
return "FullName[firstName=" + firstName
+ ", lastName=" + lastName + "]";
}
public boolean equals(Object obj) {
// (definition omitted)
}
public int hashCode() {
// (definition omitted)
}
}
We see that a record class is automatically final, that is, it cannot be extended by subclasses.
Furthermore, a record class cannot extend another class (but it is a subclass of Object, as is
true for any class).
The instance variables in a record are private and final. Accessor, or “getter”, methods
for the instance variables are automatically defined, but instead of using the typical getXXX()
naming convention for getter methods, their names are the same as the names of the instance
variables. For example, if fname is a variable of type FullName, then the instance variables would
be accessed as fname.firstName() and fname.lastName(). Because its instance variables are
final, a record is immutable, so no “setter” methods can be defined.
Furthermore, reasonable definitions are automatically provided for three methods inherited
from class Object: toString(), equals(), and hashCode(). The toString() method returns a
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 374
string that includes the name of the class and the names and values of its fields. The equals()
method returns true if its parameter is an object of the same type that has the same values
for its fields. (We will not encounter the hashCode() method until Section 10.3.)
We will see that record class definitions can be more complex, but you should expect basic
record classes, with empty class bodies, to be very common, since they provide a simple way
to group together a set of related data items. For example, the CurveData class from the
SimplePaint2.java example in the previous section was created to group together all the data
relevant to a single curve:
private static class CurveData {
Color color;
boolean symmetric;
ArrayList<Point> points;
}
This nested class could be replaced by a nested record class:
private record CurveData(
Color color,
boolean symmetric,
ArrayList<Point> points
) { }
Note that the nested CurveData record class does not have to be declared static, because
nested record classes are automatically static.
After this change, when a CurveData object is created, values must be provided for its fields.
For example,
currentCurve = new CurveData(currentColor, useSymmetry, new ArrayList<Point>());
Another change is that CurveData objects are now immutable. That happens to be OK in
SimplePaint2.java, but it’s not something that will work in all cases. For example, class
Point is a simple container for xy coordinates, but it could not be a record class because points
are not immutable.
This extends the canonical constructor. Although the parameter list is omitted in the definition,
a call to this constructor still requires two parameters, and it still uses those parameters to
initialize firstName and lastName, before the code in the constructor definition is executed.
Additional constructors can be defined, but any non-canonical constructor must begin with
a call to a constructor in the same class, using the special variable this as discussed in
Subsection 5.6.3. This means that the canonical constructor will be called, directly or indirectly,
by any other constructor.
As an example, noting that there are people who use only a single name, we might want to
provide a FullName constructor that takes just one parameter representing that name:
public FullName(String onlyName) {
this( onlyName, null ); // call the canonical constructor
}
This constructor calls the default constructor to set the firstName field equal to onlyName and
the lastName field equal to null.
We might also want to define a more natural version of toString() for the FullName
record class. For a full class definition that implements all of these ideas, see the sample file
FullName.java.
A final syntax note: Although a record class cannot extend another class, it can implement
one or more interfaces.
the mailing list example, we might have an array of records where each record contains a first
name, last name, street address, state, city, and zip code as fields. For the purpose of searching
or sorting, one of the fields is designated to be the key field. Searching then means finding a
record in the array that has a specified value in its key field. Sorting means moving the records
around in the array so that the key fields of the record are in increasing (or decreasing) order.
In this section, most of my examples follow the tradition of using arrays of numbers. But
I’ll also give a few examples using objects, to remind you of the more practical applications.
7.5.1 Searching
There is an obvious algorithm for searching for a particular item in an array: Look at each
item in the array in turn, and check whether that item is the one you are looking for. If so,
the search is finished. If you look at every item without finding the one you want, then you
can be sure that the item is not in the array. It’s easy to write a subroutine to implement this
algorithm. Let’s say the array that you want to search is an array of ints. Here is a method
that will search the array for a specified integer. If the integer is found, the method returns
the index of the location in the array where it is found. If the integer is not in the array, the
method returns the value -1 as a signal that the integer could not be found:
/**
* Searches the array A for the integer N. If N is not in the array,
* then -1 is returned. If N is in the array, then the return value is
* the first integer i that satisfies A[i] == N.
*/
static int find(int[] A, int N) {
for (int index = 0; index < A.length; index++) {
if ( A[index] == N )
return index; // N has been found at this index!
}
// If we get this far, then N has not been found
// anywhere in the array. Return a value of -1.
return -1;
}
This method of searching an array by looking at each item in turn is called linear search.
If nothing is known about the order of the items in the array, then there is really no better
alternative algorithm. But if the elements in the array are known to be in increasing or
decreasing order, then a much faster search algorithm can be used. An array in which the
elements are in order is said to be sorted . Of course, it takes some work to sort an array, but
if the array is to be searched many times, then the work done in sorting it can really pay off.
Binary search is a method for searching for a given item in a sorted array. Although
the implementation is not trivial, the basic idea is simple: If you are searching for an item in
a sorted list, then it is possible to eliminate half of the items in the list by inspecting a single
item. For example, suppose that you are looking for the number 42 in a sorted array of 1000
integers. Let’s assume that the array is sorted into increasing order. Suppose you check item
number 500 in the array, and find that the item is 93. Since 42 is less than 93, and since the
elements in the array are in increasing order, we can conclude that if 42 occurs in the array
at all, then it must occur somewhere before location 500. All the locations numbered 500 or
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 379
above contain values that are greater than or equal to 93. These locations can be eliminated
as possible locations of the number 42.
Once we know that 42 can only be in the first half of the array, the obvious next step is to
check location 250. If the number at that location is, say, -21, then you can eliminate locations
before 250 and limit further search to locations between 251 and 499. The next test will limit
the search to about 125 locations, and the one after that to about 62. After just 10 steps, there
is only one location left. This is a whole lot better than looking through every element in the
array. If there were a million items, it would still take only 20 steps for binary search to search
the array! (Mathematically, the number of steps is approximately equal to the logarithm, in
the base 2, of the number of items in the array.)
In order to make binary search into a Java subroutine that searches an array, A, for an item,
N, we just have to keep track of the range of locations that could possibly contain N. At each
step, as we eliminate possibilities, we reduce the size of this range. The basic operation is to
look at the item in the middle of the range. If this item is greater than N, then the second
half of the range can be eliminated. If it is less than N, then the first half of the range can
be eliminated. If the number in the middle just happens to be N exactly, then the search is
finished. If the size of the range decreases to zero, then the number N does not occur in the
array. Here is a subroutine that implements this idea:
/**
* Searches the array A for the integer N.
* Precondition: A must be sorted into increasing order.
* Postcondition: If N is in the array, then the return value, i,
* satisfies A[i] == N. If N is not in the array, then the
* return value is -1.
*/
static int binarySearch(int[] A, int N) {
int lowestPossibleLoc = 0;
int highestPossibleLoc = A.length - 1;
while (highestPossibleLoc >= lowestPossibleLoc) {
int middle = (lowestPossibleLoc + highestPossibleLoc) / 2;
if (A[middle] == N) {
// N has been found at this index!
return middle;
}
else if (A[middle] > N) {
// eliminate locations >= middle
highestPossibleLoc = middle - 1;
}
else {
// eliminate locations <= middle
lowestPossibleLoc = middle + 1;
}
}
// At this point, highestPossibleLoc < lowestPossibleLoc,
// which means that N is known to be not in the array. Return
// a -1 to indicate that N could not be found in the array.
return -1;
}
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 380
}
PhoneEntry newEntry = new PhoneEntry(); // Create a new pair.
newEntry.name = name;
newEntry.number = number;
data[dataCount] = newEntry; // Add the new pair to the array.
dataCount++;
}
}
} // end class PhoneDirectory
The class defines a private instance method, find(), that uses linear search to find the
position of a given name in the array of name/number pairs. The find() method is used
both in the getNumber() method and in the putNumber() method. Note in particular that
putNumber(name,number) has to check whether the name is in the phone directory. If so, it
just changes the number in the existing entry; if not, it has to create a new phone entry and
add it to the array.
This class could also have be written using an ArrayList (Section 7.3) instead of a dynamic
array. And the nested PhoneEntry class is a natural candidate to be a record class (Section 7.4).
For a version that uses these ideas, see PhoneDirectory2.java.
This phone directory implementation could be improved by using binary search instead
of simple linear search in the find() method. However, we could only do that if the list of
PhoneEntries were sorted into alphabetical order according to name. In fact, it’s really not all
that hard to keep the list of entries in sorted order, as you’ll see in the next subsection.
I will mention that association lists are also called “maps,” and Java has a standard
parameterized type named Map that implements association lists for keys and values of any
type. The implementation is more efficient than anything you can do with basic arrays. You
will encounter this class in Section 10.3.
*/
static void insert(int[] A, int itemsInArray, int newItem) {
int loc = itemsInArray - 1; // Start at the end of the array.
/* Move items bigger than newItem up one space;
Stop when a smaller item is encountered or when the
beginning of the array (loc == 0) is reached. */
while (loc >= 0 && A[loc] > newItem) {
A[loc + 1] = A[loc]; // Bump item from A[loc] up to loc+1.
loc = loc - 1; // Go on to next location.
}
A[loc + 1] = newItem; // Put newItem in last vacated space.
}
Conceptually, this could be extended to a sorting method if we were to take all the items
out of an unsorted array, and then insert them back into the array one-by-one, keeping the list
in sorted order as we do so. Each insertion can be done using the insert routine given above.
In the actual algorithm, we don’t really take all the items from the array; we just remember
what part of the array has been sorted:
static void insertionSort(int[] A) {
// Sort the array A into increasing order.
int itemsSorted; // Number of items that have been sorted so far.
for (itemsSorted = 1; itemsSorted < A.length; itemsSorted++) {
// Assume that items A[0], A[1], ... A[itemsSorted-1]
// have already been sorted. Insert A[itemsSorted]
// into the sorted part of the list.
int temp = A[itemsSorted]; // The item to be inserted.
int loc = itemsSorted - 1; // Start at end of list.
while (loc >= 0 && A[loc] > temp) {
A[loc + 1] = A[loc]; // Bump item from A[loc] up to loc+1.
loc = loc - 1; // Go on to next location.
}
A[loc + 1] = temp; // Put temp in last vacated space.
}
}
Here is an illustration of one stage in insertion sort. It shows what happens during one
execution of the for loop in the above method, when itemsSorted is 5:
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 384
S I till to be sorted
a partially
sorted list of it
3'
∗ ∗ ∗
A variation of selection sort is used in the Hand class that was introduced in Subsection 5.4.1.
(By the way, you are finally in a position to fully understand the source code for the Hand class
from that section; note that it uses an ArrayList. The source file is Hand.java.)
In the Hand class, a hand of playing cards is represented by an ArrayList<Card>. The objects
stored in the list are of type Card. A Card object contains instance methods getSuit() and
getValue() that can be used to determine the suit and value of the card. In my sorting method,
I actually create a new list and move the cards one-by-one from the old list to the new list.
The cards are selected from the old list in increasing order. In the end, the new list becomes
the hand and the old list is discarded. This is not the most efficient procedure, but hands of
cards are so small that the inefficiency is negligible. Here is the code for sorting cards by suit:
/**
* Sorts the cards in the hand so that cards of the same suit are
* grouped together, and within a suit the cards are sorted by value.
* Note that aces are considered to have the lowest value, 1.
*/
public void sortBySuit() {
ArrayList<Card> newHand = new ArrayList<Card>();
while (hand.size() > 0) {
int pos = 0; // Position of minimal card.
Card c = hand.get(0); // Minimal card.
for (int i = 1; i < hand.size(); i++) {
Card c1 = hand.get(i);
if ( c1.getSuit() < c.getSuit() ||
(c1.getSuit() == c.getSuit() && c1.getValue() < c.getValue()) ) {
pos = i; // Update the minimal card and location.
c = c1;
}
}
hand.remove(pos); // Remove card from original hand.
newHand.add(c); // Add card to the new hand.
}
hand = newHand;
}
This example illustrates the fact that comparing items in a list is not usually as simple as
using the operator “<”. In this case, we consider one card to be less than another if the suit
of the first card is less than the suit of the second, and also if the suits are the same and the
value of the second card is less than the value of the first. The second part of this test ensures
that cards with the same suit will end up sorted by value.
Sorting a list of Strings raises a similar problem: the “<” operator is not defined for strings.
However, the String class does define a compareTo method. If str1 and str2 are of type String,
then
str1.compareTo(str2)
returns an int that is 0 when str1 is equal to str2, is less than 0 when str1 precedes str2, and
is greater than 0 when str1 follows str2. For example, you can test whether str1 precedes or
is equal to str2 by testing
if ( str1.compareTo(str2) <= 0 )
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 386
The definition of “precedes” and “follows” for strings uses what is called lexicographic
ordering , which is based on the Unicode values of the characters in the strings. Lexicographic
ordering is not the same as alphabetical ordering, even for strings that consist entirely of
letters (because in lexicographic ordering, all the upper case letters come before all the lower
case letters). However, for words consisting strictly of the 26 lower case letters in the English
alphabet, lexicographic and alphabetic ordering are the same. (The same holds true if the
strings consist entirely of uppercase letters.) The method str1.compareToIgnoreCase(str2)
compares the two strings after converting any characters that they contain to lower case.
∗ ∗ ∗
Insertion sort and selection sort are suitable for sorting fairly small arrays (up to a few
hundred elements, say). There are more complicated sorting algorithms that are much faster
than insertion sort and selection sort for large arrays, to the same degree that binary search is
faster than linear search. The standard method Arrays.sort uses these fast sorting algorithms.
I’ll discuss one such algorithm in Chapter 9.
7.5.5 Unsorting
I can’t resist ending this section on sorting with a related problem that is much less common,
but is a bit more fun. That is the problem of putting the elements of an array into a random
order. The typical case of this problem is shuffling a deck of cards. A good algorithm for
shuffling is similar to selection sort, except that instead of moving the biggest item to the end
of the list, an item is selected at random and moved to the end of the list. Here is a subroutine
to shuffle an array of ints:
/**
* Postcondition: The items in A have been rearranged into a random order.
*/
static void shuffle(int[] A) {
for (int lastPlace = A.length-1; lastPlace > 0; lastPlace--) {
// Choose a random location from among 0,1,...,lastPlace.
int randLoc = (int)(Math.random()*(lastPlace+1));
// Swap items in locations randLoc and lastPlace.
int temp = A[randLoc];
A[randLoc] = A[lastPlace];
A[lastPlace] = temp;
}
}
This creates a 2D array of int that has 12 elements arranged in 3 rows and 4 columns. Although
I haven’t mentioned it, there are initializers for 2D arrays. For example, this statement creates
the 3-by-4 array that is shown in the picture below:
int[][] A = { { 1, 0, 12, -1 },
{ 7, -3, 2, 5 },
{ -5, -2, 2, -9 }
};
An array initializer for a 2D array contains the rows of A, separated by commas and enclosed
between braces. Each row, in turn, is a list of values separated by commas and enclosed between
braces. There are also 2D array literals with a similar syntax that can be used anywhere, not
just in declarations. For example,
A = new int[][] { { 1, 0, 12, -1 },
{ 7, -3, 2, 5 },
{ -5, -2, 2, -9 }
};
All of this extends naturally to three-dimensional, four-dimensional, and even higher-
dimensional arrays, but they are not used very often in practice.
For the most part, you can ignore the reality and keep the picture of a grid in mind.
Sometimes, though, you will need to remember that each row in the grid is really an array in
itself. These arrays can be referred to as A[0], A[1], and A[2]. Each row is in fact a value of
type int[ ]. It could, for example, be passed to a subroutine that asks for a parameter of type
int[ ].
Some of the consequences of this structure are a little subtle. For example, thinking of a 2D
array, A, as an array of arrays, we see that A.length makes sense and is equal to the number
of rows of A. If A has the usual shape for a 2D array, then the number of columns in A would
be the same as the number of elements in the first row, that is, A[0].length. But there is no
rule that says that all of the rows of A must have the same length (although an array created
with new BaseType[rows][columns] will always have that form). Each row in a 2D array is
a separate one-dimensional array, and each of those arrays can have a different length. In fact,
it’s even possible for a row to be null. For example, the statement
A = new int[3][];
with no number in the second set of brackets, creates an array of 3 elements where all the
elements are null. There are places for three rows, but no actual rows have been created. You
can then create the rows A[0], A[1], and A[2] individually.
As an example, consider a symmetric matrix . A symmetric matrix, M, is a two-
dimensional array in which the number of rows is equal to the number of columns and satisfying
M[i][j] equals M[j][i] for all i and j. Because of this equality, we only really need to store
M[i][j] for i >= j. We can store the data in a “triangular matrix”:
3 HJ KL O P KJ LK XY Z [\^^_`ric mZ`cdfg 3
the elements above the
HJ HK Q HL R KK L HJ HK
diagonal (shown in redj
KL Q HU KL LL KQ UP duplicate elements KL Q HU
below the diagonal
O HL KL KQ KU V HV (bluejk lm Z [ymmetric O HL KL KQ
^Z`cdf can be stored P R LL KU UQ
P R LL KU UQ K LV
as a "triangular mZ`cdfn
KJ KK KQ V K W HQ with rows of diperent KJ KK KQ V K W
lengths.
LK L UP HV LV HQ KO LK L UP HV LV HQ KO
It’s easy enough to make a triangular array, if we create each row separately. To create a 7-by-7
triangular array of double, we can use the code segment
double[][] matrix = new double[7][]; // rows have not yet been created!
for (int i = 0; i < 7; i++) {
matrix[i] = new double[i+1]; // Create row i with i + 1 elements.
}
We just have to remember that if we want to know the value of the matrix at (i,j), and if
i < j, then we actually have to get the value of matrix[j][i] in the triangular matrix. And
similarly for setting values. It’s easy to write a class to represent symmetric matrices:
/**
* Represents symmetric n-by-n matrices of real numbers.
*/
public class SymmetricMatrix {
private double[][] matrix; // A triangular matrix to hold the data.
/**
* Creates an n-by-n symmetric matrix in which all entries are 0.
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 389
*/
public SymmetricMatrix(int n) {
matrix = new double[n][];
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++)
matrix[i] = new double[i+1];
}
/**
* Returns the matrix entry at position (row,col). (If row < col,
* the value is actually stored at position (col,row).)
*/
public double get( int row, int col ) {
if (row >= col)
return matrix[row][col];
else
return matrix[col][row];
}
/**
* Sets the value of the matrix entry at (row,col). (If row < col,
* the value is actually stored at position (col,row).)
*/
public void set( int row, int col, double value ) {
if (row >= col)
matrix[row][col] = value;
else
matrix[col][row] = value;
}
/**
* Returns the number of rows and columns in the matrix.
*/
public int size() {
return matrix.length; // The size is the number of rows.
}
} // end class SymmetricMatrix
This class is in the file SymmetricMatrix.java, and a small program to test it can be found in
TestSymmetricMatrix.java.
By the way, the standard function Arrays.copyOf() can’t make a full copy of a 2D array
in a single step. To do that, you need to copy each row separately. To make a copy of a
two-dimensional array of int, for example:
int[][] B = new int[A.length][]; // B has as many rows as A.
for (int i = 0; i < A.length; i++) {
B[i] = Arrays.copyOf(A[i], A[i].length)); // Copy row i.
}
cells whose content changes over time according to definite, deterministic rules. In Life, a cell
can only have two possible contents: It can be “alive” or “dead.” We will use a 2D array to
represent the grid, with each element of the array representing the content of one cell in the
grid. In the game, an initial grid is set up in which each cell is marked as either alive or dead.
After that, the game “plays itself.” The grid evolves through a series of time steps. The contents
of the grid at each time step are completely determined by the contents at the previous time
step, according to simple rules: Each cell in the grid looks at its eight neighbors (horizontal,
vertical, and diagonal) and counts how many of its neighbors are alive. Then the state of the
cell in the next step is determined by the rules:
• For a cell that is alive in the current time step: If the cell has 2 or 3 living neighbors,
then the cell remains alive in the next time step; otherwise, it dies. (A living cell dies of
loneliness if it has 0 or 1 living neighbor, and of overcrowding if it has more than 3 living
neighbors.)
• For a cell that is dead in the current time step: If the cell has 3 living neighbors, then the
cell becomes alive in the next time step; otherwise, it remains dead. (Three living cells
give birth to a new living cell.)
Here’s a picture of part of a Life board, showing the same board before and after the rules have
been applied. The rules are applied to every cell in the grid. The picture shows how they apply
to four of the cells:
qsuv xsyy with 3 live
neighbors comes to life
The Game of Life is interesting because it gives rise to many interesting and surprising
patterns. (Look it up on Wikipedia.) Here, we are just interested in writing a program to
simulate the game. The complete program can be found in the file Life.java. In the program,
the life grid is shown as a grid of squares in which dead squares are black and living squares
are white. (The program uses MosaicCanvas.java from Section 4.7 to represent the grid, so you
will also need that file to compile and run the program.) In the program, you can fill the life
board randomly with dead and alive cells, or you can use the mouse to set up the game board.
There is a “Step” button that will compute one time-step of the game, and a “Start” button
that will run time steps as an animation.
We’ll look at some of the array processing involved in implementing the Game of Life for
this program. Since a cell can only be alive or dead, it is natural to use a two-dimensional
array of boolean[ ][ ] to represent the states of all the cells. The array is named alive, and
alive[r][c] is true when the cell in row r, column c is alive. The number of rows and the
number of columns are equal and are given by a constant, GRID SIZE. So, for example, to fill
the Life grid with random values, the program uses simple nested for loops:
for (int r = 0; r < GRID SIZE; r++) {
for (int c = 0; c < GRID SIZE; c++) {
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 391
Column c-1
Column c
Column c+1
Row r-1:
Row r:
Row r+1:
The row above row number r is row number r-1, and the row below is r+1. Similarly
for the columns. We just have to look at the values of alive[r-1][c-1], alive[r-1][c],
alive[r-1][c+1], alive[r][c-1], alive[r][c+1], alive[r+1][c-1], alive[r+1][c], and
alive[r+1][c+1], and count the number that are true. (You should make sure that you
understand how the array indexing works here.)
But there is a problem when the cell is along one of the edges of the grid. In that case, some
of the array elements in the list don’t exist, and an attempt to use them will cause an exception.
To avoid the exception, we have to give special consideration to cells along the edges. One idea
is that before referencing any array element, check that the array element actually exists. In
that case, the code for neighbor counting becomes
if (r-1 >= 0 && c-1 >= 0 && alive[r-1][c-1])
N++; // A cell at position (r-1,c-1) exists and is alive.
if (r-1 >= 0 && alive[r-1][c])
N++; // A cell at position (r-1,c) exists and is alive.
if (r-1 >= 0 && c+1 <= GRID SIZE && alive[r-1][c+1])
N++; // A cell at position (r-1,c+1) exists and is alive.
// and so on...
All the possible exceptions are avoided. But in my program, I actually do something that is
common in 2D computer games—I pretend that the left edge of the board is attached to the
right edge and the top edge to the bottom edge. For example, for a cell in row 0, we say that the
row “above” is actually the bottom row, row number GRID SIZE-1. I use variables to represent
the positions above, below, left, and right of a given cell. The code turns out to be simpler
than the code shown above. Here is the complete method for computing the new board:
private void doFrame() { // Compute the new state of the Life board.
boolean[][] newboard = new boolean[GRID SIZE][GRID SIZE];
for ( int r = 0; r < GRID SIZE; r++ ) {
int above, below; // rows considered above and below row number r
int left, right; // columns considered left and right of column c
above = r > 0 ? r-1 : GRID SIZE-1; // (for "?:" see Subsection 2.5.5)
below = r < GRID SIZE-1 ? r+1 : 0;
for ( int c = 0; c < GRID SIZE; c++ ) {
left = c > 0 ? c-1 : GRID SIZE-1;
right = c < GRID SIZE-1 ? c+1 : 0;
int n = 0; // number of alive cells in the 8 neighboring cells
if (alive[above][left])
n++;
if (alive[above][c])
n++;
if (alive[above][right])
n++;
if (alive[r][left])
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 393
n++;
if (alive[r][right])
n++;
if (alive[below][left])
n++;
if (alive[below][c])
n++;
if (alive[below][right])
n++;
if (n == 3 || (alive[r][c] && n == 2))
newboard[r][c] = true;
else
newboard[r][c] = false;
}
}
alive = newboard;
}
Again, I urge you to check out the source code, Life.java, and try the program. Don’t forget
that you will also need MosaicCanvas.java.
7.6.3 Checkers
As a final example for this chapter, we’ll look at a more substantial example of using a 2D
array. This is the longest program that we have encountered so far, with 721 lines of code.
The program lets two users play checkers against each other. The checkers game is played on
an eight-by-eight board, which is based on an example from Subsection 6.6.5. The players are
called “red” and “black,” after the color of their checkers. I’m not going to explain the rules of
checkers here; possibly you can learn them by trying out the program.
In the program, a player moves by clicking on the piece that they want to move, and then
clicking on the empty square to which it is to be moved. As an aid to the players, any square
that the current player can legally click at a given time is highlighted with a brightly colored
border. The square containing a piece that has been selected to be moved, if any, is surrounded
by a yellow border. Other pieces that can legally be moved are surrounded by a cyan-colored
border. If a piece has already been selected to be moved, each empty square that it can legally
move to is highlighted with a green border. The game enforces the rule that if the current
player can jump one of the opponent’s pieces, then the player must jump. When a player’s
piece becomes a king, by reaching the opposite end of the board, a big white “K” is drawn on
the piece. Here is a picture of the program early in a game. It is black’s turn to move. Black
has selected the piece in the yellow-outlined square to be moved. Black can click one of the
squares outlined in green to complete the move, or can click one of the squares outlined in cyan
to select a different piece to be moved.
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 394
I will only cover a part of the programming for this example. I encourage you to read the
complete source code, Checkers.java. It’s long and complex, but with some study, you should
understand all the techniques that it uses. The program is a good example of state-based,
event-driven, object-oriented programming.
∗ ∗ ∗
The data about the pieces on the board are stored in a two-dimensional array. Because of
the complexity of the program, I wanted to divide it into several classes. In addition to the main
class, there are several nested classes. One of these classes is CheckersData, which handles the
data for the board. It is not directly responsible for any part of the graphics or event-handling,
but it provides methods that can be called by other classes that handle graphics and events. It
is mainly this class that I want to talk about.
The CheckersData class has an instance variable named board of type int[][]. The value
of board is set to “new int[8][8]”, an 8-by-8 grid of integers. The values stored in the grid
are defined as constants representing the possible contents of a square on a checkerboard:
static final int
EMPTY = 0, // Value representing an empty square.
RED = 1, // A regular red piece.
RED KING = 2, // A red king.
BLACK = 3, // A regular black piece.
BLACK KING = 4; // A black king.
The constants RED and BLACK are also used in my program (or, perhaps, misused) to represent
the two players in the game. When a game is started, the values in the array are set to represent
the initial state of the board. The grid of values looks like
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 395
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
A regular black piece can only move “down” the grid. That is, the row number of the square
it moves to must be greater than the row number of the square it comes from. A regular red
piece can only move up the grid. Kings of either color can move in both directions.
One function of the CheckersData class is to take care of changes to the data structures
that need to be made when one of the users moves a checker. An instance method named
makeMove() is provided to do this. When a player moves a piece from one square to another,
the values of two elements in the array are changed. But that’s not all. If the move is a jump,
then the piece that was jumped is removed from the board. (The method checks whether the
move is a jump by checking if the square to which the piece is moving is two rows away from
the square where it starts.) Furthermore, a RED piece that moves to row 0 or a BLACK piece
that moves to row 7 becomes a king. Putting all that into a subroutine is good programming:
the rest of the program doesn’t have to worry about any of these details. It just calls this
makeMove() method:
/**
* Make the move from (fromRow,fromCol) to (toRow,toCol). It is
* ASSUMED that this move is legal! If the move is a jump, the
* jumped piece is removed from the board. If a piece moves
* to the last row on the opponent’s side of the board, the
* piece becomes a king.
*/
void makeMove(int fromRow, int fromCol, int toRow, int toCol) {
board[toRow][toCol] = board[fromRow][fromCol]; // Move the piece.
board[fromRow][fromCol] = EMPTY; // The square it moved from is now empty.
if (fromRow - toRow == 2 || fromRow - toRow == -2) {
// The move is a jump. Remove the jumped piece from the board.
int jumpRow = (fromRow + toRow) / 2; // Row of the jumped piece.
int jumpCol = (fromCol + toCol) / 2; // Column of the jumped piece.
board[jumpRow][jumpCol] = EMPTY;
}
if (toRow == 0 && board[toRow][toCol] == RED)
board[toRow][toCol] = RED KING; // Red piece becomes a king.
if (toRow == 7 && board[toRow][toCol] == BLACK)
board[toRow][toCol] = BLACK KING; // Black piece becomes a king.
} // end makeMove()
An even more important function of the CheckersData class is to find legal moves on the
board. In my program, a move in a Checkers game is represented by an object belonging to
the following class:
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 396
/**
* A CheckersMove object represents a move in the game of
* Checkers. It holds the row and column of the piece that is
* to be moved and the row and column of the square to which
* it is to be moved. (This class makes no guarantee that
* the move is legal.)
*/
private static class CheckersMove {
int fromRow, fromCol; // Position of piece to be moved.
int toRow, toCol; // Square it is to move to.
CheckersMove(int r1, int c1, int r2, int c2) {
// Constructor. Set the values of the instance variables.
fromRow = r1;
fromCol = c1;
toRow = r2;
toCol = c2;
}
boolean isJump() {
// Test whether this move is a jump. It is assumed that
// the move is legal. In a jump, the piece moves two
// rows. (In a regular move, it only moves one row.)
return (fromRow - toRow == 2 || fromRow - toRow == -2);
}
} // end class CheckersMove.
The CheckersData class has an instance method which finds all the legal moves that are
currently available for a specified player. This method is a function that returns an array
of type CheckersMove[ ]. The array contains all the legal moves, represented as CheckersMove
objects. The specification for this method reads
/**
* Return an array containing all the legal CheckersMoves
* for the specified player on the current board. If the player
* has no legal moves, null is returned. The value of player
* should be one of the constants RED or BLACK; if not, null
* is returned. If the returned value is non-null, it consists
* entirely of jump moves or entirely of regular moves, since
* if the player can jump, only jumps are legal moves.
*/
CheckersMove[] getLegalMoves(int player)
A brief pseudocode algorithm for the method is
Start with an empty list of moves
Find any legal jumps and add them to the list
if there are no jumps:
Find any other legal moves and add them to the list
if the list is empty:
return null
else:
return the list
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 397
Now, what is this “list”? We have to return the legal moves in an array. But since an array has
a fixed size, we can’t create the array until we know how many moves there are, and we don’t
know that until near the end of the method, after we’ve already made the list! A neat solution
is to use an ArrayList instead of an array to hold the moves as we find them. In fact, I use an
object defined by the parameterized type ArrayList<CheckersMove> so that the list is restricted
to holding objects of type CheckersMove. As we add moves to the list, it will grow just as large
as necessary. At the end of the method, we can create the array that we really want and copy
the data into it:
Let "moves" be an empty ArrayList<CheckersMove>
Find any legal jumps and add them to moves
if moves.size() is 0: // There are no legal jumps!
Find any other legal moves and add them to moves
if moves.size() is 0: // There are no legal moves at all!
return null
else:
Let moveArray be an array of CheckersMoves of length moves.size()
Copy the contents of moves into moveArray
return moveArray
Now, how do we find the legal jumps or the legal moves? The information we need is in the
board array, but it takes some work to extract it. We have to look through all the positions
in the array and find the pieces that belong to the current player. For each piece, we have to
check each square that it could conceivably move to, and check whether that would be a legal
move. If we are looking for legal jumps, we want to look at squares that are two rows and
two columns away from the piece. There are four squares to consider. Thus, the line in the
algorithm that says “Find any legal jumps and add them to moves” expands to:
For each row of the board:
For each column of the board:
if one of the player’s pieces is at this location:
if it is legal to jump to row + 2, column + 2
add this move to moves
if it is legal to jump to row - 2, column + 2
add this move to moves
if it is legal to jump to row + 2, column - 2
add this move to moves
if it is legal to jump to row - 2, column - 2
add this move to moves
The line that says “Find any other legal moves and add them to moves” expands to
something similar, except that we have to look at the four squares that are one column and one
row away from the piece. Testing whether a player can legally move from one given square to
another given square is itself non-trivial. The square the player is moving to must actually be
on the board, and it must be empty. Furthermore, regular red and black pieces can only move
in one direction. I wrote the following utility method to check whether a player can make a
given non-jump move:
/**
* This is called by the getLegalMoves() method to determine
* whether the player can legally move from (r1,c1) to (r2,c2).
* It is ASSUMED that (r1,c1) contains one of the player’s
* pieces and that (r2,c2) is a neighboring square.
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 398
*/
private boolean canMove(int player, int r1, int c1, int r2, int c2) {
if (r2 < 0 || r2 >= 8 || c2 < 0 || c2 >= 8)
return false; // (r2,c2) is off the board.
if (board[r2][c2] != EMPTY)
return false; // (r2,c2) already contains a piece.
if (player == RED) {
if (board[r1][c1] == RED && r2 > r1)
return false; // Regular red piece can only move down.
return true; // The move is legal.
}
else {
if (board[r1][c1] == BLACK && r2 < r1)
return false; // Regular black piece can only move up.
return true; // The move is legal.
}
} // end canMove()
This method is called by my getLegalMoves() method to check whether one of the possible
moves that it has found is actually legal. I have a similar method that is called to check whether
a jump is legal. In this case, I pass to the method the square containing the player’s piece,
the square that the player might move to, and the square between those two, which the player
would be jumping over. The square that is being jumped must contain one of the opponent’s
pieces. This method has the specification:
/**
* This is called by other methods to check whether
* the player can legally jump from (r1,c1) to (r3,c3).
* It is assumed that the player has a piece at (r1,c1), that
* (r3,c3) is a position that is 2 rows and 2 columns distant
* from (r1,c1) and that (r2,c2) is the square between (r1,c1)
* and (r3,c3).
*/
private boolean canJump(int player, int r1, int c1,
int r2, int c2, int r3, int c3) { . . .
Given all this, you should be in a position to understand the complete getLegalMoves()
method. It’s a nice way to finish off this chapter, since it combines several topics that we’ve
looked at: one-dimensional arrays, ArrayLists, and two-dimensional arrays:
CheckersMove[] getLegalMoves(int player) {
if (player != RED && player != BLACK)
return null; // (This will not happen in a correct program.)
int playerKing; // The constant for a King belonging to the player.
if (player == RED)
playerKing = RED KING;
else
playerKing = BLACK KING;
ArrayList<CheckersMove> moves = new ArrayList<CheckersMove>();
// Moves will be stored in this list.
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 399
1. Write a subroutine that creates an ArrayList containing several different random integers (solution)
in the range from 1 up to some specified maximum. The number of integers and the
maximum allowed value for the integers should be parameters to the subroutine. Write a
main() routine to test your subroutine.
2. Suppose that M is a two-dimensional array that has R rows and C columns. The (solution)
transpose of M is defined to be an array T that has C rows and R columns such that
T[i][j] = M[j][i] for each i and j. Write a function that takes an array of type int[ ][ ]
as a parameter, and returns the transpose of that array. (Assume that the parameter is a
typical 2D array in which all the rows have the same length.) Also write a subroutine to
print a 2D array of integers in neat rows and columns, and include a main() routine to
test your work.
3. In Subsection 7.5.4, it is mentioned that the standard sorting method Arrays.sort() is (solution)
much faster and efficient than selection sort. Write a program to test this claim. To be
specific, your program should create a large array filled with random real numbers. It
should use both Arrays.sort() and selectionSort() to sort the array, and it should
time how long it takes to perform each sort. Furthermore, it should do the same thing for
a large array of random Strings. To find the times, you can use System.nanoTime() (see
Subsection 2.3.1 and the example TimedComputation.java).
4. In Exercise 6.2, you wrote a program DragTwoSquares that allows the user to drag a red (solution)
square and a blue square around on a canvas. Write a much improved version where the
user can add squares to a canvas and drag them around. In particular: If the user shift-
clicks or right-clicks the canvas, then the user is trying to drag a square; find the square
that contains the mouse position, if any, and move it as the user drags the mouse. Other
clicks should add squares. You can place the center of the new square at the current mouse
position. To make the picture more visually appealing, give each square a random color,
and when you draw the squares, draw a black outline around each square. (My program
also gives the square a random alpha value between 0.5 and 1.0).
Write a class to represent the data needed for drawing one square, and use an ArrayList
to store the data for all the squares in the picture. If the user drags a square completely
off the canvas, delete it from the list.
5. Write a program that will read a sequence of positive real numbers entered by the user (solution)
and will print the same numbers in sorted order from smallest to largest. The user will
input a zero to mark the end of the input. Assume that at most 100 positive numbers
will be entered. Do not use any built-in function such as Arrays.sort(). Do the sorting
yourself.
6. Write a program that will read a text file selected by the user, and will make an alphabetical (solution)
list of all the different words in that file. All words should be converted to lower case, and
duplicates should be eliminated from the list. The list should be written to an output file
selected by the user. As discussed in Subsection 2.4.4, you can use TextIO to read and
write files. Use a variable of type ArrayList<String> to store the words. It is not easy to
separate a file into words as you are reading it, especially if you want to allow apostrophes
in the middle of a word. You can use the following method in your program:
Exercises 402
/**
* Read the next word from TextIO, if there is one. First, skip past
* any non-letters in the input. If an end-of-file is encountered before
* a word is found, return null. Otherwise, read and return the word.
* A word is defined as a sequence of letters. Also, a word can include
* an apostrophe if the apostrophe is surrounded by letters on each side.
* @return the next word from TextIO, or null if an end-of-file is
* encountered
*/
private static String readNextWord() {
char ch = TextIO.peek(); // Look at next character in input.
while (ch != TextIO.EOF && ! Character.isLetter(ch)) {
// Skip past non-letters.
TextIO.getAnyChar(); // Read the character.
ch = TextIO.peek(); // Look at the next character.
}
if (ch == TextIO.EOF) // Encountered end-of-file
return null;
// At this point, we know the next character is a letter, so read a word.
String word = ""; // This will be the word that is read.
while (true) {
word += TextIO.getAnyChar(); // Append the letter onto word.
ch = TextIO.peek(); // Look at next character.
if ( ch == ’\’’ ) {
// The next character is an apostrophe. Read it, and
// if the following character is a letter, add both the
// apostrophe and the letter onto the word and continue
// reading the word. If the character after the apostrophe
// is not a letter, the word is done, so break out of the loop.
TextIO.getAnyChar(); // Read the apostrophe.
ch = TextIO.peek(); // Look at char that follows apostrophe.
if (Character.isLetter(ch)) {
word += "\’" + TextIO.getAnyChar();
ch = TextIO.peek(); // Look at next char.
}
else
break;
}
if ( ! Character.isLetter(ch) ) {
// If the next character is not a letter, the word is
// finished, so break out of the loop.
break;
}
// If we haven’t broken out of the loop, next char is a letter.
}
return word; // Return the word that has been read.
}
Note that this method will return null when the file has been entirely read. You can use
this as a signal to stop processing the input file.
7. The game of Go Moku (also known as Pente or Five Stones) is similar to Tic-Tac-Toe, (solution)
except that it is played on a much larger board and the object is to get five squares in a
Exercises 403
row rather than three. The board should have 13 rows and 13 columns of squares. Players
take turns placing pieces on a board. A piece can be placed in any empty square. The
first player to get five pieces in a row—horizontally, vertically, or diagonally—wins. If all
squares are filled before either player wins, then the game is a draw. Write a program
that lets two players play Go Moku against each other.
Your program will be simpler than the Checkers program from Subsection 7.6.3. Play
alternates strictly between the two players, and there is no need to highlight the legal
moves. You will only need one nested subclass, a subclass of JPanel to draw the board
and do all the work of the game, like the nested Board class in the Checkers program. You
will probably want to look at the source code for the checkers program, Checkers.java, for
ideas about the general outline of the program.
The hardest part of the program is checking whether the move that a player makes is
a winning move. To do this, you have to look in each of the four possible directions from
the square where the user has placed a piece. You have to count how many pieces that
player has in a row in that direction. If the number is five or more in any direction, then
that player wins. As a hint, here is part of the code from my program. This code counts
the number of pieces that the user has in a row in a specified direction. The direction is
specified by two integers, dirX and dirY. The values of these variables are 0, 1, or -1, and
at least one of them is non-zero. For example, to look in the horizontal direction, dirX is
1 and dirY is 0.
int ct = 1; // Number of pieces in a row belonging to the player.
int r, c; // A row and column to be examined
r = row + dirX; // Look at square in specified direction.
c = col + dirY;
while ( r >= 0 && r < 13 && c >= 0 && c < 13
&& board[r][c] == player ) {
// Square is on the board, and it
// contains one of the player’s pieces.
ct++;
r += dirX; // Go on to next square in this direction.
c += dirY;
}
r = row - dirX; // Now, look in the opposite direction.
c = col - dirY;
while ( r >= 0 && r < 13 && c >= 0 && c < 13
&& board[r][c] == player ) {
ct++;
r -= dirX; // Go on to next square in this direction.
c -= dirY;
}
Here is a picture of my program, just after black has won the game.
Exercises 404
Quiz 405
Quiz on Chapter 7
(answers)
2. What is the purpose of the following variable-arity method? What are the values of
same(1,2,3), same(17,17,17,17), and same(2)? Why?
static double same( int... value ) {
for (int i = 1; i < value.length; i++) {
if ( value[i-1] != value[i] )
return false;
}
return true;
}
4. What is the main advantage of binary search over linear search? What is the main
disadvantage?
5. What is meant by a dynamic array? What is the advantage of a dynamic array over a
regular array?
9. Write a complete static method that finds the largest value in an array of ints. The
method should have one parameter, which is an array of type int[]. The largest number
in the array should be returned as the value of the method.
10. Suppose that temperature measurements were made on each day of 2021 in each of 100
cities. The measurements have been stored in an array
int[][] temps = new int[100][365];
where temps[c][d] holds the measurement for city number c on the dth day of the year.
Write a code segment that will print out the average temperature, over the course of the
whole year, for each city. The average temperature for a city can be obtained by adding
up all 365 measurements for that city and dividing the answer by 365.0.
12.
Convert the Employee class from the previous question into a record class. What
changes would then need to be made to the previous question’s solution?
13.
Write a record class to represent dates, where a Date object contains three integer fields
giving the month, day, and year of the date. The canonical constructor should throw an
exception if the values for the month and day are not legal. Also include a toString()
method that prints a date in a form such as “5/27/2022”.
14. What is the purpose of the following subroutine? What is the meaning of the value that
it returns, in terms of the value of its parameter?
static double[] sums( double[][] data ) {
double[] answers = new double[ data.length ];
for (int i = 0; i < data.length; i++) {
double sum = 0;
for (int j = 0; j < data[i].length; i++)
sum = sum + data[i][j];
answers[i] = sum;
}
return answers;
}
Chapter 8
407
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 408
discovered in simulation. The Mariner 18 space probe was lost because of an error in one
line of a program. The Gemini V space capsule missed its scheduled landing target by
a hundred miles, because a programmer forgot to take into account the rotation of the
Earth.
• In 1990, AT&T’s long-distance telephone service was disrupted throughout the United
States when a newly loaded computer program proved to contain a bug.
Of course, there have been more recent problems. For example, computer software error
contributed to the Northeast Blackout of 2003, one of the largest power outages in history. In
2006, the Airbus A380 was delayed by software incompatibility problems, at a cost of perhaps
billions of dollars. In 2007, a software problem grounded thousands of planes at the Los Angeles
International Airport. On May 6, 2010, a flaw in an automatic trading program apparently
resulted in a 1000-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
These are just a few examples. Software problems are all too common. As programmers,
we need to understand why that is true and what can be done about it.
other languages, such as C and C++, it’s up to the programmer to make sure that the index
is within the legal range. Suppose that an array, A, has three locations, A[0], A[1], and A[2].
Then A[3], A[4], and so on refer to memory locations beyond the end of the array. In Java,
an attempt to store data in A[3] will be detected. The program will be terminated (unless the
error is “caught”, as discussed in Section 3.7). In C or C++, the computer will just go ahead
and store the data in memory that is not part of the array. Since there is no telling what that
memory location is being used for, the result will be unpredictable. The consequences could
be much more serious than a terminated program. (See, for example, the discussion of buffer
overflow errors later in this section.)
Pointers are a notorious source of programming errors. In Java, a variable of object type
holds either a pointer to an object or the special value null. Any attempt to use a null
value as if it were a pointer to an actual object will be detected by the system. In some other
languages, again, it’s up to the programmer to avoid such null pointer errors. In my first
Macintosh computer, a long time ago, a null pointer was actually implemented as if it were a
pointer to memory location zero. A program could use a null pointer to change values stored
in memory near location zero. Unfortunately, the Macintosh stored important system data in
those locations. Changing that data could cause the whole system to crash, a consequence more
severe than a single failed program.
Another type of pointer error occurs when a pointer value is pointing to an object of the
wrong type or to a segment of memory that does not even hold a valid object at all. These
types of errors are impossible in Java, which does not allow programmers to manipulate pointers
directly. In other languages, it is possible to set a pointer to point, essentially, to any location
in memory. If this is done incorrectly, then using the pointer can have unpredictable results.
Another type of error that cannot occur in Java is a memory leak. In Java, once there are
no longer any pointers that refer to an object, that object is “garbage collected” so that the
memory that it occupied can be reused. In other languages, it is the programmer’s responsibility
to return unused memory to the system. If the programmer fails to do this, unused memory
can build up, leaving less memory for programs and data. There is a story that many common
programs for older Windows computers had so many memory leaks that the computer would
run out of memory after a few days of use and would have to be restarted.
Many programs have been found to suffer from buffer overflow errors. Buffer overflow
errors often make the news because they are responsible for many network security problems.
When one computer receives data from another computer over a network, that data is stored in
a buffer. The buffer is just a segment of memory that has been allocated by a program to hold
data that it expects to receive. A buffer overflow occurs when more data is received than will
fit in the buffer. The question is, what happens then? If the error is detected by the program
or by the networking software, then the only thing that has happened is a failed network
data transmission. The real problem occurs when the software does not properly detect buffer
overflows. In that case, the software continues to store data in memory even after the buffer is
filled, and the extra data goes into some part of memory that was not allocated by the program
as part of the buffer. That memory might be in use for some other purpose. It might contain
important data. It might even contain part of the program itself. This is where the real security
issues come in. Suppose that a buffer overflow causes part of a program to be replaced with
extra data received over a network. When the computer goes to execute the part of the program
that was replaced, it’s actually executing data that was received from another computer. That
data could be anything. It could be a program that crashes the computer or takes it over. A
malicious programmer who finds a convenient buffer overflow error in networking software can
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 411
try to exploit that error to trick other computers into executing his programs.
For software written completely in Java, buffer overflow errors are impossible. The language
simply does not provide any way to store data into memory that has not been properly allocated.
To do that, you would need a pointer that points to unallocated memory or you would have
to refer to an array location that lies outside the range allocated for the array. As explained
above, neither of these is possible in Java. (However, there could conceivably still be errors in
Java’s standard classes, since some of the methods in these classes are actually written in the
C programming language rather than in Java. In fact, Java’s internal security errors have at
times been a problem for the language.)
It’s clear that language design can help prevent errors or detect them when they occur.
Doing so involves restricting what a programmer is allowed to do. Or it requires tests, such as
checking whether a pointer is null, that take some extra processing time. Some programmers
feel that the sacrifice of power and efficiency is too high a price to pay for the extra security. In
some applications, this is true. However, there are many situations where safety and security
are primary considerations. Java is designed for such situations.
The quadratic formula (from high-school mathematics) assures us that the value assigned to x
is a solution of the equation A*x2 + B*x + C = 0, provided that the value of disc is greater
than or equal to zero and the value of A is not zero. If we can guarantee that B*B-4*A*C >= 0
and that A != 0, then the fact that x is a solution of the equation becomes a postcondition
of the program segment. We say that the condition, B*B-4*A*C >= 0 is a precondition of
the program segment. The condition that A != 0 is another precondition. A precondition is
defined to be a condition that must be true at a given point in the execution of a program in
order for the program to continue correctly. A precondition is something that you want to be
true. It’s something that you have to check or force to be true, if you want your program to be
correct.
We’ve encountered preconditions and postconditions once before, in Subsection 4.7.1. That
section introduced preconditions and postconditions as a way of specifying the contract of
a subroutine. As the terms are being used here, a precondition of a subroutine is just a
precondition of the code that makes up the definition of the subroutine, and the postcondition
of a subroutine is a postcondition of the same code. In this section, we have generalized these
terms to make them more useful in talking about program correctness in general.
Let’s see how this works by considering a longer program segment:
do {
System.out.println("Enter A, B, and C.");
System.out.println("A must be non-zero and B*B-4*A*C must be >= 0.");
System.out.print("A = ");
A = TextIO.getlnDouble();
System.out.print("B = ");
B = TextIO.getlnDouble();
System.out.print("C = ");
C = TextIO.getlnDouble();
if (A == 0 || B*B - 4*A*C < 0)
System.out.println("Your input is illegal. Try again.");
} while (A == 0 || B*B - 4*A*C < 0);
disc = B*B - 4*A*C;
x = (-B + Math.sqrt(disc)) / (2*A);
After the loop ends, we can be sure that B*B-4*A*C >= 0 and that A != 0. The preconditions
for the last two lines are fulfilled, so the postcondition that x is a solution of the equation
A*x2 + B*x + C = 0 is also valid. This program segment correctly and provably computes a
solution to the equation. (Actually, because of problems with representing real numbers on
computers, this is not 100% true. The algorithm is correct, but the program is not a perfect
implementation of the algorithm. See the discussion in Subsection 8.1.3.)
Here is another variation, in which the precondition is checked by an if statement. In the
first part of the if statement, where a solution is computed and printed, we know that the
preconditions are fulfilled. In the other parts, we know that one of the preconditions fails to
hold. In any case, the program is correct.
System.out.println("Enter your values for A, B, and C.");
System.out.print("A = ");
A = TextIO.getlnDouble();
System.out.print("B = ");
B = TextIO.getlnDouble();
System.out.print("C = ");
C = TextIO.getlnDouble();
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 415
8.2.3 Invariants
Let’s look at how loops work in more detail. Consider a subroutine for finding the sum of the
elements in an array of int:
static int arraySum( int[] A ) {
int total = 0;
int i = 0;
while ( i < A.length ) {
total = total + A[i];
i = i + 1;
}
return total;
}
(Note, by the way, that the requirements that A is not null is a precondition of the subroutine.
If it is violated, the code in the subroutine will throw a NullPointerException.)
How can we be sure that this subroutine works? We need to prove that when the return
statement is executed, the value of total is the sum of all the elements in A. One way to think
about this problem is in terms of loop invariants.
A loop invariant is, roughly, a statement that remains true as the loop is executed. More
precisely, we can show that a statement is an invariant for a loop if the following holds: As
long as the statement is true before the code inside the loop is executed, then it will also
be true after the code inside the loop has been executed. That is, a loop invariant is both a
precondition and a postcondition of the body of the loop.
A loop invariant for the loop in the above subroutine is, “total is equal to the sum of the
first i elements of A.” Suppose this is true at the beginning of the while loop. That is, before
the statement “total = total + A[i]” is executed, total is the sum of the first i elements of
the array (namely A[0] through A[i-1]). After A[i] is added to total, total is now the sum
of the first i+1 elements of the array. At this point, the loop invariant is not true. However, as
soon as the next statement, “i = i + 1” is executed, replacing i with i+1, the loop invariant
becomes true again. We have checked that if the loop invariant is true at the start of the body
of the loop, then is also true at the end.
Note that a loop invariant is not necessarily true at every point during the execution of
a loop. Executing one of the statements in the loop can make it false temporarily, as long as
later statements in the loop make it true again.
So, have we proved that the subroutine arraySum() is correct? Not quite. There are still a
few things to check. First of all, we need to make sure that the loop invariant is true before the
very first time the loop is executed. At that point, i is zero, and total is also equal to zero,
which is the correct sum of zero elements. So the loop invariant is true before the loop. Once
we know that, we know that it remains true after each execution of the loop (because it’s an
invariant), and in particular, we know that it will still be true after the loop ends.
But for that to do us any good, we need to check that the loop actually does end! In each
execution of the loop, the value of i goes up by one. That means that eventually it has to
reach A.length. At that point, the condition in the while loop is false, and the loop ends.
After the loop ends, we know that i equals A.length, and we know that the loop invariant
is true. At that point, since i is A.length, the loop invariant says, “total is the sum of the
first A.length” elements of A.” But that includes all of the elements of A. So, the loop invariant
gives us exactly what we wanted to show: When total is returned by the subroutine, it is equal
to the sum of all the elements of the array!
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 417
This might seem to you to be a lot of work to prove something that’s obvious. But if you
try to explain why it’s obvious that arraySum() works, you’ll probably find yourself using the
logic behind loop invariants, even if you don’t use the term.
Let’s look more quickly at a similar example. Consider a subroutine that finds the maximum
value in an array of int, where we assume that the array has length at least one:
static int maxInArray( int[] A ) {
int max = A[0];
int i = 1;
while ( i < A.length ) {
if ( A[i] > max )
max = A[i];
i = i + 1;
}
return max;
}
In this case, we have a loop invariant that says, “max is the largest value among the first i
elements of A.” This statement is true before the loop starts, when i is 1 and max is A[0].
Suppose it is true at the start of the loop, before the if statement. After the if statement, max
is greater than or equal to A[i], because that is a postcondition of the if statement, and it is
greater than or equal to A[0] through A[i-1], because of the truth of the loop invariant. Put
those two facts together, and you get that max is the largest value among the first i+1 elements
of A. When i is replaced by i+1 in the next statement, the loop invariant becomes true again.
After the loop ends, i is A.length, and the loop invariant tells us exactly what we need to
know: max is the largest value in the whole array.
Loop invariants are not just useful for proving that programs are correct. Thinking in terms
of loop invariants can be useful when you are trying to develop an algorithm. As an example,
let’s look at the insertion sort algorithm that was discussed in Subsection 7.5.3. Suppose that
we want to sort an array A. That is, at the end of the algorithm, we want it to be true that
A[0] <= A[1] <= ... <= A[A.length-1]
The question is, what step-by-step procedure can we use to make this statement true? Well,
can we come up with a loop invariant that, at the end, will become the statement that we want
to be true? If we want all of the elements to be sorted at the end, how about a loop invariant
that says that some of the elements are sorted—say, that the first i elements are sorted. This
leads to an outline for the algorithm:
i = 0;
while (i < A.length ) {
// Loop invariant: A[0] <= A[1] <= ... <= A[i-1]
.
. // Code that adds A[i] to the sorted portion of the array
.
i = i + 1;
}
// At this point, i = A.length, and A[0] <= A[1] <= ... <= A[A.length-1]
The loop invariant is true before the while loop, and when the loop ends, the loop invariant
becomes precisely the statement that we want to be true at the end of the algorithm. We know
what we have to do to complete the algorithm: Develop code for the inside of the loop that
will preserve the truth of the loop invariant. If we can do that, the loop invariant will assure
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 418
us that the algorithm that we have developed is correct. The algorithm for adding A[i] to the
sorted portion of the array will require its own loop, with its own loop invariant. I’ll leave you
to think about that.
∗ ∗ ∗
There is another kind of invariant that is useful for thinking about programs: class
invariants. A class invariant is, roughly, a statement that is always true about the state
of a class, or about objects created from that class. For example, suppose we have a PairOfDice
class in which the values shown on the dice are stored in instance variables die1 and die2.
(See Section 5.2 for a variety of such classes.) We might like to have a class invariant that says,
“the values of die1 and die2 are in the range 1 through 6.” (This would be a statement about
any object created from the PairOfDice class, not about the class as such.) After all, this is a
statement that should always be true about any pair of dice.
But in order to be a class invariant, the statement has to be guaranteed true at all times.
If die1 and die2 are public instance variables, then no such guarantee is possible, since there
is no way to control what values a program that uses the class might assign to them. So,
we are led to make die1 and die2 private. Then we just have to make sure that all of the
code in the class definition respects the class invariant. That is, first of all, when a PairOfDice
object is constructed, the variables die1 and die2 must be initialized to be in the range 1 to 6.
Furthermore, every method in the class must preserve the truth of the class invariant. In this
case, that means that any method that assigns a value to die1 or die2 must ensure that the
value is in the range 1 to 6. For example, a setter method would have to check that a legal
value is being assigned.
In general, we can say that a class invariant is a postcondition of every constructor and is
both a precondition and a postcondition of every method in the class. When you are writing
a class, a class invariant is something that you want to be true at all times. When you write a
method, you need to make sure that the code in that method respects the invariant: Assuming
that the class invariant is true when the method in called, you need to ensure that it will still
be true after the code in the method is executed. This kind of thinking can be a very useful
tool for class design.
As another example, consider a dynamic array class, like the one in Subsection 7.2.4. That
class uses an ordinary array to store values and a counter to keep track of how many items have
been added to the dyanmic array:
private int[] items = new int[8];
private int itemCount = 0;
Class invariants include the facts that “itemCount is the number of items,” that
“0 <= itemCount < items.length,” and that “the items are in the array elements items[0]
through items[itemCount-1].” Keeping these invariants in mind can be helpful when writing
the class. When writing a method for adding an item, the first invariant reminds you to incre-
ment itemCount in order to ensure that the invariant remains true. The second invariant tells
you where the new item has to be stored. And the third invariant tells you that if increment-
ing itemCount makes it equal to items.length, then you will need to do something to avoid
violating the invariant. (Since itemCount has to be incremented, the invariant means that you
will have to make the array bigger.)
In future chapters, I will occasionally point out how it can be useful to think in terms of
preconditions, postconditions, and invariants.
I should note that reasoning about invariants becomes much more complicated in parallel
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 419
programs, when several threads that are running at the same time and are accessing the same
data. This will be an issue when we encounter threads in Chapter 12.
An example in Subsection 3.5.3 allowed the user to enter length measurements such as “3
miles” or “1ft”. It would then convert the measurement into inches, feet, yards, and miles.
But people commonly use combined measurements such as “3 feet 7 inches”. Let’s improve the
program so that it allows inputs of this form.
More specifically, the user will input lines containing one or more measurements such as “1
foot” or “3 miles 20 yards 2 feet”. The legal units of measure are inch, foot, yard, and mile.
The program will also recognize plurals (inches, feet, yards, miles) and abbreviations (in, ft,
yd, mi). Let’s write a subroutine that will read one line of input of this form and compute
the equivalent number of inches. The main program uses the number of inches to compute the
equivalent number of feet, yards, and miles. If there is any error in the input, the subroutine
will print an error message and return the value -1. The subroutine assumes that the input
line is not empty. The main program tests for this before calling the subroutine and uses an
empty line as a signal for ending the program.
Ignoring the possibility of illegal inputs, a pseudocode algorithm for the subroutine is
inches = 0 // This will be the total number of inches
while there is more input on the line:
read the numerical measurement
read the units of measure
add the measurement to inches
return inches
We can test whether there is more input on the line by checking whether the next non-blank
character is the end-of-line character. But this test has a precondition: We have to make sure
that the next character in the input is in fact either an end-of-line or is a non-blank. To ensure
that, we need to skip over any blank characters. So, the algorithm becomes
inches = 0
skipBlanks()
while TextIO.peek() is not ’\n’:
read the numerical measurement
read the unit of measure
add the measurement to inches
skipBlanks()
return inches
Note the call to skipBlanks() at the end of the while loop. The call to skipBlanks() ensures
that the precondition for the test is again true. More generally, if the test in a while loop has a
precondition, then you have to make sure that this precondition holds at the end of the while
loop, before the computer jumps back to re-evaluate the test, as well as before the start of the
loop.
What about error checking? Before reading the numerical measurement, we have to make
sure that there is really a number there to read. Before reading the unit of measure, we have
to test that there is something there to read. (The number might have been the last thing on
the line. An input such as “3”, without a unit of measure, is not acceptable.) Also, we have to
check that the unit of measure is one of the valid units: inches, feet, yards, or miles. Here is
an algorithm that includes error-checking:
inches = 0
skipBlanks()
while TextIO.peek() is not ’\n’:
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 421
ch = TextIO.peek();
/* As long as there is more input on the line, read a measurement and
add the equivalent number of inches to the variable, inches. If an
error is detected during the loop, end the subroutine immediately
by returning -1. */
while (ch != ’\n’) {
/* Get the next measurement and the units. Before reading
anything, make sure that a legal value is there to read. */
if ( ! Character.isDigit(ch) ) {
System.out.println(
"Error: Expected to find a number, but found " + ch);
return -1;
}
measurement = TextIO.getDouble();
skipBlanks();
if (TextIO.peek() == ’\n’) {
System.out.println(
"Error: Missing unit of measure at end of line.");
return -1;
}
units = TextIO.getWord();
units = units.toLowerCase();
/* Convert the measurement to inches and add it to the total. */
if (units.equals("inch")
|| units.equals("inches") || units.equals("in")) {
inches += measurement;
}
else if (units.equals("foot")
|| units.equals("feet") || units.equals("ft")) {
inches += measurement * 12;
}
else if (units.equals("yard")
|| units.equals("yards") || units.equals("yd")) {
inches += measurement * 36;
}
else if (units.equals("mile")
|| units.equals("miles") || units.equals("mi")) {
inches += measurement * 12 * 5280;
}
else {
System.out.println("Error: \"" + units
+ "\" is not a legal unit of measure.");
return -1;
}
/* Look ahead to see whether the next thing on the line is
the end-of-line. */
skipBlanks();
ch = TextIO.peek();
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 423
} // end while
return inches;
} // end readMeasurement()
The source code for the complete program can be found in the file LengthConverter2.java.
Chapter 12. In particular, GUI programs are multithreaded, and parts of the program might
continue to function even while other parts are non-functional because of exceptions.)
By the way, since Java programs are executed by a Java interpreter, having a program
crash simply means that it terminates abnormally and prematurely. It doesn’t mean that
the Java interpreter will crash. In effect, the interpreter catches any exceptions that are not
caught by the program. The interpreter responds by terminating the program. In many other
programming languages, a crashed program will sometimes crash the entire system and freeze
the computer until it is restarted. With Java, such system crashes should be impossible—which
means that when they happen, you have the satisfaction of blaming the system rather than
your own program.
Exceptions were introduced in Section 3.7, along with the try..catch statement, which is
used to catch and handle exceptions. However, that section did not cover the complete syntax
of try..catch or the full complexity of exceptions. In this section, we cover these topics in full
detail.
∗ ∗ ∗
When an exception occurs, the thing that is actually “thrown” is an object. This object
can carry information (in its instance variables) from the point where the exception occurs to
the point where it is caught and handled. This information always includes the subroutine
call stack , which is a list of the subroutines that were being executed when the exception was
thrown. (Since one subroutine can call another, several subroutines can be active at the same
time.) Typically, an exception object also includes an error message describing what happened
to cause the exception, and it can contain other data as well. All exception objects must belong
to a subclass of the standard class java.lang.Throwable. In general, each different type of
exception is represented by its own subclass of Throwable, and these subclasses are arranged in
a fairly complex class hierarchy that shows the relationship among various types of exception.
Throwable has two direct subclasses, Error and Exception. These two subclasses in turn have
many other predefined subclasses. In addition, a programmer can create new exception classes
to represent new types of exception.
Most of the subclasses of the class Error represent serious errors within the Java virtual
machine that should ordinarily cause program termination because there is no reasonable way
to handle them. In general, you should not try to catch and handle such errors. An example is
a ClassFormatError, which occurs when the Java virtual machine finds some kind of illegal data
in a file that is supposed to contain a compiled Java class. If that class was being loaded as
part of the program, then there is really no way for the program to proceed.
On the other hand, subclasses of the class Exception represent exceptions that are meant
to be caught. In many cases, these are exceptions that might naturally be called “errors,” but
they are errors in the program or in input data that a programmer can anticipate and possibly
respond to in some reasonable way. (However, you should avoid the temptation of saying, “Well,
I’ll just put a thing here to catch all the errors that might occur, so my program won’t crash.”
If you don’t have a reasonable way to respond to the error, it’s best just to let the program
crash, because trying to go on will probably only lead to worse things down the road—in the
worst case, a program that gives an incorrect answer without giving you any indication that
the answer might be wrong!)
The class Exception has its own subclass, RuntimeException. This class groups together
many common exceptions, including all those that have been covered in previous sections. For
example, IllegalArgumentException and NullPointerException are subclasses of RuntimeException.
A RuntimeException generally indicates a bug in the program, which the programmer should
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 425
fix. RuntimeExceptions and Errors share the property that a program can simply ignore
the possibility that they might occur. (“Ignoring” here means that you are content to
let your program crash if the exception occurs.) For example, a program does this
every time it uses an array reference like A[i] without making arrangements to catch
a possible ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException. For all other exception classes besides Error,
RuntimeException, and their subclasses, exception-handling is “mandatory” in a sense that
I’ll discuss below.
The following diagram is a class hierarchy showing the class Throwable and just a few of
its subclasses. Classes that require mandatory exception-handling are shown in red:
Throwable
Error Exception
EOFException SocketException
ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException
IllegalArgumentException
The class Throwable and
some of its subclasses.
NumberFormatException
The class Throwable includes several instance methods that can be used with any exception
object. If e is of type Throwable (or one of its subclasses), then e.getMessage() is a function
that returns a String that describes the exception. The function e.toString(), which is used by
the system whenever it needs a string representation of the object, returns a String that contains
the name of the class to which the exception belongs as well as the same string that would be
returned by e.getMessage(). And the method e.printStackTrace() writes a stack trace to
standard output that tells which subroutines were active when the exception occurred. A stack
trace can be very useful when you are trying to determine the cause of the problem. Information
in the stack trace can tell you exactly where in the program the exception occurred. (Note that
if an exception is not caught by the program, then the default response to the exception prints
the stack trace to standard output.)
The semantics of the finally clause is that the block of statements in the finally clause is
guaranteed to be executed as the last step in the execution of the try statement, whether or not
any exception occurs and whether or not any exception that does occur is caught and handled.
The finally clause is meant for doing essential cleanup that under no circumstances should
be omitted. One example of this type of cleanup is closing a network connection. Although
you don’t yet know enough about networking to look at the actual programming in this case,
we can consider some pseudocode:
try {
open a network connection
communicate over the connection
}
catch ( IOException e ) {
report the error
}
finally {
if the connection was successfully opened
close the connection
}
The finally clause ensures that the network connection will definitely be closed, whether or not
an error occurs during the communication. The pseudocode in this example follows a general
pattern that can be used to robustly obtain a resource, use the resource, and then release the
resource.
∗ ∗ ∗
The pattern of obtaining a resource, then using the resource, and then releasing the resource
is very common. Note that the resource can only be released if no error occurred while obtaining
it. And, if it was successfully obtained, then it should be closed whether or not an error occurs
while using it. This pattern is so common that it leads to one last option in the try statement
syntax. With this option, you only need code to obtain the resource, and you don’t need to
worry about releasing it. That will happen automatically at the end of the try statement.
In order for this to work, the resource must be represented by an object that implements
an interface named AutoCloseable, which defines a single method named close(), with no
parameters. Standard Java classes that represent things like files and network connections
already implement AutoClosable. So does the Scanner class, which was introduced in
Subsection 2.4.6. In that section, I showed how to use a Scanner to read from System.in.
Although I didn’t do it in that section, it’s considered good form to close a Scanner after using
it. Here is an example that uses the pattern in a try statement to make sure that the Scanner
is closed automatically:
try( Scanner in = new Scanner(System.in) ) {
// Use the Scanner to read from standard input
}
catch (Exception e) {
// ... some error occurred while using the Scanner
}
The statement that allocates the Scanner goes in parentheses after the word “try”. The
statement must have the form of a variable declaration that includes an initialization of the
variable. The variable is local to the try statement. (You can actually declare several variables
in the parentheses, separated by semicolons.) In this example, we can be sure that in.close()
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 429
will definitely be called by the system at the end of the try statement, as long as the Scanner
was successfully initialized.
This is all getting quite complicated, and I won’t continue the discussion here. The sample
program TryStatementDemo.java demonstrates a try statement with all its options, and it
includes a lot of comments to help you understand what can happen when you run the program.
A subroutine that might generate an exception can announce this fact by adding a clause
“throws hexception-class-namei” to the header of the routine. For example:
/**
* Returns the larger of the two roots of the quadratic equation
* A*x*x + B*x + C = 0, provided it has any roots. If A == 0 or
* if the discriminant, B*B - 4*A*C, is negative, then an exception
* of type IllegalArgumentException is thrown.
*/
static public double root( double A, double B, double C )
throws IllegalArgumentException {
if (A == 0) {
throw new IllegalArgumentException("A can’t be zero.");
}
else {
double disc = B*B - 4*A*C;
if (disc < 0)
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Discriminant < zero.");
return (-B + Math.sqrt(disc)) / (2*A);
}
}
As discussed in the previous section, the computation in this subroutine has the precon-
ditions that A != 0 and B*B-4*A*C >= 0. The subroutine throws an exception of type Ille-
galArgumentException when either of these preconditions is violated. When an illegal condition
is found in a subroutine, throwing an exception is often a reasonable response. If the program
that called the subroutine knows some good way to handle the error, it can catch the exception.
If not, the program will crash—and the programmer will know that the program needs to be
fixed.
A throws clause in a subroutine heading can declare several different types of exception,
separated by commas. For example:
void processArray(int[] A) throws NullPointerException,
ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException { ...
either case, the exception must be handled. This can be done in one of two ways: The first way
is to place the statement in a try statement that has a catch clause that handles the exception;
in this case, the exception is handled within the subroutine, so that no caller of the subroutine
can ever see the exception. The second way is to declare that the subroutine can throw the
exception. This is done by adding a “throws” clause to the subroutine heading, which alerts
any callers to the possibility that the exception might be generated when the subroutine is
executed. The caller will, in turn, be forced either to handle the exception in a try statement
or to declare the exception in a throws clause in its own header.
Exception-handling is mandatory for any exception class that is not a subclass of either
Error or RuntimeException. These checked exceptions generally represent conditions that are
outside the control of the programmer. For example, they might represent bad input or an
illegal action taken by the user. There is no way to avoid such errors, so a robust program
has to be prepared to handle them. The design of Java makes it impossible for programmers
to ignore the possibility of such errors.
Among the checked exceptions are several that can occur when using Java’s input/output
routines. This means that you can’t even use these routines unless you understand something
about exception-handling. Chapter 11 deals with input/output and uses checked exceptions
extensively.
Here, a ShipDestroyed object contains an error message and some information about a ship that
was destroyed. This could be used, for example, in a statement:
if ( userShip.isHit() )
throw new ShipDestroyed("You’ve been hit!", userShip, xPos, yPos);
Note that the condition represented by a ShipDestroyed object might not even be considered
an error. It could be just an expected interruption to the normal flow of a game. Exceptions
can sometimes be used to handle such interruptions neatly.
∗ ∗ ∗
The ability to throw exceptions is particularly useful in writing general-purpose methods
and classes that are meant to be used in more than one program. In this case, the person writing
the method or class often has no reasonable way of handling the error, since that person has no
way of knowing exactly how the method or class will be used. In such circumstances, a novice
programmer is often tempted to print an error message and forge ahead, but this is almost
never satisfactory since it can lead to unpredictable results down the line. Printing an error
message and terminating the program is almost as bad, since it gives the program no chance
to handle the error.
The program that calls the method or uses the class needs to know that the error has
occurred. In languages that do not support exceptions, the only alternative is to return some
special value or to set the value of some global variable to indicate that an error has occurred.
For example, the readMeasurement() function in Subsection 8.2.2 returns the value -1 if the
user’s input is illegal. However, this only does any good if the main program bothers to test
the return value. It is very easy to be lazy about checking for special return values every time
a subroutine is called. And in this case, using -1 as a signal that an error has occurred makes
it impossible to allow negative measurements. Exceptions are a cleaner way for a subroutine to
react when it encounters an error.
It is easy to modify the readMeasurement() function to use exceptions instead of a special
return value to signal an error. My modified subroutine throws a ParseError when the user’s
input is illegal, where ParseError is the subclass of Exception that was defined above. (Arguably,
it might be reasonable to avoid defining a new class by using the standard exception class
IllegalArgumentException instead.) The changes from the original version are shown in italic:
/**
* Reads the user’s input measurement from one line of input.
* Precondition: The input line is not empty.
* Postcondition: If the user’s input is legal, the measurement
* is converted to inches and returned.
* @throws ParseError if the user’s input is not legal.
*/
static double readMeasurement() throws ParseError {
double inches; // Total number of inches in user’s measurement.
double measurement; // One measurement,
// such as the 12 in "12 miles."
String units; // The units specified for the measurement,
// such as "miles."
char ch; // Used to peek at next character in the user’s input.
inches = 0; // No inches have yet been read.
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 434
skipBlanks();
ch = TextIO.peek();
/* As long as there is more input on the line, read a measurement and
add the equivalent number of inches to the variable, inches. If an
error is detected during the loop, end the subroutine immediately
by throwing a ParseError. */
while (ch != ’\n’) {
/* Get the next measurement and the units. Before reading
anything, make sure that a legal value is there to read. */
if ( ! Character.isDigit(ch) ) {
throw new ParseError("Expected to find a number, but found " + ch);
}
measurement = TextIO.getDouble();
skipBlanks();
if (TextIO.peek() == ’\n’) {
throw new ParseError("Missing unit of measure at end of line.");
}
units = TextIO.getWord();
units = units.toLowerCase();
/* Convert the measurement to inches and add it to the total. */
if (units.equals("inch")
|| units.equals("inches") || units.equals("in")) {
inches += measurement;
}
else if (units.equals("foot")
|| units.equals("feet") || units.equals("ft")) {
inches += measurement * 12;
}
else if (units.equals("yard")
|| units.equals("yards") || units.equals("yd")) {
inches += measurement * 36;
}
else if (units.equals("mile")
|| units.equals("miles") || units.equals("mi")) {
inches += measurement * 12 * 5280;
}
else {
throw new ParseError("\"" + units
+ "\" is not a legal unit of measure.");
}
/* Look ahead to see whether the next thing on the line is
the end-of-line. */
skipBlanks();
ch = TextIO.peek();
} // end while
return inches;
} // end readMeasurement()
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 435
In the main program, this subroutine is called in a try statement of the form
try {
inches = readMeasurement();
}
catch (ParseError e) {
. . . // Handle the error.
}
The complete program can be found in the file LengthConverter3.java. From the user’s
point of view, this program has exactly the same behavior as the program LengthConverter2
from the previous section. Internally, however, the programs are significantly different, since
LengthConverter3 uses exception handling.
8.4.1 Assertions
Recall that a precondition is a condition that must be true at a certain point in a program, for
the execution of the program to continue correctly from that point. In the case where there is
a chance that the precondition might not be satisfied—for example, if it depends on input from
the user—then it’s a good idea to insert an if statement to test it. But then the question arises,
What should be done if the precondition does not hold? One option is to throw an exception.
This will terminate the program, unless the exception is caught and handled elsewhere in the
program.
In many cases, of course, instead of using an if statement to test whether a precondition
holds, a programmer tries to write the program in a way that will guarantee that the
precondition holds. In that case, the test should not be necessary, and the if statement can
be avoided. The problem is that programmers are not perfect. In spite of the programmer’s
intention, the program might contain a bug that screws up the precondition. So maybe it’s a
good idea to check the precondition after all—at least during the debugging phase of program
development.
Similarly, a postcondition is a condition that is true at a certain point in the program as
a consequence of the code that has been executed before that point. Assuming that the code
is correctly written, a postcondition is guaranteed to be true, but here again testing whether a
desired postcondition is actually true is a way of checking for a bug that might have screwed
up the postcondition. This is something that might be desirable during debugging.
And the same thing applies to loop invariants and class invariants. These are things that
should be true at certain points in a program. If they are not true at those points, it means
that the program contains a bug.
The programming languages C and C++ have always had a facility for adding what are
called assertions to a program. These assertions take the form “assert(hconditioni)”,
where hconditioni is a boolean-valued expression. This condition expresses a precondition or
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 436
postcondition that should hold at that point in the program. When the computer encounters
an assertion during the execution of the program, it evaluates the condition. If the condition is
false, the program is terminated. Otherwise, the program continues normally. This allows the
programmer’s belief that the condition is true to be tested; if it is not true, that indicates that
the part of the program that preceded the assertion contained a bug. One nice thing about
assertions in C and C++ is that they can be “turned off” at compile time. That is, if the
program is compiled in one way, then the assertions are included in the compiled code. If the
program is compiled in another way, the assertions are not included. During debugging, the
first type of compilation is used, with assertions turned on. The release version of the program
is compiled with assertions turned off. The release version will be more efficient, because the
computer won’t have to evaluate all the assertions.
Although early versions of Java did not have assertions, an assertion facility similar to the
one in C/C++ has been available in Java since version 1.4. As with the C/C++ version, Java
assertions can be turned on during debugging and turned off during normal execution. In Java,
however, assertions are turned on and off at run time rather than at compile time. An assertion
in the Java source code is always included in the compiled class file. When the program is
run in the normal way, these assertions are ignored; since the condition in the assertion is not
evaluated in this case, there is little or no performance penalty for having the assertions in
the program. When the program is being debugged, it can be run with assertions enabled, as
discussed below, and then the assertions can be a great help in locating and identifying bugs.
∗ ∗ ∗
An assertion statement in Java takes one of the following two forms:
assert hcondition i ;
or
assert hcondition i : herror-message i ;
where hconditioni is a boolean-valued expression and herror-messagei is a string or an
expression of type String. The word “assert” is a reserved word in Java, which cannot be
used as an identifier. An assertion statement can be used anyplace in Java where a statement
is legal.
If a program is run with assertions disabled, an assertion statement is equivalent to an
empty statement and has no effect. When assertions are enabled and an assertion statement is
encountered in the program, the hconditioni in the assertion is evaluated. If the value is true,
the program proceeds normally. If the value of the condition is false, then an exception of
type java.lang.AssertionError is thrown, and the program will crash (unless the error is
caught by a try statement). If the assert statement includes an herror-messagei, then the
error message string becomes the message in the AssertionError.
So, the statement “assert hcondition i : herror-message i;" is similar to
if ( hcondition i == false )
throw new AssertionError( herror-message i );
except that the if statement is executed whenever the program is run, and the assert
statement is executed only when the program is run with assertions enabled.
The question is, when to use assertions instead of exceptions? The general rule is to use
assertions to test conditions that should definitely be true, if the program is written correctly.
Assertions are useful for testing a program to see whether or not it is correct and for finding
the errors in an incorrect program. After testing and debugging, when the program is used in
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 437
the normal way, the assertions in the program will be ignored. However, if a problem turns
up later, the assertions are still there in the program to be used to help locate the error. If
someone writes to you to say that your program doesn’t work when he does such-and-such, you
can run the program with assertions enabled, do such-and-such, and hope that the assertions
in the program will help you locate the point in the program where it goes wrong.
Consider, for example, the root() method from Subsection 8.3.3 that calculates a root of
a quadratic equation. If you believe that your program will always call this method with legal
arguments, then it would make sense to write the method using assertions instead of exceptions:
/**
* Returns the larger of the two roots of the quadratic equation
* A*x*x + B*x + C = 0.
* Precondition: A != 0 and B*B - 4*A*C >= 0.
*/
static public double root( double A, double B, double C ) {
assert A != 0 : "Leading coefficient of quadratic equation cannot be zero.";
double disc = B*B - 4*A*C;
assert disc >= 0 : "Discriminant of quadratic equation cannot be negative.";
return (-B + Math.sqrt(disc)) / (2*A);
}
The assertions are not checked when the program is run in the normal way. If you are correct in
your belief that the method is never called with illegal arguments, then checking the conditions
in the assertions would be unnecessary. If your belief is not correct, the problem should turn
up during testing or debugging, when the program is run with the assertions enabled.
If the root() method is part of a software library that you expect other people to use, then
the situation is less clear. Oracle’s Java documentation advises that assertions should not be
used for checking the contract of public methods: If the caller of a method violates the contract
by passing illegal parameters, then an exception should be thrown. This will enforce the contract
whether or not assertions are enabled. (However, while it’s true that Java programmers expect
the contract of a method to be enforced with exceptions, there are reasonable arguments for
using assertions instead, in some cases.) One might say that assertions are for you, to help you
in debugging your code, while exceptions are for people who use your code, to alert them that
they are misusing it.
On the other hand, it never hurts to use an assertion to check a postcondition or an invariant.
These are conditions that are definitely expected to be true in any bug-free program, so an
assertion is the natural way to check the condition while debugging, without imposing an
efficiency penalty when the program is executed normally. If the postcondition or invariant
is false, there is a bug, and that is something that needs to be found during the testing and
debugging phase of programming.
∗ ∗ ∗
To have any effect, assertions must be enabled when the program is run. How to do this
depends on what programming environment you are using. (See Section 2.6 for a discussion of
programming environments.) In the usual command line environment, assertions are enabled by
adding the option -enableassertions to the java command that is used to run the program.
For example, if the class that contains the main program is RootFinder, then the command
java -enableassertions RootFinder
will run the program with assertions enabled. The -enableassertions option can be
abbreviated to -ea, so the command can alternatively be written as
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 438
8.4.2 Annotations
The term “annotation” commonly refers to notes added to or written alongside a main text, to
help you understand or appreciate the text. An annotation might be a note that you make to
yourself in the margin of a book. It might be a footnote added to an old novel by an editor to
explain the historical context of some event. The annotation is metadata or “metatext,” that
is, text written about the main text rather than as part of the main text itself.
Comments on a program are actually a kind of annotation. Since they are ignored by the
compiler, they have no effect on the meaning of the program. They are there to explain that
meaning to a human reader. It is possible, of course, for another computer program (not the
compiler) to process comments. That’s what is done in the case of Javadoc comments, which
are processed by a program that uses them to create API documentation. But comments are
only one type of metadata that might be added to programs.
In Java 5.0, a new feature called annotations was added to the Java language to make
it easier to create new kinds of metadata for Java programs. This has made it possible for
programmers to devise new ways of annotating programs, and to write programs that can read
and use their annotations.
Java annotations have no direct effect on the program that they annotate. But they do have
many potential uses. Some annotations are used to make the programmer’s intent more explicit.
Such annotations might be checked by a compiler to make sure that the code is consistent with
the programmer’s intention. For example, @Override is a standard annotation that can be
used to annotate method definitions. It means that the method is intended to override (that
is replace) a method with the same signature that was defined in some superclass. A compiler
can check that the superclass method actually exists; if not, it can inform the programmer. An
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 439
annotation used in this way is an aid to writing correct programs, since the programmer can
be warned about a potential error in advance, instead of having to hunt it down later as a bug.
To annotate a method definition with the @Override annotation, simply place it in front of
the definition. Syntactically, annotations are modifiers that are used in much the same way as
built-in modifiers like “public” and “final.” For example,
@Override public void WindowClosed(WindowEvent evt) { ... }
If there is no "WindowClosed(WindowEvent)" method in any superclass, then the compiler can
issue an error. In fact, this example is based on a hard-to-find bug that I once introduced
when trying to override a method named “windowClosed” with a method that I called
“WindowClosed” (with an upper case “W”). If the @Override annotation had existed at
that time—and if I had used it—the compiler could have rejected my code and saved me the
trouble of tracking down the bug.
(Annotations are a fairly advanced feature, and I might not have mentioned them in this
textbook, except that some notations, such as @Override, can show up in code generated by
Eclipse and other integrated development environments.)
There are two other standard annotations. One is @Deprecated, which can be used to mark
deprecated classes, methods, and variables. (A deprecated item is one that is considered to be
obsolete, but is still part of the Java language for backwards compatibility for old code.) Use of
this annotation would allow a compiler to generate warnings when the deprecated item is used.
The other standard annotation is @SurpressWarnings, which can be used by a compiler
to turn off warning messages that would ordinarily be generated when a class or method is
compiled. @SuppressWarnings is an example of an annotation that has a parameter. The
parameter tells what class of warnings are to be suppressed. For example, when a class or
method is annotated with
@SuppressWarnings("deprecation")
then no warnings about the use of deprecated items will be emitted when the class or method
is compiled. There are other types of warning that can be suppressed; unfortunately the list of
warnings and their names is not standardized and will vary from one compiler to another.
Note, by the way, that the syntax for annotation parameters—especially for an annotation
that accepts multiple parameters—is not the same as the syntax for method parameters. I
won’t cover the annotation syntax here.
Programmers can define new annotations for use in their code. Such annotations are ignored
by standard compilers and programming tools, but it’s possible to write programs that can
understand the annotations and check for their presence in source code. It is even possible to
create annotations that will be retained at run-time and become part of the running program.
In that case, a program can check for annotations in the actual compiled code that is being
executed, and take actions that depend on the presence of the annotation or the values of its
parameters.
Annotations can help programmers to write correct programs. To use an example from the
Java documentation, they can help with the creation of “boilerplate” code—that is, code that
has a very standardized format and that can be generated mechanically. Often, boilerplate code
is generated based on other code. Doing that by hand is a tedious and error-prone process.
A simple example might be code to save certain aspects of a program’s state to a file and to
restore it later. The code for reading and writing the values of all the relevant state variables is
highly repetitious. Instead of writing that code by hand, a programmer could use an annotation
to mark the variables that are part of the state that is to be saved. A program could then be
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 440
used to check for the annotations and generate the save-and-restore code. In fact, it would even
be possible to do without that code altogether, if the program checks for the presence of the
annotation at run time to decide which variables to save and restore.
fixed finite size. Only what happens in the long run, as the problem size increases without
limit, is important. Showing that Algorithm A is asymptotically faster than Algorithm B
doesn’t necessarily mean that Algorithm A will run faster than Algorithm B for problems of
size 10 or size 1000 or even size 1000000—it only means that if you keep increasing the problem
size, you will eventually come to a point where Algorithm A is faster than Algorithm B. An
asymptotic analysis is only a first approximation, but in practice it often gives important and
useful information.
∗ ∗ ∗
Central to asymptotic analysis is Big-Oh notation. Using this notation, we might say,
for example, that an algorithm has a running time that is O(n2 ) or O(n) or O(log(n)). These
notations are read “Big-Oh of n squared,” “Big-Oh of n,” and “Big-Oh of log n” (where log is a
logarithm function). More generally, we can refer to O(f(n)) (“Big-Oh of f of n”), where f(n) is
some function that assigns a positive real number to every positive integer n. The “n” in this
notation refers to the size of the problem. Before you can even begin an asymptotic analysis,
you need some way to measure problem size. Usually, this is not a big issue. For example, if
the problem is to sort a list of items, then the problem size can be taken to be the number of
items in the list. When the input to an algorithm is an integer, as in the case of an algorithm
that checks whether a given positive integer is prime, the usual measure of the size of a problem
is the number of bits in the input integer rather than the integer itself. More generally, the
number of bits in the input to a problem is often a good measure of the size of the problem.
To say that the running time of an algorithm is O(f(n)) means that for large values of
the problem size, n, the running time of the algorithm is no bigger than some constant times
f(n). (More rigorously, there is a number C and a positive integer M such that whenever n
is greater than M, the run time is less than or equal to C*f(n).) The constant takes into
account details such as the speed of the computer on which the algorithm is run; if you use
a slower computer, you might have to use a bigger constant in the formula, but changing the
constant won’t change the basic fact that the run time is O(f(n)). The constant also makes
it unnecessary to say whether we are measuring time in seconds, years, CPU cycles, or any
other unit of measure; a change from one unit of measure to another is just multiplication by
a constant. Note also that O(f(n)) doesn’t depend at all on what happens for small problem
sizes, only on what happens in the long run as the problem size increases without limit.
To look at a simple example, consider the problem of adding up all the numbers in an array.
The problem size, n, is the length of the array. Using A as the name of the array, the algorithm
can be expressed in Java as:
total = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++)
total = total + A[i];
This algorithm performs the same operation, total = total + A[i], n times. The total
time spent on this operation is a*n, where a is the time it takes to perform the operation once.
Now, this is not the only thing that is done in the algorithm. The value of i is incremented
and is compared to n each time through the loop. This adds an additional time of b*n to the
run time, for some constant b. Furthermore, i and total both have to be initialized to zero;
this adds some constant amount c to the running time. The exact running time would then be
(a+b)*n+c, where the constants a, b, and c depend on factors such as how the code is compiled
and what computer it is run on. Using the fact that c is less than or equal to c*n for any
positive integer n, we can say that the run time is less than or equal to (a+b+c)*n. That is,
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 442
the run time is less than or equal to a constant times n. By definition, this means that the run
time for this algorithm is O(n).
If this explanation is too mathematical for you, we can just note that for large values of
n, the c in the formula (a+b)*n+c is insignificant compared to the other term, (a+b)*n. We
say that c is a “lower order term.” When doing asymptotic analysis, lower order terms can
be discarded. A rough, but correct, asymptotic analysis of the algorithm would go something
like this: Each iteration of the for loop takes a certain constant amount of time. There are
n iterations of the loop, so the total run time is a constant times n, plus lower order terms
(to account for the initialization). Disregarding lower order terms, we see that the run time is
O(n).
∗ ∗ ∗
Note that to say that an algorithm has run time O(f(n)) is to say that its run time is no
bigger than some constant times f(n) (for large values of n). O(f(n)) puts an upper limit on
the run time. However, the run time could be smaller, even much smaller. For example, if the
run time is O(n), it would also be correct to say that the run time is O(n2 ) or even O(n10 ). If
the run time is less than a constant times n, then it is certainly less than the same constant
times n2 or n10 .
Of course, sometimes it’s useful to have a lower limit on the run time. That is, we want
to be able to say that the run time is greater than or equal to some constant times f(n) (for
large values of n). The notation for this is Ω(f(n)), read “Omega of f of n” or “Big Omega of f
of n.” “Omega” is the name of a letter in the Greek alphabet, and Ω is the upper case version
of that letter. (To be technical, saying that the run time of an algorithm is Ω(f(n)) means that
there is a positive number C and a positive integer M such that whenever n is greater than
M, the run time is greater than or equal to C*f(n).) O(f(n)) tells you something about the
maximum amount of time that you might have to wait for an algorithm to finish; Ω(f(n)) tells
you something about the minimum time.
The algorithm for adding up the numbers in an array has a run time that is Ω(n) as well as
O(n). When an algorithm has a run time that is both Ω(f(n)) and O(f(n)), its run time is said
to be Θ(f(n)), read “Theta of f of n” or “Big Theta of f of n.” (Theta is another letter from
the Greek alphabet.) To say that the run time of an algorithm is Θ(f(n)) means that for large
values of n, the run time is between a*f(n) and b*f(n), where a and b are constants (with b
greater than a, and both greater than 0).
Let’s look at another example. Consider the algorithm that can be expressed in Java in the
following method:
/**
* Sorts the n array elements A[0], A[1], ..., A[n-1] into increasing order.
*/
public static void simpleBubbleSort( int[] A, int n ) {
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
// Do n passes through the array...
for (int j = 0; j < n-1; j++) {
if ( A[j] > A[j+1] ) {
// A[j] and A[j+1] are out of order, so swap them
int temp = A[j];
A[j] = A[j+1];
A[j+1] = temp;
}
}
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 443
}
}
Here, the parameter n represents the problem size. The outer for loop in the method is executed
n times. Each time the outer for loop is executed, the inner for loop is executed n-1 times, so
the if statement is executed n*(n-1) times. This is n2 -n, but since lower order terms are not
significant in an asymptotic analysis, it’s good enough to say that the if statement is executed
about n2 times. In particular, the test A[j] > A[j+1] is executed about n2 times, and this fact
by itself is enough to say that the run time of the algorithm is Ω(n2 ), that is, the run time is
at least some constant times n2 . Furthermore, if we look at other operations—the assignment
statements, incrementing i and j, etc.—none of them are executed more than n2 times, so the
run time is also O(n2 ), that is, the run time is no more than some constant times n2 . Since it
is both Ω(n2 ) and O(n2 ), the run time of the simpleBubbleSort algorithm is Θ(n2 ).
You should be aware that some people use the notation O(f(n)) as if it meant Θ(f(n)). That
is, when they say that the run time of an algorithm is O(f(n)), they mean to say that the run
time is about equal to a constant times f(n). For that, they should use Θ(f(n)). Properly
speaking, O(f(n)) means that the run time is less than a constant times f(n), possibly much
less.
∗ ∗ ∗
So far, my analysis has ignored an important detail. We have looked at how run time
depends on the problem size, but in fact the run time usually depends not just on the size of
the problem but on the specific data that has to be processed. For example, the run time of a
sorting algorithm can depend on the initial order of the items that are to be sorted, and not
just on the number of items.
To account for this dependency, we can consider either the worst case run time analysis
or the average case run time analysis of an algorithm. For a worst case run time analysis, we
consider all possible problems of size n and look at the longest possible run time for all such
problems. For an average case analysis, we consider all possible problems of size n and look at
the average of the run times for all such problems. Usually, the average case analysis assumes
that all problems of size n are equally likely to be encountered, although this is not always
realistic—or even possible in the case where there is an infinite number of different problems of
a given size.
In many cases, the average and the worst case run times are the same to within a constant
multiple. This means that as far as asymptotic analysis is concerned, they are the same. That
is, if the average case run time is O(f(n)) or Θ(f(n)), then so is the worst case. However, later in
the book, we will encounter a few cases where the average and worst case asymptotic analyses
differ.
It is also possible to talk about best case run time analysis, which looks at the shortest
possible run time for all inputs of a given size. However, a best case analysis is only occasionally
useful.
∗ ∗ ∗
So, what do you really have to know about analysis of algorithms to read the rest of this
book? We will not do any rigorous mathematical analysis, but you should be able to follow
informal discussion of simple cases such as the examples that we have looked at in this section.
Most important, though, you should have a feeling for exactly what it means to say that the
running time of an algorithm is O(f(n)) or Θ(f(n)) for some common functions f(n). The main
point is that these notations do not tell you anything about the actual numerical value of the
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 444
running time of the algorithm for any particular case. They do not tell you anything at all
about the running time for small values of n. What they do tell you is something about the
rate of growth of the running time as the size of the problem increases.
Suppose you compare two algorithms that solve the same problem. The run time of one
algorithm is Θ(n2 ), while the run time of the second algorithm is Θ(n3 ). What does this tell
you? If you want to know which algorithm will be faster for some particular problem of size,
say, 100, nothing is certain. As far as you can tell just from the asymptotic analysis, either
algorithm could be faster for that particular case—or in any particular case. But what you can
say for sure is that if you look at larger and larger problems, you will come to a point where the
Θ(n2 ) algorithm is faster than the Θ(n3 ) algorithm. Furthermore, as you continue to increase
the problem size, the relative advantage of the Θ(n2 ) algorithm will continue to grow. There
will be values of n for which the Θ(n2 ) algorithm is a thousand times faster, a million times
faster, a billion times faster, and so on. This is because for any positive constants a and b, the
function a*n3 grows faster than the function b*n2 as n gets larger. (Mathematically, the limit
of the ratio of a*n3 to b*n2 is infinite as n approaches infinity.)
This means that for “large” problems, a Θ(n2 ) algorithm will definitely be faster than a
Θ(n3 ) algorithm. You just don’t know—based on the asymptotic analysis alone—exactly how
large “large” has to be. In practice, in fact, it is likely that the Θ(n2 ) algorithm will be faster
even for fairly small values of n, and absent other information you would generally prefer a
Θ(n2 ) algorithm to a Θ(n3 ) algorithm.
So, to understand and apply asymptotic analysis, it is essential to have some idea of the
rates of growth of some common functions. For the power functions n, n2 , n3 , n4 , . . . , the larger
the exponent, the greater the rate of growth of the function. Exponential functions such as 2n
and 10n , where the n is in the exponent, have a growth rate that is faster than that of any power
function. In fact, exponential functions grow so quickly that an algorithm whose run time grows
exponentially is almost certainly impractical even for relatively modest values of n, because the
running time is just too long. Another function that often turns up in asymptotic analysis is
the logarithm function, log(n). There are actually many different logarithm functions, but the
one that is usually used in computer science is the so-called logarithm to the base two, which is
defined by the fact that log(2x ) = x for any number x. (Usually, this function is written log2 (n),
but I will leave out the subscript 2, since I will only use the base-two logarithm in this book.)
The logarithm function grows very slowly. The growth rate of log(n) is much smaller than the
growth rate of n. The growth rate of n*log(n) is a little larger than the growth rate of n, but
much smaller than the growth rate of n2 . The following table should help you understand the
differences among the rates of growth of various functions:
The reason that log(n) shows up so often is because of its association with multiplying and
dividing by two: Suppose you start with the number n and divide it by 2, then divide by 2
again, and so on, until you get a number that is less than or equal to 1. Then the number of
divisions is equal (to the nearest integer) to log(n).
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 445
As an example, consider the binary search algorithm from Subsection 7.5.1. This algorithm
searches for an item in a sorted array. The problem size, n, can be taken to be the length of
the array. Each step in the binary search algorithm divides the number of items still under
consideration by 2, and the algorithm stops when the number of items under consideration is
less than or equal to 1 (or sooner). It follows that the number of steps for an array of length n
is at most log(n). This means that the worst-case run time for binary search is Θ(log(n)). (The
average case run time is also Θ(log(n)).) By comparison, the linear search algorithm, which
was also presented in Subsection 7.5.1 has a run time that is Θ(n). The Θ notation gives us
a quantitative way to express and to understand the fact that binary search is “much faster”
than linear search.
In binary search, each step of the algorithm divides the problem size by 2. It often happens
that some operation in an algorithm (not necessarily a single step) divides the problem size
by 2. Whenever that happens, the logarithm function is likely to show up in an asymptotic
analysis of the run time of the algorithm.
Analysis of Algorithms is a large, fascinating field. We will only use a few of the most basic
ideas from this field, but even those can be very helpful for understanding the differences among
algorithms.
Exercises 446
1. Write a program that uses the following subroutine, from Subsection 8.3.3, to solve (solution)
equations specified by the user.
/**
* Returns the larger of the two roots of the quadratic equation
* A*x*x + B*x + C = 0, provided it has any roots. If A == 0 or
* if the discriminant, B*B - 4*A*C, is negative, then an exception
* of type IllegalArgumentException is thrown.
*/
static public double root( double A, double B, double C )
throws IllegalArgumentException {
if (A == 0) {
throw new IllegalArgumentException("A can’t be zero.");
}
else {
double disc = B*B - 4*A*C;
if (disc < 0)
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Discriminant < zero.");
return (-B + Math.sqrt(disc)) / (2*A);
}
}
Your program should allow the user to specify values for A, B, and C. It should call the
subroutine to compute a solution of the equation. If no error occurs, it should print the
root. However, if an error occurs, your program should catch that error and print an error
message. After processing one equation, the program should ask whether the user wants
to enter another equation. The program should continue until the user answers no.
2. As discussed in Section 8.1, values of type int are limited to 32 bits. Integers that are too (solution)
large to be represented in 32 bits cannot be stored in an int variable. Java has a standard
class, java.math.BigInteger, that addresses this problem. An object of type BigInteger
is an integer that can be arbitrarily large. (The maximum size is limited only by the
amount of memory available to the Java Virtual Machine.) Since BigIntegers are objects,
they must be manipulated using instance methods from the BigInteger class. For example,
you can’t add two BigIntegers with the + operator. Instead, if N and M are variables that
refer to BigIntegers, you can compute the sum of N and M with the function call N.add(M).
The value returned by this function is a new BigInteger object that is equal to the sum of
N and M.
The BigInteger class has a constructor new BigInteger(str), where str is a string.
The string must represent an integer, such as “3” or “39849823783783283733”. If the string
does not represent a legal integer, then the constructor throws a NumberFormatException.
There are many instance methods in the BigInteger class. Here are a few that you will
find useful for this exercise. Assume that N and M are variables of type BigInteger.
• N.add(M) — a function that returns a BigInteger representing the sum of N and M.
• N.multiply(M) — a function that returns a BigInteger representing the result of
multiplying N times M.
Exercises 447
3. A Roman numeral represents an integer using letters. Examples are XVII to represent 17, (solution)
MCMLIII for 1953, and MMMCCCIII for 3303. By contrast, ordinary numbers such as
17 or 1953 are called Arabic numerals. The following table shows the Arabic equivalent
of all the single-letter Roman numerals:
M 1000 X 10
D 500 V 5
C 100 I 1
L 50
When letters are strung together, the values of the letters are just added up, with the
following exception. When a letter of smaller value is followed by a letter of larger value,
the smaller value is subtracted from the larger value. For example, IV represents 5 - 1, or
4. And MCMXCV is interpreted as M + CM + XC + V, or 1000 + (1000 - 100) + (100 -
10) + 5, which is 1995. In standard Roman numerals, no more than three consecutive
copies of the same letter are used. Following these rules, every number between 1 and
3999 can be represented as a Roman numeral made up of the following one- and two-letter
combinations:
M 1000 X 10
CM 900 IX 9
D 500 V 5
CD 400 IV 4
Exercises 448
C 100 I 1
XC 90
L 50
XL 40
Write a class to represent Roman numerals. The class should have two constructors.
One constructs a Roman numeral from a string such as “XVII” or “MCMXCV”. It
should throw a NumberFormatException if the string is not a legal Roman numeral.
The other constructor constructs a Roman numeral from an int. It should throw a
NumberFormatException if the int is outside the range 1 to 3999.
In addition, the class should have two instance methods. The method toString()
returns the string that represents the Roman numeral. The method toInt() returns the
value of the Roman numeral as an int.
At some point in your class, you will have to convert an int into the string that
represents the corresponding Roman numeral. One way to approach this is to gradually
“move” value from the Arabic numeral to the Roman numeral. Here is the beginning of a
routine that will do this, where number is the int that is to be converted:
String roman = "";
int N = number;
while (N >= 1000) {
// Move 1000 from N to roman.
roman += "M";
N -= 1000;
}
while (N >= 900) {
// Move 900 from N to roman.
roman += "CM";
N -= 900;
}
.
. // Continue with other values from the above table.
.
(You can save yourself a lot of typing in this routine if you use arrays in a clever way to
represent the data in the above table.)
Once you’ve written your class, use it in a main program that will read both Arabic
numerals and Roman numerals entered by the user. If the user enters an Arabic numeral,
print the corresponding Roman numeral. If the user enters a Roman numeral, print the
corresponding Arabic numeral. (You can tell the difference by using TextIO.peek() to
peek at the first character in the user’s input (see Subsection 8.2.2). If the first character
is a digit, then the user’s input is an Arabic numeral. Otherwise, it’s a Roman numeral.)
The program should end when the user inputs an empty line.
4. The source code file Expr.java defines a class, Expr, that can be used to represent (solution)
mathematical expressions involving the variable x. The expression can use the operators
+, -, *, /, and ^ (where ^ represents the operation of raising a number to a power). It
can use mathematical functions such as sin, cos, abs, and ln. See the source code file
for full details. The Expr class uses some advanced techniques which have not yet been
covered in this textbook. However, the interface is easy to understand. It contains only a
constructor and two public methods.
Exercises 449
The constructor new Expr(def) creates an Expr object defined by a given expres-
sion. The parameter, def, is a string that contains the definition. For example,
new Expr("x^2") or new Expr("sin(x)+3*x"). If the parameter in the constructor call
does not represent a legal expression, then the constructor throws an IllegalArgumentEx-
ception. The message in the exception describes the error.
If func is a variable of type Expr and num is of type double, then func.value(num)
is a function that returns the value of the expression when the number num is substituted
for the variable x in the expression. For example, if Expr represents the expression 3*x+1,
then func.value(5) is 3*5+1, or 16. If the expression is undefined for the specified value
of x, then the special value Double.NaN is returned; no exception is thrown.
Finally, func.toString() returns the definition of the expression. This is just the
string that was used in the constructor that created the expression object.
For this exercise, you should write a program that lets the user enter an expression. If
the expression contains an error, print an error message. Otherwise, let the user enter some
numerical values for the variable x. Print the value of the expression for each number that
the user enters. However, if the expression is undefined for the specified value of x, print
a message to that effect. You can use the boolean-valued function Double.isNaN(val)
to check whether a number, val, is Double.NaN.
The user should be able to enter as many values of x as desired. After that, the user
should be able to enter a new expression.
5. This exercise uses the class Expr, which was described in Exercise 8.4 and which is defined (solution)
in the source code file Expr.java. For this exercise, you should write a GUI program that
can graph a function, f(x), whose definition is entered by the user. The program should
have a text-input box where the user can enter an expression involving the variable x, such
as x^2 or sin(x-3)/x. This expression is the definition of the function. When the user
presses return, the program should use the contents of the text input box to construct an
object of type Expr. If an error is found in the definition, then the program should display
an error message. Otherwise, it should display a graph of the function.
The program will need a JPanel for displaying the graph. To keep things simple,
the panel should represent a fixed region in the xy-plane, defined by -5 <= x <= 5 and
-5 <= y <= 5. To draw the graph, compute a large number of points and connect them
with line segments. (This method does not handle discontinuous functions properly; doing
so is very hard, so you shouldn’t try to do it for this exercise.) My program divides
the interval -5 <= x <= 5 into 300 subintervals and uses the 301 endpoints of these
subintervals for drawing the graph. Note that the function might be undefined at one
of these x-values. In that case, you have to skip that point.
A point on the graph has the form (x,y) where y is obtained by evaluating the user’s
expression at the given value of x. You will have to convert x and y values in the range
from -5 to 5 to the pixel coordinates that you need for drawing on the canvas. The formulas
for the conversion are:
int a = (int)( (x + 5)/10 * width );
int b = (int)( (5 - y)/10 * height );
where a and b are the horizontal and vertical pixel coordinates on the panel. The values
of width and height give the size of the panel.
Quiz 450
Quiz on Chapter 8
(answers)
1. Why do programming languages require that variables be declared before they are used?
What does this have to do with correctness and robustness?
4. Find a useful loop invariant for the while loop in the binary search algorithm (Subsec-
tion 7.5.1).
5. Java has a predefined class called Throwable. What does this class represent? Why does
it exist?
6. Write a method that prints out a 3N+1 sequence starting from a given integer, N. The
starting value should be a parameter to the method. If the parameter is less than or equal
to zero, throw an IllegalArgumentException. If the number in the sequence becomes too
large to be represented as a value of type int, throw an ArithmeticException.
7. Rewrite the method from the previous question, using assert statements instead of
exceptions to check for errors. What is the difference between the two versions of the
method when the program is run?
8. Some classes of exceptions are checked exceptions that require mandatory exception
handling. Explain what this means.
10. Why should a subroutine throw an exception when it encounters an error? Why not just
terminate the program?
11. Suppose that you have a choice of two algorithms that perform the same task. One has
average-case run time that is Θ(n2 ) while the run time of the second algorithm has an
average-case run time that is Θ(n*log(n)). Suppose that you need to process an input
of size n = 100. Which algorithm would you choose? Can you be certain that you are
choosing the fastest algorithm for the input that you intend to process?
12. Analyze the run time of the following algorithm. That is, find a function f(n) such that
the run time of the algorithm is O(f(n)) or, better, Θ(f(n)). Assume that A is an array of
integers, and use the length of the array as the input size, n.
int total = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < A.length; i++) {
if (A[i] > 0)
total = total + A[i];
}
Chapter 9
In this chapter, we look at two advanced programming techniques, recursion and linked data
structures, and some of their applications. Both of these techniques are related to the seemingly
paradoxical idea of defining something in terms of itself. This turns out to be a remarkably
powerful idea.
A subroutine is said to be recursive if it calls itself, either directly or indirectly. What this
means is that the subroutine is used in its own definition. Recursion can often be used to solve
complex problems by reducing them to simpler problems of the same type.
A reference to one object can be stored in an instance variable of another object. The
objects are then said to be “linked.” Complex data structures can be built by linking objects
together. An especially interesting case occurs when an object contains a link to another object
that belongs to the same class. In that case, the class is used in its own definition. Several
important types of data structures are built using classes of this kind.
9.1 Recursion
At one time or another, you’ve probably been told that you can’t define something in
terms of itself. Nevertheless, if it’s done right, defining something at least partially in terms of
itself can be a very powerful technique. A recursive definition is one that uses the concept
or thing that is being defined as part of the definition. For example: An “ancestor” is either
a parent or an ancestor of a parent. A “sentence” can be, among other things, two sentences
joined by a conjunction such as “and.” A “directory” is a part of a disk drive that can hold files
and directories. In mathematics, a “set” is a collection of elements, which can themselves be
sets. A “statement” in Java can be a while statement, which is made up of the word “while”,
a boolean-valued condition, and a statement.
Recursive definitions can describe very complex situations with just a few words. A
definition of the term “ancestor” without using recursion might go something like “a parent,
or a grandparent, or a great-grandparent, or a great-great-grandparent, and so on.” But saying
“and so on” is not very rigorous. (I’ve often thought that recursion is really just a rigorous
way of saying “and so on.”) You run into the same problem if you try to define a “directory”
as “a file that is a list of files, where some of the files can be lists of files, where some of those
files can be lists of files, and so on.” Trying to describe what a Java statement can look like,
without using recursion in the definition, would be difficult and probably pretty comical.
451
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 452
result can be an infinite recursion, where the subroutine keeps calling itself over and over,
without ever reaching a base case. Infinite recursion is similar to an infinite loop. However,
since each recursive call to the subroutine uses up some of the computer’s memory, a program
that is stuck in an infinite recursion will run out of memory and crash before long. In Java, the
program will crash with an exception of type StackOverflowError.
The problem is to move ten disks from Stack 0 to Stack 1, subject to the rules given above.
Stack 2 can be used as a spare location. Can we reduce this to smaller problems of the same
type, possibly generalizing the problem a bit to make this possible? It seems natural to consider
the size of the problem to be the number of disks to be moved. If there are N disks in Stack 0,
we know that we will eventually have to move the bottom disk from Stack 0 to Stack 1. But
before we can do that, according to the rules, the first N-1 disks must be on Stack 2. Once
we’ve moved the N-th disk to Stack 1, we must move the other N-1 disks from Stack 2 to Stack 1
to complete the solution. But moving N-1 disks is the same type of problem as moving N disks,
except that it’s a smaller version of the problem. This is exactly what we need to do recursion!
The problem has to be generalized a bit, because the smaller problems involve moving disks
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 455
from Stack 0 to Stack 2 or from Stack 2 to Stack 1, instead of from Stack 0 to Stack 1. In the
recursive subroutine that solves the problem, the stacks that serve as the source and destination
of the disks have to be specified. It’s also convenient to specify the stack that is to be used as
a spare, even though we could figure that out from the other two parameters. The base case is
when there is only one disk to be moved. The solution in this case is trivial: Just move the disk
in one step. Here is a version of the subroutine that will print out step-by-step instructions for
solving the problem:
/**
* Solve the problem of moving the number of disks specified
* by the first parameter from the stack specified by the
* second parameter to the stack specified by the third
* parameter. The stack specified by the fourth parameter
* is available for use as a spare. Stacks are specified by
* number: 0, 1, or 2.
*/
static void towersOfHanoi(int disks, int from, int to, int spare) {
if (disks == 1) {
// There is only one disk to be moved. Just move it.
System.out.printf("Move disk 1 from stack %d to stack %d%n",
from, to);
}
else {
// Move all but one disk to the spare stack, then
// move the bottom disk, then put all the other
// disks on top of it.
towersOfHanoi(disks-1, from, spare, to);
System.out.printf("Move disk %d from stack %d to stack %d%n",
disks, from, to);
towersOfHanoi(disks-1, spare, to, from);
}
}
This subroutine just expresses the natural recursive solution. The recursion works because
each recursive call involves a smaller number of disks, and the problem is trivial to solve
in the base case, when there is only one disk. To solve the “top level” problem of moving
N disks from Stack 0 to Stack 1, the subroutine should be called with the command
TowersOfHanoi(N,0,1,2). The subroutine is used in the sample program TowersOfHanoi.java.
Here, for example, is the output from the program when it is run with the number of disks set
equal to 4:
Move disk 1 from stack 0 to stack 2
Move disk 2 from stack 0 to stack 1
Move disk 1 from stack 2 to stack 1
Move disk 3 from stack 0 to stack 2
Move disk 1 from stack 1 to stack 0
Move disk 2 from stack 1 to stack 2
Move disk 1 from stack 0 to stack 2
Move disk 4 from stack 0 to stack 1
Move disk 1 from stack 2 to stack 1
Move disk 2 from stack 2 to stack 0
Move disk 1 from stack 1 to stack 0
Move disk 3 from stack 2 to stack 1
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 456
}
else {
// Apply quicksortStep and get the new pivot position.
// Then apply quicksort to sort the items that
// precede the pivot and the items that follow it.
int pivotPosition = quicksortStep(A, lo, hi);
quicksort(A, lo, pivotPosition - 1);
quicksort(A, pivotPosition + 1, hi);
}
}
As usual, we had to generalize the problem. The original problem was to sort an array, but
the recursive algorithm is set up to sort a specified part of an array. To sort an entire array, A,
using the quickSort() subroutine, you would call quicksort(A, 0, A.length - 1).
Quicksort is an interesting example from the point of view of the analysis of algorithms
(Section 8.5), because its average case run time differs greatly from its worst case run time.
Here is a very informal analysis, starting with the average case: Note that an application of
quicksortStep divides a problem into two sub-problems. On the average, the subproblems will
be of approximately the same size. A problem of size n is divided into two problems that are
roughly of size n/2; these are then divided into four problems that are roughly of size n/4;
and so on. Since the problem size is divided by 2 on each level, there will be approximately
log(n) levels of subdivision. The amount of processing on each level is proportional to n. (On
the top level, each element in the array is looked at and possibly moved. On the second level,
where there are two subproblems, every element but one in the array is part of one of those
two subproblems and must be looked at and possibly moved, so there is a total of about n
steps in both subproblems combined. Similarly, on the third level, there are four subproblems
and a total of about n steps in the four subproblems on that level. . . .) With a total of n steps
on each level and approximately log(n) levels in the average case, the average case run time
for Quicksort is Θ(n*log(n)). This analysis assumes that quicksortStep divides a problem into
two approximately equal parts. However, in the worst case, each application of quicksortStep
divides a problem of size n into a problem of size 0 and a problem of size n-1. This happens
when the pivot element ends up at the beginning or end of the array. In this worst case, there
are n levels of subproblems, and the worst-case run time is Θ(n2 ). The worst case is very
rare—it depends on the items in the array being arranged in a very special way, so the average
performance of Quicksort can be very good even though it is not so good in certain rare cases.
(One of these “rare” cases is when the original array is already sorted or almost sorted, which
is really not all that rare in practice. Applying the Quicksort algorithm as given above to a
large sorted array will take a long time. One way to avoid that—with high probablility—is to
pick the pivot for QuickSort step at random, rather than always using the first item.)
There are sorting algorithms that have both an average case and a worst case run time of
Θ(n*log(n)). One example that is fairly easy to understand is MergeSort, which you can look
up if you are interested.
The gray or red squares are considered to be “filled” and the white squares are “empty.”
For the purposes of this example, we define a “blob” to consist of a filled square and all the
filled squares that can be reached from it by moving up, down, left, and right through other
filled squares. If the user clicks on any filled square in the program, the computer will count
the squares in the blob that contains the clicked square, and it will change the color of those
squares to red. In the picture, one of the blobs is shown in red. The program has several
controls. There is a “New Blobs” button; clicking this button will create a new random pattern
in the grid. A pop-up menu specifies the approximate percentage of squares that will be filled
in the new pattern. The more filled squares, the larger the blobs. And a button labeled “Count
the Blobs” will tell you how many different blobs there are in the pattern.
Recursion is used in this program to count the number of squares in a blob. Without
recursion, this would be a very difficult thing to implement. Recursion makes it relatively easy,
but it still requires a new technique, which is also useful in a number of other applications.
The data for the grid of squares is stored in a two dimensional array of boolean values,
boolean[][] filled;
The value of filled[r][c] is true if the square in row r and in column c of the grid is
filled. The number of rows in the grid is stored in an instance variable named rows, and the
number of columns is stored in columns. The program uses a recursive instance method named
getBlobSize(r,c) to count the number of squares in a blob. The parameters r and c tell
which blob to count, namely the blob that includes the square in a row r and column c. If
there is no filled square at position (r,c), then the answer is zero. Otherwise, getBlobSize()
has to count all the filled squares that can be reached from the square at position (r,c). The
idea is to use getBlobSize() recursively to get the number of filled squares that can be reached
from each of the neighboring positions: (r+1,c), (r-1,c), (r,c+1), and (r,c-1). Add up
these numbers, and add one to count the square at (r,c) itself, and you get the total number
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 461
of filled squares that can be reached from (r,c). Here is an implementation of this algorithm,
as stated. Unfortunately, it has a serious flaw: It leads to an infinite recursion!
int getBlobSize(int r, int c) { // BUGGY, INCORRECT VERSION!!
// This INCORRECT method tries to count all the filled
// squares that can be reached from position (r,c) in the grid.
if (r < 0 || r >= rows || c < 0 || c >= columns) {
// This position is not in the grid, so there is
// no blob at this position. Return a blob size of zero.
return 0;
}
if (filled[r][c] == false) {
// This square is not part of a blob, so return zero.
return 0;
}
int size = 1; // Count the square at this position, then count the
// the blobs that are connected to this square
// horizontally or vertically.
size += getBlobSize(r-1,c);
size += getBlobSize(r+1,c);
size += getBlobSize(r,c-1);
size += getBlobSize(r,c+1);
return size;
} // end INCORRECT getBlobSize()
Unfortunately, this routine will count the same square more than once. In fact, if there are
at least two squares in the blob, then it will try to count each square infinitely often! Think of
yourself standing at position (r,c) and trying to follow these instructions. The first instruction
tells you to move up one row. You do that, and then you apply the same procedure. As one
of the steps in that procedure, you have to move down one row and apply the same procedure
yet again. But that puts you back at position (r,c)! From there, you move up one row, and
from there you move down one row. . . . Back and forth forever! We have to make sure that a
square is only counted and processed once, so we don’t end up going around in circles. The
solution is to leave a trail of breadcrumbs—or on the computer a trail of boolean values—to
mark the squares that you’ve already visited. Once a square is marked as visited, it won’t be
processed again. The remaining, unvisited squares are reduced in number, so definite progress
has been made in reducing the size of the problem. Infinite recursion is avoided!
A second boolean array, visited[r][c], is used to keep track of which squares have already
been visited and processed. It is assumed that all the values in this array are set to false before
getBlobSize() is called. As getBlobSize() encounters unvisited squares, it marks them as
visited by setting the corresponding entry in the visited array to true. When getBlobSize()
encounters a square that it has already visited, it doesn’t count it or process it further. The
technique of “marking” items as they are encountered is one that is used over and over in the
programming of recursive algorithms. Here is the corrected version of getBlobSize(), with
changes shown in italic:
/**
* Counts the squares in the blob at position (r,c) in the
* grid. Squares are only counted if they are filled and
* unvisited. If this routine is called for a position that
* has been visited, the return value will be zero.
*/
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 462
if ( emp.supervisor == null) {
System.out.println( emp.name + " is the boss and has no supervisor!" );
}
else {
System.out.print( "The supervisor of " + emp.name + " is " );
System.out.println( emp.supervisor.name );
}
Now, suppose that we want to know how many levels of supervisors there are between a
given employee and the boss. We just have to follow the chain of command through a series of
supervisor links, and count how many steps it takes to get to the boss:
if ( emp.supervisor == null ) {
System.out.println( emp.name + " is the boss!" );
}
else {
Employee runner; // For "running" up the chain of command.
runner = emp.supervisor;
if ( runner.supervisor == null) {
System.out.println( emp.name + " reports directly to the boss." );
}
else {
int count = 0;
while ( runner.supervisor != null ) {
count++; // Count the supervisor on this level.
runner = runner.supervisor; // Move up to the next level.
}
System.out.println( "There are " + count
+ " supervisors between " + emp.name
+ " and the boss." );
}
}
As the while loop is executed, runner points in turn to the original employee (emp), then
to emp’s supervisor, then to the supervisor of emp’s supervisor, and so on. The count
variable is incremented each time runner “visits” a new employee. The loop ends when
runner.supervisor is null, which indicates that runner has reached the boss. At that point,
count has counted the number of steps between emp and the boss.
In this example, the supervisor variable is quite natural and useful. In fact, data structures
that are built by linking objects together are so useful that they are a major topic of study
in computer science. We’ll be looking at a few typical examples. In this section and the
next, we’ll be looking at linked lists. A linked list consists of a chain of objects of the same
type, linked together by pointers from one object to the next. This is much like the chain of
supervisors between emp and the boss in the above example. It’s also possible to have more
complex situations, in which one object can contain links to several other objects. We’ll look
at an example of this in Section 9.4.
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 465
null
null
null
If head is a variable of type IntNode that points to a linked list of integers, we can find the sum
of the integers in the list using:
int sum = 0;
IntNode runner = head;
while ( runner != null ) {
sum = sum + runner.item; // Add current item to the sum.
runner = runner.next;
}
System.out.println("The sum of the list of items is " + sum);
It is also possible to use recursion to process a linked list. Recursion is rarely the natural
way to process a list, since it’s so easy to use a loop to traverse the list. However, understanding
how to apply recursion to lists can help with understanding the recursive processing of more
complex data structures. A non-empty linked list can be thought of as consisting of two parts:
the head of the list, which is just the first node in the list, and the tail of the list, which
consists of the remainder of the list after the head. Note that the tail is itself a linked list and
that it is shorter than the original list (by one node). This is a natural setup for recursion,
where the problem of processing a list can be divided into processing the head and recursively
processing the tail. The base case occurs in the case of an empty list (or sometimes in the case
of a list of length one). For example, here is a recursive algorithm for adding up the numbers
in a linked list of integers:
if the list is empty then
return 0 (since there are no numbers to be added up)
otherwise
let listsum = the number in the head node
let tailsum be the sum of the numbers in the tail list (recursively)
add tailsum to listsum
return listsum
One remaining question is, how do we get the tail of a non-empty linked list? If head is a
variable that points to the head node of the list, then head.next is a variable that points to
the second node of the list—and that node is in fact the first node of the tail. So, we can view
head.next as a pointer to the tail of the list. One special case is when the original list consists
of a single node. In that case, the tail of the list is empty, and head.next is null. Since an
empty list is represented by a null pointer, head.next represents the tail of the list even in this
special case. This allows us to write a recursive list-summing function in Java as
/**
* Compute the sum of all the integers in a linked list of integers.
* @param head a pointer to the first node in the linked list
*/
public static int addItemsInList( IntNode head ) {
if ( head == null ) {
// Base case: The list is empty, so the sum is zero.
return 0;
}
else {
// Recursive case: The list is non-empty. Find the sum of
// the tail list, and add that to the item in the head node.
// (Note that this case could be written simply as
// return head.item + addItemsInList( head.next );)
int listsum = head.item;
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 468
∗ ∗ ∗
In the rest of this section, we’ll look at a few more advanced operations on a linked list of
strings. The subroutines that we consider are instance methods in a class that I wrote named
StringList. An object of type StringList represents a linked list of strings. The class has a private
instance variable named head of type Node that points to the first node in the list, or is null
if the list is empty. Instance methods in class StringList access head as a global variable. The
source code for StringList is in the file StringList.java, and it is used in a sample program named
ListDemo.java, so you can take a look at the code in context if you want.
One of the methods in the StringList class searches the list, looking for a specified string.
If the string that we are looking for is searchItem, then we have to compare searchItem to
each item in the list. This is an example of basic list traversal and processing. However, in this
case, we can stop processing if we find the item that we are looking for.
/**
* Searches the list for a specified item.
* @param searchItem the item that is to be searched for
* @return true if searchItem is one of the items in the list or false if
* searchItem does not occur in the list.
*/
public boolean find(String searchItem) {
Node runner; // A pointer for traversing the list.
runner = head; // Start by looking at the head of the list.
// (head is an instance variable! )
while ( runner != null ) {
// Go through the list looking at the string in each
// node. If the string is the one we are looking for,
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 469
// return true, since the string has been found in the list.
if ( runner.item.equals(searchItem) )
return true;
runner = runner.next; // Move on to the next node.
}
// At this point, we have looked at all the items in the list
// without finding searchItem. Return false to indicate that
// the item does not exist in the list.
return false;
} // end find()
It is possible that the list is empty, that is, that the value of head is null. We should be
careful that this case is handled properly. In the above code, if head is null, then the body
of the while loop is never executed at all, so no nodes are processed and the return value is
false. This is exactly what we want when the list is empty, since the searchItem can’t occur
in an empty list.
runner:
previous:
newNode: "larry"
Once we have previous and runner pointing to the right nodes, the command
“previous.next = newNode;” can be used to make previous.next point to the new node.
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 470
And the command “newNode.next = runner” will set newNode.next to point to the correct
place. However, before we can use these commands, we need to set up runner and previous
as shown in the illustration. The idea is to start at the first node of the list, and then move
along the list past all the items that are less than the new item. While doing this, we have to
be aware of the danger of “falling off the end of the list.” That is, we can’t continue if runner
reaches the end of the list and becomes null. If insertItem is the item that is to be inserted,
and if we assume that it does, in fact, belong somewhere in the middle of the list, then the
following code would correctly position previous and runner:
Node runner, previous;
previous = head; // Start at the beginning of the list.
runner = head.next;
while ( runner != null && runner.item.compareTo(insertItem) < 0 ) {
previous = runner; // "previous = previous.next" would also work
runner = runner.next;
}
(This uses the compareTo() instance method from the String class to test whether the item in
the node is less than the item that is being inserted. See Subsection 2.3.3.)
This is fine, except that the assumption that the new node is inserted into the middle of
the list is not always valid. It might be that insertItem is less than the first item of the list.
In that case, the new node must be inserted at the head of the list. This can be done with the
instructions
newNode.next = head; // Make newNode.next point to the old head.
head = newNode; // Make newNode the new head of the list.
It is also possible that the list is empty. In that case, newNode will become the first and only
node in the list. This can be accomplished simply by setting head = newNode. The following
insert() method from the StringList class covers all of these possibilities:
/**
* Insert a specified item into the list, keeping the list in order.
* @param insertItem the item that is to be inserted.
*/
public void insert(String insertItem) {
Node newNode; // A Node to contain the new item.
newNode = new Node();
newNode.item = insertItem; // (N.B. newNode.next is null.)
if ( head == null ) {
// The new item is the first (and only) one in the list.
// Set head to point to it.
head = newNode;
}
else if ( head.item.compareTo(insertItem) >= 0 ) {
// The new item is less than the first item in the list,
// so it has to be inserted at the head of the list.
newNode.next = head;
head = newNode;
}
else {
// The new item belongs somewhere after the first item
// in the list. Search for its proper position and insert it.
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 471
abstract data type. Any sequence of Strings that is arranged in increasing order is a possible
value of this data type. The operations on the data type include inserting a new string, deleting
a string, and finding a string in the list. There are often several different ways to implement the
same abstract data type. For example, the “ordered list of strings” ADT can be implemented
as a linked list or as an array. A program that only depends on the abstract definition of
the ADT can use either implementation, interchangeably. In particular, the implementation
of the ADT can be changed without affecting the program as a whole. This can make the
program easier to debug and maintain, so ADTs are an important tool in software engineering.
Abstraction is an important general concept in computer science. We have seen other examples:
control abstraction in Subsection 3.1.4 and procedural abstraction in Section 4.1. Here, we are
considering data abstraction.
In this section, we’ll look at two common abstract data types, stacks and queues. Both
stacks and queues are often implemented as linked lists, but that is not the only possible
implementation. You should think of the rest of this section partly as a discussion of stacks
and queues and partly as a case study in ADTs.
9.3.1 Stacks
A stack consists of a sequence of items, which should be thought of as piled one on top of
the other like a physical stack of boxes or cafeteria trays. Only the top item on the stack is
accessible at any given time. It can be removed from the stack with an operation called pop.
An item lower down on the stack can only be removed after all the items on top of it have been
popped off the stack. A new item can be added to the top of the stack with an operation called
push. We can make a stack of any type of items. If, for example, the items are values of type
int, then the push and pop operations can be implemented as instance methods
• void push(int newItem) — Add newItem to top of stack.
• int pop() — Remove the top int from the stack and return it.
It is an error to try to pop an item from an empty stack, so it is important to be able to tell
whether a stack is empty. We need another stack operation to do the test, implemented as an
instance method
• boolean isEmpty() — Returns true if the stack is empty.
This defines “stack of ints” as an abstract data type. This ADT can be implemented in several
ways, but however it is implemented, its behavior must correspond to the abstract mental image
of a stack.
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 474
12 83
25 25 25
123 123 123
5 5 5
17 17 17
In the linked list implementation of a stack, the top of the stack is actually the node at the
head of the list. It is easy to add and remove nodes at the front of a linked list—much easier
than inserting and deleting nodes in the middle of the list. Here is a class that implements the
“stack of ints” ADT using a linked list. (It uses a static nested class to represent the nodes of
the linked list, but that is part of the private implementation of the ADT.)
public class StackOfInts {
/**
* An object of type Node holds one of the items in the linked list
* that represents the stack.
*/
private static class Node {
int item;
Node next;
}
private Node top; // Pointer to the Node that is at the top of
// of the stack. If top == null, then the
// stack is empty.
/**
* Add N to the top of the stack.
*/
public void push( int N ) {
Node newTop; // A Node to hold the new item.
newTop = new Node();
newTop.item = N; // Store N in the new Node.
newTop.next = top; // The new Node points to the old top.
top = newTop; // The new item is now on top.
}
/**
* Remove the top item from the stack, and return it.
* Throws an IllegalStateException if the stack is empty when
* this method is called.
*/
public int pop() {
if ( top == null )
throw new IllegalStateException("Can’t pop from an empty stack.");
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 475
9.3.2 Queues
Queues are similar to stacks in that a queue consists of a sequence of items, and there are
restrictions about how items can be added to and removed from the list. However, a queue has
two ends, called the front and the back of the queue. Items are always added to the queue at the
back and removed from the queue at the front. The operations of adding and removing items
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 477
are called enqueue and dequeue in this book. (These names are not completely standardized,
in the way that “push” and “pop” are. For example, the operations are sometimes called “put”
and “take.”) An item that is added to the back of the queue will remain on the queue until all
the items in front of it have been removed. This should sound familiar. A queue is like a “line”
or “queue” of customers waiting for service. Customers are serviced in the order in which they
arrive on the queue.
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A queue can hold items of any type. For a queue of ints, the enqueue and dequeue operations
can be implemented as instance methods in a “QueueOfInts” class. We also need an instance
method for checking whether the queue is empty:
• void enqueue(int N) — Add N to the back of the queue.
• int dequeue() — Remove the item at the front and return it.
• boolean isEmpty() — Return true if the queue is empty.
A queue can be implemented as a linked list or as an array. An efficient array implementation
is trickier than the array implementation of a stack, so I won’t give it here. In the linked list
implementation, the first item of the list is at the front of the queue. Dequeueing an item from
the front of the queue is just like popping an item off a stack. The back of the queue is at the
end of the list. Enqueueing an item involves setting a pointer in the last node of the current
list to point to a new node that contains the item. To do this, we’ll need a command like
“tail.next = newNode;”, where tail is a pointer to the last node in the list. If head is a
pointer to the first node of the list, it would always be possible to get a pointer to the last node
of the list by saying:
Node tail; // This will point to the last node in the list.
tail = head; // Start at the first node.
while (tail.next != null) {
tail = tail.next; // Move to next node.
}
// At this point, tail.next is null, so tail points to
// the last node in the list.
However, it would be very inefficient to do this over and over every time an item is enqueued.
For the sake of efficiency, we’ll use another instance variable to store a pointer to the last node.
This complicates the class somewhat; we have to be careful to update the value of this variable
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 478
whenever a new node is added to the end of the list. Given all this, writing the QueueOfInts
class is not all that difficult:
public class QueueOfInts {
/**
* An object of type Node holds one of the items
* in the linked list that represents the queue.
*/
private static class Node {
int item;
Node next;
}
private Node head = null; // Points to first Node in the queue.
// The queue is empty when head is null.
private Node tail = null; // Points to last Node in the queue
// when the queue is not empty.
/**
* Add N to the back of the queue.
*/
public void enqueue( int N ) {
Node newTail = new Node(); // A Node to hold the new item.
newTail.item = N;
if (head == null) {
// The queue was empty. The new Node becomes
// the only node in the list. Since it is both
// the first and last node, both head and tail
// point to it.
head = newTail;
tail = newTail;
}
else {
// The new node becomes the new tail of the list.
// (The head of the list is unaffected.)
tail.next = newTail;
tail = newTail;
}
}
/**
* Remove and return the front item in the queue.
* Throws an IllegalStateException if the queue is empty.
*/
public int dequeue() {
if ( head == null)
throw new IllegalStateException("Can’t dequeue from an empty queue.");
int firstItem = head.item;
head = head.next; // The previous second item is now first.
// If we have just removed the last item,
// then head is null.
if (head == null) {
// The queue has become empty. The Node that was
// deleted was the tail as well as the head of the
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 479
will eventually process every square in the grid. To understand how the program works, think
of yourself in the place of the program. When the user clicks a square, you are handed an index
card. The location of the square—its row and column—is written on the card. You put the
card in a pile, which then contains just that one card. Then, you repeat the following: If the
pile is empty, you are done. Otherwise, remove an index card from the pile. The index card
specifies a square. Look at each horizontal and vertical neighbor of that square. If the neighbor
has not already been encountered, write its location on a new index card and put the card in
the pile. You are done when there are no more index cards waiting in the pile to be processed.
In the program, while a square is in the pile, waiting to be processed, it is colored red;
that is, red squares have been encountered but not yet processed. When a square is taken from
the pile and processed, its color changes to gray. Once a square has been colored gray, the
program will never consider it again, since all of its neighbors have already been accounted for.
Eventually, all the squares have been processed, all the squares are gray, and the procedure
ends. In the index card analogy, the pile of cards has been emptied.
The program can use your choice of three methods: Stack, Queue, and Random. In each
case, the same general procedure is used. The only difference is how the “pile of index cards” is
managed. For a stack, cards are added and removed at the top of the pile. For a queue, cards
are added to the bottom of the pile and removed from the top. In the random case, the card to
be processed is picked at random from among all the cards in the pile. The order of processing
is very different in these three cases. Here are three pictures from the program, using the three
different processing methods. In each case, the process was started by selecting a square near
the middle of the grid. A stack is used for the picture on the left, a queue for the picture in
the middle, and random selection for the picture on the right:
The patterns that are produced are very different. When using a stack, the program explores
out as far as possible before it starts backtracking to look at previously encountered squares.
With a queue, squares are processed roughly in the order of their distance from the starting
point. When random selection is used, the result is an irregular blob, but it is a connected blob
since a square can only be encountered if it is next to a previously encountered square.
You should experiment with the program to see how it all works. Try to understand how
stacks and queues are being used. Try starting from one of the corner squares. While the
process is going on, you can click on other white squares, and they will be added to the list of
encountered squares. When you do this with a stack, you should notice that the square you
click is processed immediately, and all the red squares that were already waiting for processing
have to wait. On the other hand, if you do this with a queue, the square that you click will
wait its turn until all the squares that were already in the pile have been processed. Again, the
source code for the program is DepthBreadth.java.
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 481
∗ ∗ ∗
Queues seem very natural because they occur so often in real life, but there are times when
stacks are appropriate and even essential. For example, consider what happens when a routine
calls a subroutine. The first routine is suspended while the subroutine is executed, and it will
continue only when the subroutine returns. Now, suppose that the subroutine calls a second
subroutine, and the second subroutine calls a third, and so on. Each subroutine is suspended
while the subsequent subroutines are executed. The computer has to keep track of all the
subroutines that are suspended. It does this with a stack.
When a subroutine is called, an activation record is created for that subroutine. The
activation record contains information relevant to the execution of the subroutine, such as
its local variables, parameters, and return address (the the point in the program where the
computer should return to when the subroutine ends). The activation record for the subroutine
is placed on a stack. It will be removed from the stack and destroyed when the subroutine
returns. If the subroutine calls another subroutine, the activation record of the second
subroutine is pushed onto the stack, on top of the activation record of the first subroutine. The
stack can continue to grow as more subroutines are called, and it shrinks as those subroutines
return.
In the case of a recursive subroutine, which calls itself, there can be several activation records
on the stack for the same subroutine. This is how the computer keeps track of many recursive
calls at the same time: It has a different activation record for each call.
value of the entire expression, so all we have to do is pop the answer from the stack, and we
are done! The value of the expression is 53.
Although it’s easier for people to work with infix expressions, postfix expressions have some
advantages. For one thing, postfix expressions don’t require parentheses or precedence rules.
The order in which operators are applied is determined entirely by the order in which they
occur in the expression. This allows the algorithm for evaluating postfix expressions to be
fairly straightforward:
Start with an empty stack
for each item in the expression:
if the item is a number:
Push the number onto the stack
else if the item is an operator:
Pop the operands from the stack // Can generate an error
Apply the operator to the operands
Push the result onto the stack
else
There is an error in the expression
Pop a number from the stack // Can generate an error
if the stack is not empty:
There is an error in the expression
else:
The last number that was popped is the value of the expression
Errors in an expression can be detected easily. For example, in the expression “2 3 + *”,
there are not enough operands for the “*” operation. This will be detected in the algorithm
when an attempt is made to pop the second operand for “*” from the stack, since the stack
will be empty. The opposite problem occurs in “2 3 4 +”. There are not enough operators for
all the numbers. This will be detected when the 2 is left still sitting in the stack at the end of
the algorithm.
This algorithm is demonstrated in the sample program PostfixEval.java. This program lets
you type in postfix expressions made up of non-negative real numbers and the operators “+”,
“-”, “*”, “/”, and ”^”. The “^” represents exponentiation. That is, “2 3 ^” is evaluated as
23 . The program prints out a message as it processes each item in the expression. The stack
class that is used in the program is defined in the file StackOfDouble.java. The StackOfDouble
class is identical to the first StackOfInts class, given above, except that it has been modified to
store values of type double instead of values of type int.
The only interesting aspect of this program is the method that implements the postfix
evaluation algorithm. It is a direct implementation of the pseudocode algorithm given above:
/**
* Read one line of input and process it as a postfix expression.
* If the input is not a legal postfix expression, then an error
* message is displayed. Otherwise, the value of the expression
* is displayed. It is assumed that the first character on
* the input line is a non-blank.
*/
private static void readAndEvaluate() {
StackOfDouble stack; // For evaluating the expression.
stack = new StackOfDouble(); // Make a new, empty stack.
System.out.println();
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 483
return;
}
double value = stack.pop(); // Value of the expression.
System.out.println(" Popped " + value + " at end of expression.");
if (stack.isEmpty() == false) {
System.out.println(" Stack is not empty.");
System.out.println("\nNot enough operators for all the numbers!");
return;
}
System.out.println("\nValue = " + value);
} // end readAndEvaluate()
Postfix expressions are often used internally by computers. In fact, the Java virtual machine
is a “stack machine” which uses the stack-based approach to expression evaluation that we have
been discussing. The algorithm can easily be extended to handle variables, as well as constants.
When a variable is encountered in the expression, the value of the variable is pushed onto the
stack. It also works for operators with more or fewer than two operands. As many operands as
are needed are popped from the stack and the result is pushed back onto the stack. For example,
the unary minus operator, which is used in the expression “-x”, has a single operand. We
will continue to look at expressions and expression evaluation in the next two sections.
Root Node
2 3
null
4 5 6
null null null
null null null
Leaf Nodes
A node that has no children is called a leaf . A leaf node can be recognized by the fact that
both the left and right pointers in the node are null. In the standard picture of a binary tree,
the root node is shown at the top and the leaf nodes at the bottom—which doesn’t show much
respect for the analogy to real trees. But at least you can see the branching, tree-like structure
that gives a binary tree its name.
/**
* Print all the items in the tree to which root points.
* The items in the left subtree are printed first, followed
* by the item in the root node and then the items
* in the right subtree.
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 487
*/
static void inorderPrint( TreeNode root ) {
if ( root != null ) { // (Otherwise, there’s nothing to print.)
inorderPrint( root.left ); // Print items in left subtree.
System.out.print( root.item + " " ); // Print the root item.
inorderPrint( root.right ); // Print items in right subtree.
}
} // end inorderPrint()
Each of these subroutines can be applied to the binary tree shown in the illustration at the
beginning of this section. The order in which the items are printed differs in each case:
preorderPrint outputs: 1 2 4 5 3 6
postorderPrint outputs: 4 5 2 6 3 1
inorderPrint outputs: 4 2 5 1 3 6
In preorderPrint, for example, the item at the root of the tree, 1, is output before anything
else. But the preorder printing also applies to each of the subtrees of the root. The root item
of the left subtree, 2, is printed before the other items in that subtree, 4 and 5. As for the right
subtree of the root, 3 is output before 6. A preorder traversal applies at all levels in the tree.
The other two traversal orders can be analyzed similarly.
´µµ¶·
judy
bill mary
dave jane
Binary sort trees have this useful property: An inorder traversal of the tree will process the
items in increasing order. In fact, this is really just another way of expressing the definition.
For example, if an inorder traversal is used to print the items in the tree shown above, then the
items will be in alphabetical order. The definition of an inorder traversal guarantees that all
the items in the left subtree of “judy” are printed before “judy”, and all the items in the right
subtree of “judy” are printed after “judy”. But the binary sort tree property guarantees that
the items in the left subtree of “judy” are precisely those that precede “judy” in alphabetical
order, and all the items in the right subtree follow “judy” in alphabetical order. So, we know
that “judy” is output in its proper alphabetical position. But the same argument applies to
the subtrees. “Bill” will be output after “alice” and before “fred” and its descendants. “Fred”
will be output after “dave” and before “jane” and “joe”. And so on.
Suppose that we want to search for a given item in a binary search tree. Compare that item
to the root item of the tree. If they are equal, we’re done. If the item we are looking for is
less than the root item, then we need to search the left subtree of the root—the right subtree
can be eliminated because it only contains items that are greater than or equal to the root.
Similarly, if the item we are looking for is greater than the item in the root, then we only need
to look in the right subtree. In either case, the same procedure can then be applied to search
the subtree. Inserting a new item is similar: Start by searching the tree for the position where
the new item belongs. When that position is found, create a new node and attach it to the tree
at that position.
Searching and inserting are efficient operations on a binary search tree, provided that the
tree is close to being balanced . A binary tree is balanced if for each node, the left subtree of
that node contains approximately the same number of nodes as the right subtree. In a perfectly
balanced tree, the two numbers differ by at most one. Not all binary trees are balanced, but if
the tree is created by inserting items in a random order, there is a high probability that the tree
is approximately balanced. (If the order of insertion is not random, however, it’s quite possible
for the tree to be very unbalanced.) During a search of any binary sort tree, every comparison
eliminates one of two subtrees from further consideration. If the tree is balanced, that means
cutting the number of items still under consideration in half. This is exactly the same as the
binary search algorithm, and the result is a similarly efficient algorithm.
In terms of asymptotic analysis (Section 8.5), searching, inserting, and deleting in a binary
search tree have average case run time Θ(log(n)). The problem size, n, is the number of items
in the tree, and the average is taken over all the different orders in which the items could have
been inserted into the tree. As long as the actual insertion order is random, the actual run
time can be expected to be close to the average. However, the worst case run time for binary
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 489
search tree operations is Θ(n), which is much worse than Θ(log(n)). The worst case occurs
for particular insertion orders. For example, if the items are inserted into the tree in order of
increasing size, then every item that is inserted moves always to the right as it moves down
the tree. The result is a “tree” that looks more like a linked list, since it consists of a linear
string of nodes strung together by their right child pointers. Operations on such a tree have
the same performance as operations on a linked list. Now, there are data structures that are
similar to simple binary sort trees, except that insertion and deletion of nodes are implemented
in a way that will always keep the tree balanced, or almost balanced. For these data structures,
searching, inserting, and deleting have both average case and worst case run times that are
Θ(log(n)). Here, however, we will look at only the simple versions of inserting and searching.
The sample program SortTreeDemo.java is a demonstration of binary sort trees. The
program includes subroutines that implement inorder traversal, searching, and insertion. We’ll
look at the latter two subroutines below. The main() routine tests the subroutines by letting
you type in strings to be inserted into the tree.
In SortTreeDemo, nodes in the binary tree are represented using the following static nested
class, which includes a simple constructor to make creating nodes easier:
/**
* An object of type TreeNode represents one node in a binary tree of strings.
*/
private static class TreeNode {
String item; // The data in this node.
TreeNode left; // Pointer to left subtree.
TreeNode right; // Pointer to right subtree.
TreeNode(String str) {
// Constructor. Make a node containing str.
// Note that left and right pointers are null.
item = str;
}
} // end class TreeNode
A static member variable of type TreeNode points to the binary sort tree that is used by the
program:
private static TreeNode root; // Pointer to the root node in the tree.
// When the tree is empty, root is null.
A recursive subroutine named treeContains is used to search for a given item in the tree. This
routine implements the search algorithm for binary trees that was outlined above:
/**
* Return true if item is one of the items in the binary
* sort tree to which root points. Return false if not.
*/
static boolean treeContains( TreeNode root, String item ) {
if ( root == null ) {
// Tree is empty, so it certainly doesn’t contain item.
return false;
}
else if ( item.equals(root.item) ) {
// Yes, the item has been found in the root node.
return true;
}
else if ( item.compareTo(root.item) < 0 ) {
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 490
variable root directly. One difference between inserting an item and searching for an item is
that we have to be careful not to fall off the tree. That is, we have to stop searching just before
runner becomes null. When we get to an empty spot in the tree, that’s where we have to
insert the new node:
/**
* Add the item to the binary sort tree to which the global variable
* "root" refers. (Note that root can’t be passed as a parameter to
* this routine because the value of root might change, and a change
* in the value of a formal parameter does not change the actual parameter.)
*/
private static void treeInsert(String newItem) {
if ( root == null ) {
// The tree is empty. Set root to point to a new node containing
// the new item. This becomes the only node in the tree.
root = new TreeNode( newItem );
return;
}
TreeNode runner; // Runs down the tree to find a place for newItem.
runner = root; // Start at the root.
while (true) {
if ( newItem.compareTo(runner.item) < 0 ) {
// Since the new item is less than the item in runner,
// it belongs in the left subtree of runner. If there
// is an open space at runner.left, add a new node there.
// Otherwise, advance runner down one level to the left.
if ( runner.left == null ) {
runner.left = new TreeNode( newItem );
return; // New item has been added to the tree.
}
else
runner = runner.left;
}
else {
// Since the new item is greater than or equal to the item in
// runner, it belongs in the right subtree of runner. If there
// is an open space at runner.right, add a new node there.
// Otherwise, advance runner down one level to the right.
if ( runner.right == null ) {
runner.right = new TreeNode( newItem );
return; // New item has been added to the tree.
}
else
runner = runner.right;
}
} // end while
} // end treeInsert()
This expression is made up of two subexpressions, 3*((7+1)/4) and (17-5), combined with
the operator “+”. When the expression is represented as a binary tree, the root node holds the
operator +, while the subtrees of the root node represent the subexpressions 3*((7+1)/4) and
(17-5). Every node in the tree holds either a number or an operator. A node that holds a
number is a leaf node of the tree. A node that holds an operator has two subtrees representing
the operands to which the operator applies. The tree is shown in the illustration below. I will
refer to a tree of this type as an expression tree.
Given an expression tree, it’s easy to find the value of the expression that it represents. Each
node in the tree has an associated value. If the node is a leaf node, then its value is simply the
number that the node contains. If the node contains an operator, then the associated value is
computed by first finding the values of its child nodes and then applying the operator to those
values. The process is shown by the upward-directed arrows in the illustration. The value
computed for the root node is the value of the expression as a whole. There are other uses for
expression trees. For example, a postorder traversal of the tree will output the postfix form of
the expression.
A tree that represents
18 answer
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6 12
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3 * 2 17 5
3 8 / 4 17 5
7 + 1 4
7 1
An expression tree contains two types of nodes: nodes that contain numbers and nodes that
contain operators. Furthermore, we might want to add other types of nodes to make the trees
more useful, such as nodes that contain variables. If we want to work with expression trees in
Java, how can we deal with this variety of nodes? One way—which will be frowned upon by
object-oriented purists—is to include an instance variable in each node object to record which
type of node it is:
enum NodeType { NUMBER, OPERATOR } // Possible kinds of node.
class ExpNode { // A node in an expression tree.
NodeType kind; // Which type of node is this?
double number; // The value in a node of type NUMBER.
char op; // The operator in a node of type OPERATOR.
ExpNode left; // Pointers to subtrees,
ExpNode right; // in a node of type OPERATOR.
ExpNode( double val ) {
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 493
of nodes can be added more cleanly, since it can be done by creating a new subclass of ExpNode
rather than by modifying an existing class.
We’ll return to the topic of expression trees in the next section, where we’ll see how to
create an expression tree to represent a given expression.
recipe for a sentence: If you want to make a sentence, make a noun-phrase and follow it by a
verb-phrase. Noun-phrase and verb-phrase must, in turn, be defined by other BNF rules.
In BNF, a choice between alternatives is represented by the symbol “|”, which is read “or”.
For example, the rule
<verb-phrase> ::= <intransitive-verb> |
( <transitive-verb> <noun-phrase> )
says that a <verb-phrase> can be an <intransitive-verb>, or a <transitive-verb> followed
by a <noun-phrase>. Note also that parentheses can be used for grouping. To express the fact
that an item is optional, it can be enclosed between “[” and “]”. An optional item that can
be repeated any number of times is enclosed between “[” and “]...”. And a symbol that is
an actual part of the language that is being described is enclosed in quotes. For example,
<noun-phrase> ::= <common-noun> [ "that" <verb-phrase> ] |
<common-noun> [ <prepositional-phrase> ]...
says that a <noun-phrase> can be a <common-noun>, optionally followed by the literal word
“that” and a <verb-phrase>, or it can be a <common-noun> followed by zero or more
<prepositional-phrase>’s. Obviously, we can describe very complex structures in this way.
The real power comes from the fact that BNF rules can be recursive. In fact, the two
preceding rules, taken together, are recursive. A <noun-phrase> is defined partly in terms
of <verb-phrase>, while <verb-phrase> is defined partly in terms of <noun-phrase>. For
example, a <noun-phrase> might be “the rat that ate the cheese”, since “ate the cheese” is a
<verb-phrase>. But then we can, recursively, make the more complex <noun-phrase> “the cat
that caught the rat that ate the cheese” out of the <common-noun> “the cat”, the word “that”
and the <verb-phrase> “caught the rat that ate the cheese”. Building from there, we can make
the <noun-phrase> “the dog that chased the cat that caught the rat that ate the cheese”. The
recursive structure of language is one of the most fundamental properties of language, and the
ability of BNF to express this recursive structure is what makes it so useful.
BNF can be used to describe the syntax of a programming language such as Java in a formal
and precise way. For example, a <while-loop> can be defined as
<while-loop> ::= "while" "(" <condition> ")" <statement>
This says that a <while-loop> consists of the word “while”, followed by a left parenthesis,
followed by a <condition>, followed by a right parenthesis, followed by a <statement>. Of
course, it still remains to define what is meant by a condition and by a statement. Since a
statement can be, among other things, a while loop, we can already see the recursive structure
of the Java language. The exact specification of an if statement, which is hard to express
clearly in words, can be given as
<if-statement> ::=
"if" "(" <condition> ")" <statement>
[ "else" "if" "(" <condition> ")" <statement> ]...
[ "else" <statement> ]
This rule makes it clear that the “else” part is optional and that there can be, optionally, one
or more “else if” parts.
phrase in the language. This is the first step in determining the meaning of the phrase—which
for a programming language means translating it into machine language. Although we will look
at only a simple example, I hope it will be enough to convince you that compilers can in fact
be written and understood by mortals and to give you some idea of how that can be done.
The parsing method that we will use is called recursive descent parsing . It is not the
only possible parsing method, or the most efficient, but it is the one most suited for writing
compilers by hand (rather than with the help of so called “parser generator” programs). In a
recursive descent parser, every rule of the BNF grammar is the model for a subroutine. Not
every BNF grammar is suitable for recursive descent parsing. The grammar must satisfy a
certain property. Essentially, while parsing a phrase, it must be possible to tell what syntactic
category is coming up next just by looking at the next item in the input. Many grammars are
designed with this property in mind.
∗ ∗ ∗
When we try to parse a phrase that contains a syntax error, we need some way to respond
to the error. A convenient way of doing this is to throw an exception. I’ll use an exception
class called ParseError, defined as follows:
/**
* An object of type ParseError represents a syntax error found in
* the user’s input.
*/
private static class ParseError extends Exception {
ParseError(String message) {
super(message);
}
} // end nested class ParseError
Another general point is that our BNF rules don’t say anything about spaces between items,
but in reality we want to be able to insert spaces between items at will. To allow for this, I’ll
always call the routine TextIO.skipBlanks() before trying to look ahead to see what’s coming
up next in input. TextIO.skipBlanks() skips past any whitespace, such as spaces and tabs, in
the input, and stops when the next character in the input is either a non-blank character or the
end-of-line character. (For a discussion of robust handling of TextIO input, see Subsection 8.2.4.)
Let’s start with a very simple example. A “fully parenthesized expression” can be specified
in BNF by the rules
<expression> ::= <number> |
"(" <expression> <operator> <expression> ")"
<operator> ::= "+" | "-" | "*" | "/"
where <number> refers to any non-negative real number. An example of a fully parenthesized
expression is “(((34-17)*8)+(2*7))”. Since every operator corresponds to a pair of
parentheses, there is no ambiguity about the order in which the operators are to be applied.
Suppose we want a program that will read and evaluate such expressions. We’ll read the
expressions from standard input, using TextIO. To apply recursive descent parsing, we need a
subroutine for each rule in the grammar. Corresponding to the rule for <operator>, we get a
subroutine that reads an operator. The operator can be a choice of any of four things. Any
other input will be an error.
/**
* If the next character in input is one of the legal operators,
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 498
The first rule uses the “[ ]...” notation, which says that the items that it encloses can occur
zero, one, two, or more times. The rule means that an <expression> can begin, optionally,
with a “-”. Then there must be a <term> which can optionally be followed by one of the
operators “+” or “-” and another <term>, optionally followed by another operator and <term>,
and so on. In a subroutine that reads and evaluates expressions, this repetition is handled by
a while loop. An if statement is used at the beginning of the loop to test whether a leading
minus sign is present:
/**
* Read an expression from the current line of input and return its value.
* @throws ParseError if the input contains a syntax error
*/
private static double expressionValue() throws ParseError {
TextIO.skipBlanks();
boolean negative; // True if there is a leading minus sign.
negative = false;
if (TextIO.peek() == ’-’) {
TextIO.getAnyChar(); // Read the minus sign.
negative = true;
}
double val; // Value of the expression.
val = termValue(); // Read and evaluate the first term.
if (negative)
val = -val; // Apply the leading minus sign to the first term.
TextIO.skipBlanks();
while ( TextIO.peek() == ’+’ || TextIO.peek() == ’-’ ) {
// Read the next term and add it to or subtract it from
// the value of previous terms in the expression.
char op = TextIO.getAnyChar(); // Read the operator.
double nextVal = termValue(); // Read and evaluate the next term.
if (op == ’+’)
val += nextVal;
else
val -= nextVal;
TextIO.skipBlanks();
}
return val;
} // end expressionValue()
The subroutine for <term> is very similar to this, and the subroutine for <factor> is
similar to the example given above for fully parenthesized expressions. A complete program
that reads and evaluates expressions based on the above BNF rules can be found in the file
SimpleParser2.java.
can both evaluate the expression and print a list of stack machine operations for evaluating the
expression.
It’s quite a jump from this program to a recursive descent parser that can read a program
written in Java and generate the equivalent machine language code—but the conceptual leap
is not huge.
The SimpleParser3 program doesn’t actually generate the stack operations directly as it
parses an expression. Instead, it builds an expression tree, as discussed in Subsection 9.4.3, to
represent the expression. The expression tree is then used to find the value and to generate
the stack operations. The tree is made up of nodes belonging to classes ConstNode and
BinOpNode that are similar to those given in Subsection 9.4.3. Another subclass of ExpNote,
UnaryMinusNode, has been introduced to represent the unary minus operation. I’ve added a
method, printStackCommands(), to each class. This method is responsible for printing out
the stack operations that are necessary to evaluate an expression. Here for example is the new
BinOpNode class from SimpleParser3.java:
private static class BinOpNode extends ExpNode {
char op; // The operator.
ExpNode left; // The expression for its left operand.
ExpNode right; // The expression for its right operand.
BinOpNode(char op, ExpNode left, ExpNode right) {
// Construct a BinOpNode containing the specified data.
assert op == ’+’ || op == ’-’ || op == ’*’ || op == ’/’;
assert left != null && right != null;
// (for assert statements, see Subsection 8.4.1)
this.op = op;
this.left = left;
this.right = right;
}
double value() {
// The value is obtained by evaluating the left and right
// operands and combining the values with the operator.
double x = left.value();
double y = right.value();
switch (op) {
case ’+’:
return x + y;
case ’-’:
return x - y;
case ’*’:
return x * y;
case ’/’:
return x / y;
default:
return Double.NaN; // Bad operator! Should not be possible.
}
}
void printStackCommands() {
// To evaluate the expression on a stack machine, first do
// whatever is necessary to evaluate the left operand, leaving
// the answer on the stack. Then do the same thing for the
// second operand. Then apply the operator (which means popping
// the operands, applying the operator, and pushing the result).
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 502
left.printStackCommands();
right.printStackCommands();
System.out.println(" Operator " + op);
}
}
It’s also interesting to look at the new parsing subroutines. Instead of computing a value,
each subroutine builds an expression tree. For example, the subroutine corresponding to the
rule for <expression> becomes
static ExpNode expressionTree() throws ParseError {
// Read an expression from the current line of input and
// return an expression tree representing the expression.
// (The return value is a pointer to the root of the tree.)
TextIO.skipBlanks();
boolean negative; // True if there is a leading minus sign.
negative = false;
if (TextIO.peek() == ’-’) {
TextIO.getAnyChar();
negative = true;
}
ExpNode exp; // The expression tree for the expression.
exp = termTree(); // Start with a tree for first term.
if (negative) {
// Build the tree that corresponds to applying a
// unary minus operator to the term we’ve
// just read.
exp = new UnaryMinusNode(exp);
}
TextIO.skipBlanks();
while ( TextIO.peek() == ’+’ || TextIO.peek() == ’-’ ) {
// Read the next term and combine it with the
// previous terms into a bigger expression tree.
char op = TextIO.getAnyChar();
ExpNode nextTerm = termTree();
// Create a tree that applies the binary operator
// to the previous tree and the term we just read.
exp = new BinOpNode(op, exp, nextTerm);
TextIO.skipBlanks();
}
return exp;
} // end expressionTree()
In some real compilers, the parser creates a tree to represent the program that is being
parsed. This tree is called a parse tree or abstract syntax tree. Parse trees are somewhat
different in form from expression trees, but the purpose is the same. Once you have the tree,
there are a number of things you can do with it. For one thing, it can be used to generate
machine language code. But there are also techniques for examining the tree and detecting
certain types of programming errors, such as an attempt to reference a local variable before
it has been assigned a value. (The Java compiler, of course, will reject the program if it
contains such an error.) It’s also possible to manipulate the tree to optimize the program.
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 503
In optimization, the tree is transformed to make the program more efficient before the code is
generated.
And so we are back where we started in Chapter 1, looking at programming languages,
compilers, and machine language. But looking at them, I hope, with a lot more understanding
and a much wider perspective.
Exercises 504
1. In many textbooks, the first examples of recursion are the mathematical functions factorial (solution)
and fibonacci. These functions are defined for non-negative integers using the following
recursive formulas:
factorial(0) = 1
factorial(N) = N*factorial(N-1) for N > 0
fibonacci(0) = 1
fibonacci(1) = 1
fibonacci(N) = fibonacci(N-1) + fibonacci(N-2) for N > 1
Write recursive functions to compute factorial(N) and fibonacci(N) for a given non-
negative integer N, and write a main() routine to test your functions. Consider using the
BigInteger class (see Exercise 8.2)
(In fact, factorial and fibonacci are really not very good examples of recursion, since
the most natural way to compute them is to use simple for loops. Furthermore, fibonacci
is a particularly bad example, since the natural recursive approach to computing this
function is extremely inefficient.)
2. Exercise 7.6 asked you to read a file, make an alphabetical list of all the words that occur (solution)
in the file, and write the list to another file. In that exercise, you were asked to use an
ArrayList<String> to store the words. Write a new version of the same program that stores
the words in a binary sort tree instead of in an arraylist. You can use the binary sort tree
routines from SortTreeDemo.java, which was discussed in Subsection 9.4.2.
3. Suppose that linked lists of integers are made from objects belonging to the class (solution)
class ListNode {
int item; // An item in the list.
ListNode next; // Pointer to the next node in the list.
}
Write a subroutine that will make a copy of a list, with the order of the items of the list
reversed. The subroutine should have a parameter of type ListNode, and it should return
a value of type ListNode. The original list should not be modified.
You should also write a main() routine to test your subroutine.
4. Subsection 9.4.1 explains how to use recursion to print out the items in a binary tree in (solution)
various orders. That section also notes that a non-recursive subroutine can be used to
print the items, provided that a stack or queue is used as an auxiliary data structure.
Assuming that a queue is used, here is an algorithm for such a subroutine:
Add the root node to an empty queue
while the queue is not empty:
Get a node from the queue
Print the item in the node
if node.left is not null:
add it to the queue
if node.right is not null:
add it to the queue
Exercises 505
Write a subroutine that implements this algorithm, and write a program to test the
subroutine. Note that you will need a queue of TreeNodes, so you will need to write
a class to represent such queues.
(Note that the order in which items are printed by this algorithm is different from all
three of the orders considered in Subsection 9.4.1.
5. In Subsection 9.4.2, I say that “if the [binary sort] tree is created by inserting items in a (solution)
random order, there is a high probability that the tree is approximately balanced.” For
this exercise, you will do an experiment to test whether that is true.
The depth of a node in a binary tree is the length of the path from the root of the tree
to that node. That is, the root has depth 0, its children have depth 1, its grandchildren
have depth 2, and so on. In a balanced tree, all the leaves in the tree are about the same
depth. For example, in a perfectly balanced tree with 1023 nodes, all the leaves are at
depth 9. In an approximately balanced tree with 1023 nodes, the average depth of all the
leaves should be not too much bigger than 9.
On the other hand, even if the tree is approximately balanced, there might be a few
leaves that have much larger depth than the average, so we might also want to look at the
maximum depth among all the leaves in a tree.
For this exercise, you should create a random binary sort tree with 1023 nodes. The
items in the tree can be real numbers, and you can create the tree by generating 1023
random real numbers and inserting them into the tree, using the usual treeInsert()
method for binary sort trees. Once you have the tree, you should compute and output the
average depth of all the leaves in the tree and the maximum depth of all the leaves. To
do this, you will need three recursive subroutines: one to count the leaves, one to find the
sum of the depths of all the leaves, and one to find the maximum depth. The latter two
subroutines should have an int-valued parameter, depth, that tells how deep in the tree
you’ve gone. When you call this routine from the main program, the depth parameter is
0; when you call the routine recursively, the parameter increases by 1.
6. The parsing programs in Section 9.5 work with expressions made up of numbers and (solution)
operators. We can make things a little more interesting by allowing the variable “x” to
occur. This would allow expression such as “3*(x-1)*(x+1)”, for example. Make a new
version of the sample program SimpleParser3.java that can work with such expressions.
In your program, the main() routine can’t simply print the value of the expression, since
the value of the expression now depends on the value of x. Instead, it should print the
value of the expression for x=0, x=1, x=2, and x=3.
The original program will have to be modified in several other ways. Currently, the
program uses classes ConstNode, BinOpNode, and UnaryMinusNode to represent nodes
in an expression tree. Since expressions can now include x, you will need a new class,
VariableNode, to represent an occurrence of x in the expression.
In the original program, each of the node classes has an instance method,
“double value()”, which returns the value of the node. But in your program, the
value can depend on x, so you should replace this method with one of the form
“double value(double xValue)”, where the parameter xValue is the value of x.
Finally, the parsing subroutines in your program will have to take into account the
fact that expressions can contain x. There is just one small change in the BNF rules for
the expressions: A <factor> is allowed to be the variable x:
<factor> ::= <number> | <x-variable> | "(" <expression> ")"
Exercises 506
where <x-variable> can be either a lower case or an upper case “X”. This change in the
BNF requires a change in the factorTree() subroutine.
7. This exercise builds on the previous exercise, Exercise 9.6. To understand it, you should (solution)
have some background in Calculus. The derivative of an expression that involves the
variable x can be defined by a few recursive rules:
• The derivative of a constant is 0.
• The derivative of x is 1.
• If A is an expression, let dA be the derivative of A. Then the derivative of -A is -dA.
• If A and B are expressions, let dA be the derivative of A and let dB be the derivative
of B. Then the derivative of A+B is dA+dB.
• The derivative of A-B is dA-dB.
• The derivative of A*B is A*dB + B*dA.
• The derivative of A/B is (B*dA - A*dB) / (B*B).
For this exercise, you should modify your program from the previous exercise so that
it can compute the derivative of an expression. You can do this by adding a derivative-
computing method to each of the node classes. First, add another abstract method to the
ExpNode class:
abstract ExpNode derivative();
Then implement this method in each of the four subclasses of ExpNode. All the information
that you need is in the rules given above. In your main program, instead of printing the
stack operations for the original expression, you should print out the stack operations
that define the derivative. Note that the formula that you get for the derivative can be
much more complicated than it needs to be. For example, the derivative of 3*x+1 will be
computed as (3*1+0*x)+0. This is correct, even though it’s kind of ugly, and it would be
nice for it to be simplified. However, simplifying expressions is not easy.
As an alternative to printing out stack operations, you might want to print the
derivative as a fully parenthesized expression. You can do this by adding a printInfix()
routine to each node class. It would be nice to leave out unnecessary parentheses, but
again, the problem of deciding which parentheses can be left out without altering the
meaning of the expression is a fairly difficult one, which I don’t advise you to attempt.
(There is one curious thing that happens here: If you apply the rules, as given, to an
expression tree, the result is no longer a tree, since the same subexpression can occur at
multiple points in the derivative. For example, if you build a node to represent B*B by
saying “new BinOpNode(’*’,B,B)”, then the left and right children of the new node are
actually the same node! This is not allowed in a tree. However, the difference is harmless
in this case since, like a tree, the structure that you get has no loops in it. Loops, on the
other hand, would be a disaster in most of the recursive tree-processing subroutines that
we have written, since it would lead to infinite recursion. The type of structure that is
built by the derivative functions is technically referred to as a directed acyclic graph.)
Quiz 507
Quiz on Chapter 9
(answers)
3. Suppose that a linked list is formed from objects that belong to the class
class ListNode {
int item; // An item in the list.
ListNode next; // Pointer to next item in the list.
}
Write a subroutine that will count the number of zeros that occur in a given linked list
of ints. The subroutine should have a parameter of type ListNode and should return a
value of type int.
4. Let ListNode be defined as in the previous problem. Suppose that head is a variable of
type ListNode that points to the first node in a linked list. Write a code segment that
will add the number 42 in a new node at the end of the list. Assume that the list is not
empty. (There is no “tail pointer” for the list.)
5. List nodes can be used to build linked data structures that do not have the form of linked
lists. Consider the list node class shown on the left and the code shown on the right:
class ListNode { ListNode one = new ListNode(10);
int item; ListNode two = new ListNode(20);
ListNode next; ListNode three = new ListNode(30);
Listnode(int i) { ListNode four = new ListNode(40);
item = i; one.next = two;
next = null; two.next = three;
} three.next = four;
} four.next = two;
Draw the data structure that is constructed by the code. What happens if you try to print
the items in the data structure using the usual code for traversing a linked list:
Quiz 508
8. What is an activation record ? What role does a stack of activation records play in a
computer?
9. Suppose that a binary tree of integers is formed from objects belonging to the class
class TreeNode {
int item; // One item in the tree.
TreeNode left; // Pointer to the left subtree.
TreeNode right; // Pointer to the right subtree.
}
Write a recursive subroutine that will find the sum of all the nodes in the tree. Your
subroutine should have a parameter of type TreeNode, and it should return a value of
type int.
10. Let TreeNode be the same class as in the previous problem. Write a recursive subroutine
that makes a copy of a binary tree. The subroutine has a parameter that points to the
root of the tree that is to be copied. The return type is TreeNode, and the return value
should be a pointer to the root of the copy. The copy should consist of newly created
nodes, and it should have exactly the same structure as the original tree.
12. Suppose that a binary sort tree of integers is initially empty and that the following integers
are inserted into the tree in the order shown:
5 7 1 3 4 2 6
Draw the binary sort tree that results. Then list the integers in the order that is produced
by a post-order traversal of the tree.
How to avoid reinventing the wheel? Many data structures and algorithms, such as
those from Chapter 9, have been studied, programmed, and re-programmed by generations of
computer science students. This is a valuable learning experience. Unfortunately, they have
also been programmed and re-programmed by generations of working computer professionals,
taking up time that could be devoted to new, more creative work. A programmer who needs
a list or a binary tree shouldn’t have to re-code these data structures from scratch. They are
well-understood and have been programmed thousands of times before. The problem is how to
make pre-written, robust data structures available to programmers. In this chapter, we’ll look
at Java’s attempt to address this problem.
You have already seen part of the solution in Section 7.3. That section introduced
parameterized types and the ArrayList class. Parameterized types make it possible for the
same class to work with many different kinds of data. This idea—that the same code can be
used for a variety of data types—is called generic programming .
509
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 510
In Section 10.5, we will see that it is possible to define new generic classes, interfaces, and
methods. Until then, we will stick to using Java’s predefined generics. And in Section 10.6, we
will look at streams, a relatively new feature of Java that makes extensive use of generics.
It is no easy task to design a library for generic programming. Java’s solution has many
nice features but is certainly not the only possible approach. It is almost certainly not the
best, and has a few features that in my opinion can only be called bizarre, but in the context
of the overall design of Java, it might be close to optimal. To get some perspective on generic
programming in general, it might be useful to look very briefly at some other approaches to
generic programming.
at run time, and at run time there is no such thing as “ArrayList<String>”; only the non-
parameterized type ArrayList exists at run time. (However, although you can’t have an array
of ArrayList<String>, you can have an ArrayList of ArrayList<String>—with the type written as
ArrayList<ArrayList<String>>—which is just as good or better.)
Fortunately, most programmers don’t have to deal with such problems, since they turn
up only in fairly advanced programming. Most people who use parameterized types will not
encounter the problems, and they will get the benefits of type-safe generic programming with
little difficulty.
It’s worth noting that if the type parameter in a parameterized type can be deduced by the
compiler, then the name of the type parameter can be omitted. For example, the word “String”
is optional in the constructor in the following statement, because the ArrayList that is created
must be an ArrayList<String> to match the type of the variable:
ArrayList<String> words = new ArrayList<>();
∗ ∗ ∗
The interface Collection<T> specifies methods for performing some basic operations on any
collection of objects. Since “collection” is a very general concept, operations that can be applied
to all collections are also very general. They are generic operations in the sense that they can
be applied to various types of collections containing various types of objects. Suppose that
coll is an object that implements the interface Collection<T> (for some specific non-primitive
type T ). Then the following operations, which are specified in the interface Collection<T>, are
defined for coll:
• coll.size() — returns an int that gives the number of objects in the collection.
• coll.isEmpty() — returns a boolean value which is true if the size of the collection is 0.
• coll.clear() — removes all objects from the collection.
• coll.add(tobject) — adds tobject to the collection. The parameter must be of type T ;
if not, a syntax error occurs at compile time. (Remember that if T is a class, this includes
objects belonging to a subclass of T, and if T is an interface, it includes any object that
implements T.) The add() method returns a boolean value which tells you whether the
operation actually modified the collection. For example, adding an object to a Set has no
effect if that object was already in the set.
• coll.contains(object) — returns a boolean value that is true if object is in the
collection. Note that object is not required to be of type T, since it makes sense to
check whether object is in the collection, no matter what type object has. (For testing
equality, null is considered to be equal to itself. The criterion for testing non-null objects
for equality can differ from one kind of collection to another; see Subsection 10.1.6, below.)
• coll.remove(object) — removes object from the collection, if it occurs in the collection,
and returns a boolean value that tells you whether the object was found. Again, object
is not required to be of type T. The test for equality is the same test that is used by
contains().
• coll.containsAll(coll2) — returns a boolean value that is true if every object in
coll2 is also in coll. The parameter can be any collection.
• coll.addAll(coll2) — adds all the objects in coll2 to coll. The parameter, coll2,
can be any collection of type Collection<T>. However, it can also be more general. For
example, if T is a class and S is a sub-class of T, then coll2 can be of type Collection<S>.
This makes sense because any object of type S is automatically of type T and so can
legally be added to coll.
• coll.removeAll(coll2) — removes every object from coll that also occurs in the
collection coll2. coll2 can be any collection.
• coll.retainAll(coll2) — removes every object from coll that does not occur in
the collection coll2. It “retains” only the objects that do occur in coll2. coll2 can be
any collection.
• coll.toArray() — returns an array of type Object[ ] that contains all the items in
the collection. Note that the return type is Object[ ], not T[ ]! However, there is
another version of this method that takes an array of type T[ ] as a parameter: the
method coll.toArray(tarray) returns an array of type T[ ] containing all the items
in the collection. If the array parameter tarray is large enough to hold the entire
collection, then the items are stored in tarray and tarray is also the return value of
the collection. If tarray is not large enough, then a new array is created to hold the
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 515
items; in that case tarray serves only to specify the type of the array. For example,
coll.toArray(new String[0]) can be used if coll is a collection of Strings and will
return a new array of type String[ ].
Since these methods are part of the Collection<T> interface, they must be defined for every
object that implements that interface. There is a problem with this, however. For example,
the size of some collections cannot be changed after they are created. Methods that add or
remove objects don’t make sense for these collections. While it is still legal to call the methods,
an exception will be thrown when the call is evaluated at run time. The type of the exception
is UnsupportedOperationException. Furthermore, since Collection<T> is only an interface, not a
concrete class, the actual implementation of the method is left to the classes that implement
the interface. This means that the semantics of the methods, as described above, are not
guaranteed to be valid for all collection objects; they are valid, however, for classes in the Java
Collection Framework.
There is also the question of efficiency. Even when an operation is defined for several types of
collections, it might not be equally efficient in all cases. Even a method as simple as size() can
vary greatly in efficiency. For some collections, computing the size() might involve counting
the items in the collection. The number of steps in this process is equal to the number of items.
Other collections might have instance variables to keep track of the size, so evaluating size()
just means returning the value of a variable. In this case, the computation takes only one step,
no matter how many items there are. When working with collections, it’s good to have some
idea of how efficient operations are and to choose a collection for which the operations that you
need can be implemented most efficiently. We’ll see specific examples of this in the next two
sections.
the interface Collection<T> for some specific type T, then coll.iterator() returns an iterator
of type Iterator<T>, with the same type T as its type parameter. The interface Iterator<T>
defines just three methods. If iter refers to an object that implements Iterator<T>, then we
have:
• iter.next() — returns the next item, and advances the iterator. The return value is of
type T. This method lets you look at one of the items in the collection. Note that there is
no way to look at an item without advancing the iterator past that item. If this method
is called when no items remain, it will throw a NoSuchElementException.
• iter.hasNext() — returns a boolean value telling you whether there are more items to
be processed. In general, you should test this before calling iter.next().
• iter.remove() — if you call this after calling iter.next(), it will remove the item
that you just saw from the collection. Note that this method has no parameter. It
removes the item that was most recently returned by iter.next(). This might produce
an UnsupportedOperationException, if the collection does not support removal of items.
Using iterators, we can write code for printing all the items in any collection. Suppose,
for example, that coll is of type Collection<String>. In that case, the value returned by
coll.iterator() is of type Iterator<String>, and we can say:
Iterator<String> iter; // Declare the iterator variable.
iter = coll.iterator(); // Get an iterator for the collection.
while ( iter.hasNext() ) {
String item = iter.next(); // Get the next item.
System.out.println(item);
}
The same general form will work for other types of processing. For example, the following
code will remove all null values from any collection of type Collection<Color> (as long as that
collection supports removal of values):
Iterator<Color> iter = coll.iterator():
while ( iter.hasNext() ) {
Color item = iter.next();
if (item == null)
iter.remove();
}
(Note, by the way, that when Collection<T>, Iterator<T>, or any other parameterized type is
used in actual code, they are always used with actual types such as String or Color in place of
the “formal type parameter” T. An iterator of type Iterator<String> is used to iterate through
a collection of Strings; an iterator of type Iterator<Color> is used to iterate through a collection
of Color ; and so on.)
An iterator is often used to apply the same operation to all the elements in a collection. In
many cases, it’s possible to avoid the use of iterators for this purpose by using a for-each loop.
The for-each loop was discussed in Subsection 7.1.1 for use with arrays and in Subsection 7.3.3
for use with ArrayLists. But in fact, a for-each loop can be used to iterate through any
collection. For a collection coll of type Collection<T>, a for-each loop takes the form:
for ( T x : coll ) { // "for each object x, of type T, in coll"
// process x
}
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 517
Here, x is the loop control variable. Each object in coll will be assigned to x in turn, and the
body of the loop will be executed for each object. Since objects in coll are of type T, x is
declared to be of type T. For example, if namelist is of type Collection<String>, we can print
out all the names in the collection with:
for ( String name : namelist ) {
System.out.println( name );
}
This for-each loop could, of course, be written as a while loop using an iterator, but the for-each
loop is much easier to follow.
catch (Exception e) {
// This will catch the NullPointerException that occurs if obj
// is null and the ClassCastException that occurs if obj is
// not of type Card. In these cases, obj is not equal to
// this Card, so return false.
return false;
}
}
.
. // other methods and constructors
.
}
Without the equals() method in this class, methods such as contains() and remove() from
the interface Collection<Card> will not work as expected.
A similar concern arises when items in a collection are sorted. Sorting refers to arranging
a sequence of items in ascending order, according to some criterion. The problem is that there
is no natural notion of ascending order for arbitrary objects. Before objects can be sorted,
some method must be defined for comparing them. Objects that are meant to be compared
should implement the interface java.lang.Comparable. In fact, Comparable is defined as a
parameterized interface, Comparable<T>, which represents the ability to be compared to an
object of type T. The interface Comparable<T> defines one method:
public int compareTo( T obj )
The value returned by obj1.compareTo(obj2) should be negative if and only if obj1 comes
before obj2, when the objects are arranged in ascending order. It should be positive if and only
if obj1 comes after obj2. A return value of zero means that the objects are considered to be
the same for the purposes of this comparison. This does not necessarily mean that the objects
are equal in the sense that obj1.equals(obj2) is true. But in general, classes that implement
Comparable should try to define .equals() and compareTo() so that obj1.equals(obj2)
and obj1.compareTo(obj2) == 0 always have the same value. (Some classes in the JCF use
compareTo() rather than equals() to test objects for equality.)
The String class implements the interface Comparable<String> and defines compareTo in a
reasonable way. In this case, the return value of compareTo is zero if and only if the two strings
that are being compared are equal. If you define your own class and want to be able to sort
objects belonging to that class, you should do the same. For example:
/**
* Represents a full name consisting of a first name and a last name.
*/
public class FullName implements Comparable<FullName> {
private String firstName, lastName; // Non-null first and last names.
public FullName(String first, String last) { // Constructor.
if (first == null || last == null)
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Names must be non-null.");
firstName = first;
lastName = last;
}
public boolean equals(Object obj) {
try {
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 519
This method compares two objects of type T and returns a value that is negative, or positive,
or zero, depending on whether obj1 comes before obj2, or comes after obj2, or is considered
to be the same as obj2 for the purposes of this comparison. Comparators are useful for
comparing objects that do not implement the Comparable interface and for defining several
different orderings on the same collection of objects. Since Comparator is a functional interface,
comparators are often defined by lambda expressions (see Section 4.5).
Note that it can often make sense to use a Comparator for which obj1.equals(obj2) does
not always have the same value as compare(obj1,obj2) == 0. For example, when sorting
addresses by zip code, you would use a Comparator that looks at the zip code field in the
addresses that it compares.
In the next two sections, we’ll see how Comparable and Comparator are used in the context
of collections and maps.
into some definite order. I will also briefly discuss a third category of collection known as a
“priority queue.”
to end. However, for Lists, there is a special type of Iterator, called a ListIterator, which offers
additional capabilities. ListIterator<T> is an interface that extends the interface Iterator<T>.
The method list.listIterator() returns an object of type ListIterator<T>.
A ListIterator has the usual Iterator methods, hasNext(), next(), and remove(), but it
also has methods hasPrevious(), previous(), add(obj), and set(obj) that make it possible
to move backwards in the list, to add an item at the current position of the iterator, and to
replace one of the items in the list. To understand how these work, it’s best to think of an
iterator as pointing to a position between two list elements, or at the beginning or end of the
list. In this diagram, the items in a list are represented by squares, and arrows indicate the
possible positions of an iterator:
If iter is of type ListIterator<T>, then iter.next() moves the iterator one space to the
right along the list and returns the item that the iterator passes as it moves. The method
iter.previous() moves the iterator one space to the left along the list and returns the item
that it passes. The method iter.remove() removes an item from the list; the item that is
removed is the item that the iterator passed most recently in a call to either iter.next()
or iter.previous(). The method iter.set(obj) works similarly; it replaces the item that
would be removed by iter.remove(). There is also a method iter.add(obj) that adds the
specified object to the list at the current position of the iterator (where obj must be of type
T ). This can be between two existing items or at the beginning of the list or at the end of the
list.
(By the way, the lists that are used in class LinkedList<T> are doubly linked lists.
That is, each node in the list contains two pointers—one to the next node in the list and
one to the previous node. This makes it possible to efficiently implement both the next()
and previous() methods of a ListIterator. Also, to make the addLast() and getLast()
methods of a LinkedList efficient, the class LinkedList<T> includes a “tail pointer” that points
to the last node in the list.)
As an example of using a ListIterator, suppose that we want to maintain a list of items
that is always sorted into increasing order. When adding an item to the list, we can use a
ListIterator to find the position in the list where the item should be added. Once the position
has been found, we use the same list iterator to place the item in that position. The idea is to
start at the beginning of the list and to move the iterator forward past all the items that are
smaller than the item that is being inserted. At that point, the iterator’s add() method can
be used to insert the item. To be more definite, suppose that stringList is a variable of type
List<String>. Assume that the strings that are already in the list are stored in ascending order
and that newItem is a string that we would like to insert into the list. The following code will
place newItem in the list in its correct position, so that the modified list is still in ascending
order:
ListIterator<String> iter = stringList.listIterator();
// Move the iterator so that it points to the position where
// newItem should be inserted into the list. If newItem is
// bigger than all the items in the list, then the while loop
// will end when iter.hasNext() becomes false, that is, when
// the iterator has reached the end of the list.
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 524
while (iter.hasNext()) {
String item = iter.next();
if (newItem.compareTo(item) <= 0) {
// newItem should come BEFORE item in the list.
// Move the iterator back one space so that
// it points to the correct insertion point,
// and end the loop.
iter.previous();
break;
}
}
iter.add(newItem);
Here, stringList might be of type ArrayList<String> or of type LinkedList<String>. The
algorithm that is used to insert newItem into the list will be about equally efficient for both types
of lists, and it will even work for other classes that implement the interface List<String>. You
would probably find it easier to design an insertion algorithm that uses array-like indexing with
the methods get(index) and add(index,obj). However, that algorithm would be horribly
inefficient for LinkedLists because random access is so inefficient for linked lists. (By the way,
the insertion algorithm works when the list is empty, and it works when the new item has to
be inserted at the beginning or at the end of the list. It might be useful for you to think about
why this is true.)
10.2.2 Sorting
Sorting a list is a fairly common operation, and there should really be a sorting method in
the List interface. There is not, presumably because it only makes sense to sort lists of certain
types of objects. However, methods for sorting lists are available as static methods in the class
java.util.Collections. This class contains a variety of static utility methods for working
with collections. The methods are generic; that is, they will work for collections of objects of
various types. (You have already seen similar methods for arrays in the Arrays class.) Suppose
that list is of type List<T>. The command
Collections.sort(list);
can be used to sort the list into ascending order. The items in the list should implement the
interface Comparable<T> (see Subsection 10.1.6). The method Collections.sort() will work,
for example, for lists of String and for lists of any of the wrapper classes such as Integer and
Double. There is also a sorting method that takes a Comparator as its second argument:
Collections.sort(list,comparator);
In this method, the comparator will be used to compare the items in the list. As mentioned
in the previous section, a Comparator is an object that defines a compare() method that can
be used to compare two objects. We’ll see an example of using a Comparator in Section 10.4.
The sorting method that is used by Collections.sort() is the so-called “merge sort”
algorithm, which has both worst-case and average-case run times that are Θ(n*log(n)) for
a list of size n. Although the average run time for MergeSort is a little slower than that of
QuickSort, its worst-case performance is much better than QuickSort’s. (QuickSort was covered
in Subsection 9.1.3.) MergeSort also has a nice property called “stability” that we will encounter
at the end of Subsection 10.4.3.
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 525
The Collections class has at least two other useful methods for modifying lists.
Collections.shuffle(list) will rearrange the elements of the list into a random order.
Collections.reverse(list) will reverse the order of the elements, so that the last element is
moved to the beginning of the list, the next-to-last element to the second position, and so on.
Since an efficient sorting method is provided for Lists, there is no need to write one yourself.
for the set will automatically visit the items in the set in sorted order. An algorithm for the
program, using a TreeSet, would be:
TreeSet<String> words = new TreeSet<String>();
while there is more data in the input file:
Let word = the next word from the file
Convert word to lower case
words.add(word) // Adds the word only if not already present.
for ( String w : words ) // for each String w in words
Output w // words are output in sorted order
If you would like to see a complete, working program, you can find it in the file WordListWith-
TreeSet.java.
As another example, suppose that coll is any Collection of Strings. (This would also
work for any other type for which compareTo() is properly defined.) We can use a TreeSet to
sort the items of coll and remove the duplicates simply by saying:
TreeSet<String> set = new TreeSet<String>();
set.addAll(coll);
The second statement adds all the elements of the collection to the set. Since it’s a Set,
duplicates are ignored. Since it’s a TreeSet, the elements of the set are sorted. If you would like
to have the data in some other type of data structure, it’s easy to copy the data from the set.
For example, to place the answer in an ArrayList, you could say:
TreeSet<String> set = new TreeSet<String>();
set.addAll(coll);
ArrayList<String> list = new ArrayList<String>();
list.addAll(set);
Now, in fact, every one of Java’s collection classes has a constructor that takes a Collection
as an argument. All the items in that Collection are added to the new collection when it is
created. So, if coll is of type Collection<String>, then “new TreeSet<String>(coll)” creates
a TreeSet that contains the same elements as coll, but with duplicates removed and in sorted
order. This means that we can abbreviate the four lines in the above example to the single
command:
ArrayList<String> list = new ArrayList<>( new TreeSet<>(coll) );
This makes a sorted list of the elements of coll with no duplicates. This is a nice example of
the power of generic programming. (Note that the type parameter, String, is optional in the
two constructors in this example, since it can be deduced by the compiler.)
∗ ∗ ∗
A HashSet stores its elements in a hash table, a type of data structure that I will discuss
in the next section. The operations of finding, adding, and removing elements are implemented
very efficiently in hash tables, even more so than for TreeSets. The elements of a HashSet are
not stored in any particular order, and so do not need to implement the Comparable interface.
(They do, however, need to define a proper “hash code,” as we’ll see in the next section.)
The equals() method is used to determine whether two objects in a HashSet are to be
considered the same. An Iterator for a HashSet will visit its elements in what seems to be a
completely arbitrary order, and it’s even possible for the order to change when a new element
is added. Use a HashSet instead of a TreeSet when the elements it contains are not comparable,
or when the order is not important, or when the small advantage in efficiency is important.
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 527
∗ ∗ ∗
A note about the mathematics of sets: In mathematical set theory, the items in a set are
called members or elements of that set. Important operations include adding an element
to a set, removing an element from a set, and testing whether a given entity is an element of
a set. Operations that can be performed on two sets include union, intersection, and set
difference. All these operations are defined in Java for objects of type Set, but with different
names. Suppose that A and B are Sets. Then:
• A.add(x) adds the element x to the set A.
• A.remove(x) removes the element x from the set A.
• A.contains(x) tests whether x is an element of the set A.
• A.addAll(B) computes the union of A and B.
• A.retainAll(B) computes the intersection of A and B.
• A.removeAll(B) computes the set difference, A - B.
There are of course, differences between mathematical sets and sets in Java. Most important,
perhaps, sets in Java must be finite, while in mathematics, most of the fun in set theory comes
from working with infinity. In mathematics, a set can contain arbitrary elements, while in Java,
a set of type Set<T> can only contain elements of type T. The operation A.addAll(B) acts by
modifying the value of A, while in mathematics the operation A union B computes a new set,
without changing the value of A or B. See Exercise 10.2 for an example of mathematical set
operations in Java.
You’ve probably noticed that I haven’t yet mentioned how the priority of items in the
priority queue are determined. The situation is much like sorting: We need to be able to
compare any two items in the queue. As with sorting, there are two solutions. If the items
implement the Comparable interface, then they can be compared using the compareTo() method
from that interface. Alternatively, a Comparator object can be provided as a parameter to the
PriorityQueue constructor. In that case, the Comparator’s compare() method will be used to
compare items.
Classes such as String, Integer, and Date that implement Comparable can be used in a priority
queue. For example, a PriorityQueue<String> can be used to sort strings into lexicographic order:
Just add all the strings to the priority queue, then remove them one-by-one. Since items are
removed from the queue in order of priority, they will be removed in lexicographic order. Earlier,
I showed how to use a TreeSet to sort and remove duplicates from a collection. A PriorityQueue
can be used in a similar way to sort a collection without removing duplicates. For example, if
coll is of type Collection<String>, then the following code segment will print all the items from
coll in order, including duplicates:
PriorityQueue<String> pq = new PriorityQueue<>();
pq.addAll( coll );
while ( ! pq.isEmpty() ) {
System.out.println( pq.remove() );
}
Note, by the way, that we can’t use an iterator or a for-each loop to print the items in this
example, since iterators and for-each loops do not traverse a priority queue in ascending order.
The sample program WordListWithPriorityQueue.java makes a sorted list of words from
a file without removing duplicates, using a priority queue to hold the words. It is a minor
modification of WordListWithTreeSet.java.
Although priority queues can be used for sorting, they have other natural applications. For
example, consider the problem of scheduling “jobs” to be executed on a computer, where each
job is assigned a priority and jobs with lower priority should always be executed before jobs
with higher priority. Jobs can be placed into a priority queue as they are created. When the
computer removes jobs from the queue for execution, they will be removed in order of increasing
priority.
10.3 Maps
An array of N elements can be thought of as a way of associating some item with each of
the integers 0, 1, . . . , N-1. If i is one of these integers, it’s possible to get the item associated
with i, and it’s possible to put a new item in the i-th position. These “get” and “put”
operations define what it means to be an array.
A map is a kind of generalized array. Like an array, a map is defined by “get” and “put”
operations. But in a map, these operations are defined not for integers 0, 1, . . . , N-1, but for
arbitrary objects of some specified type T. Associated to these objects of type T are objects of
some possibly different type S.
In fact, some programming languages use the term associative array instead of “map”
and use the same notation for associative arrays as for regular arrays. In those languages,
for example, you might see the notation A["fred"] used to indicate the item associated to the
string “fred” in an associative array A. Java does not use array notation for maps, unfortunately,
but the idea is the same: A map is like an array, but the indices for a map are objects, not
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 529
integers. In a map, an object that serves as an “index” is called a key . The object that is
associated with a key is called a value. Note that a key can have at most one associated value,
but the same value can be associated to several different keys. A map can be considered to be
a set of “associations,” where each association is a key/value pair.
or that a Comparator must be provided for comparing keys. (The Comparator can be provided
as a parameter to the TreeMap constructor.) Note that in a TreeMap, as in a TreeSet, the
compareTo() (or compare()) method is used to decide whether two keys are to be considered
the same. This can have undesirable consequences if the comparison method does not agree
with the usual notion of equality, and you should keep this in mind when using TreeMaps.
A HashMap does not store associations in any particular order, so the keys that can be used
in a HashMap do not have to be comparable. However, the key class should have reasonable
definitions for the equals() method and for a hashCode() method that is discussed later in
this section; most of Java’s standard classes define these methods correctly. Most operations are
a little faster on HashMaps than they are on TreeMaps. In general, you should use a HashMap
unless you have some particular need for the ordering property of a TreeMap. In particular, if
you are only using the put and get operations, you can safely use a HashMap.
Let’s consider an example where maps would be useful. In Subsection 7.5.2, I presented
a simple PhoneDirectory class that associated phone numbers with names. That class defined
operations addEntry(name,number) and getNumber(name), where both name and number are
given as Strings. In fact, the phone directory is acting just like a map, with the addEntry
method playing the role of the put operation and getNumber playing the role of get. In a real
programming application, there would be no need to define a new class; we could simply use a
map of type Map<String,String>. A directory could be defined as
Map<String,String> directory = new TreeMap<>();
(using TreeMap so that the entries are kept in sorted order by name). Then
directory.put(name,number) would record a phone number in the directory and
directory.get(name) would retrieve the phone number associated with a given name.
∗ ∗ ∗
Maps are not the only place in Java’s generic programming framework where views are
used. For example, the interface List<T> defines a sublist as a view of a part of a list. If list
implements the interface List<T>, then the method
list.subList( fromIndex, toIndex )
where fromIndex and toIndex are integers, returns a view of the part of the list consisting
of the list elements in positions between fromIndex and toIndex (including fromIndex but
excluding toIndex). This view lets you operate on the sublist using any of the operations
defined for lists, but the sublist is not an independent list. Changes made to the sublist are
actually made to the original list.
Similarly, it is possible to obtain views that represent certain subsets of a sorted set. If
set is of type TreeSet<T>, then set.subSet(fromElement,toElement) returns a Set<T> that
contains all the elements of set that are between fromElement and toElement (including
fromElement and excluding toElement). The parameters fromElement and toElement must
be objects of type T. For example, if words is a set of type TreeSet<String> in which all
the elements are strings of lower case letters, then words.subSet("m","n") contains all the
elements of words that begin with the letter ’m’. This subset is a view of part of the original
set. That is, creating the subset does not involve copying elements. And changes made to
the subset, such as adding or removing elements, are actually made to the original set. The
view set.headSet(toElement) consists of all elements from the set which are strictly less than
toElement, and set.tailSet(fromElement) is a view that contains all elements from the set
that are greater than or equal to fromElement.
The class TreeMap<K,V> defines three submap views. A submap is similar to a subset.
A submap is a Map that contains a subset of the keys from the original Map, along with
their associated values. If map is a variable of type TreeMap<K,V>, and if fromKey and toKey
are of type K, then map.subMap(fromKey,toKey) returns a view that contains all key/value
pairs from map whose keys are between fromKey and toKey (including fromKey and excluding
toKey). There are also views map.headMap(toKey) and map.tailMap(fromKey) which are
defined analogously to headSet and tailSet. Suppose, for example, that phoneBook is a map
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 533
of type TreeMap<String,String> in which the keys are names and the values are phone numbers.
We can print out all the entries from phoneBook where the name begins with “M” as follows:
Map<String,String> ems = phoneBook.subMap("M","N");
// This submap contains entries for which the key is greater
// than or equal to "M" and strictly less than "N".
if (ems.isEmpty()) {
System.out.println("No entries beginning with M.");
}
else {
System.out.println("Entries beginning with M:");
for ( var entry : ems.entrySet() ) {
// Note: type for entry is Map.Entry<String,String>
// but it’s easier to user var to declare the variable!
System.out.println( " " + entry.getKey() + ": " + entry.getValue() );
}
}
Subsets and submaps are probably best thought of as generalized search operations that
make it possible to find all the items in a range of values, rather than just to find a single
value. For example, suppose that a database of scheduled events is stored in a map of type
TreeMap<DateTime,Event> in which the a key gives the date and time of an event, and suppose
you want a listing of all events that are scheduled for some time on July 4, 2022. Just make
a submap containing all keys in the range from 12:00 AM, July 4, 2022 to 12:00 AM, July 5,
2022, and output all the entries from that submap. This type of search, which is known as a
subrange query , is quite common.
one location for each possible key. For example, if the key can be any value of type int, then
we would need an array with over four billion locations—quite a waste of space if we are only
going to store, say, a few thousand items! If the key can be a string of any length, then the
number of possible keys is infinite, and using an array with one location for each possible key
is simply impossible.
Nevertheless, hash tables store their data in an array, and the array index where a key is
stored is based on the key. The index is not equal to the key, but it is computed from the key.
The array index for a key is called the hash code for that key. A function that computes a
hash code, given a key, is called a hash function. To find a key in a hash table, you just have
to compute the hash code of the key and go directly to the array location given by that hash
code. If the hash code is 17, look in array location number 17.
Now, since there are fewer array locations than there are possible keys, it’s possible that
we might try to store two or more keys in the same array location. This is called a collision.
A collision is not an error. We can’t reject a key just because another key happened to have
the same hash code. A hash table must be able to handle collisions in some reasonable way. In
the type of hash table that is used in Java, each array location actually holds a linked list of
key/value pairs (possibly an empty list). When two items have the same hash code, they are
in the same linked list. The structure of the hash table looks something like this:
0 item item
1
2 item
3
4
5 item item item
6
7
8 item
à item
áâ
11
item item
In this diagram, there are two items with hash code 0, no items with hash code 1, one item
with hash code 2, and so on. In a properly designed hash table, most of the linked lists are of
length zero or one, and the average length of the lists is less than one. Although the hash code
of a key doesn’t necessarily take you directly to that key, there are probably no more than one
or two other items that you have to look through before finding the key you want. For this to
work properly, the number of items in the hash table should be somewhat less than the number
of locations in the array. In Java’s implementation, whenever the number of items exceeds 75%
of the array size, the array is replaced by a larger one and all the items in the old array are
inserted into the new one. (This is why adding one new item will sometimes cause the ordering
of all the items in the hash table to change completely.)
There is still the question of where hash codes come from. Every object in Java has a
hash code. The Object class defines the method hashCode(), which returns a value of type
int. When an object, obj, is stored in a hash table that has N locations, a hash code in the
range 0 to N-1 is needed. This hash code is computed as Math.abs(obj.hashCode()) % N,
the remainder when the absolute value of obj.hashCode() is divided by N. (The Math.abs
is necessary because obj.hashCode() can be a negative integer, and we need a non-negative
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 535
To demonstrate the idea, we’ll use a rather simple-minded program in which the user types
commands such as:
let x = 3 + 12
print 2 + 2
print 10*x +17
let rate = 0.06
print 1000*(1+rate)
The program is an interpreter for a very simple language. The only two commands that
the program understands are “print” and “let”. When a “print” command is executed, the
computer evaluates the expression and displays the value. If the expression contains a variable,
the computer has to look up the value of that variable in the symbol table. A “let” command
is used to give a value to a variable. The computer has to store the value of the variable in
the symbol table. (Note: The “variables” I am talking about here are not variables in the Java
program. The Java program is executing a sort of program typed in by the user. I am talking
about variables in the user’s program. The user gets to make up variable names, so there is no
way for the Java program to know in advance what the variables will be.)
In Subsection 9.5.2, we saw how to write a program, SimpleParser2.java, that can evaluate
expressions that do not contain variables. Here, I will discuss another example program,
SimpleInterpreter.java, that is based on the older program. I will only talk about the parts
that are relevant to the symbol table.
The program uses a HashMap as the symbol table. A TreeMap could also be used, but since
the program does not need to access the variables in alphabetical order, we don’t need to have
the keys stored in sorted order. The symbol table in the program is represented by a variable
named symbolTable of type HashMap<String,Double>. At the beginning of the program, the
symbol table object is created with the command:
symbolTable = new HashMap<>();
This creates a map that initially contains no key/value associations. To execute a “let”
command, the program uses the symbol table’s put() method to associate a value with the
variable name. Suppose that the name of the variable is given by a String, varName, and the
value of the variable is stored in a variable, val, of type double. The following command would
then set the value associated with the variable in the symbol table:
symbolTable.put( varName, val );
In the program SimpleInterpreter.java, you’ll find this in the method named doLetCommand().
The actual value that is stored in the symbol table is an object of type Double. We can use the
double value val in the call to put because Java does an automatic conversion of type double
to Double when necessary.
Just for fun, I decided to pre-define two variables named “pi” and “e” whose values are
the usual mathematical constants π and e. In Java, the values of these constants are given by
Math.PI and Math.E. To make these variables available to the user of the program, they are
added to the symbol table with the commands:
symbolTable.put( "pi", Math.PI );
symbolTable.put( "e", Math.E );
When the program encounters a variable while evaluating an expression, the symbol table’s
get() method is used to retrieve its value. The function symbolTable.get(varName) returns
a value of type Double. It is possible that the return value is null; this will happen if no value
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 537
has ever been assigned to varName in the symbol table. It’s important to check this possibility.
It indicates that the user is trying to use a variable that the user has not defined. The program
considers this to be an error, so the processing looks something like this:
Double val = symbolTable.get(varName);
if (val == null) {
... // Throw an exception: Undefined variable.
}
// The value associated to varName is val.doubleValue()
You will find this code, more or less, in a method named primaryValue() in SimpleInter-
preter.java.
As you can see from this example, Maps are very useful and are really quite easy to use.
references to put in the index, and just look at how the TreeMap is used. It can be created with
the commands:
TreeMap<String,TreeSet<Integer>> index; // Declare the variable.
index = new TreeMap<>(); // Create the map object.
(Note that even for this complex type, the type parameters can be omitted from the
constructor.)
Now, suppose that we find a reference to some term (of type String ) on some pageNum (of
type int). We need to insert this information into the index. To do this, we should look up the
term in the index, using index.get(term). The return value is either null or is the set of page
references that we have previously found for the term. If the return value is null, then this is
the first page reference for the term, so we should add the term to the index, with a new set
that contains the page reference we’ve just found. If the return value is non-null, we already
have a set of page references, and we should just add the new page reference to the set. Here
is a subroutine that does this:
/**
* Add a page reference to the index.
*/
void addReference(String term, int pageNum) {
TreeSet<Integer> references; // The set of page references that we
// have so far for the term.
references = index.get(term);
if (references == null){
// This is the first reference that we have
// found for the term. Make a new set containing
// the page number and add it to the index, with
// the term as the key.
TreeSet<Integer> firstRef = new TreeSet<>();
firstRef.add( pageNum ); // pageNum is "autoboxed" to give an Integer!
index.put(term,firstRef);
}
else {
// references is the set of page references
// that we have found previously for the term.
// Add the new page number to that set. This
// set is already associated to term in the index.
references.add( pageNum );
}
}
The only other thing we need to do with the index is print it out. We want to iterate
through the index and print out each term, together with the set of page references for that
term. We could use an Iterator to iterate through the index, but it’s much easier to do it with
a for-each loop. The loop will iterate through the entry set of the map (see Subsection 10.3.2).
Each “entry” is a key/value pair from the map; the key is a term and the value is the associated
set of page references. Inside the for-each loop, we will have to print out a set of Integers, which
can also be done with a for-each loop. So, here we have an example of nested for-each loops.
(You might try to do the same thing entirely with iterators; doing so should give you some
appreciation for the for-each loop!) Here is a subroutine that will print the index:
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 539
/**
* Print each entry in the index.
*/
void printIndex() {
for ( Map.Entry<String,TreeSet<Integer>> entry : index.entrySet() ) {
String term = entry.getKey();
TreeSet<Integer> pageSet = entry.getValue();
System.out.print( term + ": " );
for ( int page : pageSet ) {
System.out.print( page + " " );
}
System.out.println();
}
}
The hardest thing here is the name of the type Map.Entry<String,TreeSet<Integer>>!
Remember that the entries in a map of type Map<K,V> have type Map.Entry<K,V>, so the type
parameters in Map.Entry<String,TreeSet<Integer>> are simply copied from the declaration
of index. Another thing to note is that I used a loop control variable, page, of type int to
iterate through the elements of pageSet, which is of type TreeSet<Integer>. You might have
expected page to be of type Integer, not int, and in fact Integer would have worked just as well
here. However, int does work, because of automatic type conversion: It’s legal to assign a value
of type Integer to a variable of type int. (To be honest, I was sort of surprised that this worked
when I first tried it!)
This is not a lot of code, considering the complexity of the operations. I have not written
a complete indexing program, but Exercise 10.6 presents a problem that is almost identical to
the indexing problem.
(By the way, the printIndex() method could have used var to declare all of its local
variables. This would have avoided the complex type names, but you would still need to be
aware of the types, since you have to know what methods, such as entry.getKey(), can be
used with the variables.)
∗ ∗ ∗
By the way, in this example, I would prefer to print each list of page references with the
integers separated by commas. In the printIndex() method given above, they are separated
by spaces. There is an extra space after the last page reference in the list, but it does no harm
since it’s invisible in the printout. An extra comma at the end of the list would be annoying.
The lists should be in a form such as “17,42,105” and not “17,42,105,”. The problem is, how
to leave that last comma out. Unfortunately, this is not so easy to do with a for-each loop. It
might be fun to look at a few ways to solve this problem. One alternative is to use an iterator:
Iterator<Integer> iter = pageSet.iterator();
int firstPage = iter.next(); // In this program, we know the set has
// at least one element.
System.out.print(firstPage);
while ( iter.hasNext() ) {
int nextPage = iter.next();
System.out.print("," + nextPage);
}
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 540
Another possibility is to use the fact that the TreeSet class defines a method first() that
returns the first item in the set, that is, the one that is smallest in terms of the ordering that
is used to compare items in the set. (It also defines the method last().) We can solve our
problem using this method and a for-each loop:
int firstPage = pageSet.first(); // Find out the first page number in the set.
for ( int page : pageSet ) {
if ( page != firstPage )
System.out.print(","); // Output comma only if this is not the first page.
System.out.print(page);
}
Finally, here is an elegant solution using a subset view of the tree. (See Subsection 10.3.2.)
Actually, this solution might be a bit extreme:
int firstPage = pageSet.first(); // Get first item, which we know exists.
System.out.print(firstPage); // Print first item, with no comma.
for ( int page : pageSet.tailSet( firstPage+1 ) ) // Process remaining items.
System.out.print( "," + page );
This does work. However, there one technicality. Suppose, for example, that
the indexing program calls addReference("aardvark",56) and that it later calls
addReference("Aardvark",102). The words “aardvark” and “Aardvark” differ only in that
one of them begins with an upper case letter; when converted to lower case, they are the same.
When we insert them into the index, do they count as two different terms or as one term? The
answer depends on the way that a TreeMap tests objects for equality. In fact, TreeMaps and
TreeSets always use a Comparator object or a compareTo method to test for equality. They do
not use the equals() method for this purpose. The Comparator that is used for the TreeMap in
this example returns the value zero when it is used to compare “aardvark” and “Aardvark”, so
the TreeMap considers them to be the same. Page references to “aardvark” and “Aardvark” are
combined into a single list, and when the index is printed it will contain only the first version
of the word that was encountered by the program. This is probably acceptable behavior in this
example. If not, some other technique must be used to sort the terms into alphabetical order.
object already exists for that word, and if it does, we need to find that object so that we can
increment its counter. A Map can be used to implement these operations. Given a word, we
want to look up a WordData object in the Map. This means that the word is the key, and
the WordData object is the value. (It might seem strange that the key is also one of the
instance variables in the value object, but in fact this is a very common situation: The value
object contains all the information about some entity, and the key is one of those pieces of
information; the partial information in the key is used to retrieve the full information in the
value object.) After reading the file, we want to output the words in alphabetical order, so we
should use a TreeMap rather than a HashMap. This program converts all words to lower case
so that the default ordering on Strings will put the words in alphabetical order. The data is
stored in a variable named words of type TreeMap<String,WordData>. The variable is declared
and the map object is created with the statement:
TreeMap<String,WordData> words = new TreeMap<>();
When the program reads a word from a file, it calls words.get(word) to find out if that
word is already in the map. If the return value is null, then this is the first time the word
has been encountered, so a new WordData object is created and inserted into the map with the
command words.put(word, new WordData(word)). If words.get(word) is not null, then
its value is the WordData object for this word, and the program only has to increment the
counter in that object. The program uses a method readNextWord(), which was given in
Exercise 7.6, to read one word from the file. This method returns null when the end of the file
is encountered. Here is the complete code segment that reads the file and collects the data:
String word = readNextWord();
while (word != null) {
word = word.toLowerCase(); // convert word to lower case
WordData data = words.get(word);
if (data == null)
words.put( word, new WordData(word) );
else
data.count++;
word = readNextWord();
}
After reading the words and printing them out in alphabetical order, the program has
to sort the words by frequency and print them again. To do the sorting using a generic
algorithm, we can copy the WordData objects into a list and then use the generic method
Collections.sort(list,comparator), which specifies a comparator as its second parameter.
Since we want to sort the data into decreasing order by count, we want a comparator for two
WordData values a and b that puts a before b if a.count > b.count. You should check that
the following lambda expression defines a comparator that will work here:
(a,b) -> b.count - a.count
The WordData objects that we need are the values in the map, words. Recall that
words.values() returns a Collection that contains all the values from the map. The constructor
for the ArrayList class lets you specify a collection to be copied into the list when it is created.
So, we can use the following commands to create a list of type ArrayList<WordData> containing
the word data and then sort that list according to frequency:
ArrayList<WordData> wordsByFrequency = new ArrayList<>( words.values() );
Collections.sort( wordsByFrequency, (a,b) -> b.count - a.count );
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 543
You should notice that these two lines replace a lot of code! It requires some practice to think
in terms of generic data structures and algorithms, but the payoff is significant in terms of saved
time and effort.
The only remaining problem is to print the data. We have to print the data from all the
WordData objects twice, first in alphabetical order and then sorted according to frequency
count. The data is in alphabetical order in the TreeMap, or more precisely, in the values of
the TreeMap. We can use a for-each loop to print the data in the collection words.values(),
and the words will appear in alphabetical order. Another for-each loop can be used to print
the data in the list wordsByFrequency, and the words will be printed in order of decreasing
frequency. Here is the code that does it:
TextIO.putln("List of words in alphabetical order"
+ " (with counts in parentheses):\n");
for ( WordData data : words.values() )
TextIO.putln(" " + data.word + " (" + data.count + ")");
TextIO.putln("\n\nList of words by frequency of occurrence:\n");
for ( WordData data : wordsByFrequency )
TextIO.putln(" " + data.word + " (" + data.count + ")");
You can find the complete word-counting program in the file WordCount.java. Note that for
reading and writing files, it uses the file I/O capabilities of TextIO.java, which were discussed
in Subsection 2.4.4.
By the way, if you run the WordCount program on a reasonably large file and take a look
at the output, it will illustrate something about the Collections.sort() method. The second
list of words in the output is ordered by frequency, but if you look at a group of words that all
have the same frequency, you will see that the words in that group are in alphabetical order.
The method Collections.sort() was applied to sort the words by frequency, but before it was
applied, the words were already in alphabetical order. When Collections.sort() rearranged
the words, it did not change the ordering of words that have the same frequency, so they were
still in alphabetical order within the group of words with that frequency. This is because the
algorithm used by Collections.sort() is a stable sorting algorithm. A sorting algorithm is
said to be stable if it satisfies the following condition: When the algorithm is used to sort a list
according to some property of the items in the list, then the sort does not change the relative
order of items that have the same value of that property. That is, if item B comes after item A
in the list before the sort, and if both items have the same value for the property that is being
used as the basis for sorting, then item B will still come after item A after the sorting has
been done. Neither SelectionSort nor QuickSort are stable sorting algorithms. Insertion sort is
stable, but is not very fast. Merge sort, the sorting algorithm used by Collections.sort(),
is both stable and fast.
I hope that the programming examples in this section have convinced you of the usefulness
of the Java Collection Framework!
Not every programmer needs to write reusable software libraries, but every programmer should
know at least a little about how to do it. In fact, just to read the Javadoc documentation for
Java’s standard generic classes, you need to know some of the syntax that is introduced in this
section.
I will not cover every detail of generic programming in Java in this section, but the material
presented here should be sufficient to cover the most common cases.
Note that within the class, the type parameter T is used just like any regular type name.
It’s used to declare the return type for dequeue, as the type of the formal parameter item in
enqueue, and even as the actual type parameter in LinkedList<T>. Given this class definition,
we can use parameterized types such as Queue<String> and Queue<Integer> and Queue<Color>.
That is, the Queue class is used in exactly the same way as built-in generic classes like LinkedList
and HashSet.
Note that you don’t have to use “T” as the name of the type parameter in the definition of
the generic class. Type parameters are like formal parameters in subroutines. You can make up
any name you like in the definition of the class. The name in the definition will be replaced by
an actual type name when the class is used to declare variables or create objects. If you prefer
to use a more meaningful name for the type parameter, you might define the Queue class as:
class Queue<ItemType> {
private LinkedList<ItemType> items = new LinkedList<>();
public void enqueue(ItemType item) {
items.addLast(item);
}
public ItemType dequeue() {
return items.removeFirst();
}
public boolean isEmpty() {
return (items.size() == 0);
}
}
Changing the name from “T” to “ItemType” has absolutely no effect on the meaning of the
class definition or on the way that Queue is used.
Generic interfaces can be defined in a similar way. It’s also easy to define generic classes
and interfaces that have two or more type parameters, as is done with the standard interface
Map<K,V>. A typical example is the definition of a “Pair” that contains two objects, possibly
of different types. A simple version of such a class can be defined as:
public class Pair<T,S> {
public T first;
public S second;
public Pair( T a, S b ) { // Constructor.
first = a;
second = b;
}
}
This class can be used to declare variables and create objects such as:
Pair<String,Color> colorName = new Pair<>("Red", Color.RED);
Pair<Double,Double> coordinates = new Pair<>(17.3,42.8);
Note that in the definition of the constructor in this class, the name “Pair” does not have type
parameters. You might have expected “Pair<T,S>”. However, the name of the class is “Pair”,
not “Pair<T,S>”, and within the definition of the class, “T” and “S” are used as if they are the
names of specific, actual types. Note in any case that type parameters are never added to the
names of methods or constructors, only to the names of classes and interfaces.
Record classes can also be generic. For example, a generic record class version of Pair could
be defined simply as
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 546
The “<T>” marks the method as being generic and specifies the name of the type parameter
that will be used in the definition. Of course, the name of the type parameter doesn’t have to
be “T”; it can be anything. (The “<T>” looks a little strange in that position, I know, but it
had to go somewhere and that’s just where the designers of Java decided to put it.)
Given the generic method definition, we can apply it to objects of any type. If wordList is
a variable of type String[ ] and word is a variable of type String, then
int ct = countOccurrences( wordList, word );
will count the number of times that word occurs in wordList. If palette is a variable of type
Color[ ] and color is a variable of type Color, then
int ct = countOccurrences( palette, color );
will count the number of times that color occurs in palette. If numbers is a variable of type
Integer[ ], then
int ct = countOccurrences( numbers, 17 );
will count the number of times that 17 occurs in numbers. This last example uses autoboxing;
the 17 is automatically converted to a value of type Integer. Note that, since generic
programming in Java applies only to objects, we cannot use countOccurrences to count
the number of occurrences of 17 in an array of type int[ ].
A generic method can have one or more type parameters, such as the “T” in
countOccurrences. Note that when a generic method is used, as in the function call
“countOccurrences(wordlist, word)”, there is no explicit mention of the type that is sub-
stituted for the type parameter. The compiler deduces the type from the types of the actual
parameters in the method call. Since wordlist is of type String[ ], the compiler can tell that
in “countOccurrences(wordlist, word)”, the type that replaces T is String. This contrasts
with the use of generic classes, as in “Queue<String>”, where the type parameter is specified
explicitly.
The countOccurrences method operates on an array. We could also write a similar method
to count occurrences of an object in any collection:
public static <T> int countOccurrences(Collection<T> collection, T itemToCount) {
int count = 0;
if (itemToCount == null) {
for ( T item : collection )
if (item == null)
count++;
}
else {
for ( T item : collection )
if (itemToCount.equals(item))
count++;
}
return count;
}
Since Collection<T> is itself a generic type, this method is very general. It can operate on
an ArrayList of Integers, a TreeSet of Strings, a LinkedList of JButtons, . . . .
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 548
ensures that the addAll method of the queue can be applied to collections of Rects and Ovals
as well as to collections of Shapes.
The for-each loop in the definition of addAll iterates through the collection using a
variable, item, of type T. Now, collection can be of type Collection<S>, where S is a subclass
of T. Since item is of type T, not S, do we have a problem here? No, no problem. As long as
S is a subclass of T, a value of type S can be assigned to a variable of type T. The restriction
on the wildcard type makes everything work nicely.
The addAll method adds all the items from a collection to the queue. Suppose that we
wanted to do the opposite: Add all the items that are currently in the queue to a given collection.
An instance method defined as
public void addAllTo(Collection<T> collection)
would only work for collections whose base type is exactly the same as T. This is too restrictive.
We need some sort of wildcard. However, “? extends T” won’t work. Suppose we try it:
public void addAllTo(Collection<? extends T> collection) {
// Remove all items currently on the queue and add them to collection
while ( ! isEmpty() ) {
T item = dequeue(); // Remove an item from the queue.
collection.add( item ); // Add it to the collection. ILLEGAL!!
}
}
The problem is that we can’t add an item of type T to a collection that might only be able
to hold items belonging to some subclass, S, of T. The containment is going in the wrong
direction: An item of type T is not necessarily of type S. For example, if we have a queue of
type Queue<Shape>, it doesn’t make sense to add items from the queue to a collection of type
Collection<Rect>, since not every Shape is a Rect. On the other hand, if we have a Queue<Rect>,
it would make sense to add items from that queue to a Collection<Shape> or indeed to any
collection Collection<S> where S is a superclass of Rect.
To express this type of relationship, we need a new kind of type wildcard: “? super T”.
This wildcard means, roughly, “either T itself or any class that is a superclass of T.” For
example, Collection<? super Rect> would match the types Collection<Shape>, ArrayList<Object>,
and Set<Rect>. This is what we need for our addAllTo method. With this change, our complete
generic queue class becomes:
class Queue<T> {
private LinkedList<T> items = new LinkedList<T>();
public void enqueue(T item) {
items.addLast(item);
}
public T dequeue() {
return items.removeFirst();
}
public boolean isEmpty() {
return (items.size() == 0);
}
public void addAll(Collection<? extends T> collection) {
// Add all the items from the collection to the end of the queue
for ( T item : collection )
enqueue(item);
}
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 551
∗ ∗ ∗
Wildcard types are used only as type parameters in parameterized types, such as
Collection<? extends Runnable>. The place where a wildcard type is most likely to occur, by far,
is in a formal parameter list, where the wildcard type is used in the declaration of the type of
a formal parameter. However, they can also be used in a few other places. For example, they
can be used in the type specification in a variable declaration statement.
One final remark: The wildcard type “<?>” is equivalent to “<? extends Object>”. That
is, it matches any possible type. For example, the removeAll() method in the generic interface
Collection<T> is declared as
public boolean removeAll( Collection<?> c ) { ...
This just means that the removeAll method can be applied to any collection of any type of
object.
The problem is that the setEnabled() method is defined in a JComponent object, but not for
objects of arbitrary type. It wouldn’t make sense to allow types such as ControlGroup<String>
or ControlGroup<Integer>, since Strings and Integers don’t have setEnabled() methods. We
need some way to restrict the type parameter T in ControlGroup<T> so that only JComponent
and subclasses of JComponent are allowed as actual type parameters. We can do this by using
the bounded type “T extends JComponent” instead of a plain “T” in the definition of the
class:
public class ControlGroup<T extends JComponent> {
private ArrayList<T> components; // For storing the components in this group.
public void disableAll( ) {
for ( JComponent c : components ) {
if (c != null)
c.setEnabled(false);
}
}
public void enableAll( ) {
for ( JComponent c : components ) {
if (c != null)
c.setEnabled(true);
}
}
public void add( T c ) { // Add a value c, of type T, to the group.
components.add(c);
}
.
. // Additional methods and constructors.
.
}
The restriction “extends JComponent” on T makes it illegal to create the parameterized
types ControlGroup<String> and ControlGroup<Integer>, since the actual type parameter that
replaces “T” is required to be either JComponent itself or a subclass of JComponent. With
this restriction, we know—and, more important, the compiler knows—that the objects in the
group are of type JComponent, so that the operation c.setEnabled() is defined for any c in
the group.
In general, a bounded type parameter “T extends SomeType” means roughly “a type, T,
that is either equal to SomeType or is a subclass of SomeType; the upshot is that any object of
type T is also of type SomeType, and any operation that is defined for objects of type SomeType
is defined for objects of type T. The type SomeType doesn’t have to be the name of a class. It
can be any name that represents an actual object type. For example, it can be an interface
or even a parameterized type.
Bounded types and wildcard types are clearly related. They are, however, used in very
different ways. A bounded type can be used only as a formal type parameter in the definition
of a generic method, class, or interface. A wildcard type is used most often to declare the type
of a formal parameter in a method and cannot be used as a formal type parameter. One other
difference, by the way, is that, in contrast to wildcard types, bounded type parameters can only
use “extends”, never “super”.
Bounded type parameters can be used when declaring generic methods. For example, as an
alternative to the generic ControlGroup class, one could write a free-standing generic static
method that can disable any collection of JComponents as follows:
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 553
We immediately run into a problem, because we have no name for the unknown type represented
by the wildcard. We need a name for that type because the type of newItem and of iter should
be the same as the type of the items in the list. The problem is solved if we write a generic
method with a bounded type parameter, since then we have a name for the unknown type, and
we can write a valid generic method:
static <T extends Comparable> void sortedInsert(List<T> sortedList, T newItem) {
ListIterator<T> iter = sortedList.listIterator();
while (iter.hasNext()) {
T item = iter.next();
if (newItem.compareTo(item) <= 0) {
iter.previous();
break;
}
}
iter.add(newItem);
}
There is still one technicality to cover in this example. Comparable is itself a parameterized
type, but I have used it here without a type parameter. This is legal but the compiler might give
you a warning about using a “raw type.” In fact, the objects in the list should implement the
parameterized interface Comparable<T>, since they are being compared to items of type T. This
just means that instead of using Comparable as the type bound, we should use Comparable<T>:
static <T extends Comparable<T>> void sortedInsert(List<T> sortedList, ...
large ArrayList<String>, where none of the elements are null, and you want to know the average
length of the strings in the list. This can be done easily with a for-each loop:
int lengthSum = 0;
for ( String str : stringList ) {
lengthSum = lengthSum + str.length();
}
double average = (double)lengthSum / stringList.size();
To do the same thing with the stream API, you could use:
int lengthSum = stringList.parallelStream()
.mapToInt( str -> str.length() )
.sum();
double average = (double)lengthSum / stringList.size();
In this version, stringList.parallelStream() creates a stream consisting of all the elements
of the list. The fact that it is a “parallelStream” makes it possible to parallelize the computation.
The method mapToInt() applies a map operation to the stream of strings. That is, it takes
each string from the stream and applies a function to it; in this case, the function computes the
length of the string, giving a value of type int. The result of the map operation is to produce
a new stream, this time a stream of integers, consisting of all the outputs from the function.
The final operation, sum(), adds up all the numbers in the stream of integers and returns the
result.
The net result is that we’ve added up the lengths of all the strings in the list. Because of
the potential for parallelization, the stream version might be substantially faster than the for
loop version. In practice, there is significant overhead involved in setting up and manipulating
streams, so the list would have to be fairly large before you would see any speedup. In fact, for
small lists, the stream version will almost certainly take longer than the for loop.
The stream API is complex, and I can only give a basic introduction to it here—but hopefully
enough to convey some of its spirit.
maps strings to ints. However, if you want to read the API documentation, you will have to
deal with parameter types similar to ToIntFunction.
The package java.util.function contains a large number of generic functional interfaces.
Many of them, like ToIntFunction, are parameterized types, and they are all generic in that they
represent very generic functions, with no set meaning. For example, the functional interface
DoubleUnaryOperator represents the general idea of a function from double to double. This
interface is essentially the same as my example FunctionR2R from Subsection 4.5.2 (except for
the name of the function that it defines, which is often irrelevant).
The interfaces in java.util.function are used to specify parameter types for many stream
operators as well as for other built-in functions in the Java API, and you can certainly use them
to specify parameter types for your own subroutines as well. I will discuss some of them here.
Most of the others are variations on the ones that I cover.
The general term predicate refers to a function whose return type is boolean. The
functional interface Predicate<T> defines a boolean-valued function test(t) with a parameter
of type T. This interface is used, for example, as the parameter type for the method
removeIf(p), which is defined for any Collection. For example, if strList is of type
LinkedList<String>, then you can remove all null values from the list simply by saying
strList.removeIf( s -> (s == null) );
The parameter is a Predicate<String> that tests whether its input, s, is null. The removeIf()
method removes all elements from the list for which the value of the predicate is true.
A predicate for testing int values could be represented by the type Predicate<Integer>, but
that introduces the overhead of autoboxing every int in a wrapper of type Integer. To avoid that
overhead, the package java.util.function has the functional interface IntPredicate, which
defines the boolean-valued function test(n), where n is of type int. Similarly, it defines
DoublePredicate and LongPredicate. This is typical of how the stream API deals with primitive
types. For example, it defines IntStream to represent a stream of ints as a more efficient
alternative to Stream<Integer>.
The functional interface Supplier<T> defines a function, get() with no parameters and a
return type of T. It represents a source of values of type T. There is a companion interface
Consumer<T> that defines the void function accept(t) with a parameter of type T. There are
also specialized versions for primitive types, including IntSupplier, IntConsumer, DoubleSupplier
and DoubleConsumer. I will give examples of using suppliers and consumers below.
Function<T,R> represents functions from values of type T to values of type R. This functional
interface defines the function apply(t), where t is of type T and the return type is R. The
interface UnaryOperator<T> is essentially Function<T,T>; that is, it represents a function whose
input and output types are the same. Note that DoubleUnaryOperator is a specialized version
of UnaryOperator<Double>, and of course there is also IntUnaryOperator.
Finally, I will mention BinaryOperator<T> and its specializations such as IntBinaryOperator.
The interface BinaryOperator<T> defines the function apply(t1,t2) where t1 and t2 are both
of type T and the return type is also T. Binary operators include things like addition of numbers
or concatenation of strings.
There are two basic types of streams, sequential streams and parallel streams. The
difference is that operations on parallel streams can, potentially, be parallelized while the values
in a sequential stream are always processed sequentially, in a single process, as they would be
by a for loop. (It might not be clear why sequential streams should exist, but some operations
cannot be safely parallelized.) It is possible to convert a stream from one type to the other
type. If stream is a Stream, then stream.parallel() represents the same stream of values, but
converted to a parallel stream (if it was not already parallel). Similarly, stream.sequential()
is a sequential stream with the same values as stream.
We have already seen that if c is any Collection, then c.parallelStream() is a stream
whose values are the values from the collection. As you might suspect, it is a parallel stream.
The method c.stream() creates a sequential stream of the same values. This works for
any collection, including lists and sets. You could also get the parallel stream by calling
c.stream().parallel().
An array does not have a stream() method, but you can create a stream from an array
using a static method in class Arrays from package java.util. If A is an array, then
Arrays.stream(A)
is a sequential stream containing the values from the array. (To get a parallel stream, use
Arrays.stream(A).parallel().) This works for arrays of objects and for arrays of the
primitive types int, double, and long. If A is of type T[ ], where T is an object type, then
the stream is of type Stream<T>. If A is an array of int, the result is an IntStream, and similarly
for double and long.
Suppose supplier is of type Supplier<T>. It should be possible to create a stream of values
of type T by calling supplier.get() over and over. That stream can in fact be created using
Stream.generate( supplier )
The stream is sequential and is effectively infinite. That is, it will continue to produce values
forever or until trying to do so produces an error. Similarly, IntStream.generate(s) will
create the stream of int values from an IntSupplier, and DoubleStream.generate(s) creates a
stream of doubles from a DoubleSupplier. For example,
DoubleStream.generate( () -> Math.random() )
creates an infinite stream of random numbers. In fact, you can get a similar stream of random
values from a variable, rand, of type Random (see Subsection 5.3.1): rand.doubles() is an
infinite stream of random numbers in the range 0 to 1. If you only want a finite number of
random numbers, use rand.doubles(count). The Random class has other methods for creating
streams of random doubles and ints. You will find other methods that create streams in various
standard classes.
The IntStream interface defines a method for creating a stream containing a given range of
integer values. The stream
IntStream.range( start, end )
is a sequential stream containing the values start, start+1, . . . , end-1. Note that end is not
included.
Some additional methods for making streams have been introduced in newer versions of
Java. For example, in Java 11, for a Scanner, input, the method input.tokens() creates a
stream consisting of all the strings that would be returned by calling input.next() over and
over. And for a String, str, that contains multiple lines of text, Java 11 added str.lines()
that creates a stream consisting of the lines from the string.
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 558
stringList.stream()
.filter( s -> (s.length() >= 5) )
.sorted()
.forEachOrdered( s -> System.out.println(s) )
Some terminal operations output a single value. For example, S.count() returns the
number of values in the stream S. And IntStreams, LongStreams, and DoubleStreams have the
terminal operation sum(), to compute the sum of all the values in the stream. Suppose, for
example, that you would like to test the random number generator by generating 10000 random
numbers and counting how many of them are less than 0.5:
long half = DoubleStream.generate( Math::random )
.limit(10000)
.filter( x -> (x < 0.5) )
.count();
Note that count() returns a long rather than an int. Also note that I’ve used the method refer-
ence Math::random here instead of the equivalent lambda expression “() -> Math.random()”
(see Subsection 4.5.4). If you are having trouble reading things like this, keep in mind that the
pattern is: Create a stream, apply some intermediate operations, apply a terminal operation.
Here, an infinite stream of random numbers is generated by calling Math.random() over and
over. The operation limit(10000) truncates that stream to 10000 values, so that in fact only
10000 values are generated. The filter() operation only lets through numbers x such that
x < 0.5 is true. And finally, count() returns the number of items in the resulting stream.
A Stream<T> also has terminal operations min(c) and max(c) to return the smallest and
largest values in the stream. The parameter, c, is of type Comparator<T>; it is used for
comparing the values. However, the return type of min() and max() is a little peculiar: The
return type is Optional<T>, which represents a value of type T that might or might not exist.
The problem is that an empty stream does not have a largest or smallest value, so the minimum
and maximum of an empty stream do not exist. An Optional has a get() method that returns
the value of the Optional, if there is one; it will throw an exception if the Optional is empty. For
example, if words is a Collection<String>, you can get the longest string in the collection with
String longest = words.parallelStream()
.max( (s1,s2) -> s1.length() - s2.length() )
.get();
But this will throw an exception if the collection is empty. (The boolean-valued method
isPresent() in an Optional can be used to test whether the value exists.)
Similarly, IntStream, LongStream, and DoubleStream provide terminal operations min() and
max() that return values of type OptionalInt, OptionalLong, and OptionalDouble. Each of these
classes also has an average() method that returns an OptionalDouble.
The terminal operators allMatch(p) and anyMatch(p) take a predicate as parameter and
compute a boolean value. The value of allMatch(p) is true if the predicate, p, is true for every
value in the stream to which it is applied. The value of anyMatch(p) is true if there is at least
one value in the stream for which p is true. Note that anyMatch() will stop processing, and
will return true as its output, if it finds a value that satisfies the predicate. And allMatch()
will stop processing if it finds a value that does not match the predicate.
Many terminal operations that compute a single value can be expressed in terms of a more
general operation, reduce. A reduce operation combines the values from a stream using a
BinaryOperator. For example, a sum is computed by a reduce operation in which the binary
operation is addition. The binary operator should be associative, which means that the order in
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 560
which the operator is applied doesn’t matter. There is no built-in terminal operator to compute
the product of the values in a stream, but we can do that directly with reduce. Suppose, for
example, that A is an array of double, and we want the product of all the non-zero elements
in A:
double multiply = Arrays.stream(A).filter( x -> (x != 0) )
.reduce( 1, (x,y) -> x*y );
The binary operator here maps a pair of numbers (x,y) to their product x*y. The first
parameter to reduce() is an “identity” for the binary operation. That is, it is a value such
that 1*x = x for any x. The maximum of a stream of double could be computed with reduce()
by using reduce(Double.NEGATIVE INFINITY, Math::max).
The last major terminal operation is collect(c), a very general operation which collects
all of the values in the stream into a data structure or a single summary result of some type.
The parameter, c is something called a collector. The collector will ordinarily be given by one
of the static functions in the Collectors class. This can get very complicated, and I will only
give a couple of examples. The function Collectors.toList() returns a Collector that can be
used with collect() to put all of the values from the stream into a List. For example, suppose
that A is an array of non-null Strings, and we want a list of all the strings in A that begin with
the substring “Fred”:
List<String> freds = Arrays.stream(A)
.filter( s -> s.startsWith("Fred") )
.collect( Collectors.toList() );
That’s actually pretty easy! Even more useful are collectors that group the items from a stream
according to some criterion. The collector Collectors.groupingBy(f) takes a parameter, f,
whose type is specified by the functional interface Function<T,S>, representing a function from
values of type T to values of type S. When used with collect(), Collectors.groupingBy(f)
operates on a stream of type Stream<T>, and it separates the items in the stream into groups,
based on the value of the function f when applied to the items. That is, all the items, x, in a
given group have the same value for f(x). The result is a Map<S,List<T>>. In this map, a key
is one of the function values, f(x), and the associated value for that key is a list containing all
the items from the stream to which f assigns that function value.
An example will clarify things. Suppose we have an array of people, where each person has
a first name and a last name. And suppose that we want to put the people into groups, where
each group consists of all the people with a given last name. A person can be represented by
an object of type Person that contains instance variables named firstname and lastname. Let’s
say that population is a variable of type Person[ ]. Then Arrays.stream(population) is a
stream of Persons, and we can group the people in the stream by last name with the following
code:
Map<String, List<Person>> families;
families = Arrays.stream(population)
.collect(Collectors.groupingBy( person -> person.lastname ));
Here, the lambda expression, person -> person.lastname, defines the grouping function. The
function takes a Person as input and outputs a String giving that person’s last name. In the
resulting Map, families, a key is one of the last names from the Persons in the array, and the
value associated with that last name is a List containing all the Persons with that last name.
We could print out the groups as follows:
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 561
10.6.4 An Experiment
Most of the examples of using streams that I have given so far are not very practical. In most
cases, a simple for loop would have been just as easy to write and probably more efficient. That’s
especially true since I’ve mostly used sequential streams, and most of the examples cannot
be efficiently parallelized. (A notable exception is the reduce operation, which is important
precisely because it parallelizes well.) Let’s look at an example where the stream API is applied
to a long computation that might get some real speedup with parallelization. The problem is to
compute a Riemann sum. This is something from Calculus, but you don’t need to understand
anything at all about what it means. Here is a traditional method for computing the desired
sum:
/**
* Use a basic for loop to compute a Riemann sum.
* @param f The function that is to be summed.
* @param a The left endpoint of the interval over which f is summed.
* @param b The right endpoint.
* @param n The number of subdivisions of the interval.
* @return The value computed for the Riemann sum.
*/
private static double riemannSumWithForLoop(
DoubleUnaryOperator f, double a, double b, int n) {
double sum = 0;
double dx = (b - a) / n;
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
sum = sum + f.applyAsDouble(a + i*dx);
}
return sum * dx;
}
The type for the first parameter is a functional interface, so we could call this method, for
example, with
reimannSumWithForLoop( x -> Math.sin(x), 0, Math.PI, 10000 )
How can we apply the stream API to this problem? To imitate the for loop, we can start by
generating the integers from 0 to n as a stream, using IntStream.range(0,n). This gives a
sequential stream. To enable parallelism, we have to convert it to a parallel stream by applying
the .parallel() operation. To compute the values that we want to sum up, we can apply a
map operation that maps the stream of ints to a stream of doubles by mapping the integer i
to f.applyAsDouble(a+i*dx). Finally, we can apply sum() as the terminal operation. Here is
a version of the Riemann sum method that uses a parallel stream:
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 562
1. Rewrite the PhoneDirectory class from Subsection 7.5.2 so that it uses a TreeMap to store (solution)
directory entries, instead of an array. (Doing this was suggested in Subsection 10.3.1.)
You should also write a short program to test the class.
2. In mathematics, several operations are defined on sets. The union of two sets A and B is (solution)
a set that contains all the elements that are in A together with all the elements that are
in B. The intersection of A and B is the set that contains elements that are in both A
and B. The difference of A and B is the set that contains all the elements of A except
for those elements that are also in B.
Suppose that A and B are variables of type Set in Java. The mathematical operations
on A and B can be computed using methods from the Set interface. In particular:
A.addAll(B) computes the union of A and B; A.retainAll(B) computes the intersection
of A and B; and A.removeAll(B) computes the difference of A and B. (These operations
change the contents of the set A, while the mathematical operations create a new set
without changing A, but that difference is not relevant to this exercise.)
For this exercise, you should write a program that can be used as a “set calculator” for
simple operations on sets of non-negative integers. (Negative integers are not allowed.) For
input and output, a set of such integers will be written as a list of integers, separated by
commas and, optionally, spaces and enclosed in square brackets. For example: [1,2,3] or
[17, 42, 9, 53, 108]. The characters +, *, and - will be used for the union, intersection,
and difference operations. The user of the program will type in lines of input containing
two sets, separated by an operator. The program should perform the operation and print
the resulting set. Here are some examples:
Input Output
------------------------- -------------------
[1, 2, 3] + [3, 5, 7] [1, 2, 3, 5, 7]
[10,9,8,7] * [2,4,6,8] [8]
[ 5, 10, 15, 20 ] - [ 0, 10, 20 ] [5, 15]
To represent sets of non-negative integers, use sets of type TreeSet<Integer>. Read the
user’s input, create two TreeSets, and use the appropriate TreeSet method to perform the
requested operation on the two sets. Your program should be able to read and process
any number of lines of input. If a line contains a syntax error, your program should not
crash. It should report the error and move on to the next line of input. (Note: To print
out a Set, A, of Integers, you can just say System.out.print(A). I’ve chosen the syntax
for sets to be the same as that used by the system for outputting a set.)
3. The fact that Java has a HashMap class means that no Java programmer has to write (solution)
an implementation of hash tables from scratch—unless, of course, that programmer is a
computer science student.
For this exercise, you should write a hash table in which both the keys and the values
are of type String. (This is not an exercise in generic programming; do not try to write a
generic class.) Write an implementation of hash tables from scratch. Define the following
methods: get(key), put(key,value), remove(key), containsKey(key), and size().
Remember that every object, obj, has a method obj.hashCode() that can be used for
computing a hash code for the object, so at least you don’t have to define your own hash
Exercises 564
function. Do not use any of Java’s built-in generic types; create your own linked lists
using nodes as covered in Subsection 9.2.2. However, you are not required to increase the
size of the table when it becomes too full.
You should also write a short program to test your solution.
4. A predicate is a boolean-valued function with one parameter. Java has the parameterized (solution)
functional interface Predicate<T>, from package java.util.function, to represent
predicates. The definition of Predicate<T> could be:
public interface Predicate<T> {
public boolean test( T obj );
}
The idea is that an object that implements this interface knows how to “test” objects
of type T in some way. Java already has some methods that use predicates, such as the
removeIf(p) method that is defined for any Collection. (See Subsection 10.6.1). However,
this exercise asks you to write a few similar methods yourself. Define a class that contains
the following generic static methods for working with predicate objects. The name of the
class should be Predicates, in analogy with the standard class Collections that provides
various static methods for working with collections. You should not use the stream API
for this exercise.
public static <T> void remove(Collection<T> coll, Predicate<T> pred)
// Remove every object, obj, from coll for which pred.test(obj)
// is true. (This does the same thing as coll.removeIf(pred).)
public static <T> void retain(Collection<T> coll, Predicate<T> pred)
// Remove every object, obj, from coll for which
// pred.test(obj) is false. (That is, retain the
// objects for which the predicate is true.)
public static <T> List<T> collect(Collection<T> coll, Predicate<T> pred)
// Return a List that contains all the objects, obj,
// from the collection, coll, such that pred.test(obj)
// is true.
public static <T> int find(ArrayList<T> list, Predicate<T> pred)
// Return the index of the first item in list
// for which the predicate is true, if any.
// If there is no such item, return -1.
5. This is a short exercise in using the stream API. Suppose that the class Score is defined (solution)
as
/**
* Data for one student about a score on a test.
*/
private record ScoreInfo(
String lastName,
String firstName,
int score
) { };
Exercises 565
defined here as a record class for convenience (see Section 7.4). And suppose that
scoreData is an array of ScoreInfos containing information about the scores of students
on a test. Use the stream API to do each of the following tasks:
• print the number of students (without using scoreData.length)
• print the average score for all of the students
• print the number of students who got an A (score greater than or equal to 90)
• use the collect() stream operation to create a List<String> that contains the names
of students whose score was less than 70; the names should be in the form first name
followed by last name
• print the names from the List that was generated in the previous task
• print out the students’ names and scores, ordered by last name
• print out the students’ names and scores, ordered by score
You can put all of the code in main() routine and include ScoreInfo as a nested class. Do
not use any for loops or other control structures. Do everything using the stream API.
For testing your code, you can use this array:
private static ScoreInfo[] scoreData = new ScoreInfo[] {
new ScoreInfo("Smith","John",70),
new ScoreInfo("Doe","Mary",85),
new ScoreInfo("Page","Alice",82),
new ScoreInfo("Cooper","Jill",97),
new ScoreInfo("Flintstone","Fred",66),
new ScoreInfo("Rubble","Barney",80),
new ScoreInfo("Smith","Judy",48),
new ScoreInfo("Dean","James",90),
new ScoreInfo("Russ","Joe",55),
new ScoreInfo("Wolfe","Bill",73),
new ScoreInfo("Dart","Mary",54),
new ScoreInfo("Rogers","Chris",78),
new ScoreInfo("Toole","Pat",51),
new ScoreInfo("Khan","Omar",93),
new ScoreInfo("Smith","Ann",95)
};
6. An example in Subsection 10.4.2 concerns the problem of making an index for a book. (solution)
A related problem is making a concordance for a document. A concordance lists every
word that occurs in the document, and for each word it gives the line number of every
line in the document where the word occurs. All the subroutines for creating an index
that were presented in Subsection 10.4.2 can also be used to create a concordance. The
only real difference is that the integers in a concordance are line numbers rather than page
numbers.
Write a program that can create a concordance. The document should be read from
an input file, and the concordance data should be written to an output file. You can use
the indexing subroutines from Subsection 10.4.2, modified to write the data to TextIO
instead of to System.out. (You will need to make these subroutines static.) The input
and output files should be selected by the user when the program is run. The sample
program WordCount.java, from Subsection 10.4.4, can be used as a model of how to use
files. That program also has a useful subroutine that reads one word from input.
Exercises 566
As you read the file, you want to take each word that you encounter and add it to the
concordance along with the current line number. Keeping track of the line numbers is one
of the trickiest parts of the problem. In an input file, the end of each line in the file is
marked by the newline character, ’\n’. Every time you encounter this character, you have
to add one to the line number. WordCount.java ignores ends of lines. Because you need
to find and count the end-of-line characters, your program cannot process the input file in
exactly the same way as does WordCount.java. Also, you will need to detect the end of
the file. The function TextIO.peek(), which is used to look ahead at the next character
in the input, returns the value TextIO.EOF at end-of-file, after all the characters in the
file have been read.
Because it is so common, don’t include the word “the” in your concordance. Also, do
not include words that have length less than 3.
7. The sample program SimpleInterpreter.java from Subsection 10.4.1 can carry out com- (solution)
mands of the form “let variable = expression” or “print expression”. That program can
handle expressions that contain variables, numbers, operators, and parentheses. Extend
the program so that it can also handle the standard mathematical functions sin, cos,
tan, abs, sqrt, and log. For example, the program should be able to evaluate an expres-
sion such as sin(3*x-7)+log(sqrt(y)), assuming that the variables x and y have been
given values. Note that the name of a function must be followed by an expression that is
enclosed in parentheses.
In the original program, a symbol table holds a value for each variable that has been
defined. In your program, you should add another type of symbol to the table to represent
standard functions. You can use the following nested enumerated type and class for this
purpose:
private enum Functions { SIN, COS, TAN, ABS, SQRT, LOG }
/**
* An object of this class represents one of the standard functions.
*/
private static class StandardFunction {
/**
* Tells which function this is.
*/
Functions functionCode;
/**
* Constructor creates an object to represent one of
* the standard functions
* @param code which function is represented.
*/
StandardFunction(Functions code) {
functionCode = code;
}
/**
* Finds the value of this function for the specified
* parameter value, x.
*/
double evaluate(double x) {
// (This uses the "switch expression" syntax)
Exercises 567
return switch(functionCode) {
case SIN -> Math.sin(x);
case COS -> Math.cos(x);
case TAN -> Math.tan(x);
case ABS -> Math.abs(x);
case SQRT -> Math.sqrt(x);
default -> Math.log(x);
};
}
} // end class StandardFunction
Add a symbol to the symbol table to represent each function. The key is the name
of the function and the value is an object of type StandardFunction that represents the
function. For example:
symbolTable.put("sin", new StandardFunction(Function.SIN));
In SimpleInterpreter.java, the symbol table is a map of type HashMap<String,Double>. It’s
not legal to use a StandardFunction as the value in such a map, so you will have to change
the type of the map. The map has to hold two different types of objects. The easy way
to make this possible is to create a map of type HashMap<String,Object>. (A better way
is to create a general type to represent objects that can be values in the symbol table,
and to define two subclasses of that class, one to represent variables and one to represent
standard functions, but for this exercise, you should do it the easy way.)
In your parser, when you encounter a word, you have to be able to tell whether it’s a
variable or a standard function. Look up the word in the symbol table. If the associated
object is non-null and is of type Double, then the word is a variable. If it is of type
StandardFunction, then the word is a function. Remember that you can test the type of
an object using the instanceof operator. For example: if (obj instanceof Double).
Quiz 568
Quiz on Chapter 10
(answers)
2. Why can’t you make an object of type LinkedList<int>? What should you do instead?
3. What is an iterator and why are iterators necessary for generic programming?
5. Interfaces such as List, Set, and Map define abstract data types. Explain what this means.
6. What is the fundamental property that distinguishes Sets from other types of Collections?
9. Modify the following Date class so that it implements the interface Comparable<Date>.
The ordering on objects of type Date should be the natural, chronological ordering.
class Date {
int month; // Month number in range 1 to 12.
int day; // Day number in range 1 to 31.
int year; // Year number.
Date(int m, int d, int y) {
month = m;
day = d;
year = y;
}
}
Also, rewrite the resulting Date class as a record class. (See Section 7.4.)
10. Suppose that syllabus is a variable of type TreeMap<Date,String>, where Date is the class
from the preceding exercise. Write a code segment that will write out the value string for
every key that is in the month of December, 2021.
11. Write a generic class Stack<T> that can be used to represent stacks of objects of type T.
The class should include methods push(), pop(), and isEmpty(). Inside the class, use
an ArrayList to hold the items on the stack.
12. Write a generic method, using a generic type parameter <T>, that replaces every occurrence
in an ArrayList<T> of a specified item with a specified replacement item. The list and the
two items are parameters to the method. Both items are of type T. Take into account
the fact that the item that is being replaced might be null. For a non-null item, use
equals() to do the comparison.
13. Suppose that words is an array of Strings. Explain what is done by the following code:
Quiz 569
long n = Arrays.stream(words)
.filter( w -> (w != null) )
.map( w -> w.toLowerCase() )
.distinct()
.count();
14. Use the stream API to print all the even integers from 2 to 20. Start with
IntStream.range and apply a filter operation.
15. Write a generic method countIf(c,t) with type parameter <T>, where the first parameter,
c, is of type Collection<T>, and the second parameter, p, is of type Predicate<T>. The
method should return the number of items in the collection for which the predicate is true.
Give two versions, one using a loop and the other using the stream API.
Chapter 11
Computer programs are only useful if they interact with the rest of the world in some
way. This interaction is referred to as input/output, or I/O (pronounced “eye-oh”). Up
until now, this book has concentrated on just one type of interaction: interaction with the
user, through either a graphical user interface or a command-line interface. But the user is
only one possible source of information and only one possible destination for information. We
have already encountered one other type of input/output, since TextIO can read data from files
and write data to files. However, Java has an input/output framework that provides much
more power and flexibility than does TextIO, and that covers other kinds of I/O in addition
to files. Most important, aside from files, is that it supports communication over network
connections. In Java, the most common type of input/output involving files and networks is
based on I/O streams, which are objects that support I/O commands that are similar to
those that you have already used. In fact, standard output (System.out) and standard input
(System.in) are examples of I/O streams. (Note that I/O streams are not streams in the sense
of the stream API that was covered in Section 10.6.)
Working with files and networks requires familiarity with exceptions, which were covered in
Section 8.3. Many of the subroutines that are used can throw checked exceptions, which require
mandatory exception handling. This generally means calling the subroutine in a try..catch
statement that can deal with the exception if one occurs. Effective network communication
also requires the use of threads, which will be covered in Chapter 12. We will look at the basic
networking API in this chapter, but we will return to the topic of threads and networking in
Section 12.4.
571
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 572
such as “files” and “channels” also exist, but in this section we will look only at streams. Every
stream represents either a source of input or a destination to which output can be sent.
rather than character streams. However, you should prefer Readers and Writers rather than
InputStreams and OutputStreams when working with character data, even when working with
the standard ASCII character set.
The standard I/O stream classes discussed in this section are defined in the package java.io,
along with several supporting classes. You must import the classes from this package if you
want to use them in your program. That means either importing individual classes or putting
the directive “import java.io.*;” at the beginning of your source file. I/O streams are used
for working with files and for doing communication over a network. They can also be used
for communication between two concurrently running threads, and there are stream classes for
reading and writing data stored in the computer’s memory.
(Note: The Java API provides additional support for I/O in the package java.nio and its
subpackages, but they are not covered in this textbook. In general, java.nio gives programmers
efficient access to more advanced I/O techniques.)
The beauty of the stream abstraction is that it is as easy to write data to a file or to send
data over a network as it is to print information on the screen.
∗ ∗ ∗
The basic I/O classes Reader, Writer, InputStream, and OutputStream provide only very
primitive I/O operations. For example, the InputStream class declares an abstract instance
method
public int read() throws IOException
for reading one byte of data, as a number in the range 0 to 255, from an input stream.
If the end of the input stream is encountered, the read() method will return the value -1
instead. If some error occurs during the input attempt, an exception of type IOException is
thrown. Since IOException is a checked exception, this means that you can’t use the read()
method except inside a try statement or in a subroutine that is itself declared with a “throws
IOException” clause. (Checked exceptions and mandatory exception handling were covered in
Subsection 8.3.3.)
The InputStream class also defines methods for reading multiple bytes of data in one step into
an array of bytes, which can be a lot more efficient that reading individual bytes. However,
InputStream provides no convenient methods for reading other types of data, such as int or
double, from a stream. This is not a problem because you will rarely use an object of type
InputStream itself. Instead, you’ll use subclasses of InputStream that add more convenient input
methods to InputStream’s rather primitive capabilities. Similarly, the OutputStream class defines
a primitive output method for writing one byte of data to an output stream. The method is
defined as:
public void write(int b) throws IOException
The parameter is of type int rather than byte, but the parameter value is type-cast to type
byte before it is written; this effectively discards all but the eight low order bits of b. Again,
in practice, you will almost always use higher-level output operations defined in some subclass
of OutputStream.
The Reader and Writer classes provide the analogous low-level read and write methods.
As in the byte stream classes, the parameter of the write(c) method in Writer and the return
value of the read() method in Reader are of type int, but in these character-oriented classes,
the I/O operations read and write characters rather than bytes. The return value of read()
is -1 if the end of the input stream has been reached. Otherwise, the return value must be
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 574
type-cast to type char to obtain the character that was read. In practice, you will ordinarily use
higher level I/O operations provided by sub-classes of Reader and Writer, as discussed below.
11.1.2 PrintWriter
One of the neat things about Java’s I/O package is that it lets you add capabilities to a stream
by “wrapping” it in another stream object that provides those capabilities. The wrapper object
is also a stream, so you can read from or write to it—but you can do so using fancier operations
than those available for basic streams.
For example, PrintWriter is a subclass of Writer that provides convenient methods for
outputting human-readable character representations of all of Java’s basic data types. If you
have an object belonging to the Writer class, or any of its subclasses, and you would like to use
PrintWriter methods to output data to that Writer, all you have to do is wrap the Writer in a
PrintWriter object. You do this by constructing a new PrintWriter object, using the Writer as
input to the constructor. For example, if charSink is of type Writer, then you could say
PrintWriter printableCharSink = new PrintWriter(charSink);
In fact, the parameter to the constructor can also be an OutputStream or a File, and the
constructor will build a PrintWriter that can write to that output destination. (Files are covered
in the next section.) When you output data to the PrintWriter printableCharSink, using the
high-level output methods in PrintWriter, that data will go to exactly the same place as data
written directly to charSink. You’ve just provided a better interface to the same output
destination. For example, this allows you to use PrintWriter methods to send data to a file or
over a network connection.
For the record, if out is a variable of type PrintWriter, then the following methods are
defined:
• out.print(x) — prints the value of x, represented in the form of a string of characters,
to the output stream; x can be an expression of any type, including both primitive types
and object types. An object is converted to string form using its toString() method. A
null value is represented by the string “null”.
• out.println() — outputs an end-of-line to the output stream.
• out.println(x) — outputs the value of x, followed by an end-of-line; this is equivalent
to out.print(x) followed by out.println().
• out.printf(formatString, x1, x2, ...) — does formatted output of x1, x2, ... to
the output stream. The first parameter is a string that specifies the format of the output.
There can be any number of additional parameters, of any type, but the types of the
parameters must match the formatting directives in the format string. Formatted output
for the standard output stream, System.out, was introduced in Subsection 2.4.1, and
out.printf has the same functionality.
• out.flush() — ensures that characters that have been written with the above methods
are actually sent to the output destination. In some cases, notably when writing to a file
or to the network, it might be necessary to call this method to force the output to actually
appear at the destination.
Note that none of these methods will ever throw an IOException. Instead, the PrintWriter
class includes the method
public boolean checkError()
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 575
which will return true if any error has been encountered while writing to the stream. The
PrintWriter class catches any IOExceptions internally, and sets the value of an internal error flag
if one occurs. The checkError() method can be used to check the error flag. This allows you
to use PrintWriter methods without worrying about catching exceptions. On the other hand, to
write a fully robust program, you should call checkError() to test for possible errors whenever
you use a PrintWriter.
There are various ways for characters to be encoded as binary data. A particular encoding is
known as a charset or character set. Charsets have standardized names such as “UTF-16,”
“UTF-8,” and “ISO-8859-1.” In UTF-16, characters are encoded as 16-bit UNICODE values;
this is the character set that is used internally by Java. UTF-8 is a way of encoding UNICODE
characters using 8 bits for common ASCII characters and longer codes for other characters.
ISO-8859-1, also known as “Latin-1,” is an 8-bit encoding that includes ASCII characters as
well as certain accented characters that are used in several European languages. Readers and
Writers use the default charset for the computer on which they are running, unless you specify
a different one. That can be done, for example, in a constructor such as
Writer charSink = new OutputStreamWriter( byteSink, "ISO-8859-1" );
Certainly, the existence of a variety of charset encodings has made text processing more
complicated—unfortunate for us English-speakers but essential for people who use non-Western
character sets. Ordinarily, you don’t have to worry about this, but it’s a good idea to be aware
that different charsets exist in case you run into textual data encoded in a non-default way.
the input source, the Scanner will simply read the characters in the string from beginning to
end, in the same way that it would process the same sequence of characters from a stream. For
example, you can use a Scanner to read from standard input by saying:
Scanner standardInputScanner = new Scanner( System.in );
and if charSource is of type Reader, you can create a Scanner for reading from charSource
with:
Scanner scanner = new Scanner( charSource );
When processing input, a scanner usually works with tokens. A token is a meaningful
string of characters that cannot, for the purposes at hand, be further broken down into smaller
meaningful pieces. A token can, for example, be an individual word or a string of characters
that represents a value of type double. In the case of a scanner, tokens must be separated by
“delimiters.” By default, the delimiters are whitespace characters such as spaces, tabs, and end-
of-line markers. In normal processing, whitespace characters serve simply to separate tokens
and are discarded by the scanner. A scanner has instance methods for reading tokens of various
types. Suppose that scanner is an object of type Scanner. Then we have:
• scanner.next() — reads the next token from the input source and returns it as a String.
• scanner.nextInt(), scanner.nextDouble(), and so on — read the next token from the
input source and tries to convert it to a value of type int, double, and so on. There are
methods for reading values of any of the primitive types.
• scanner.nextLine() — reads an entire line from the input source, up to the next end-of-
line, and returns the line as a value of type String. The end-of-line marker is read but is
not part of the return value. Note that this method is not based on tokens. An entire line
is read and returned, including any whitespace characters in the line. The return value
can be the empty string.
All of these methods can generate exceptions. If an attempt is made to read past the
end of input, an exception of type NoSuchElementException is thrown. Methods such as
scanner.getInt() will throw an exception of type InputMismatchException if the next token
in the input does not represent a value of the requested type. The exceptions that can be
generated do not require mandatory exception handling.
The Scanner class has very nice look-ahead capabilities. You can query a scanner to
determine whether more tokens are available and whether the next token is of a given type. If
scanner is of type Scanner :
• scanner.hasNext() — returns a boolean value that is true if there is at least one more
token in the input source.
• scanner.hasNextInt(), scanner.hasNextDouble(), and so on — return a boolean value
that is true if there is at least one more token in the input source and that token represents
a value of the requested type.
• scanner.hasNextLine() — returns a boolean value that is true if there is at least one
more line in the input source.
Although the insistence on defining tokens only in terms of delimiters limits the usability
of scanners to some extent, they are easy to use and are suitable for many applications. With
so many input classes available—BufferedReader, TextIO, Scanner —you might have trouble
deciding which one to use! In general, I would recommend using a Scanner unless you have some
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 579
particular reason for preferring TextIO-style input. BufferedReader can be used as a lightweight
alternative when all that you want to do is read entire lines of text from the input source.
(It is possible to change the delimiter that is used by a Scanner, but the syntax uses
something called “regular expressions.” Unfortunately, the syntax for regular expressions is
rather complicated, and they are not covered in this book. However, as an example, suppose
you want tokens to be words that consist entirely of letters of the English alphabet. In that
case, delimiters should include all non-letter characters. If you want a Scanner, scnr, to use
that kind of delimiter, you can say: scnr.useDelimiter("[^a-zA-Z]+"). After that, tokens
returned by scnr.next() will consist entirely of letters. The string "[^a-zA-Z]+" is a regular
expression. Regular expressions are an important tool for a working programmer. If you have
a chance to learn about them, you should do so.)
to tell it that the object is meant to be writable and readable. You only need to add the words
“implements Serializable” to your class definitions. Many of Java’s standard classes are
already declared to be serializable.
One warning about using ObjectOutputStreams: These streams are optimized to avoid
writing the same object more than once. When an object is encountered for a second time, only
a reference to the first occurrence is written. Unfortunately, if the object has been modified in
the meantime, the new data will not be written. That is, the modified value will not be written
correctly to the stream. Because of this, ObjectOutputStreams are meant mainly for use with
“immutable” objects that can’t be changed after they are created. (Strings are an example of
this.) However, if you do need to write mutable objects to an ObjectOutputStream, and if it
is possible that you will write the same object more than once, you can ensure that the full,
correct version of the object will be written by calling the stream’s reset() method before
writing the object to the stream.
11.2 Files
The data and programs in a computer’s main memory survive only as long as the power
is on. For more permanent storage, computers use files, which are collections of data stored
on a hard disk, on a USB memory stick, on a CD-ROM, or on some other type of storage
device. Files are organized into directories (also called folders). A directory can hold other
directories, as well as files. Both directories and files have names that are used to identify them.
Programs can read data from existing files. They can create new files and can write data
to files. In Java, such input and output can be done using I/O streams. Human-readable
character data can be read from a file using an object belonging to the class FileReader, which
is a subclass of Reader. Similarly, data can be written to a file in human-readable format through
an object of type FileWriter, a subclass of Writer. For files that store data in machine format,
the appropriate I/O classes are FileInputStream and FileOutputStream. In this section, I will
only discuss character-oriented file I/O using the FileReader and FileWriter classes. However,
FileInputStream and FileOutputStream are used in an exactly parallel fashion. All these classes
are defined in the java.io package.
}
catch (IOException e) {
... // handle the exception
}
You can even use just a String as the parameter to the constructor, and it will be interpreted as
a file name (but you should remember that a String in the Scanner constructor does not name
a file; instead the scanner will read characters from the string itself).
If no file named result.dat exists, a new file will be created. If the file already exists, then
the current contents of the file will be erased and replaced with the data that your program
writes to the file. This will be done without any warning. To avoid overwriting a file that
already exists, you can check whether a file of the same name already exists before trying
to create the stream, as discussed later in this section. An IOException might occur in the
PrintWriter constructor if, for example, you are trying to create a file on a disk that is “write-
protected,” meaning that it cannot be modified.
When you are finished with a PrintWriter, you should call its flush() method, such as
“result.flush()”, to make sure that all the output has been sent to its destination. If you
forget to do this, you might find that some of the data that you have written to a file output
stream has not actually shown up in the file.
After you are finished using a file, it’s a good idea to close the file, to tell the operating
system that you are finished using it. You can close a file by calling the close() method of
the associated PrintWriter, BufferedReader, or Scanner. Once a file has been closed, it is no
longer possible to read data from it or write data to it, unless you open it again as a new I/O
stream. (Note that for most I/O stream classes, including BufferedReader the close() method
can throw an IOException, which must be handled; however, PrintWriter and Scanner override
this method so that it cannot throw such exceptions.) If you forget to close a file, the file
will ordinarily be closed automatically when the program terminates or when the file object
is garbage collected, but it is better not to depend on this. Note that calling close() should
automatically call flush() before the file is closed. (I have seen that fail, but not recently.)
As a complete example, here is a program that will read numbers from a file named
data.dat, and will then write out the same numbers in reverse order to another file named
result.dat. It is assumed that data.dat contains only real numbers. The input file is read
using a Scanner. Exception-handling is used to check for problems along the way. Although the
application is not a particularly useful one, this program demonstrates the basics of working
with files.
import java.io.*;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Scanner;
/**
* Reads numbers from a file named data.dat and writes them to a file
* named result.dat in reverse order. The input file should contain
* only real numbers.
*/
public class ReverseFileWithScanner {
public static void main(String[] args) {
Scanner data; // For reading the data.
PrintWriter result; // Character output stream for writing data.
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 583
program opened a file in one try statement and used it in another try statement. The resource
pattern requires that it all be done in one try, which requires some reorganization of the code
(and can sometimes make it harder to determine the exact cause of an exception). Here is the
try..catch statement from the sample program that opens the input file, reads from it, and
closes it automatically.
try( Scanner data = new Scanner(new File("data.dat")) ) {
// Read numbers, adding them to the ArrayList.
while ( data.hasNextDouble() ) { // Read until end-of-file.
double inputNumber = data.nextDouble();
numbers.add( inputNumber );
}
}
catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
// Can be caused if file does not exist or can’t be read.
System.out.println("Can’t open input file data.dat!");
System.out.println("Error: " + e);
return; // Return from main(), since an error has occurred.
}
The resource, data, is constructed on the first line. The syntax requires a declaration of the
resource with an initial value, in parentheses after the word “try.” It’s possible to have several
resource declarations, separated by semicolons. They will be closed in the order opposite to the
order in which they are declared.
in that directory. The corresponding relative path name for Windows would be
examples\data.dat.
• ../examples/data.dat — a relative path name in UNIX that means “go to the directory
that contains the current directory, then go into a directory named examples inside that
directory, and look there for a file named data.dat.” In general, “..” means “go up one
directory.” The corresponding path on Windows is ..\examples\data.dat.
When working on the command line, it’s safe to say that if you stick to using simple file names
only, and if the files are stored in the same directory with the program that will use them, then
you will be OK. Later in this section, we’ll look at a convenient way of letting the user specify
a file in a GUI program, which allows you to avoid the issue of path names altogether.
It is possible for a Java program to find out the absolute path names for two important
directories, the current directory and the user’s home directory. The names of these directories
are system properties, and they can be read using the function calls:
• System.getProperty("user.dir") — returns the absolute path name of the current
directory as a String.
• System.getProperty("user.home") — returns the absolute path name of the user’s home
directory as a String.
To avoid some of the problems caused by differences in path names between platforms, Java
has the class java.io.File. An object belonging to this class does not actually represent a
file! Precisely speaking, an object of type File represents a file name rather than a file as such.
The file to which the name refers might or might not exist. Directories are treated in the same
way as files, so a File object can represent a directory just as easily as it can represent a file.
A File object has a constructor, “new File(String)”, that creates a File object from a path
name. The name can be a simple name, a relative path, or an absolute path. For example,
new File("data.dat") creates a File object that refers to a file named data.dat, in the current
directory. Another constructor, “new File(File,String)”, has two parameters. The first is a
File object that refers to a directory. The second can be the name of the file in that directory
or a relative path from that directory to the file.
File objects contain several useful instance methods. Assuming that file is a variable of
type File, here are some of the methods that are available:
• file.exists() — This boolean-valued function returns true if the file named by the
File object already exists. You can use this method if you want to avoid overwriting the
contents of an existing file when you create a new output stream. The boolean function
file.canRead() returns true if the file exists and the program has permission to read the
file. And file.canWrite() is true if the program has permission to write to the file.
• file.isDirectory() — This boolean-valued function returns true if the File object
refers to a directory. It returns false if it refers to a regular file or if no file with the given
name exists.
• file.delete() — Deletes the file, if it exists. Returns a boolean value to indicate whether
the file was successfully deleted.
• file.list() — If the File object refers to a directory, this function returns an array of
type String[] containing the names of the files in that directory. Otherwise, it returns
null. The method file.listFiles() is similar, except that it returns an array of File
instead of an array of String.
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 586
Here, for example, is a program that will list the names of all the files in a directory specified
by the user. In this example, I have used a Scanner to read the user’s input:
import java.io.File;
import java.util.Scanner;
/**
* This program lists the files in a directory specified by
* the user. The user is asked to type in a directory name.
* If the name entered by the user is not a directory, a
* message is printed and the program ends.
*/
public class DirectoryList {
Swing includes a platform-independent technique for using file dialog boxes in the form of a
class called JFileChooser. This class is part of the package javax.swing. We looked at using
some basic dialog boxes in Subsection 6.7.2. File dialog boxes are similar to those, but are just
a little more complicated to use.
A file dialog box shows the user a list of files and sub-directories in some directory, and makes
it easy for the user to specify a file in that directory. The user can also navigate easily from
one directory to another. The most common constructor for JFileChooser has no parameter
and sets the starting directory in the dialog box to be the user’s home directory. There are also
constructors that specify the starting directory explicitly:
new JFileChooser( File startDirectory )
new JFileChooser( String pathToStartDirectory )
Constructing a JFileChooser object does not make the dialog box appear on the screen.
You have to call a method in the object to do that. There are two different methods that
can be used because there are two types of file dialog: An open file dialog allows the user
to specify an existing file to be opened for reading data into the program; a save file dialog
lets the user specify a file, which might or might not already exist, to be opened for writing
data from the program. File dialogs of these two types are opened using the showOpenDialog
and showSaveDialog methods. These methods make the dialog box appear on the screen; the
methods do not return until the user selects a file or cancels the dialog.
A file dialog box always has a parent, another component which is associated with the
dialog box. The parent is specified as a parameter to the showOpenDialog or showSaveDialog
methods. The parent is a GUI component, and can often be specified as “this” in practice,
since file dialogs are often used in instance methods of GUI component classes. (The
parameter can also be null, in which case an invisible component is created to be used
as the parent.) Both showOpenDialog and showSaveDialog have a return value, which
will be one of the constants JFileChooser.CANCEL OPTION, JFileChooser.ERROR OPTION, or
JFileChooser.APPROVE OPTION. If the return value is JFileChooser.APPROVE OPTION, then
the user has selected a file. If the return value is something else, then the user did not select a
file. The user might have clicked a “Cancel” button, for example. You should always check the
return value, to make sure that the user has, in fact, selected a file. If that is the case, then you
can find out which file was selected by calling the JFileChooser’s getSelectedFile() method,
which returns an object of type File that represents the selected file.
Putting all this together, we can look at a typical subroutine that reads data from a file
that is selected using a JFileChooser :
public void readFile() {
if (fileDialog == null) // (fileDialog is an instance variable)
fileDialog = new JFileChooser();
fileDialog.setDialogTitle("Select File for Reading");
fileDialog.setSelectedFile(null); // No file is initially selected.
int option = fileDialog.showOpenDialog(this);
// (Using "this" as a parameter to showOpenDialog() assumes that the
// readFile() method is an instance method in a GUI component class.)
if (option != JFileChooser.APPROVE OPTION)
return; // User canceled or clicked the dialog’s close box.
File selectedFile = fileDialog.getSelectedFile();
Scanner in; // (or use some other wrapper class)
try {
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 588
"Confirm Save",
JOptionPane.YES NO OPTION,
JOptionPane.WARNING MESSAGE );
if (response != JOptionPane.YES OPTION)
return; // User does not want to replace the file.
}
PrintWriter out; // or use some other type of output stream
try {
out = new PrintWriter( selectedFile );
}
catch (Exception e) {
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(this,
"Sorry, but an error occurred while trying to open the file:\n" + e);
return;
}
try {
.
. // Write data to the output stream, out. (Does not throw exceptions.)
.
out.flush();
out.close();
if (out.checkError()) // (need to check for errors in PrintWriter)
throw new IOException("Error occurred while trying to write file.");
}
catch (Exception e) {
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(this,
"Sorry, but an error occurred while trying to write the data:\n" + e);
}
}
The readFile() and writeFile() routines presented here can be used, with just a few
changes, when you need to read or write a file in a GUI program. You can find working
subroutines for saving and opening text files in the sample program TrivialEdit.java, which lets
the user edit small text files. We’ll look at some more complete examples of using files and file
dialogs in the next section.
Since the program should be able to copy any file, we can’t assume that the data in the file is
in human-readable form. So, we have to use the byte streams, InputStream and OutputStream,
to operate on the file. The program simply copies all the data from the InputStream to the
OutputStream, one byte at a time. If source is the variable that refers to the InputStream,
then the function source.read() can be used to read one byte. This function returns the
value -1 when all the bytes in the input file have been read. Similarly, if copy refers to the
OutputStream, then copy.write(b) writes one byte to the output file. So, the heart of the
program is a simple while loop. As usual, the I/O operations can throw exceptions, so this
must be done in a try..catch statement:
while(true) {
int data = source.read();
if (data < 0)
break;
copy.write(data);
}
The file-copy command in an operating system such as UNIX uses command line arguments
to specify the names of the files. For example, the user might say “copy original.dat
backup.dat” to copy an existing file, original.dat, to a file named backup.dat. Command-
line arguments can also be used in Java programs. The command line arguments are stored
in the array of strings, args, which is a parameter to the main() routine. The program can
retrieve the command-line arguments from this array. (See Subsection 4.3.6.) For example, if
the program is named CopyFile and if the user runs the program with the command
java CopyFile work.dat oldwork.dat
then in the program, args[0] will be the string "work.dat" and args[1] will be the string
"oldwork.dat". The value of args.length tells the program how many command-line
arguments were specified by the user.
The program CopyFile.java gets the names of the files from the command-line arguments.
It prints an error message and exits if the file names are not specified. To add a little interest,
there are two ways to use the program. The command line can simply specify the two file names.
In that case, if the output file already exists, the program will print an error message and end.
This is to make sure that the user won’t accidently overwrite an important file. However, if the
command line has three arguments, then the first argument must be “-f” while the second and
third arguments are file names. The -f is a command-line option, which is meant to modify
the behavior of the program. The program interprets the -f to mean that it’s OK to overwrite
an existing program. (The “f” stands for “force,” since it forces the file to be copied in spite of
what would otherwise have been considered an error.) You can see in the source code how the
command line arguments are interpreted by the program:
import java.io.*;
/**
* Makes a copy of a file. The original file and the name of the
* copy must be given as command-line arguments. In addition, the
* first command-line argument can be "-f"; if present, the program
* will overwrite an existing file; if not, the program will report
* an error and end if the output file already exists. The number
* of bytes that are copied is reported.
*/
public class CopyFile {
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 591
try {
copy = new FileOutputStream(copyName);
}
catch (IOException e) {
System.out.println("Can’t open output file \"" + copyName + "\".");
return;
}
/* Copy one byte at a time from the input stream to the output
stream, ending when the read() method returns -1 (which is
the signal that the end of the stream has been reached). If any
error occurs, print an error message. Also print a message if
the file has been copied successfully. */
byteCount = 0;
try {
while (true) {
int data = source.read();
if (data < 0)
break;
copy.write(data);
byteCount++;
}
source.close();
copy.close();
System.out.println("Successfully copied " + byteCount + " bytes.");
}
catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println("Error occurred while copying. "
+ byteCount + " bytes copied.");
System.out.println("Error: " + e);
}
} // end main()
}
catch (IOException e) {
System.out.println("Error in phone book data file.");
System.out.println("File name: " + dataFile.getAbsolutePath());
System.out.println("This program cannot continue.");
System.exit(1);
}
}
The program then lets the user do various things with the phone book, including making
modifications. Any changes that are made are made only to the TreeMap that holds the data.
When the program ends, the phone book data is written to the file (if any changes have been
made while the program was running), using the following code:
if (changed) {
System.out.println("Saving phone directory changes to file " +
dataFile.getAbsolutePath() + " ...");
PrintWriter out;
try {
out = new PrintWriter( new FileWriter(dataFile) );
}
catch (IOException e) {
System.out.println("ERROR: Can’t open data file for output.");
return;
}
for ( Map.Entry<String,String> entry : phoneBook.entrySet() )
out.println(entry.getKey() + "%" + entry.getValue() );
out.flush();
out.close();
if (out.checkError())
System.out.println("ERROR: Some error occurred while writing data file.");
else
System.out.println("Done.");
}
The net effect of this is that all the data, including the changes, will be there the next time the
program is run. I’ve shown you all the file-handling code from the program. If you would like
to see the rest of the program, see the source code.
The new version of the program can be found in the source code file SimplePaintWith-
Files.java. A “File” menu has been added to the new version. It implements “Save” and
“Open” commands for writing program data to a file and reading saved data back into the
program.
The data for a sketch consists of the background color of the picture and a list of the curves
that were drawn by the user. A curve consists of a list of Points. A Point, pt, has instance
variables x and y of type int that represent the coordinates of the point in the xy-plane. Each
curve can be a different color. Furthermore, a curve can be “symmetric,” which means that in
addition to the curve itself, the horizontal and vertical reflections of the curve are also drawn.
The data for each curve are stored in an object of type CurveData, which is defined in the
program as:
/**
* An object of type CurveData represents the data required to redraw one
* of the curves that have been sketched by the user.
*/
private static class CurveData {
Color color; // The color of the curve.
boolean symmetric; // Are horizontal and vertical reflections also drawn?
ArrayList<Point> points; // The points on the curve.
}
Then, a list of type ArrayList<CurveData> is used to hold data for all of the curves that the user
has drawn.
Let’s think about how the data for a sketch could be saved to a text file. The basic idea is
that all data necessary to reconstitute a sketch must be saved to the output file in some definite
format. The method that reads the file must follow exactly the same format as it reads the
data, and it must use the data to rebuild the data structures that represent the sketch while
the program is running.
When writing character data, all of the data has to be expressed, ultimately, in terms of
simple data values such as strings and primitive type values. A color, for example, can be
expressed in terms of three numbers giving the red, green, and blue components of the color.
The first (not very good) idea that comes to mind might be to just dump all the necessary data,
in some definite order, into the file. Suppose that out is a PrintWriter that is used to write to
the file. We could then say:
Color backgroundColor = getBackground();
out.println( backgroundColor.getRed() ); // Write background color to file.
out.println( backgroundColor.getGreen() );
out.println( backgroundColor.getBlue() );
out.println( curves.size() ); // Write the number of curves.
for ( CurveData curve : curves ) { // For each curve, write...
out.println( curve.color.getRed() ); // the color of the curve
out.println( curve.color.getGreen() );
out.println( curve.color.getBlue() );
out.println( curve.symmetric ? 0 : 1 ); // the curve’s symmetry property
out.println( curve.points.size() ); // the number of points on curve
for ( Point pt : curve.points ) { // the coordinates of each point
out.println( pt.x );
out.println( pt.y );
}
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 596
}
This works in the sense that the file-reading method can read the data and rebuild the data
structures. Suppose that the input method uses a Scanner named scanner to read the data
file. Then it could say:
Color newBackgroundColor; // Read the background Color.
int red = scanner.nextInt();
int green = scanner.nextInt();
int blue = scanner.nextInt();
newBackgroundColor = new Color(red,green,blue);
ArrayList<CurveData> newCurves = new ArrayList<>();
int curveCount = scanner.nextInt(); // The number of curves to be read.
for (int i = 0; i < curveCount; i++) {
CurveData curve = new CurveData();
int r = scanner.nextInt(); // Read the curve’s color.
int g = scanner.nextInt();
int b = scanner.nextInt();
curve.color = new Color(r,g,b);
int symmetryCode = scanner.nextInt(); // Read the curve’s symmetry property.
curve.symmetric = (symmetryCode == 1);
curveData.points = new ArrayList<>();
int pointCount = scanner.nextInt(); // The number of points on this curve.
for (int j = 0; j < pointCount; j++) {
int x = scanner.nextDouble(); // Read the coordinates of the point.
int y = scanner.nextDouble();
curveData.points.add(new Point(x,y));
}
newCurves.add(curve);
}
curves = newCurves; // Install the new data structures.
setBackground(newBackgroundColor);
Note how every piece of data that was written by the output method is read, in the same order,
by the input method. While this does work, the data file is just a long string of numbers. It
doesn’t make much more sense to a human reader than a binary-format file would. Furthermore,
it is still fragile in the sense that any small change made to the data representation in the
program, such as adding a new property to curves, will render the data file useless (unless you
happen to remember exactly which version of the program created the file).
So, I decided to use a more complex, more meaningful data format for the text files created
by my program. Instead of just writing numbers, I add words to say what the numbers mean.
Here is a short but complete data file for the program; just by looking at it, you can probably
tell what is going on:
SimplePaintWithFiles 1.0
background 110 110 180
startcurve
color 255 255 255
symmetry true
coords 10 10
coords 200 250
coords 300 10
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 597
endcurve
startcurve
color 0 255 255
symmetry false
coords 10 400
coords 590 400
endcurve
The first line of the file identifies the program that created the data file; when the user
selects a file to be opened, the program can check the first word in the file as a simple test to
make sure the file is of the correct type. The first line also contains a version number, 1.0. If
the file format changes in a later version of the program, a higher version number would be
used; if the program sees a version number of 1.2 in a file, but the program only understands
version 1.0, the program can explain to the user that a newer version of the program is needed
to read the data file.
The second line of the file specifies the background color of the picture. The three numbers
specify the red, green, and blue components of the color. The word “background” at the
beginning of the line makes the meaning clear. The remainder of the file consists of data for the
curves that appear in the picture. The data for each curve is clearly marked with “startcurve”
and “endcurve.” The data consists of the color and symmetry properties of the curve and the
xy-coordinates of each point on the curve. Again, the meaning is clear. Files in this format can
easily be created or edited by hand. In fact, the data file shown above was actually created in
a text editor rather than by the program. Furthermore, it’s easy to extend the format to allow
for additional options. Future versions of the program could add a “thickness” property to the
curves to make it possible to have curves with differing line widths. Shapes such as rectangles
and ovals could easily be added.
Outputting data in this format is easy. Suppose that out is a PrintWriter that is being used
to write the sketch data to a file. Then the output is be done with:
out.println("SimplePaintWithFiles 1.0"); // Version number.
out.println( "background " + backgroundColor.getRed() + " " +
backgroundColor.getGreen() + " " + backgroundColor.getBlue() );
for ( CurveData curve : curves ) {
out.println();
out.println("startcurve");
out.println(" color " + curve.color.getRed() + " " +
curve.color.getGreen() + " " + curve.color.getBlue() );
out.println( " symmetry " + curve.symmetric );
for ( Point pt : curve.points )
out.println( " coords " + pt.x + " " + pt.y );
out.println("endcurve");
}
In the program, this code is used in a doSave() method that is similar to the writeFile()
method that is presented in Subsection 11.2.3. The method uses a file dialog box to allow the
user to select the output file.
Reading the data is somewhat harder, since the input routine has to deal with all the extra
words in the data. In my input routine, I decided to allow some variation in the order in which
the data occurs in the file. For example, the background color can be specified at the end of the
file, instead of at the beginning. It can even be left out altogether, in which case white will be
used as the default background color. This is possible because each item of data is labeled with
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 598
a word that describes its meaning; the labels can be used to drive the processing of the input.
Here is the complete method from SimplePaintWithFiles.java that reads data files created by
the doSave() method. It uses a Scanner to read items from the file:
private void doOpen() {
if (fileDialog == null)
fileDialog = new JFileChooser();
fileDialog.setDialogTitle("Select File to be Opened");
fileDialog.setSelectedFile(null); // No file is initially selected.
int option = fileDialog.showOpenDialog(this);
if (option != JFileChooser.APPROVE OPTION)
return; // User canceled or clicked the dialog’s close box.
File selectedFile = fileDialog.getSelectedFile();
Scanner scanner;
try {
Reader stream = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(selectedFile));
scanner = new Scanner( stream );
}
catch (Exception e) {
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(this,
"Sorry, but an error occurred while trying to open the file:\n" +
e);
return;
}
try {
String programName = scanner.next();
if ( ! programName.equals("SimplePaintWithFiles") )
throw new IOException("File is not a SimplePaintWithFiles data file.");
double version = scanner.nextDouble();
if (version > 1.0)
throw new IOException("File requires a newer version of SimplePaintWithFiles.");
Color newBackgroundColor = Color.WHITE;
ArrayList<CurveData> newCurves = new ArrayList<CurveData>();
while (scanner.hasNext()) {
String itemName = scanner.next();
if (itemName.equalsIgnoreCase("background")) {
int red = scanner.nextInt();
int green = scanner.nextInt();
int blue = scanner.nextInt();
newBackgroundColor = new Color(red,green,blue);
}
else if (itemName.equalsIgnoreCase("startcurve")) {
CurveData curve = new CurveData();
curve.color = Color.BLACK;
curve.symmetric = false;
curve.points = new ArrayList<Point>();
itemName = scanner.next();
while ( ! itemName.equalsIgnoreCase("endcurve") ) {
if (itemName.equalsIgnoreCase("color")) {
int r = scanner.nextInt();
int g = scanner.nextInt();
int b = scanner.nextInt();
curve.color = new Color(r,g,b);
}
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 599
else if (itemName.equalsIgnoreCase("symmetry")) {
curve.symmetric = scanner.nextBoolean();
}
else if (itemName.equalsIgnoreCase("coords")) {
int x = scanner.nextInt();
int y = scanner.nextInt();
curve.points.add( new Point(x,y) );
}
else {
throw new Exception("Unknown term in input.");
}
itemName = scanner.next();
}
newCurves.add(curve);
}
else {
throw new Exception("Unknown term in input.");
}
}
scanner.close();
setBackground(newBackgroundColor);
curves = newCurves;
repaint();
editFile = selectedFile;
setTitle("SimplePaint: " + editFile.getName());
}
catch (Exception e) {
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(this,
"Sorry, but an error occurred while trying to read the data:\n" +
e);
}
}
The main reason for this long discussion of file formats has been to get you to think about
the problem of representing complex data in a form suitable for storing the data in a file. The
same problem arises when data must be transmitted over a network. There is no one correct
solution to the problem, but some solutions are certainly better than others. In Section 11.5,
we will look at one solution to the data representation problem that has become increasingly
common.
∗ ∗ ∗
In addition to being able to save sketch data in text form, SimplePaintWithFiles can also
save the picture itself as an image file that could be, for example, printed or put on a web page.
This is a preview of image-handling techniques that will be covered in Subsection 13.1.5, and
it uses techniques that I have not yet covered.
11.4 Networking
As far as a program is concerned, a network is just another possible source of input data,
and another place where data can be output. That does oversimplify things, because networks
are not as easy to work with as files are. But in Java, you can do network communication using
input streams and output streams, just as you can use such streams to communicate with the
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 600
user or to work with files. Nevertheless, opening a network connection between two computers
is a bit tricky, since there are two computers involved and they have to somehow agree to open a
connection. And when each computer can send data to the other, synchronizing communication
can be a problem. But the fundamentals are the same as for other forms of I/O.
One of the standard Java packages is called java.net. This package includes several
classes that can be used for networking. Two different styles of network I/O are supported.
One of these, which is fairly high-level, is based on the World Wide Web, and provides the
sort of network communication capability that is used by a Web browser when it downloads
pages for you to view. The main classes for this style of networking are java.net.URL
and java.net.URLConnection. An object of type URL is an abstract representation of a
Universal Resource Locator , which is an address for an HTML document or other resource.
A URLConnection represents a network connection to such a resource.
The second style of I/O, which is more general and more important, views the network at
a lower level. It is based on the idea of a socket. A socket is used by a program to establish a
connection with another program on a network. Communication over a network involves two
sockets, one on each of the computers involved in the communication. Java uses a class called
java.net.Socket to represent sockets that are used for network communication. The term
“socket” presumably comes from an image of physically plugging a wire into a computer to
establish a connection to a network, but it is important to understand that a socket, as the
term is used here, is simply an object belonging to the class Socket. In particular, a program can
have several sockets at the same time, each connecting it to another program running on some
other computer on the network—or even running on the same computer. All these connections
use the same physical network connection.
This section gives a brief introduction to these basic networking classes, and shows how
they relate to input and output streams.
Note that these constructors will throw an exception of type MalformedURLException if the
specified strings don’t represent legal url’s. The MalformedURLException class is a subclass of
IOException, and it requires mandatory exception handling.
Once you have a valid URL object, you can call its openConnection() method to set up a
connection. This method returns a URLConnection. The URLConnection object can, in turn,
be used to create an InputStream for reading data from the resource represented by the URL.
This is done by calling its getInputStream() method. For example:
URL url = new URL(urlAddressString);
URLConnection connection = url.openConnection();
InputStream in = connection.getInputStream();
The openConnection() and getInputStream() methods can both throw exceptions of type
IOException. Once the InputStream has been created, you can read from it in the usual way,
including wrapping it in another input stream type, such as BufferedReader, or using a Scanner.
Reading from the stream can, of course, generate exceptions.
One of the other useful instance methods in the URLConnection class is getContentType(),
which returns a String that describes the type of information available from the URL. The
return value can be null if the type of information is not yet known or if it is not possible
to determine the type. The type might not be available until after the input stream has
been created, so you should generally call getContentType() after getInputStream(). The
string returned by getContentType() is in a format called a mime type. Mime types include
“text/plain”, “text/html”, “image/jpeg”, “image/png”, and many others. All mime types
contain two parts: a general type, such as “text” or “image”, and a more specific type within
that general category, such as “html” or “png”. If you are only interested in text data, for
example, you can check whether the string returned by getContentType() starts with “text”.
(Mime types were first introduced to describe the content of email messages. The name stands
for “Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions.” They are now used almost universally to specify
the type of information in a file or other resource.)
Let’s look at a short example that uses all this to read the data from a URL. This subroutine
opens a connection to a specified URL, checks that the type of data at the URL is text, and
then copies the text onto the screen. Many of the operations in this subroutine can throw
exceptions. They are handled by declaring that the subroutine “throws IOException” and
leaving it up to the main program to decide what to do when an error occurs.
static void readTextFromURL( String urlString ) throws IOException {
/* Open a connection to the URL, and get an input stream
for reading data from the URL. */
URL url = new URL(urlString);
URLConnection connection = url.openConnection();
InputStream urlData = connection.getInputStream();
/* Check that the content is some type of text. Note:
connection.getContentType() method should be called
after getInputStream(). */
String contentType = connection.getContentType();
System.out.println("Stream opened with content type: " + contentType);
System.out.println();
if (contentType == null || contentType.startsWith("text") == false)
throw new IOException("URL does not seem to refer to a text file.");
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 602
A program that creates a listening socket is sometimes said to be a server , and the socket is
called a server socket. A program that connects to a server is called a client, and the socket
that it uses to make a connection is called a client socket. The idea is that the server is out
there somewhere on the network, waiting for a connection request from some client. The server
can be thought of as offering some kind of service, and the client gets access to that service by
connecting to the server. This is called the client/server model of network communication.
In many actual applications, a server program can provide connections to several clients at the
same time. When a client connects to the listening socket in a server of that type, that socket
does not stop listening. Instead, it continues listening for additional client connection requests
at the same time that the client is being serviced. But to allow multiple clients to be connected
at the same time, it is necessary to use threads. We’ll look at how it works in the next chapter.
The URL class that was discussed at the beginning of this section uses a client socket behind
the scenes to do any necessary network communication. On the other side of that connection is
a server program that accepts a connection request from the URL object, reads a request from
that object for some particular file on the server computer, and responds by transmitting the
contents of that file over the network back to the URL object. After transmitting the data, the
server closes the connection.
∗ ∗ ∗
A client program has to have some way to specify which computer, among all those on the
network, it wants to communicate with. Every computer on the Internet has an IP address
which identifies it. Many computers can also be referred to by domain names such as
math.hws.edu or www.whitehouse.gov. (See Section 1.7.) Traditional (or IPv4 ) IP addresses
are 32-bit integers. They are usually written in the so-called “dotted decimal” form, such as
64.89.144.237, where each of the four numbers in the address represents an 8-bit integer in
the range 0 through 255. A new version of the Internet Protocol, IPv6 , is being introduced.
IPv6 addresses are 128-bit integers and are usually written in hexadecimal form (with some
colons and maybe some extra information thrown in). You might see IP addresses of either
form.
A computer can have several IP addresses, and can have both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.
Usually, one of these is the loopback address, which can be used when a program wants to
communicate with another program on the same computer. The loopback address has IPv4
address 127.0.0.1 and can also, in general, be referred to using the domain name localhost. In
addition, there can be one or more IP addresses associated with physical network connections.
Your computer probably has some utility for displaying your computer’s IP addresses. I have
written a small Java program, ShowMyNetwork.java, that does the same thing. When I run
ShowMyNetwork on one computer, the output was:
wlo1 : /2603:7080:7f41:f400:441a:459f:2c62:c349%wlo1 /192.168.0.2
lo : /0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1%lo /127.0.0.1
The first thing on each line is a network interface name, which is really meaningful only to the
computer’s operating system. The same line also contains the IP addresses for that interface.
In this example, lo refers to the loopback address, which has IPv4 address 127.0.0.1 as usual.
The most important number here is 192.168.0.2, which is the IPv4 address that can be used
for communication over the network. (The slashes at the start of each address are not part
of the actual address.) The other numbers in the output are IPv6 addresses, but the IPv4
addresses are easier for a human to use.
Now, a single computer might have several programs doing network communication at the
same time, or one program communicating with several other computers. To allow for this
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 604
should give you the basic ideas of network programming, and it is enough to write some simple
network applications. Let’s look at a few working examples of client/server programming.
and time to this stream and then closes the connection. (The standard class java.util.Date
is used to obtain the current time. An object of type Date represents a particular date and
time. The default constructor, “new Date()”, creates an object that represents the time when
the object is created.) The complete server program is as follows:
import java.net.*;
import java.io.*;
import java.util.Date;
/**
* This program is a server that takes connection requests on
* the port specified by the constant LISTENING PORT. When a
* connection is opened, the program sends the current time to
* the connected socket. The program will continue to receive
* and process connections until it is killed (by a CONTROL-C,
* for example). Note that this server processes each connection
* as it is received, rather than creating a separate thread
* to process the connection.
*/
public class DateServer {
public static final int LISTENING PORT = 32007;
public static void main(String[] args) {
ServerSocket listener; // Listens for incoming connections.
Socket connection; // For communication with the connecting program.
/* Accept and process connections forever, or until some error occurs.
(Note that errors that occur while communicating with a connected
program are caught and handled in the sendDate() routine, so
they will not crash the server.) */
try {
listener = new ServerSocket(LISTENING PORT);
System.out.println("Listening on port " + LISTENING PORT);
while (true) {
// Accept next connection request and handle it.
connection = listener.accept();
sendDate(connection);
}
}
catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println("Sorry, the server has shut down.");
System.out.println("Error: " + e);
return;
}
} // end main()
/**
* The parameter, client, is a socket that is already connected to another
* program. Get an output stream for the connection, send the current time,
* and close the connection.
*/
private static void sendDate(Socket client) {
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 609
try {
System.out.println("Connection from " +
client.getInetAddress().toString() );
Date now = new Date(); // The current date and time.
PrintWriter outgoing; // Stream for sending data.
outgoing = new PrintWriter( client.getOutputStream() );
outgoing.println( now.toString() );
outgoing.flush(); // Make sure the data is actually sent!
client.close();
}
catch (Exception e){
System.out.println("Error: " + e);
}
} // end sendDate()
closes down its listener so that no other clients can connect. After the client and server are
connected, both ends of the connection work in much the same way. The user on the client end
types a message, and it is transmitted to the server, which displays it to the user on that end.
Then the user of the server types a message that is transmitted to the client. Then the client
user types another message, and so on. This continues until one user or the other enters “quit”
when prompted for a message. When that happens, the connection is closed and both programs
terminate. The client program and the server program are very similar. The techniques for
opening the connections differ, and the client is programmed to send the first message while
the server is programmed to receive the first message. The client and server programs can be
found in the files CLChatClient.java and CLChatServer.java. (The name “CLChat” stands for
“command-line chat.”) Here is the source code for the server; the client is similar:
import java.net.*;
import java.util.Scanner;
import java.io.*;
/**
* This program is one end of a simple command-line interface chat program.
* It acts as a server which waits for a connection from the CLChatClient
* program. The port on which the server listens can be specified as a
* command-line argument. If it is not, then the port specified by the
* constant DEFAULT PORT is used. Note that if a port number of zero is
* specified, then the server will listen on any available port.
* This program only supports one connection. As soon as a connection is
* opened, the listening socket is closed down. The two ends of the connection
* each send a HANDSHAKE string to the other, so that both ends can verify
* that the program on the other end is of the right type. Then the connected
* programs alternate sending messages to each other. The client always sends
* the first message. The user on either end can close the connection by
* entering the string "quit" when prompted for a message. Note that the first
* character of any string sent over the connection must be 0 or 1; this
* character is interpreted as a command.
*/
public class CLChatServer {
/**
* Port to listen on, if none is specified on the command line.
*/
static final int DEFAULT PORT = 1728;
/**
* Handshake string. Each end of the connection sends this string to the
* other just after the connection is opened. This is done to confirm that
* the program on the other side of the connection is a CLChat program.
*/
static final String HANDSHAKE = "CLChat";
/**
* This character is prepended to every message that is sent.
*/
static final char MESSAGE = ’0’;
/**
* This character is sent to the connected program when the user quits.
*/
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 611
return;
}
/* Exchange messages with the other end of the connection until one side
or the other closes the connection. This server program waits for
the first message from the client. After that, messages alternate
strictly back and forth. */
try {
userInput = new Scanner(System.in);
System.out.println("NOTE: Enter ’quit’ to end the program.\n");
while (true) {
System.out.println("WAITING...");
messageIn = incoming.readLine();
if (messageIn.length() > 0) {
// The first character of the message is a command. If
// the command is CLOSE, then the connection is closed.
// Otherwise, remove the command character from the
// message and proceed.
if (messageIn.charAt(0) == CLOSE) {
System.out.println("Connection closed at other end.");
connection.close();
break;
}
messageIn = messageIn.substring(1);
}
System.out.println("RECEIVED: " + messageIn);
System.out.print("SEND: ");
messageOut = userInput.nextLine();
if (messageOut.equalsIgnoreCase("quit")) {
// User wants to quit. Inform the other side
// of the connection, then close the connection.
outgoing.println(CLOSE);
outgoing.flush(); // Make sure the data is sent!
connection.close();
System.out.println("Connection closed.");
break;
}
outgoing.println(MESSAGE + messageOut);
outgoing.flush(); // Make sure the data is sent!
if (outgoing.checkError()) {
throw new IOException("Error occurred while transmitting message.");
}
}
}
catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println("Sorry, an error has occurred. Connection lost.");
System.out.println("Error: " + e);
System.exit(1);
}
} // end main()
This program is a little more robust than DateServer. For one thing, it uses a handshake to
make sure that a client who is trying to connect is really a CLChatClient program. A handshake
is simply information sent between a client and a server as part of setting up a connection,
before any actual data is sent. In this case, each side of the connection sends a string to
the other side to identify itself. The handshake is part of the protocol that I made up for
communication between CLChatClient and CLChatServer. A protocol is a detailed specification
of what data and messages can be exchanged over a connection, how they must be represented,
and what order they can be sent in. When you design a client/server application, the design
of the protocol is an important consideration. Another aspect of the CLChat protocol is that
after the handshake, every line of text that is sent over the connection begins with a character
that acts as a command. If the character is 0, the rest of the line is a message from one user to
the other. If the character is 1, the line indicates that a user has entered the “quit” command,
and the connection is to be shut down.
Remember that if you want to try out this program on a single computer, you can use
two command-line windows. In one, give the command “java CLChatServer” to start the
server. Then, in the other, use the command “java CLChatClient localhost” to connect to
the server that is running on the same machine. If the server is not listening on the default
port, you can add the port number as a second command line option to the program. If you
do not specify the connection information on the command line, you will be asked to enter it.
into almost every corner of information technology. For example: There are XML languages for
representing mathematical expressions (MathML), musical notation (MusicXML), molecules
and chemical reactions (CML), vector graphics (SVG), and many other kinds of information.
XML is used by OpenOffice and recent versions of Microsoft Office in the document format
for office applications such as word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations. XML site
syndication languages (RSS, ATOM) make it possible for web sites, newspapers, and blogs to
make a list of recent headlines available in a standard format that can be used by other web
sites and by web browsers; the same format is used to publish podcasts. And XML is a common
format for the electronic exchange of business information.
My purpose here is not to tell you everything there is to know about XML. I will just
explain a few ways in which it can be used in your own programs. In particular, I will not
say anything further about DTDs and valid XML. For many purposes, it is sufficient to use
well-formed XML documents with no associated DTDs.
Aside from the first line, the document is made up of elements, attributes, and textual
content. An element starts with a tag , such as <curve> and ends with a matching end-tag
such as </curve>. Between the tag and end-tag is the content of the element, which can
consist of text and nested elements. (In the example, the only textual content is the true or
false in the <symmetric> elements.) If an element has no content, then the opening tag and
end-tag can be combined into a single empty tag , such as <point x=’83’ y=’96’/>, with
a “/” before the final “>”. This is an abbreviation for <point x=’83’ y=’96’></point>. A
tag can include attributes such as the x and y in <point x=’83’ y=’96’/> or the version
in <simplepaint version="1.0">. A document can also include a few other things, such as
comments, that I will not discuss here.
The author of a well-formed XML document gets to choose the tag names and attribute
names, and meaningful names can be chosen to describe the data to a human reader. (For a
valid XML document that uses a DTD, it’s the author of the DTD who gets to choose the tag
names.)
Every well-formed XML document follows a strict syntax. Here are some of the most
important syntax rules: Tag names and attribute names in XML are case sensitive. A name
must begin with a letter and can contain letters, digits and certain other characters. Spaces
and ends-of-line are significant only in textual content. Every tag must either be an empty
tag or have a matching end-tag. By “matching” here, I mean that elements must be properly
nested; if a tag is inside some element, then the matching end-tag must also be inside that
element. A document must have a root element, which contains all the other elements. The
root element in the above example has tag name simplepaint. Every attribute must have
a value, and that value must be enclosed in quotation marks; either single quotes or double
quotes can be used for this. The special characters < and &, if they appear in attribute values
or textual content, must be written as < and &. “<” and “&” are examples
of entities. The entities >, ", and ' are also defined, representing >, double
quote, and single quote. (Additional entities can be defined in a DTD.)
While this description will not enable you to understand everything that you might
encounter in XML documents, it should allow you to design well-formed XML documents
to represent data structures used in Java programs.
is a very complex task! It has been coded once and for all into a method that can be used very
easily in any Java program. We see the benefit of using a standardized syntax.)
The structure of the DOM data structure is defined in the package org.w3c.dom, which
contains several data types that represent an XML document as a whole and the individual
nodes in a document. The “org.w3c” in the name refers to the World Wide Web Consortium,
W3C, which is the standards organization for the Web. DOM, like XML, is a general standard,
not just a Java standard. The data types that we need here are Document, Node, Element, and
NodeList. (They are defined as interfaces rather than classes, but that fact is not relevant
here.) We can use methods that are defined in these data types to access the data in the DOM
representation of an XML document.
An object of type Document represents an entire XML document. The return value of
docReader.parse()—xmldoc in the above example—is of type Document. We will only need
one method from this class: If xmldoc is of type Document, then
xmldoc.getDocumentElement()
returns a value of type Element that represents the root element of the document. (Recall that
this is the top-level element that contains all the other elements.) In the sample XML document
from earlier in this section, the root element consists of the tag <simplepaint version="1.0">,
the end-tag </simplepaint>, and everything in between. The elements that are nested inside
the root element are represented by their own nodes, which are said to be children of the
root node. An object of type Element contains several useful methods. If element is of type
Element, then we have:
• element.getTagName() — returns a String containing the name that is used in the
element’s tag. For example, the name of a <curve> element is the string “curve”.
• element.getAttribute(attrName) — if attrName is the name of an attribute in the
element, then this method returns the value of that attribute. For the element,
<point x="83" y="42"/>, element.getAttribute("x") would return the string “83”.
Note that the return value is always a String, even if the attribute is supposed to represent
a numerical value. If the element has no attribute with the specified name, then the return
value is an empty string.
• element.getTextContent() — returns a String containing all of the textual content that
is contained in the element. Note that this includes text that is contained inside other
elements that are nested inside the element.
• element.getChildNodes() — returns a value of type NodeList that contains all the Nodes
that are children of the element. The list includes nodes representing other elements and
textual content that are directly nested in the element (as well as some other types of node
that I don’t care about here). The getChildNodes() method makes it possible to traverse
the entire DOM data structure by starting with the root element, looking at children of
the root element, children of the children, and so on. (There is a similar method that
returns the attributes of the element, but I won’t be using it here.)
• element.getElementsByTagName(tagName) — returns a NodeList that contains all the
nodes representing all elements that are nested inside element and which have the given
tag name. Note that this includes elements that are nested to any level, not just elements
that are directly contained inside element. The getElementsByTagName() method allows
you to reach into the document and pull out specific data that you are interested in.
An object of type NodeList represents a list of Nodes. Unfortunately, it does not use the
API defined for lists in the Java Collection Framework. Instead, a value, nodeList, of type
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 618
NodeList has two methods: nodeList.getLength() returns the number of nodes in the list,
and nodeList.item(i) returns the node at position i, where the positions are numbered 0,
1, . . . , nodeList.getLength() - 1. Note that the return value of nodeList.get() is of type
Node, and it might have to be type-cast to a more specific node type before it is used.
Knowing just this much, you can do the most common types of processing of DOM
representations. Let’s look at a few code fragments. Suppose that in the course of processing
a document you come across an Element node that represents the element
<background red=’255’ green=’153’ blue=’51’/>
This element might be encountered either while traversing the document with getChildNodes()
or in the result of a call to getElementsByTagName("background"). Our goal is to reconstruct
the data structure represented by the document, and this element represents part of that data.
In this case, the element represents a color, and the red, green, and blue components are given
by the attributes of the element. If element is a variable that refers to the node, the color can
be obtained by saying:
int r = Integer.parseInt( element.getAttribute("red") );
int g = Integer.parseInt( element.getAttribute("green") );
int b = Integer.parseInt( element.getAttribute("blue") );
Color bgColor = new Color(r,g,b);
Suppose now that element refers to the node that represents the element
<symmetric>true</symmetric>
In this case, the element represents the value of a boolean variable, and the value is encoded
in the textual content of the element. We can recover the value from the element with:
String bool = element.getTextContent();
boolean symmetric;
if (bool.equals("true"))
symmetric = true;
else
symmetric = false;
Next, consider an example that uses a NodeList. Suppose we encounter an element that
represents a list of Points::
<pointlist>
<point x=’17’ y=’42’/>
<point x=’23’ y=’8’/>
<point x=’109’ y=’342’/>
<point x=’18’ y=’270’/>
</pointlist>
Suppose that element refers to the node that represents the <pointlist> element. Our goal
is to build the list of type ArrayList<Point> that is represented by the element. We can do
this by traversing the NodeList that contains the child nodes of element:
ArrayList<Point> points = new ArrayList<>();
NodeList children = element.getChildNodes();
for (int i = 0; i < children.getLength(); i++) {
Node child = children.item(i); // One of the child nodes of element.
if ( child instanceof Element ) {
Element pointElement = (Element)child; // One of the <point> elements.
int x = Integer.parseInt( pointElement.getAttribute("x") );
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 619
}
else if (curveElement.getTagName().equals("point")) {
int x = Integer.parseInt(curveElement.getAttribute("x"));
int y = Integer.parseInt(curveElement.getAttribute("y"));
curve.points.add(new Point(x,y));
}
else if (curveElement.getTagName().equals("symmetric")) {
String content = curveElement.getTextContent();
if (content.equals("true"))
curve.symmetric = true;
}
}
}
}
}
}
curves = newCurves; // Change picture in window to show the data from file.
setBackground(newBackground);
repaint();
You can find the complete source code in SimplePaintWithXML.java.
∗ ∗ ∗
XML has developed into an extremely important technology, and some applications of it are
very complex. But there is a core of simple ideas that can be easily applied in Java. Knowing
just the basics, you can make good use of XML in your own Java programs.
Exercises 621
1. The sample program DirectoryList.java, given as an example in Subsection 11.2.2, will (solution)
print a list of files in a directory specified by the user. But some of the files in that
directory might themselves be directories. And the subdirectories can themselves contain
directories. And so on. Write a modified version of DirectoryList that will list all the
files in a directory and all its subdirectories, to any level of nesting. You will need a
recursive subroutine to do the listing. The subroutine should have a parameter of type
File. You will need the constructor from the File class that has the form
public File( File dir, String fileName )
// Constructs the File object representing a file
// named fileName in the directory specified by dir.
2. Write a program that will count the number of lines in each file that is specified on the (solution)
command line. Assume that the files are text files. Note that multiple files can be specified,
as in:
java LineCounts file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt
Write each file name, along with the number of lines in that file, to standard output. If an
error occurs while trying to read from one of the files, you should print an error message
for that file, but you should still process all the remaining files. Do not use TextIO to
process the files; use a Scanner or a BufferedReader to process each file.
3. For this exercise, you will write a network server program. The program is a simple file (solution)
server that makes a collection of files available for transmission to clients. When the server
starts up, it needs to know the name of the directory that contains the collection of files.
This information can be provided as a command-line argument. You can assume that the
directory contains only regular files (that is, it does not contain any sub-directories). You
can also assume that all the files are text files.
When a client connects to the server, the server first reads a one-line command from
the client. The command can be the string “INDEX”. In this case, the server responds by
sending a list of names of all the files that are available on the server. Or the command can
be of the form “GET <filename>”, where <filename> is a file name. The server checks
whether the requested file actually exists. If so, it first sends the word “OK” as a message
to the client. Then it sends the contents of the file and closes the connection. Otherwise,
it sends a line beginning with the word “ERROR” to the client and closes the connection.
(The error response can include an error message on the rest of the line.)
Your program should use a subroutine to handle each request that the server receives.
It should not stop after handling one request; it should remain open and continue to
accept new requests. See the DirectoryList example in Subsection 11.2.2 for help with the
problem of getting the list of files in the directory.
4. Write a client program for the server from Exercise 11.3. Design a user interface that will (solution)
let the user do at least two things: (1) Get a list of files that are available on the server
and display the list on standard output; and (2) Get a copy of a specified file from the
server and save it to a local file (on the computer where the client is running).
Exercises 622
6. The sample program Checkers.java from Subsection 7.6.3 lets two players play checkers. (solution)
It would be nice if, in the middle of a game, the state of the game could be saved to a file.
Later, the file could be read back into the file to restore the game and allow the players to
continue. Add the ability to save and load files to the checkers program. Design a simple
text-based format for the files. Here is a picture of my solution to this exercise, showing
that Load and Save buttons have been added:
It’s a little tricky to restore the complete state of a game after reading the data from
a file. The program has a variable board of type CheckersData that stores the current
contents of the board, and it has a variable currentPlayer of type int that indicates
whether Red or Black is currently moving. This data must be stored in the file when a
file is saved. When a file is read into the program, you should read the data into two local
variables newBoard of type CheckersData and newCurrentPlayer of type int. Once you
have successfully read all the data from the file, you can use the following code to set up
the remaining program state correctly. This code assumes that you have introduced two
Exercises 623
new variables saveButton and loadButton of type JButton to represent the “Save Game”
and “Load Game” buttons:
board = newBoard; // Set up game with data read from file.
currentPlayer = newCurrentPlayer;
legalMoves = board.getLegalMoves(currentPlayer);
selectedRow = -1;
gameInProgress = true;
newGameButton.setEnabled(false);
loadButton.setEnabled(false);
saveButton.setEnabled(true);
resignButton.setEnabled(true);
if (currentPlayer == CheckersData.RED)
message.setText("Game loaded -- it’s RED’s move.");
else
message.setText("Game loaded -- it’s BLACK’s move.");
repaint();
Quiz 624
Quiz on Chapter 11
(answers)
1. In Java, input/output is done using I/O streams. I/O streams are an abstraction. Explain
what this means and why it is important.
2. Java has two types of I/O stream: character streams and byte streams. Why? What is
the difference between the two types of streams?
5. The package java.io includes a class named URL. What does an object of type URL
represent, and how is it used?
8. What is a socket?
11. What is it about XML that makes it suitable for representing almost any type of data?
12. Write a complete program that will display the first ten lines from a text file. The lines
should be written to standard output, System.out. The file name is given as the command-
line argument args[0]. You can assume that the file contains at least ten lines. Don’t
bother to make the program robust. Do not use TextIO to process the file; read from the
file using methods covered in this chapter.
Chapter 12
In the classic programming model, there is a single central processing unit that reads
instructions from memory and carries them out, one after the other. The purpose of a program
is to provide the list of instructions for the processor to execute. This is the only type of
programming that we have considered so far.
However, this model of programming has limitations. Modern computers have multiple
processors, making it possible for them to perform several tasks at the same time. To use the
full potential of all those processors, you will need to write programs that can do parallel
processing . For Java programmers, that means learning about threads. A single thread is
similar to the programs that you have been writing up until now, but more than one thread
can be running at the same time, “in parallel.” What makes things more interesting—and
more difficult—than single-threaded programming is the fact that the threads in a parallel
program are rarely completely independent of one another. They usually need to cooperate
and communicate. Learning to manage and control cooperation among threads is the main
hurdle that you will face in this chapter.
There are several reasons to use parallel programming. One is simply to do computations
more quickly by setting several processors to work on them simultaneously. Just as important,
however, is to use threads to deal with “blocking” operations, where a process can’t proceed
until some event occurs. In the previous chapter, for example, we saw how programs can block
while waiting for data to arrive over a network connection. Threads make it possible for one
part of a program to continue to do useful work even while another part is blocked, waiting for
some event to occur. In this context, threads are a vital programming tool even for a computer
that has only a single processing unit.
As Java has developed, new features have been added to the language that make it possible
to do parallel programming without using threads directly. We have already seen one of these:
parallel streams in the stream API from Section 10.6. We will encounter several more in this
chapter. But to use these higher level language features safely and efficiently, you still need to
know something about the hazards and benefits of threads.
625
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 626
now have more than one processing unit, and such computers can literally work on several tasks
simultaneously. It is likely that from now on, most of the increase in computing power will
come from adding additional processors to computers rather than from increasing the speed of
individual processors. To use the full power of these multiprocessing computers, a programmer
must do parallel programming , which means writing a program as a set of several tasks that
can be executed simultaneously. Even on a single-processor computer, parallel programming
techniques can be useful, since some problems can be tackled most naturally by breaking the
solution into a set of simultaneous tasks that cooperate to solve the problem.
In Java, a single task is called a thread . The term “thread” refers to a “thread of control” or
“thread of execution,” meaning a sequence of instructions that are executed one after another—
the thread extends through time, connecting each instruction to the next. In a multithreaded
program, there can be many threads of control, weaving through time in parallel and forming
the complete fabric of the program. (Ok, enough with the metaphor, already!) Every Java
program has at least one thread; when the Java virtual machine runs your program, it creates a
thread that is responsible for executing the main routine of the program. This main thread can
in turn create other threads that can continue even after the main thread has terminated. In a
GUI program, there is at least one additional thread, which is responsible for handling events
and drawing components on the screen. In Swing, that thread is the “event dispatch thread.”
Unfortunately, parallel programming is even more difficult than ordinary, single-threaded
programming. When several threads are working together on a problem, a whole new category
of errors is possible. This just means that techniques for writing correct and robust programs are
even more important for parallel programming than they are for normal programming. On the
other hand, fortunately, Java has a nice thread API that makes basic uses of threads reasonably
easy. It also has a variety of standard classes to help with some of the more tricky parts or to
hide them entirely. It won’t be until midway through Section 12.3 that you’ll learn about the
low-level techniques that are necessary to handle the trickiest parts of parallel programming.
In fact, a programmer can do a lot with threads without ever learning about the low-level stuff.
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This discussion has assumed that the computer on which the program is running has more
than one processing unit, so that it is possible for the original thread and the newly created
thread to literally be executed at the same time. However, it’s possible to create multiple
threads even on a computer that has only one processor (and, more generally, it is possible to
create many more threads than there are processors, on any computer). In that case, the two
threads will compete for time on the processor. However, there is still indeterminacy because
the processor can switch from one thread to another at unpredictable times. In fact, from
the point of view of the programmer, there is no difference between programming for a single-
processor computer and programming for a multi-processor computer, and we will mostly ignore
the distinction from now on.
∗ ∗ ∗
I mentioned that there are two ways to program a thread. The first way was to
define a subclass of Thread. The second is to define a class that implements the interface
java.lang.Runnable. The Runnable interface defines a single method, public void run().
Given a Runnable, it is possible to create a Thread whose task is to execute the Runnable’s
run() method.
The Thread class has a constructor that takes a Runnable as its parameter. When an object
that implements the Runnable interface is passed to that constructor, the run() method of the
thread will simply call the run() method from the Runnable, and calling the thread’s start()
method will create a new thread of control in which the Runnable’s run() method is executed.
For example, as an alternative to the NamedThread class, we could define the class:
public class NamedRunnable implements Runnable {
private String name; // The name of this Runnable.
public NamedRunnable(String name) { // Constructor gives name to object.
this.name = name;
}
public void run() { // The run method prints a message to standard output.
System.out.println("Greetings from runnable ’" + name +"’!");
}
}
To use this version of the class, we would create a NamedRunnable object and use that object
to create an object of type Thread:
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 629
∗ ∗ ∗
To help you understand how multiple threads are executed in parallel, we consider the
sample program ThreadTest1.java. This program creates several threads. Each thread performs
exactly the same task. The task is to count the number of integers less than 10,000,000 that
are prime. (The particular task that is done is not important for our purposes here, as long as
it is something that takes a non-trivial amount of time. This is a demo program; it would be
silly in a real program to have multiple threads that do the same thing, and the method that
is used for counting the primes is very inefficient.) This computation should take no more than
a few seconds on a modern computer. The threads that perform this task are defined by the
following static nested class, where MAX is 10,000,000:
/**
* When a thread belonging to this class is run it will count the
* number of primes between 2 and MAX. It will print the result
* to standard output, along with its ID number and the elapsed
* time between the start and the end of the computation.
*/
private static class CountPrimesThread extends Thread {
int id; // An id number for this thread; specified in the constructor.
public CountPrimesThread(int id) {
this.id = id;
}
public void run() {
long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
int count = countPrimes(2,MAX); // Counts the primes.
long elapsedTime = System.currentTimeMillis() - startTime;
System.out.println("Thread " + id + " counted " +
count + " primes in " + (elapsedTime/1000.0) + " seconds.");
}
}
The main program asks the user how many threads to run, and then creates and starts the
specified number of threads:
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 630
thread to another. That is, each processor runs one thread for a while then switches to another
thread and runs that one for a while, and so on. Typically, these “context switches” occur
about 100 times or more per second. The result is that the computer makes progress on all
the tasks, and it looks to the user as if all the tasks are being executed simultaneously. This
is why in the sample program, in which each thread has the same amount of work to do, all
the threads complete at about the same time: Over any time period longer than a fraction of
a second, the computer’s time is divided approximately equally among all the threads.
for the exception, the thread can check whether it has been interrupted by calling the static
method Thread.interrupted(). This method tells whether the current thread—the thread
that executes the method—has been interrupted. It also has the unusual property of clearing
the interrupted status of the thread, so you only get one chance to check for an interruption.
In your own programs, your threads are not going to be interrupted unless you interrupt them.
So most often, you are not likely to need to do anything in response to an InterruptedException
(except to catch it).
Sometimes, it’s necessary for one thread to wait for another thread to die. This is done with
the join() method from the Thread class. Suppose that thrd is a Thread. Then, if another
thread calls thrd.join(), that other thread will go to sleep until thrd terminates. If thrd is
already dead when thrd.join() is called, then it simply has no effect. The join() method can
throw an InterruptedException, which must be handled as usual. As an example, the following
code starts several threads, waits for them all to terminate, and then outputs the elapsed time:
CountPrimesThread[] worker = new CountPrimesThread[numberOfThreads];
long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
for (int i = 0; i < numberOfThreads; i++) {
worker[i] = new CountPrimesThread();
worker[i].start();
}
for (int i = 0; i < numberOfThreads; i++) {
try {
worker[i].join(); // Wait until worker[i] finishes, if it hasn’t already.
}
catch (InterruptedException e) {
}
}
// At this point, all the worker threads have terminated.
long elapsedTime = System.currentTimeMillis() - startTime;
System.out.println("Total elapsed time: " + (elapsedTime/1000.0) + " seconds");
An observant reader will note that this code assumes that no InterruptedException will occur.
To be absolutely sure that the thread worker[i] has terminated in an environment where
InterruptedExceptions are possible, you would have to do something like:
while (worker[i].isAlive()) {
try {
worker[i].join();
}
catch (InterruptedException e) {
}
}
Another version of the join() method takes an integer parameter that specifies the
maximum number of milliseconds to wait. A call to thrd.join(m) will wait until either thrd
has terminated or until m milliseconds have elapsed (or until the waiting thread is interrupted).
This can be used to allow a thread to wake up occasionally to perform some task while it is
waiting. Here, for example, is a code segment that will start a thread, thrd, and then will
output a period every two seconds as long as thrd continues to run:
System.out.print("Running the thread ");
thrd.start();
while (thrd.isAlive()) {
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 633
try {
thrd.join(2000);
System.out.print(".");
}
catch (InterruptedException e) {
}
}
System.out.println(" Done!");
∗ ∗ ∗
Threads have two properties that are occasionally useful: a daemon status and a priority.
A Thread thrd can be designated as a daemon thread by calling thrd.setDaemon(true).
This must be done before the thread is started, and it can throw an exception of type
SecurityException if the calling thread is not allowed to modify thrd’s properties. This has
only one effect: The Java Virtual Machine will exit as soon as there are no non-daemon
threads that are still alive. That is, the fact that a daemon thread is still alive is not enough
to keep the Java Virtual Machine running. A daemon thread might exist, for example, only
to provide some service to other, non-daemon threads. When there are no more non-daemon
threads, there will be no further call for the daemon thread’s services, so the program might
as well shut down. (A call to System.exit() forces the JVM to terminate, even if there are
non-daemon threads still running.)
The priority of a thread is a more important property. Every thread has a priority , specified
as an integer. A thread with a greater priority value will be run in preference to a thread with a
smaller priority. For example, computations that can be done in the background, when no more
important thread has work to do, can be run with a low priority. In the next section, we will see
how this can be useful in GUI programs. If thrd is of type Thread, then thrd.getPriority()
returns the integer that specifies thrd’s priority, and thrd.setPriority(p) can be used to set
its priority to a given integer, p.
Priorities cannot be arbitrary integers, and thrd.setPriority() will throw an IllegalArgu-
mentException if the specified priority is not in the legal range for the thread. The range of legal
priority values can differ from one computer to another. The range of legal values is specified
by the constants Thread.MIN PRIORITY and Thread.MAX PRIORITY, but a given thread might
be further restricted to values less than Thread.MAX PRIORITY. The default priority is given
by Thread.NORM PRIORITY. To set thrd to run with a priority value just below the normal
priority, you can call
thrd.setPriority( Thread.NORM PRIORITY - 1 );
Note that thrd.setPriority() can also throw an exception of type SecurityException, if
the thread that calls the method is not allowed to set the priority of thrd to the specified value.
Finally, I’ll note that the static method Thread.currentThread() returns the current
thread. That is, the return value of this method is the thread that executed the method.
This allows a thread to get a reference to itself, so that it can modify its own properties.
For example, you can determine the priority of the currently running thread by calling
Thread.currentThread().getPriority().
by sharing resources. When two threads need access to the same resource, such as a variable or
a window on the screen, some care must be taken that they don’t try to use the same resource
at the same time. Otherwise, the situation could be something like this: Imagine several cooks
sharing the use of just one measuring cup, and imagine that Cook A fills the measuring cup
with milk, only to have Cook B grab the cup before Cook A has a chance to empty the milk
into his bowl. There has to be some way for Cook A to claim exclusive rights to the cup while
he performs the two operations: Add-Milk-To-Cup and Empty-Cup-Into-Bowl.
Something similar happens with threads, even with something as simple as adding one to a
counter. The statement
count = count + 1;
is actually a sequence of three operations:
Step 1. Get the value of count
Step 2. Add 1 to the value.
Step 3. Store the new value in count
Suppose that each of several threads performs these three steps. Remember that it’s possible
for two threads to run at the same time, and even if there is only one processor, it’s possible
for that processor to switch from one thread to another at any point. Suppose that while one
thread is between Step 2 and Step 3, another thread starts executing the same sequence of
steps. Since the first thread has not yet stored the new value in count, the second thread
reads the old value of count and adds one to that old value. Both threads have computed the
same new value for count, and both threads then go on to store that value back into count
by executing Step 3. After both threads have done so, the value of count has gone up only
by 1 instead of by 2! This type of problem is called a race condition. This occurs when one
thread is in the middle of a multi-step operation, and another thread can change some value or
condition that the first thread is depending upon. (The first thread is “in a race” to complete
all the steps before it is interrupted by another thread.)
Another example of a race condition can occur in an if statement. Consider the following
statement, which is meant to avoid a division-by-zero error:
if ( A != 0 ) {
B = C / A;
}
Suppose that this statement is executed by some thread. If the variable A is shared by one
or more other threads, and if nothing is done to guard against the race condition, then it is
possible that one of those other threads will change the value of A to zero between the time
that the first thread checks the condition A != 0 and the time that it does the division. This
means that the thread can end up dividing by zero, even though it just checked that A was not
zero!
To fix the problem of race conditions, there has to be some way for a thread to get exclusive
access to a shared resource. This is not a trivial thing to implement, but Java provides a high-
level and relatively easy-to-use approach to exclusive access. It’s done with synchronized
methods and with the synchronized statement. These are used to protect shared resources
by making sure that only one thread at a time will try to access the resource. Synchronization in
Java actually provides only mutual exclusion, which means that exclusive access to a resource
is only guaranteed if every thread that needs access to that resource uses synchronization.
Synchronization is like a cook leaving a note that says, “I’m using the measuring cup.” This
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 635
will get the cook exclusive access to the cup—but only if all the cooks agree to check the note
before trying to grab the cup.
Because this is a difficult topic, I will start with a simple example. Suppose that we want
to avoid the race condition that occurs when several threads all want to add 1 to a counter. We
can do this by defining a class to represent the counter and by using synchronized methods in
that class. A method is declared to be synchronized by adding the reserved word synchronized
as a modifier to the definition of the method:
public class ThreadSafeCounter {
private int count = 0; // The value of the counter.
synchronized public void increment() {
count = count + 1;
}
synchronized public int getValue() {
return count;
}
}
If tsc is of type ThreadSafeCounter, then any thread can call tsc.increment() to add 1 to the
counter in a completely safe way. The fact that tsc.increment() is synchronized means that
only one thread can be in this method at a time; once a thread starts executing this method, it
is guaranteed that it will finish executing it before another thread is allowed to access count.
There is no possibility of a race condition. Note that the guarantee depends on the fact that
count is a private variable. This forces all access to tsc.count to occur in the synchronized
methods that are provided by the class. If count were public, it would be possible for a
thread to bypass the synchronization by, for example, saying tsc.count++. This could change
the value of count while another thread is in the middle of tsc.increment(). Remember
that synchronization by itself does not guarantee exclusive access; it only guarantees mutual
exclusion among all the threads that are synchronized.
However, the ThreadSafeCounter class does not prevent all possible race conditions that
might arise when using a counter. Consider the if statement:
if ( tsc.getValue() == 10 ) {
doSomething();
}
where doSomething() is some method that requires the value of the counter to be 10. There is
still a race condition here, which occurs if a second thread increments the counter between the
time the first thread tests tsc.getValue() == 10 and the time it executes doSomething().
The first thread needs exclusive access to the counter during the execution of the whole if
statement. (The synchronization in the ThreadSafeCounter class only gives it exclusive access
during the time it is evaluating tsc.getValue().) We can solve the race condition by putting
the if statement in a synchronized statement:
synchronized(tsc) {
if ( tsc.getValue() == 10 )
doSomething();
}
Note that the synchronized statement takes an object—tsc in this case—as a kind of
parameter. The syntax of the synchronized statement is:
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 636
synchronized( hobject i ) {
hstatements i
}
In Java, mutual exclusion is always associated with an object; we say that the synchronization
is “on” that object. For example, the if statement above is “synchronized on tsc.” A
synchronized instance method, such as those in the class ThreadSafeCounter, is synchronized on
the object that contains the instance method. In fact, adding the synchronized modifier to the
definition of an instance method is pretty much equivalent to putting the body of the method
in a synchronized statement of the form synchronized(this) {...}. It is also possible to
have synchronized static methods; a synchronized static method is synchronized on the special
class object that represents the class containing the static method.
The real rule of synchronization in Java is this: Two threads cannot be synchronized
on the same object at the same time; that is, they cannot simultaneously be executing
code segments that are synchronized on that object. If one thread is synchronized on an object,
and a second thread tries to synchronize on the same object, the second thread is forced to
wait until the first thread has finished with the object. This means that it is not only true
that two threads cannot be executing the same synchronized method at the same time, but
in fact two threads cannot be executing two different methods at the same time, if the two
methods are synchronized on the same object. This is implemented using something called a
synchronization lock . Every object has a synchronization lock, and that lock can be “held”
by only one thread at a time. To enter a synchronized statement or synchronized method, a
thread must obtain the associated object’s lock. If the lock is available, then the thread obtains
the lock and immediately begins executing the synchronized code. It releases the lock after it
finishes executing the synchronized code. If Thread A tries to obtain a lock that is already held
by Thread B, then Thread A has to wait until Thread B releases the lock. In fact, Thread A
will go to sleep, and will not be awoken until the lock becomes available.
The discussion of invariants in Subsection 8.2.3 mentioned that reasoning about invariants
becomes much more complicated when threads are involved. The problem is race conditions. We
would like our ThreadSafeCounter class to have the class invariant that “the value of count is the
number of times that increment() has been called.” In a single-threaded program, that would
be true even without synchronization. However, in a multithreaded program, synchronization
is needed to ensure that the class invariant is really invariant.
∗ ∗ ∗
As a simple example of shared resources, we return to the prime-counting problem. In this
case, instead of having every thread perform exactly the same task, we’ll do some real parallel
processing. The program will count the prime numbers in a given range of integers, and it will
do so by dividing the work up among several threads. Each thread will be assigned a part of
the full range of integers, and it will count the primes in its assigned part. At the end of its
computation, the thread has to add its count to the overall total of primes in the entire range.
The variable that represents the total is shared by all the threads, since each thread has to add
a number to the total. If each thread just says
total = total + count;
then there is a (small) chance that two threads will try to do this at the same time and that the
final total will be wrong. To prevent this race condition, access to total has to be synchronized.
My program uses a synchronized method to add the counts to the total. This method is called
once by each thread, and it is the only method in which the value of total is changed:
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 637
changes that were made by other threads, as long as the changes were made in code that was
synchronized on the same object.
It is possible to use a shared variable safely outside of synchronized code, but in that case,
the variable must be declared to be volatile. The volatile keyword is a modifier that can be
added to a global variable declaration, as in
private volatile int count;
If a variable is declared to be volatile, no thread will keep a local copy of that variable in its
cache. Instead, the thread will always use the official, main copy of the variable. This means
that any change that is made to the variable will immediately be visible to all threads. This
makes it safe for threads to refer to volatile shared variables even outside of synchronized
code. Access to volatile variables is less efficient than access to non-volatile variables, but more
efficient than using synchronization. (Remember, though, that using a volatile variable does
not solve race conditions that occur, for example, when the value of the variable is incremented.
The increment operation can still be interrupted by another thread.)
When the volatile modifier is applied to an object variable, only the variable itself is
declared to be volatile, not the contents of the object that the variable points to. For this reason,
volatile is used mostly for variables of simple types such as primitive types or immutable types
like String.
A typical example of using volatile variables is to send a signal from one thread to another
that tells the second thread to terminate. The two threads would share a variable
volatile boolean terminate = false;
The run method of the second thread would check the value of terminate frequently, and it
would end when the value of terminate becomes true:
public void run() {
while ( terminate == false ) {
.
. // Do some work.
.
}
}
This thread will run until some other thread sets the value of terminate to true. Something
like this is really the only clean way for one thread to cause another thread to die.
(By the way, you might be wondering why threads should use local data caches in the first
place, since it seems to complicate things unnecessarily. Caching is allowed because of the
structure of multiprocessing computers. In many multiprocessing computers, each processor
has some local memory that is directly connected to the processor. A thread’s cache can be
stored in the local memory of the processor on which the thread is running. Access to this local
memory is much faster than access to the main memory that is shared by all processors, so it
is more efficient for a thread to use a local copy of a shared variable rather than some “master
copy” that is stored in main memory.)
worked with one of them: the Timer class, in package javax.swing, which can generate a
sequence of ActionEvents separated by a specified time interval. Timers were introduced in
Section 6.4, where they were used to implement animations. Behind the scenes, a Timer uses a
thread. The thread sleeps most of the time, but it wakes up periodically to generate the events
associated with the timer. Before timers were introduced, threads had to be used to implement
a similar functionality.
In a typical use of a timer for animation, each event from the timer causes a new frame of
the animation to be computed and displayed. In the response to the event, it is only necessary
to update some state variables and to repaint the display to reflect the changes. A Timer to do
that every thirty milliseconds might be created like this:
Timer timer = new Timer( 30, e -> {
updateForNextFrame();
display.repaint();
} );
timer.start();
Suppose that we wanted to do the same thing with a thread. The run() method of the
thread would have to execute a loop in which the thread sleeps for 30 milliseconds, then wakes
up to do the updating and repainting. This could be implemented in a nested class as follows
using the method Thread.sleep() that was discussed in Subsection 12.1.2:
private class MyAnimator extends Thread {
public void run() {
while (true) {
try {
Thread.sleep(30);
}
catch (InterruptedException e) {
}
updateForNextFrame();
display.repaint();
}
}
}
To use this class, you would create an object belonging to it and call its start() method. As
it stands, there would be no way to stop the thread once it is started. One way to make that
possible would be to end the loop when a volatile boolean variable, terminate, becomes
true, as discussed in Subsection 12.1.4. A thread object can only be executed once, so in order
to restart the animation after it has been stopped in this way, it would be necessary to create a
new thread. In the next section, we’ll see some more versatile techniques for controlling threads.
There is a subtle difference between using threads and using timers for animation. The
thread that is used by a Swing Timer does nothing but generate events. The event-handling
code that is executed in response to those events is actually executed in the Swing event-
handling GUI thread, which also handles repainting of components and responses to user
actions. This is important because the Swing GUI is not thread-safe. That is, it does not
use synchronization to avoid race conditions among threads trying to access GUI components
and their state variables. As long as everything is done in the Swing event thread, there is no
problem. A problem can arise when another thread manipulates components or the variables
that are also used in the GUI thread. In the MyAnimator example given above, this could
happen when the thread calls the updateForNextFrame() method. The variables that are
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 641
In this program, the display’s repaint() method is called every time the algorithm makes
a change to the array. Whenever this is done, the thread sleeps for 100 milliseconds to allow
time for the display to be repainted and for the user to see the change. There is also a longer
delay, one full second, just after the array is randomized, before the sorting starts. Since these
delays occur at several points in the code, QuicksortThreadDemo defines a delay() method
that makes the thread that calls it sleep for a specified period.
An interesting question is how to implement the “Finish” button, which should abort the
sort and terminate the thread. Pressing this button causes the value of a volatile boolean
variable, running, to be set to false, as a signal to the thread that it should terminate. The
problem is that this button can be clicked at any time, even when the algorithm is many levels
down in the recursion. Before the thread can terminate, all of those recursive method calls must
return. A nice way to cause that is to throw an exception. QuickSortThreadDemo defines a new
exception class, ThreadTerminationException, for this purpose. The delay() method checks the
value of the signal variable, running. If running is false, the delay() method throws the
exception that will cause the recursive algorithm, and eventually the animation thread itself,
to terminate. Here, then, is the delay() method:
private void delay(int millis) {
if (! running)
throw new ThreadTerminationException();
try {
Thread.sleep(millis);
}
catch (InterruptedException e) {
}
if (! running) // Check again, in case it changed during the sleep period.
throw new ThreadTerminationException();
}
The ThreadTerminationException is caught in the thread’s run() method:
/**
* This class defines the thread that runs the recursive
* QuickSort algorithm. The thread begins by randomizing the
* hue array. It then calls quickSort() to sort the entire array.
* If quickSort() is aborted by a ThreadTerminationException,
* which would be caused by the user clicking the Finish button,
* then the thread will restore the array to sorted order before
* terminating, so that whether or not the quickSort is aborted,
* the array ends up sorted. In any case, in the end, it
* resets the text on the button to "Start".
*/
private class Runner extends Thread {
public void run() {
for (int i = 0; i < hue.length; i++) {
// fill hue array with indices in order
hue[i] = i;
}
for (int i = hue.length-1; i > 0; i--) {
// Randomize the order of the hues.
int r = (int)((i+1)*Math.random());
int temp = hue[r];
hue[r] = hue[i];
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 643
hue[i] = temp;
}
try {
delay(1000); // Wait one second before starting the sort.
quickSort(0,hue.length-1); // Sort the whole array.
}
catch (ThreadTerminationException e) { // User clicked "Finish".
for (int i = 0; i < hue.length; i++)
hue[i] = i; // restore original array values.
}
finally {// Make sure running is false and button label is correct.
running = false;
startButton.setText("Start");
display.repaint();
}
}
}
The program uses a variable, runner, of type Runner to represent the thread that does the
sorting. When the user clicks the “Start” button, the following code is executed to create and
start the thread:
startButton.setText("Finish");
runner = new Runner();
running = true; // Set the signal before starting the thread!
runner.start();
Note that the value of the signal variable, running, is set to true before starting the thread.
If running were false when the thread was started, the thread might see that value as soon
as it starts and interpret it as a signal to stop before doing anything. Remember that when
runner.start() is called, runner starts running in parallel with the thread that called it.
When the user clicks the “Finish” button, the value of running is set to false as a signal
to the thread to terminate. However, the thread might be sleeping when the “Finish” button
is pressed, and in that case, the thread has to wake up before it can act on the signal. To make
the thread a little more responsive, the program calls runner.interrupt(), which will wake
the thread if it is sleeping. (See Subsection 12.1.2.) This doesn’t have much practical effect in
this program, but it does make the program respond noticeably more quickly if the user presses
“Finish” immediately after pressing “Start,” while the thread is sleeping for a full second.
thread. This makes it possible for the computer to respond to user events even while the
computation is ongoing. We say that the computation is done “in the background.”
Note that this application of threads is very different from the previous example. When a
thread is used to drive a simple animation, it actually does very little work. The thread only
has to wake up several times each second, do a few computations to update state variables for
the next frame of the animation, and then arrange for that frame to be drawn. This leaves
plenty of time while the animation thread is sleeping between frames for the Swing event thread
to do any necessary redrawing of the GUI and to handle any other events.
When a thread is used for background computation, however, we want to keep the computer
as busy as possible working on the computation. The thread will compete for processor
time with the event-handling thread; if you are not careful, event-handling—redrawing in
particular—can still be delayed. Fortunately, you can use thread priorities to avoid the problem.
By setting the computation thread to run at a lower priority than the event-handling thread,
you make sure that events will be processed as quickly as possible, while the computation thread
will get all the extra processing time. Since event handling generally uses very little time, this
means that most of the processing time goes to the background computation, but the interface
is still very responsive. (Thread priorities were discussed in Subsection 12.1.2.)
The sample program BackgroundComputationDemo.java is an example of background
processing. This program creates an image that takes a while to compute because it takes
some computation to compute the color of each pixel in the image. The image itself is a piece
of a mathematical object known as the Mandelbrot set. We will use the same image in several
examples in this chapter.
In outline, BackgroundComputationDemo is similar to the QuicksortThreadDemo discussed
above. The computation is done in a thread defined by a nested class, Runner. A volatile
boolean variable, running, is used to control the thread: If the value of running is set to
false, the thread should terminate. The sample program has a button that the user clicks to
start and to abort the computation. The difference is that the thread in this case is meant to
run continuously, without sleeping. To allow the user to see that progress is being made in the
computation (always a good idea), every time the thread computes a row of pixels, it copies
those pixels to the image that is shown on the screen. The user sees the image being built up
line-by-line.
When the computation thread is created in response to the “Start” button, we need to set
it to run at a priority lower than the Swing event thread. The code that creates the thread
is itself running in the event-handling thread, so we can use a priority that is one less than
the priority of the thread that is executing the code. Note that the priority is set inside a
try..catch statement. If an error occurs while trying to set the thread priority, the program
will still work, though perhaps not as smoothly as it would if the priority was correctly set.
Here is how the thread is created and started:
runner = new Runner();
try {
runner.setPriority( Thread.currentThread().getPriority() - 1 );
}
catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println("Error: Can’t set thread priority: " + e);
}
running = true; // Set the signal before starting the thread!
runner.start();
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 645
The other major point of interest in this program is that we have two threads that are both
using the object that represents the image. The computation thread accesses the image in order
to set the color of its pixels. The event-handling thread accesses the same image when it copies
the image to the screen. Since the image is a resource that is shared by several threads, access
to the image object should be synchronized. When the paintComponent() method copies the
image to the screen (using a method that we have not yet covered), it does so in a synchronized
statement:
synchronized(image) {
g.drawImage(image,0,0,null);
}
When the computation thread sets the colors of a row of pixels (using another unfamiliar
method), it also uses synchronized:
synchronized(image) {
image.setRGB(0,row, width, 1, rgb, 0, width);
}
Note that both of these statements are synchronized on the same object, image. This is
essential. In order to prevent the two code segments from being executed simultaneously,
the synchronization must be on the same object. I use the image object here because it is
convenient, but just about any object would do; it is not required that you synchronize on the
object to which you are trying to control access.
Although BackgroundComputationDemo works OK, there is one problem: The goal is to get
the computation done as quickly as possible, using all available processing time. The program
accomplishes that goal on a computer that has only one processor. But on a computer that
has several processors, we are still using only one of those processors for the computation.
(And in fact, in that case the business about thread priority is not all that relevant, because
the animation thread and the application thread can run both run simultaneously, on different
processors.) It would be nice to get all of the processors working on the computation. To
do that, we need real parallel processing, with several computation threads. We turn to that
problem next.
You should try out the program. On a multi-processor computer, the computation will complete
more quickly when using several threads than when using just one. Note that when using one
thread, this program has the same behavior as the previous example program.
The approach used in this example for dividing up the problem among threads is not optimal.
We will see in the next section how it can be improved. However, MultiprocessingDemo1 makes
a good first example of multiprocessing.
When the user clicks the “Start” button, the program has to create and start the specified
number of threads, and it has to assign a segment of the image to each thread. Here is how
this is done:
workers = new Runner[threadCount]; // Holds the computation threads.
int rowsPerThread; // How many rows of pixels should each thread compute?
rowsPerThread = height / threadCount; // (height = vertical size of image)
running = true; // Set the signal before starting the threads!
threadsCompleted = 0; // Records how many of the threads have terminated.
for (int i = 0; i < threadCount; i++) {
int startRow; // first row computed by thread number i
int endRow; // last row computed by thread number i
// Create and start a thread to compute the rows of the image from
// startRow to endRow. Note that we have to make sure that
// the endRow for the last thread is the bottom row of the image.
startRow = rowsPerThread*i;
if (i == threadCount-1)
endRow = height-1;
else
endRow = rowsPerThread*(i+1) - 1;
workers[i] = new Runner(startRow, endRow);
try {
workers[i].setPriority( Thread.currentThread().getPriority() - 1 );
}
catch (Exception e) {
}
workers[i].start();
}
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 647
Beyond creating more than one thread, very few changes are needed to get the benefits of
multiprocessing. Just as in the previous example, each time a thread has computed the colors
for a row of pixels, it copies that row into the image.
One thing is new, however. When all the threads have finished running, the name of the
button in the program changes from “Abort” to “Start Again”, and the pop-up menu, which
has been disabled while the threads were running, is re-enabled. The problem is, how to tell
when all the threads have terminated? (You might think about why we can’t use join() to
wait for the threads to end, as was done in the example in Subsection 12.1.2; at least, we
certainly can’t do that in the Swing event thread!) In this example, I use an instance variable,
threadsRunning, to keep track of how many computation threads are still running. As each
thread finishes, it calls a method that subtracts one from the value of this variable. (The
method is called in the finally clause of a try statement to make absolutely sure that it is
called when the thread ends.) When the number of running threads drops to zero, the method
updates the state of the program appropriately. Here is the method that is called by each
thread just before terminating:
synchronized private void threadFinished() {
threadsRunning--;
if (threadsRunning == 0) { // all threads have finished
startButton.setText("Start Again");
startButton.setEnabled(true);
running = false; // Make sure running is false after the threads end.
workers = null; // Discard the array that holds the threads.
threadCountSelect.setEnabled(true); // Re-enable pop-up menu.
}
}
Note that this method is synchronized. This is to avoid the race condition when
threadsRunning is decremented. Without the synchronization, it is possible that two threads
might call the method at the same time. If the timing is just right, both threads could read
the same value for threadsRunning and get the same answer when they decrement it. The net
result will be that threadsRunning goes down by one instead of by two. One thread is not
properly counted, and threadsRunning will never become zero. The program would hang in a
kind of deadlock. The problem would occur only very rarely, since it depends on exact timing.
But in a large program, problems of this sort can be both very serious and very hard to debug.
Proper synchronization makes the error impossible.
accessing the same resources as the painting or event handling code. This eliminates the need
for synchronizing access to those resources.
As an example, the sample program BackgroundCompWithInvoke.java is a slight modifi-
cation of BackgroundComputationDemo.java, which was discussed earlier in this section. In
the revised version, SwingUtilities.invokeLater replaces synchronized. You can check the
source code if you are interested.
After a thread calls SwingUtilities.invokeLater(task), the thread continues immedi-
ately without waiting for the task to be completed. This is a problem if the thread depends
in some way on the results of the task. The method SwingUtilities.invokeAndWait(task)
schedules the task to be executed in the GUI thread, then blocks until the task has actually
been completed. That is, the thread that called SwingUtilities.invokeAndWait will go to
sleep until it is notified that the task has been executed. This method can throw several types
of checked exceptions, so it is usually called in a try..catch statement. You can consult Java
documentation for more information.
of computation, you still can’t depend on all the subproblems requiring equal amounts of time
to solve. For example, some of the processors on your computer might be busy running other
programs. Or perhaps some of the processors are simply slower than others. (This is not so
likely when running your computation on a single computer, but when distributing computation
across several networked computers, as we will do later in this chapter, differences in processor
speed can be a major issue.)
The common technique for dealing with all this is to divide the problem into a fairly large
number of subproblems—many more subproblems than there are processors. This means that
each processor will have to solve several subproblems. Each time a processor completes one
subtask, it is assigned another subtask to work on, until all the subtasks have been assigned. Of
course, there will still be variation in the time that the various subtasks require. One processor
might complete several subproblems while another works on one particularly difficult case. And
a slow or busy processor might complete only one or two subproblems while another processor
finishes five or six. Each processor can work at its own pace. As long as the subproblems are
fairly small, most of the processors can be kept busy until near the end of the computation.
This is known as load balancing : the computational load is balanced among the available
processors in order to keep them all as busy as possible. Of course, some processors will still
finish before others, but not by longer than the time it takes to complete the longest subtask.
While the subproblems should be small, they should not be too small. There is some
computational overhead involved in creating the subproblems and assigning them to processors.
If the subproblems are very small, this overhead can add significantly to the total amount of
work that has to be done. In my example program, the task is to compute a color for each pixel
in an image. For dividing that task up into subtasks, one possibility would be to have each
subtask compute just one pixel. But the subtasks produced in that way are probably too small.
So, instead, each subtask in my program computes the colors for one row of pixels. Since there
are several hundred rows of pixels in the image, the number of subtasks will be fairly large,
while each subtask will also be fairly large. The result is fairly good load balancing, with a
reasonable amount of overhead.
Note, by the way, that the problem that we are working on is a very easy one for parallel
programming. When we divide the problem of calculating an image into subproblems, all
the subproblems are completely independent. It is possible to work on any number of them
simultaneously, and they can be done in any order. Things get a lot more complicated when
some subtasks produce results that are required by other subtasks. In that case, the subtasks are
not independent, and the order in which the subtasks are performed is important. Furthermore,
there has to be some way for results from one subtask to be shared with other tasks. When the
subtasks are executed by different threads, this raises all the issues involved in controlling access
of threads to shared resources. So, in general, decomposing a problem for parallel processing
is much more difficult than it might appear from our relatively simple example. But for the
most part, that’s a topic for a course in parallel computing, not an introductory programming
course.
method is called run() and the task object implements the standard Runnable interface that
was discussed in Subsection 12.1.1. This interface is a natural way to represent computational
tasks. It’s possible to create a new thread for each Runnable. However, that doesn’t really
make sense when there are many tasks, since there is a significant amount of overhead involved
in creating each new thread. A better alternative is to create just a few threads and let each
thread execute a number of tasks.
The optimal number of threads to use is not entirely clear, and it can depend on exactly
what problem you are trying to solve. The goal is to keep all of the computer’s processors busy.
In the image-computing example, it works well to create one thread for each available processor,
but that won’t be true for all problems. In particular, if a thread can block for a non-trivial
amount of time while waiting for some event or for access to some resource, you want to have
extra threads around for the processor to run while other threads are blocked. We’ll encounter
exactly that situation when we turn to using threads with networking in Section 12.4.
When several threads are available for performing tasks, those threads are called a thread
pool . Thread pools are used to avoid creating a new thread to perform each task. Instead,
when a task needs to be performed, it can be assigned to any idle thread in the “pool.”
Once all the threads in the thread pool are busy, any additional tasks will have to wait until
one of the threads becomes idle. This is a natural application for a queue: Associated with
the thread pool is a queue of waiting tasks. As tasks become available, they are added to the
queue. Every time that a thread finishes a task, it goes to the queue to get another task to
work on.
Note that there is only one task queue for the thread pool. All the threads in the pool
use the same queue, so the queue is a shared resource. As always with shared resources, race
conditions are possible and synchronization is essential. Without synchronization, for example,
it is possible that two threads trying to get items from the queue at the same time will end up
retrieving the same item. (See if you can spot the race conditions in the dequeue() method in
Subsection 9.3.2.)
Java has a built-in class to solve this problem: ConcurrentLinkedQueue. This class and others
that can be useful in parallel programming are defined in the package java.util.concurrent.
It is a parameterized class; to create a queue that can hold objects of type Runnable, you can
say
ConcurrentLinkedQueue<Runnable> queue = new ConcurrentLinkedQueue<>();
This class represents a queue, implemented as a linked list, in which operations on the queue are
properly synchronized. The operations on a ConcurrentLinkedQueue are not exactly the queue
operations that we are used to. The method for adding a new item, x, to the end of queue is
queue.add(x). The method for removing an item from the front of queue is queue.poll().
The queue.poll() method returns null if the queue is empty; thus, poll() can be used to
test whether the queue is empty and to retrieve an item if it is not. It makes sense to do
things in this way because testing whether the queue is non-empty before taking an item from
the queue involves a race condition: Without synchronization, it is possible for another thread
to remove the last item from the queue between the time when you check that the queue is
non-empty and the time when you try to take the item from the queue. By the time you try to
get the item, there’s nothing there! On the other hand, queue.poll() is an “atomic” operation
(Subsection 12.1.5).
∗ ∗ ∗
To use ConcurrentLinkedQueue in our image-computing example, we can use the queue along
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 651
with a thread pool. To begin the computation of the image, we create all the tasks that make
up the image and add them to the queue. Then, we can create and start the worker threads that
will execute the tasks. Each thread will run in a loop in which it gets one task from the queue,
by calling the queue’s poll() method, and carries out that task. Since the task is an object of
type Runnable, it is only necessary for the thread to call the task’s run() method. When the
poll() method returns null, the queue is empty and the thread can terminate because all the
tasks have been assigned to threads.
The sample program MultiprocessingDemo2.java implements this idea. It uses a queue,
taskQueue, of type ConcurrentLinkedQueue<Runnable> to hold the tasks. In addition, in order
to allow the user to abort the computation before it finishes, it uses the volatile boolean
variable running to signal the thread when the user aborts the computation. The thread
should terminate when this variable is set to false, even if there are still tasks remaining in
the queue. The threads are defined by a nested class named WorkerThread. It is quite short
and simple to write:
private class WorkerThread extends Thread {
public void run() {
try {
while (running) {
Runnable task = taskQueue.poll(); // Get a task from the queue.
if (task == null)
break; // (because the queue is empty)
task.run(); // Execute the task;
}
}
finally {
threadFinished(); // Records fact that this thread has terminated.
// Done in finally to make sure it gets called.
}
}
}
The program uses a nested class named MandelbrotTask to represent the task of computing
one row of pixels in the image. This class implements the Runnable interface. Its run() method
does the actual work, that is, compute the color of each pixel, and apply the colors to the image.
Here is what the program does to start the computation (with a few details omitted):
taskQueue = new ConcurrentLinkedQueue<Runnable>(); // Create the queue.
for (int row = 0; row < height; row++) { // height is number of rows in image
MandelbrotTask task;
task = ... ; // Create a task to compute one row of the image.
taskQueue.add(task); // Add the task to the queue.
}
int threadCount = ... ; // Number of threads in the pool (selected by user).
workers = new WorkerThread[threadCount];
running = true; // Set the signal before starting the threads!
threadsRemaining = workers; // Records how many threads are still running.
for (int i = 0; i < threadCount; i++) {
workers[i] = new WorkerThread();
try {
workers[i].setPriority( Thread.currentThread().getPriority() - 1 );
}
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 652
catch (Exception e) {
}
workers[i].start();
}
Note that it is important that the tasks be added to the queue before the threads are started.
The threads see an empty queue as a signal to terminate. If the queue is empty when the
threads are started, they might see an empty queue and terminate immediately after being
started, without performing any tasks!
You should try out MultiprocessingDemo2. It computes the same image as
MultiprocessingDemo1, but the rows of pixels are not computed in the same order as in
that program (if there is more than one thread). If you look carefully, you might see that the
rows of pixels are not added to the image in strict order from top to bottom. This is because
it is possible for one thread to finish row number i+1 while another thread is still working on
row i, or even earlier rows. (The effect might be more apparent if you use more threads than
you have processors. Try it with 20 threads.)
Consumer
3
Producer
1 Consumer
Blocking Queue
3
Producer
2 Consumer
3
Producer
3 Consumer
3
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 653
We are talking parallel processing, so we need a synchronized queue, but we need more than
that. When the queue is empty, we need a way to have consumers wait until an item appears in
the queue. If the queue becomes full, we need a way to have producers wait until a space opens
up in the queue. In our application, the producers and consumers are threads. A thread that
is suspended, waiting for something to happen, is said to be blocked, and the type of queue
that we need is called a blocking queue. In a blocking queue, the operation of dequeueing an
item from the queue can block if the queue is empty. That is, if a thread tries to dequeue an
item from an empty queue, the thread will be suspended until an item becomes available; at
that time, it will wake up, retrieve the item, and proceed. Similarly, if the queue has a limited
capacity, a producer that tries to enqueue an item can block if there is no space in the queue.
Java has two classes that implement blocking queues: LinkedBlockingQueue and ArrayBlock-
ingQueue. These are parameterized types to allow you to specify the type of item that the queue
can hold. Both classes are defined in the package java.util.concurrent and both implement
an interface called BlockingQueue. If bqueue is a blocking queue belonging to one of these
classes, then the following operations are defined:
• bqueue.take() – Removes an item from the queue and returns it. If the queue is empty
when this method is called, the thread that called it will block until an item becomes
available. This method throws an InterruptedException if the thread is interrupted while
it is blocked.
• bqueue.put(item) – Adds the item to the queue. If the queue has a limited capacity
and is full, the thread that called it will block until a space opens up in the queue. This
method throws an InterruptedException if the thread is interrupted while it is blocked.
• bqueue.add(item) – Adds the item to the queue, if space is available. If the queue has
a limited capacity and is full, an IllegalStateException is thrown. This method does not
block.
• bqueue.clear() – Removes all items from the queue and discards them.
Java’s blocking queues define many additional methods (for example, bqueue.poll(500) is
similar to bqueue.take(), except that it will not block for longer than 500 milliseconds), but
the four listed here are sufficient for our purposes. Note that I have listed two methods for adding
items to the queue: bqueue.put(item) blocks if there is not space available in the queue and is
most appropriate for use with blocking queues that have a limited capacity; bqueue.add(item)
does not block and is most appropriate for use with blocking queues that have an unlimited
capacity.
An ArrayBlockingQueue has a maximum capacity that is specified when it is constructed.
For example, to create a blocking queue that can hold up to 25 objects of type ItemType, you
could say:
ArrayBlockingQueue<ItemType> bqueue = new ArrayBlockingQueue<>(25);
With this declaration, bqueue.put(item) will block if bqueue already contains 25 items, while
bqueue.add(item) will throw an exception in that case. Recall that this ensures that items are
not produced indefinitely at a rate faster than they can be consumed. A LinkedBlockingQueue
is meant for creating blocking queues with unlimited capacity. For example,
LinkedBlockingQueue<ItemType> bqueue = new LinkedBlockingQueue<>();
creates a queue with no upper limit on the number of items that it can contain. In
this case, bqueue.put(item) will never block and bqueue.add(item) will never throw an
IllegalStateException. You would use a LinkedBlockingQueue when you want to avoid
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 654
blocking of producers, and you have some other way of ensuring that the queue will not grow
to arbitrary size. For both types of blocking queue, bqueue.take() will block if the queue is
empty.
∗ ∗ ∗
The sample program MultiprocessingDemo3.java uses a LinkedBlockingQueue in place of the
ConcurrentLinkedQueue in the previous version, MultiprocessingDemo2.java. In this example,
the queue holds tasks, that is, items of type Runnable, and the queue is declared as an instance
variable named taskQueue:
LinkedBlockingQueue<Runnable> taskQueue;
When the user clicks the “Start” button and it’s time to compute an image, all of the tasks that
make up the computation are put into this queue. This is done by calling taskQueue.add(task)
for each task. It’s important that this can be done without blocking, since the tasks are created
in the event-handling thread, and we don’t want to block that. The queue in this program
cannot grow indefinitely because the program only works on one image at a time, and there are
only a few hundred tasks per image.
Just as in the previous version of the program, worker threads belonging to a thread pool
will remove tasks from the queue and carry them out. However, in this case, the threads are
created once at the beginning of the program—actually, the first time the “Start” button is
pressed—and the same threads are reused for any number of images. When there are no tasks to
execute, the task queue is empty and the worker threads will block until tasks become available.
Each worker thread runs in an infinite loop, processing tasks forever, but it will spend a lot
of its time blocked, waiting for a task to be added to the queue. Here is the inner class that
defines the worker threads:
/**
* This class defines the worker threads that make up the thread pool.
* A WorkerThread runs in a loop in which it retrieves a task from the
* taskQueue and calls the run() method in that task. Note that if
* the queue is empty, the thread blocks until a task becomes available
* in the queue. The constructor starts the thread, so there is no
* need for the main program to do so. The thread will run at a priority
* that is one less than the priority of the thread that calls the
* constructor.
*
* A WorkerThread is designed to run in an infinite loop. It will
* end only when the Java virtual machine exits. (This assumes that
* the tasks that are executed don’t throw exceptions, which is true
* in this program.) The constructor sets the thread to run as
* a daemon thread; the Java virtual machine will exit automatically when
* the only threads are daemon threads, so the existence of the thread
* pool will not stop the JVM from exiting.
*/
private class WorkerThread extends Thread {
WorkerThread() {
try {
setPriority( Thread.currentThread().getPriority() - 1);
}
catch (Exception e) {
}
try {
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 655
setDaemon(true);
}
catch (Exception e) {
}
start(); // Thread starts as soon as it is constructed.
}
public void run() {
while (true) {
try {
Runnable task = taskQueue.take(); // wait for task if necessary
task.run();
}
catch (InterruptedException e) {
}
}
}
}
We should look more closely at how the thread pool works. The worker threads are created and
started before there is any task to perform. Each thread immediately calls taskQueue.take().
Since the task queue is empty, all the worker threads will block as soon as they are started. To
start the computation of an image, the event-handling thread will create tasks and add them
to the queue. As soon as this happens, worker threads will wake up and start processing tasks,
and they will continue doing so until the queue is emptied. (Note that on a multi-processor
computer, some worker threads can start processing even while the event thread is still adding
tasks to the queue.) When the queue is empty, the worker threads will go back to sleep until
processing starts on the next image.
∗ ∗ ∗
An interesting point in this program is that we want to be able to abort the computation
before it finishes, but we don’t want the worker threads to terminate when that happens. When
the user clicks the “Abort” button, the program calls taskQueue.clear(), which prevents any
more tasks from being assigned to worker threads. However, some tasks are most likely already
being executed when the task queue is cleared. Those tasks will complete after the computation
in which they are subtasks has supposedly been aborted. When those subtasks complete, we
don’t want their output to be applied to the image.
My solution is to assign a job number to each computation job. The job number of the
current job is stored in an instance variable named jobNum, and each task object has an instance
variable that tells which task that job is part of. When a job ends—either because the job
finishes on its own or because the user aborts it—the value of jobNum is incremented. When a
task completes, the job number stored in the task object is compared to jobNum. If they are
equal, then the task is part of the current job, and its output is applied to the image. If they
are not equal, then the task was part of a previous job, and its output is discarded.
It’s important that access to jobNum be properly synchronized. Otherwise, one thread might
check the job number just as another thread is incrementing it, and output meant for an old
job might sneak through after that job has been aborted. In the program, all the methods that
access or change jobNum are synchronized. You can read the source code to see how it works.
∗ ∗ ∗
One more point about MultiprocessingDemo3. . . . I have not provided any way to terminate
the worker threads in this program. They will continue to run until the Java Virtual Machine
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 656
exits. To allow thread termination before that, we could use a volatile signaling variable,
running, and set its value to false when we want the worker threads to terminate. The run()
methods for the threads would be replaced by
public void run() {
while ( running ) {
try {
Runnable task = taskQueue.take();
task.run();
}
catch (InterruptedException e) {
}
}
}
However, if a thread is blocked in taskQueue.take(), it will not see the new value of
running until it becomes unblocked. To ensure that that happens, it is necessary to call
worker.interrupt() for each worker thread worker, just after setting runner to false.
If a worker thread is executing a task when running is set to false, the thread will not
terminate until that task has completed. If the tasks are reasonably short, this is not a problem.
If tasks can take longer to execute than you are willing to wait for the threads to terminate,
then each task must also check the value of running periodically and exit when that value
becomes false.
have not found an easy way to get an ExecutorService to drop waiting tasks without shutting
down, MultiprocessingDemo4 creates a new ExecutorService each time it computes a new
image.)
∗ ∗ ∗
Tasks for an ExecutorService can also be represented by objects of type Callable<T>, which
is a parameterized functional interface that defines the method call() with no parameters and
a return type of T. A Callable represents a task that outputs a value.
A Callable, c, can be submitted to an ExecutorService by calling executor.submit(c). The
Callable will then be executed at some future time. The problem is, how to get the result of the
computation when it completes? This problem is solved by another interface, Future<T>, which
represents a value of type T that might not be available until some future time. The method
executor.submit(c) returns a Future that represents the result of the future computation.
A Future, v, defines several methods, including v.isDone(), which is a boolean-valued
function that can be called to check whether the result is available; and v.get(), which will
retrieve the value of the future. The method v.get() will block until the value is available. It
can also generate exceptions and needs to be called in a try..catch statement.
As an example, ThreadTest4.java uses Callables, Futures, and an ExecutorService to count the
number of primes in a certain range of integers. (This is the same rather useless computation
that was done by ThreadTest2.java in Subsection 12.1.3.) In this program, a subtask counts
the primes in a subrange of integers. The subtasks are represented by objects of type
Callable<Integer>, defined by this nested class:
/**
* An object belonging to this class will count primes in a specified range
* of integers. The range is from min to max, inclusive, where min and max
* are given as parameters to the constructor. The counting is done in
* the call() method, which returns the number of primes that were found.
*/
private static class CountPrimesTask implements Callable<Integer> {
int min, max;
public CountPrimesTask(int min, int max) {
this.min = min;
this.max = max;
}
public Integer call() {
int count = countPrimes(min,max); // does the counting
return count;
}
}
All the subtasks are submitted to a thread pool implemented as an ExecutorService, and the
Futures that are returned are saved in an array list. In outline:
int processors = Runtime.getRuntime().availableProcessors();
ExecutorService executor = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(processors);
ArrayList<Future<Integer>> results = new ArrayList<>();
for (int i = 0; i < numberOfTasks; i++) {
CountPrimesTask oneTask = . . . ;
Future<Integer> oneResult = executor.submit( oneTask );
results.add(oneResult); // Save the Future representing the (future) result.
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 658
}
The integers that are output by all the subtasks need to be added up to give a final result. The
outputs of the subtasks are obtained using the get() methods of the Futures in the list. Since
get() blocks until the result is available, the process completes only when all subtasks have
finished:
int total = 0;
for ( Future<Integer> res : results) {
try {
total += res.get(); // Waits for task to complete!
}
catch (Exception e) { // Should not occur in this program.
}
}
if ( resultIsAvailable() == false )
obj.wait(); // wait for notification that the result is available
useTheResult();
while Thread B does something like:
generateTheResult();
obj.notify(); // send out a notification that the result is available
Now, there is a really nasty race condition in this code. The two threads might execute
their code in the following order:
1. Thread A checks resultIsAvailable() and finds that the result is not ready,
so it decides to execute the obj.wait() statement, but before it does,
2. Thread B finishes generating the result and calls obj.notify()
3. Thread A calls obj.wait() to wait for notification that the result is ready.
In Step 3, Thread A is waiting for a notification that will never come, because notify() has
already been called in Step 2. This is a kind of deadlock that can leave Thread A waiting forever.
Obviously, we need some kind of synchronization. The solution is to enclose both Thread A’s
code and Thread B’s code in synchronized statements, and it is very natural to synchronize
on the same object, obj, that is used for the calls to wait() and notify(). In fact, since
synchronization is almost always needed when wait() and notify() are used, Java makes it
an absolute requirement. In Java, a thread can legally call obj.wait() or obj.notify() only
if that thread holds the synchronization lock associated with the object obj. If it does not hold
that lock, then an exception is thrown. (The exception is of type IllegalMonitorStateException,
which does not require mandatory handling and which is typically not caught.) One further
complication is that the wait() method can throw an InterruptedException and so should be
called in a try statement that handles the exception.
To make things more definite, let’s consider how we can get a result that is computed by
one thread to another thread that needs the result. This is a simplified producer/consumer
problem in which only one item is produced and consumed. Assume that there is a shared
variable named sharedResult that is used to transfer the result from the producer to the
consumer. When the result is ready, the producer sets the variable to a non-null value. The
consumer can check whether the result is ready by testing whether the value of sharedResult
is null. We will use a variable named lock for synchronization. The code for the producer
thread could have the form:
makeResult = generateTheResult(); // Not synchronized!
synchronized(lock) {
sharedResult = makeResult;
lock.notify();
}
while the consumer would execute code such as:
synchronized(lock) {
while ( sharedResult == null ) {
try {
lock.wait();
}
catch (InterruptedException e) {
}
}
useResult = sharedResult;
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 660
}
useTheResult(useResult); // Not synchronized!
The calls to generateTheResult() and useTheResult() are not synchronized, which allows
them to run in parallel with other threads that might also synchronize on lock. Since
sharedResult is a shared variable, all references to sharedResult should be synchronized,
so the references to sharedResult must be inside the synchronized statements. The goal is
to do as little as possible (but not less) in synchronized code segments.
If you are uncommonly alert, you might notice something funny: lock.wait() does
not finish until lock.notify() is executed, but since both of these methods are called in
synchronized statements that synchronize on the same object, shouldn’t it be impossible for
both methods to be running at the same time? In fact, lock.wait() is a special case: When
a thread calls lock.wait(), it gives up the lock that it holds on the synchronization object.
This gives another thread a chance to execute the synchronized(lock) block that contains the
lock.notify() statement. After the second thread exits from this block, the lock is returned
to the consumer thread so that it can continue.
In the full producer/consumer pattern, multiple results are produced by one or more
producer threads and are consumed by one or more consumer threads. Instead of having
just one sharedResult object, we keep a list of objects that have been produced but not yet
consumed. Let’s see how this might work in a very simple class that implements the three
operations on a LinkedBlockingQueue<Runnable> that are used in MultiprocessingDemo3:
import java.util.LinkedList;
public class MyLinkedBlockingQueue {
private LinkedList<Runnable> taskList = new LinkedList<Runnable>();
public void clear() {
synchronized(taskList) {
taskList.clear();
}
}
public void add(Runnable task) {
synchronized(taskList) {
taskList.addLast(task);
taskList.notify();
}
}
public Runnable take() throws InterruptedException {
synchronized(taskList) {
while (taskList.isEmpty())
taskList.wait();
return taskList.removeFirst();
}
}
}
An object of this class can be used as a direct replacement for the taskQueue in
MultiprocessingDemo3.
In this class, I have chosen to synchronize on the taskList object, but any object could be
used. In fact, I could simply use synchronized methods, which is equivalent to synchronizing
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 661
on this. (Note that you might see a call to wait() or notify() in a synchronized instance
method, with no reference to the object that is being used. Remember that wait() and
notify() in that context really mean this.wait() and this.notify().)
By the way, it is essential that the call to taskList.clear() be synchronized on the same
object, even though it doesn’t call wait() or notify(). Otherwise, there is a race condition
that can occur: The list might be cleared just after the take() method checks that taskList
is non-empty and before it removes an item from the list. In that case, the list is empty again
by the time taskList.removeFirst() is called, resulting in an error.
∗ ∗ ∗
It is possible for several threads to be waiting for notification. A call to obj.notify() will
wake only one of the threads that is waiting on obj. If you want to wake all threads that
are waiting on obj, you can call obj.notifyAll(). obj.notify() works OK in the above
example because only consumer threads can be blocked. We only need to wake one consumer
thread when a task is added to the queue, and it doesn’t matter which consumer gets the task.
But consider a blocking queue with limited capacity, where producers and consumers can both
block. When an item is added to the queue, we want to make sure that a consumer thread is
notified, not just another producer. One solution is to call notifyAll() instead of notify(),
which will notify all threads including any waiting consumer.
I should also mention a possible confusion about the name of the method obj.notify().
This method does not notify obj of anything! It notifies a thread that has called obj.wait()
(if there is such a thread). Similarly, in obj.wait(), it’s not obj that is waiting for something;
it’s the thread that calls the method.
And a final note on wait: There is another version of wait() that takes a number of
milliseconds as a parameter. A thread that calls obj.wait(milliseconds) will wait only up
to the specified number of milliseconds for a notification. If a notification doesn’t occur during
that period, the thread will wake up and continue without the notification. In practice, this
feature is most often used to let a waiting thread wake periodically while it is waiting in order
to perform some periodic task, such as causing a message “Waiting for computation to finish”
to blink.
∗ ∗ ∗
Let’s look at an example that uses wait() and notify() to allow one thread to control
another. The sample program TowersOfHanoiGUI.java solves the Towers Of Hanoi puzzle
(Subsection 9.1.2), with control buttons that allow the user to control the execution of the
algorithm. The user can click a “Next Step” button to execute just one step in the solution,
which moves a single disk from one pile to another. Clicking “Run” lets the algorithm run
automatically on its own; the text on the button changes from “Run” to “Pause”, and clicking
“Pause” stops the automatic execution. There is also a “Start Over” button that aborts the
current solution and puts the puzzle back into its initial configuration. Here is a picture of the
program in the middle of a solution, including the buttons:
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 662
In this program, there are two threads: a thread that runs a recursive algorithm to solve the
puzzle, and the event-handling thread that reacts to user actions. When the user clicks one of
the buttons, a method is called in the event-handling thread. But it’s actually the thread that
is running the recursion that has to respond by, for example, doing one step of the solution or
starting over. The event-handling thread has to send some sort of signal to the solution thread.
This is done by setting the value of a variable that is shared by both threads. The variable is
named status, and its possible values are the constants GO, PAUSE, STEP, and RESTART.
When the event-handling thread changes the value of this variable, the solution thread
should see the new value and respond. When status equals PAUSE, the solution thread is
paused, waiting for the user to click “Run” or “Next Step”. This is the initial state, when
the program starts. If the user clicks “Next Step”, the event-handling thread sets the value of
status to “STEP”; the solution thread should see the new value and respond by executing one
step of the solution and then resetting status to PAUSE. If the user clicks “Run”, status is
set to GO, which should cause the solution thread to run automatically. When the user clicks
“Pause” while the solution is running, status is reset to PAUSE, and the solution thread should
return to its paused state. If the user clicks “Start Over”, the event-handling thread sets status
to RESTART, and the solution thread should respond by ending the current recursive solution.
The main point for us is that when the solution thread is paused, it is sleeping. It won’t see a
new value for status unless it wakes up! To make that possible, the program uses wait() in the
solution thread to put that thread to sleep, and it uses notify() in the event-handling thread
to wake up the solution thread whenever it changes the value of status. Here are the methods
that respond to clicks on the buttons. When the user clicks a button, the corresponding method
changes the value of status and calls notify() to wake up the solution thread:
synchronized private void doStopGo() {
if (status == GO) { // Animation is running. Pause it.
status = PAUSE;
nextStepButton.setDisable(false);
runPauseButton.setText("Run");
}
else { // Animation is paused. Start it running.
status = GO;
nextStepButton.setDisable(true); // Disabled when animation is running
runPauseButton.setText("Pause");
}
notify(); // Wake up the thread so it can see the new status value!
}
synchronized private void doNextStep() {
status = STEP;
notify();
}
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 663
you’d like to have about ten times as many threads as there are processors. So even on a
computer that has just a single processor, server programs can make good use of large numbers
of threads.
The ConnectionHandler handles opening the connection both when the program acts as a server
and when it acts as a client. The thread is created when the user clicks either the “Listen”
button or the “Connect” button. The “Listen” button makes the thread act as a server, while
“Connect” makes it act as a client. To distinguish these two cases, the ConnectionHandler class
has the two constructors that are shown below. Note that the postMessage() method posts a
message to the transcript area of the window, where it will be visible to the user:
/**
* Listen for a connection on a specified port. The constructor
* does not perform any network operations; it just sets some
* instance variables and starts the thread. Note that the
* thread will only listen for one connection, and then will
* close its server socket.
*/
ConnectionHandler(int port) { // For acting as the "server."
state = ConnectionState.LISTENING;
this.port = port;
postMessage("\nLISTENING ON PORT " + port + "\n");
try { setDaemon(true); }
catch (Exception e) {}
start();
}
/**
* Open a connection to a specified computer and port. The constructor
* does not perform any network operations; it just sets some
* instance variables and starts the thread.
*/
ConnectionHandler(String remoteHost, int port) { // For acting as "client."
state = ConnectionState.CONNECTING;
this.remoteHost = remoteHost;
this.port = port;
postMessage("\nCONNECTING TO " + remoteHost + " ON PORT " + port + "\n");
try { setDaemon(true); }
catch (Exception e) {}
start();
}
Here, state is an instance variable whose type is defined by an enumerated type (Subsec-
tion 2.3.5):
enum ConnectionState { LISTENING, CONNECTING, CONNECTED, CLOSED };
The values of this enum represent different possible states of the network connection. It is
often useful to treat a network connection as a state machine (see Subsection 6.2.6), since the
response to various events can depend on the state of the connection when the event occurs.
Setting the state variable to LISTENING or CONNECTING tells the thread whether to act as a
server or as a client when setting up the connection.
Once the thread has been started, it executes the following run() method:
/**
* The run() method that is executed by the thread. It opens a
* connection as a client or as a server (depending on which
* constructor was used).
*/
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 667
It is also possible for the user on the other side of the connection to close the connection.
When that happens, the stream of incoming messages ends, and the in.readLine() on this
side of the connection returns the value null, which indicates end-of-stream and acts as a signal
that the connection has been closed by the remote user.
For a final look into the GUIChat code, consider the methods that send and receive messages.
These methods are called from different threads. The send() method is called by the event-
handling thread in response to a user action. Its purpose is to transmit a message to the remote
user. (It is conceivable, though not likely, that the data output operation could block, if the
socket’s output buffer fills up. A more sophisticated program might take this possibility into
account by using another thread to transmit outgoing messages.) The send() method uses a
PrintWriter, out, that writes to the socket’s output stream. Synchronization of this method
prevents the connection state from changing in the middle of the send operation:
/**
* Send a message to the other side of the connection, and post the
* message to the transcript. This should only be called when the
* connection state is ConnectionState.CONNECTED; if it is called at
* other times, it is ignored.
*/
synchronized void send(String message) {
if (state == ConnectionState.CONNECTED) {
postMessage("SEND: " + message);
out.println(message);
out.flush();
if (out.checkError()) {
postMessage("\nERROR OCCURRED WHILE TRYING TO SEND DATA.");
close(); // Closes the connection.
}
}
}
The received() method is called by the connection-handling thread after a message has been
read from the remote user. Its only job is to display the message to the user, but again it is
synchronized to avoid the race condition that could occur if the connection state were changed
by another thread while this method is being executed:
/**
* This is called by the run() method when a message is received from
* the other side of the connection. The message is posted to the
* transcript, but only if the connection state is CONNECTED. (This
* is because a message might be received after the user has clicked
* the "Disconnect" button; that message should not be seen by the
* user.)
*/
synchronized private void received(String message) {
if (state == ConnectionState.CONNECTED)
postMessage("RECEIVE: " + message);
}
clients shouldn’t have to wait for service. Even if the interaction with each client is expected
to be very brief, you can’t always assume that that will be the case. You have to allow for the
possibility of a misbehaving client—one that stays connected without sending data that the
server expects. This can hang up a thread indefinitely, but in a threaded server there will be
other threads that can carry on with other clients.
The DateServer.java sample program, from Subsection 11.4.4, is an extremely simple
network server program. It does not use threads, so the server must finish with one client
before it can accept a connection from another client. Let’s see how we can turn DateServer
into a threaded server. (This server is so simple that doing so doesn’t make a great deal of
sense. However, the same techniques will work for more complicated servers. See, for example,
Exercise 12.5. Also note that the client program, DateClient.java, which implements a client
for the date server, does not need to use threads, since the client only uses one connection. The
original client program will work with the new versions of the server.)
As a first attempt, consider DateServerWithThreads.java. This sample program creates
a new thread every time a connection request is received, instead of handling the connection
itself by calling a subroutine. The main program simply creates the thread and hands the
connection to the thread. This takes very little time, and in particular will not block. The
run() method of the thread handles the connection in exactly the same way that it would be
handled by the original program. This is not at all difficult to program. Here’s the new version
of the program, with significant changes shown in italic. Note again that the constructor for
the connection thread does very little and in particular cannot block; this is very important
since the constructor runs in the main thread:
import java.net.*;
import java.io.*;
import java.util.Date;
/**
* This program is a server that takes connection requests on
* the port specified by the constant LISTENING PORT. When a
* connection is opened, the program sends the current time to
* the connected socket. The program will continue to receive
* and process connections until it is killed (by a CONTROL-C,
* for example).
*
* This version of the program creates a new thread for
* every connection request.
*/
public class DateServerWithThreads {
public static final int LISTENING PORT = 32007;
public static void main(String[] args) {
ServerSocket listener; // Listens for incoming connections.
Socket connection; // For communication with the connecting program.
/* Accept and process connections forever, or until some error occurs. */
try {
listener = new ServerSocket(LISTENING PORT);
System.out.println("Listening on port " + LISTENING PORT);
while (true) {
// Accept next connection request and create a thread to handle it.
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 670
connection = listener.accept();
ConnectionHandler handler = new ConnectionHandler(connection);
handler.start();
}
}
catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println("Sorry, the server has shut down.");
System.out.println("Error: " + e);
return;
}
} // end main()
/**
* Defines a thread that handles the connection with one
* client.
*/
private static class ConnectionHandler extends Thread {
Socket client; // The connection to the client.
ConnectionHandler(Socket socket) {
client = socket;
}
public void run() {
// (code copied from the original DateServer program)
String clientAddress = client.getInetAddress().toString();
try {
System.out.println("Connection from " + clientAddress );
Date now = new Date(); // The current date and time.
PrintWriter outgoing; // Stream for sending data.
outgoing = new PrintWriter( client.getOutputStream() );
outgoing.println( now.toString() );
outgoing.flush(); // Make sure the data is actually sent!
client.close();
}
catch (Exception e){
System.out.println("Error on connection with: "
+ clientAddress + ": " + e);
}
}
}
is the problem of locating services (where in this case, a “service” means an object that is
available to be called over the network). That is, how can one computer know which computer
a service is located on and what port it is listening on? RMI solves this problem using a “request
broker”—a server program running at a known location that keeps a list of services that are
available on other computers. Computers that offer services register those services with the
request broker; computers that need services must know the location of the broker, and they
contact it to find out what services are available and where they are located.
RMI is a complex system that is not very easy to use. I mention it here because they are
part of Java’s standard network API, but I will not discuss it further. Instead, we will look at
a relatively simple demonstration of distributed computing that uses only basic networking.
The problem that we will consider is the same one that was used in Section 12.2 and
Section 12.3 for MultiprocessingDemo1.java and its variations, namely the computation of a
complex image. In this case, however, the program is not a GUI program and the image
is not shown on the screen. The computation is one that uses the simplest type of parallel
programming, in which the problem can be broken down into tasks that can be performed
independently, with no communication between the tasks. To apply distributed computing to
this type of problem, we can use one “master” program that divides the problem into tasks and
sends those tasks over the network to “worker” programs that do the actual work. The worker
programs send their results back to the master program, which combines the results from all
the tasks into a solution of the overall problem. In this context, the worker programs are often
called “slaves,” and the program uses the so-called master/slave approach to distributed
computing.
The demonstration program is defined by three source code files: CLMandelbrotMaster.java
defines the master program; CLMandelbrotWorker.java defines the worker programs; and
CLMandelbrotTask.java defines the class that represents the individual tasks that are performed
by the workers. The master divides the overall problem into a collection of tasks; it distributes
those tasks to the workers that will execute the tasks and send the results back to the master;
and the master applies the results from all the individual tasks to the overall problem.
To run the demonstration, you must first start the CLMandelbrotWorker program on several
computers (probably by running it on the command line). This program uses CLMandelbrotTask,
so both class files, CLMandelbrotWorker.class and CLMandelbrotTask.class, must be
present on the worker computers. You can then run CLMandelbrotMaster on the master
computer. Note that the master program also requires the class CLMandelbrotTask. You must
specify the host name or IP address of each of the worker computers as command line arguments
for CLMandelbrotMaster. The worker programs listen for connection requests from the master
program, and the master program must be told where to send those requests. For example, if
the worker program is running on three computers with IP addresses 172.21.7.101, 172.21.7.102,
and 172.21.7.103, then you can run CLMandelbrotMaster with the command
java CLMandelbrotMaster 172.21.7.101 172.21.7.102 172.21.7.103
The master will make a network connection to the worker at each IP address; these connections
will be used for communication between the master program and the workers.
It is possible to run several copies of CLMandelbrotWorker on the same computer, but
they must listen for network connections on different ports. It is also possible to run
CLMandelbrotWorker on the same computer as CLMandelbrotMaster. You might even see
some speed-up when you do this, if your computer has several processors. See the comments in
the program source code files for more information, but here are some commands that you can
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 674
use to run the master program and two copies of the worker program on the same computer.
Give these commands in separate command windows:
java CLMandelbrotWorker (Listens on default port)
java CLMandelbrotWorker 2501 (Listens on port 2501)
java CLMandelbrotMaster localhost localhost:2501
Every time CLMandelbrotMaster is run, it solves exactly the same problem. (For this
demonstration, the nature of the problem is not important, but the problem is to compute the
data needed for a picture of a small piece of the famous “Mandelbrot Set.” If you are interested
in seeing the picture that is produced, uncomment the call to the saveImage() method at the
end of the main() routine in CLMandelbrotMaster.java.)
You can run CLMandelbrotMaster with different numbers of worker programs to see how
the time required to solve the problem depends on the number of workers. (Note that
the worker programs continue to run after the master program exits, so you can run the
master program several times without having to restart the workers.) In addition, if you run
CLMandelbrotMaster with no command line arguments, it will solve the entire problem on its
own, so you can see how long it takes to do so without using distributed computing. In a trial
that I ran on some very old, slow computers, it took 40 seconds for CLMandelbrotMaster to solve
the problem on its own. Using just one worker, it took 43 seconds. The extra time represents
extra work involved in using the network; it takes time to set up a network connection and
to send messages over the network. Using two workers (on different computers), the problem
was solved in 22 seconds. In this case, each worker did about half of the work, and their
computations were performed in parallel, so that the job was done in about half the time. With
larger numbers of workers, the time continued to decrease, but only up to a point. The master
program itself has a certain amount of work to do, no matter how many workers there are,
and the total time to solve the problem can never be less than the time it takes for the master
program to do its part. In this case, the minimum time seemed to be about five seconds.
∗ ∗ ∗
Let’s take a look at how this distributed application is programmed. The master program
divides the overall problem into a set of tasks. Each task is represented by an object of type
CLMandelbrotTask. These tasks have to be communicated to the worker programs, and the
worker programs must send back their results. Some protocol is needed for this communication.
I decided to use character streams. The master encodes a task as a line of text, which is sent
to a worker. The worker decodes the text (into an object of type CLMandelbrotTask) to find
out what task it is supposed to perform. It performs the assigned task. It encodes the results
as another line of text, which it sends back to the master program. Finally, the master decodes
the results and combines them with the results from other tasks. After all the tasks have been
completed and their results have been combined, the problem has been solved.
A CLMandelbrotWorker receives not just one task, but a sequence of tasks. Each time
it finishes a task and sends back the result, it is assigned a new task. After all tasks are
completed, the worker receives a “close” command that tells it to close the connection. In
CLMandelbrotWorker.java, all this is done in a method named handleConnection() that
is called to handle a connection that has already been opened to the master program. It
uses a method readTask() to decode a task that it receives from the master and a method
writeResults() to encode the results of the task for transmission back to the master. It must
also handle any errors that occur:
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 675
}
else {
// The tasks will be performed by worker programs.
for each command line argument:
Get information about a worker from command line argument.
Create and start a thread to send tasks to workers.
Wait for all threads to terminate.
}
// All tasks are now complete (assuming no error occurred).
The tasks are put into a variable of type ConcurrentBlockingQueue<CLMandelbrotTask>
named tasks (see Subsection 12.3.2.) The communication threads take tasks from this queue
and send them to worker programs. The method tasks.poll() is used to remove a task from
the queue. If the queue is empty, it returns null, which acts as a signal that all tasks have
been assigned and the communication thread can terminate.
The job of a thread is to send a sequence of tasks to a worker thread and to receive the
results that the worker sends back. The thread is also responsible for opening the connection
in the first place. A pseudocode outline for the process executed by the thread might look like:
Create a socket connected to the worker program.
Create input and output streams for communicating with the worker.
while (true) {
Let task = tasks.poll().
If task == null
break; // All tasks have been assigned.
Encode the task into a message and transmit it to the worker.
Read the response from the worker.
Decode and process the response.
}
Send a "close" command to the worker.
Close the socket.
This would work OK. However, there are a few subtle points. First of all, the thread must be
ready to deal with a network error. For example, a worker might shut down unexpectedly. But if
that happens, the master program can continue, provided other workers are still available. (You
can try this when you run the program: Stop one of the worker programs, with CONTROL-C,
and observe that the master program still completes successfully.) A difficulty arises if an
error occurs while the thread is working on a task: If the problem as a whole is going to
be completed, that task will have to be reassigned to another worker. I take care of this by
putting the uncompleted task back into the task list. (Unfortunately, my program does not
handle all possible errors. If the last worker thread fails, there will be no one left to take
over the uncompleted task. Also, if a network connection “hangs” indefinitely without actually
generating an error, my program will also hang, waiting for a response from a worker that
will never arrive. A more robust program would have some way of detecting the problem and
reassigning the task.)
Another defect in the procedure outlined above is that it leaves the worker program idle
while the thread in the master program is processing the worker’s response. It would be nice
to get a new task to the worker before processing the response from the previous task. This
would keep the worker busy and allow two operations to proceed simultaneously instead of
sequentially. (In this example, the time it takes to process a response is so short that keeping
the worker waiting while it is done probably makes no significant difference. But as a general
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 677
principle, it’s desirable to have as much parallelism as possible in the algorithm.) We can
modify the procedure to take this into account:
try {
Create a socket connected to the worker program.
Create input and output streams for communicating with the worker.
Let currentTask = tasks.poll()
if (currentTask != null)
Encode currentTask into a message and send it to the worker.
while (currentTask != null) {
Read the response from the worker.
Let nextTask = tasks.poll().
If nextTask != null {
// Send nextTask to the worker before processing the
// response to currentTask.
Encode nextTask into a message and send it to the worker.
}
Decode and process the response to currentTask.
currentTask = nextTask.
}
Send a "close" command to the worker.
Close the socket.
}
catch (Exception e) {
Put uncompleted task, if any, back into the task queue.
}
finally {
Close the connection.
}
To see how this all translates into Java, check out the WorkerConnection nested class in
CLMandelbrotMaster.java
∗ ∗ ∗
The applications discussed in this section are examples of distributed computing, since they
involve several computers communicating over a network. Like the example in Subsection 12.4.5,
they use a central “server,” or “master,” to which a number of “clients” will connect. All
communication goes through the server; a client cannot send messages directly to another
client. In this section, I will refer to the server as a hub, in the sense of “communications hub”:
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 679
Client
Client
HUB
Client Client
The main things that you need to understand are that: The hub must be running before
any clients are started. Clients connect to the hub and can send messages to the hub. The
hub processes all messages from clients sequentially, in the order in which they are received.
The processing can result in the hub sending messages out to one or more clients. Each client
is identified by a unique ID number. This is a framework that can be used in a variety of
applications, and the messages and processing will be defined by the particular application.
Here are some of the details. . .
In Subsection 12.4.5, messages were sent back and forth between the server and the client in a
definite, predetermined sequence. Communication between the server and a client was actually
communication between one thread running on the server and another thread running on the
client. For the netgame framework, however, I want to allow for asynchronous communication,
in which it is not possible to wait for messages to arrive in a predictable sequence. To make
this possible a netgame client will use two threads for communication, one for sending messages
to the hub and one for receiving messages from the hub. Similarly, the netgame hub will use
two threads for communicating with each client.
The hub is generally connected to many clients and can receive messages from any of those
clients at any time. The hub will have to process each message in some way. To organize
this processing, the hub uses a single thread to process all incoming messages. When a
communication thread receives a message from a client, it simply drops that message into
a queue of incoming messages. There is only one such queue, which is used for messages from
all clients. The message processing thread runs in a loop in which it removes a message from
the queue, processes it, removes another message from the queue, processes it, and so on. The
queue itself is implemented as an object of type LinkedBlockingQueue (see Subsection 12.3.3).
send thread
Client
receive thread
HUB
receive
Incoming
Message Queue
send
Message
Processing
Thread
There is one more thread in the hub, not shown in the illustration. This final thread creates
a ServerSocket and uses it to listen for connection requests from clients. Each time it accepts
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 680
a connection request, it hands off the client socket to another object, defined by the nested
class ConnectionToClient, which will handle communication with that client. Each connected
client is identified by an ID number. ID numbers 1, 2, 3, . . . are assigned to clients as they
connect. Since clients can also disconnect, the clients connected at any give time might not
have consecutive IDs. A variable of type TreeMap<Integer,ConnectionToClient> associates the
ID numbers of connected clients with the objects that handle their connections.
The messages that are sent and received are objects. The I/O streams that are used
for reading and writing objects are of type ObjectInputStream and ObjectOutputStream. (See
Subsection 11.1.6.) The output stream of a socket is wrapped in an ObjectOutputStream to
make it possible to transmit objects through that socket. The socket’s input stream is wrapped
in an ObjectInputStream to make it possible to receive objects. Remember that the objects that
are used with such streams must implement the interface java.io.Serializable.
The netgame Hub class is defined in the file Hub.java, in the package netgame.common.
The port on which the server socket will listen must be specified as a parameter to the Hub
constructor. The Hub class defines a method
protected void messageReceived(int playerID, Object message)
When a message from some client arrives at the front of the queue of messages, the message-
processing thread removes it from the queue and calls this method. This is the point at which
the message from the client is actually processed.
The first parameter, playerID, is the ID number of the client from whom the message
was received, and the second parameter is the message itself. In the Hub class, this method
will simply forward a copy of the message to every connected client. This defines the
default processing for incoming messages to the hub. To forward the message, it wraps both
the playerID and the message in an object of type ForwardedMessage (defined in the file
ForwardedMessage.java, in the package netgame.common). In a simple application such as the
chat room discussed in the next subsection, this default processing might be exactly what is
needed by the application. For most applications, however, it will be necessary to define a
subclass of Hub and redefine the messageReceived() method to do more complicated message
processing. There are several other methods in the Hub class that you might want to redefine
in a subclass, including
• protected void playerConnected(int playerID) — This method is called each time
a player connects to the hub. The parameter playerID is the ID number of the newly
connected player. In the Hub class, this method does nothing. (The hub has already sent a
StatusMessage to every client to inform them about the new player; playerConnected()
is for any additional actions that a subclass of Hub might want to take.) Note that the
complete list of ID numbers for currently connected players can be obtained by calling
getPlayerList().
• protected void playerDisconnected(int playerID) — This is called each time a
player disconnects from the hub (after the hub sends a StatusMessage to the clients).
The parameter tells which player has just disconnected. In the Hub class, this method
does nothing.
The Hub class also defines a number of useful public methods, notably
• sendToAll(message) — sends the specified message to every client that is currently
connected to the hub. The message must be a non-null object that implements the
Serializable interface.
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 681
concepts such as players and messages. The design of these classes was developed though
several iterations, based on experience with several actual applications. I urge you to look
at the source code to see how Hub and Client use threads, sockets, and I/O streams. In the
remainder of this section, I will discuss three applications built on the netgame framework. I
will not discuss these applications in great detail. You can find the complete source code for
all three in the netgame package.
ForwardedMessage to every connected client, including the client who sent the message. On the
client side in each client, when the message is received from the hub, the messageReceived()
method of the ChatClient object in that client is called. ChatClient overrides this method to
program it to add the message to the transcript of the ChatClientWindow. To summarize: Every
message entered by any user is sent to the hub, which just sends out copies of each message
that it receives to every client. Each client will see exactly the same stream of messages from
the hub.
A client is also notified when a player connects to or disconnects from the hub and when the
connection with the hub is lost. ChatClient overrides the methods that are called when these
events happen so that they post appropriate messages to the transcript. Here’s the complete
definition of the client class for the chat room application:
/**
* A ChatClient connects to the Hub and is used to send messages to
* the Hub and receive messages from the Hub. Messages received from
* the Hub will be of type ForwardedMessage and will contain the
* ID number of the sender and the string that was sent by
* that user.
*/
private class ChatClient extends Client {
/**
* Opens a connection to the chat room server on a specified computer.
*/
ChatClient(String host) throws IOException {
super(host, PORT);
}
/**
* Responds when a message is received from the server. It should be
* a ForwardedMessage representing something that one of the participants
* in the chat room is saying. The message is simply added to the
* transcript, along with the ID number of the sender.
*/
protected void messageReceived(Object message) {
if (message instanceof ForwardedMessage) {
// (no other message types are expected)
ForwardedMessage bm = (ForwardedMessage)message;
addToTranscript("#" + bm.senderID + " SAYS: " + bm.message);
}
}
/**
* Called when the connection to the client is shut down because of some
* error message. (This will happen if the server program is terminated.)
*/
protected void connectionClosedByError(String message) {
addToTranscript(
"Sorry, communication has shut down due to an error:\n "
+ message );
sendButton.setEnabled(false);
messageInput.setEnabled(false);
messageInput.setEditable(false);
messageInput.setText("");
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 684
connected = false;
connection = null;
}
/**
* Posts a message to the transcript when someone joins the chat room.
*/
protected void playerConnected(int newPlayerID) {
addToTranscript(
"Someone new has joined the chat room, with ID number "
+ newPlayerID );
}
/**
* Posts a message to the transcript when someone leaves the chat room.
*/
protected void playerDisconnected(int departingPlayerID) {
addToTranscript( "The person with ID number "
+ departingPlayerID + " has left the chat room");
}
} // end nested class ChatClient
Except for the constructor, none of the methods in the ChatClient class are called by the
ChatRoomWindow program; they are called from the connection-handling thread in the client
object, which was programmed in Client.java. For the full source code of the chat room
application, see the source code files, which can be found in the package netgame.chat.
Note: A user of my chat room application is identified only by an ID number that is
assigned by the hub when the client connects. Essentially, users are anonymous, which is not
very satisfying. See Exercise 12.7 at the end of this chapter for a way of addressing this issue.
the same to both players. (Instead of sending a complete copy of the state each time the state
changes, I might have sent just the change. But that would require some way to encode the
changes into messages that can be sent over the network. Since the state is so simple, it seemed
easier just to send the entire state as the message in this case.)
Networked TicTacToe is defined in several classes in the package netgame.tictactoe. The
class TicTacToeGameState represents the state of a game. It includes a method
public void applyMessage(int senderID, Object message)
that modifies the state of the game to reflect the effect of a message received from one of the
players of the game. The message will represent some action taken by the player, such as
clicking on the board.
The basic Hub class knows nothing about TicTacToe. Since the hub for the TicTacToe
game has to keep track of the state of the game, it has to be defined by a subclass of Hub.
The TicTacToeGameHub class is quite simple. It overrides the messageReceived() method
so that it responds to a message from a player by applying that message to the game state
and sending a copy of the new state to both players. It also overrides the playerConnected()
and playerDisconnected() methods to take appropriate actions, since the game can only be
played when there are exactly two connected players. Here is the complete source code:
package netgame.tictactoe;
import java.io.IOException;
import netgame.common.Hub;
/**
* A "Hub" for the network TicTacToe game. There is only one Hub
* for a game, and both network players connect to the same Hub.
* Official information about the state of the game is maintained
* on the Hub. When the state changes, the Hub sends the new
* state to both players, ensuring that both players see the
* same state.
*/
public class TicTacToeGameHub extends Hub {
private TicTacToeGameState state; // Records the state of the game.
/**
* Create a hub, listening on the specified port. Note that this
* method calls setAutoreset(true), which will cause the output stream
* to each client to be reset before sending each message. This is
* essential since the same state object will be transmitted over and
* over, with changes between each transmission.
* @param port the port number on which the hub will listen.
* @throws IOException if a listener cannot be opened on the specified port.
*/
public TicTacToeGameHub(int port) throws IOException {
super(port);
state = new TicTacToeGameState();
setAutoreset(true);
}
/**
* Responds when a message is received from a client. In this case,
* the message is applied to the game state, by calling state.applyMessage().
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 686
is opened that immediately connects to the hub. The game will start as soon as a second
player connects to the hub. On the other hand, if the user running Main chooses to connect
to an existing game, then no hub is created. A TicTacToeWindow is created, and that window
connects to the hub that was created by the first player. The second player has to know the
name of the computer where the first player’s program is running. As usual, for testing, you
can run everything on one computer and use “localhost” as the computer name.
1. Subsection 12.1.3 discusses the need for synchronization in multithreaded programs, and (solution)
it defines a ThreadSafeCounter class with the necessary synchronization. Is this really
important? Can you really get errors by using an unsynchronized counter with multiple
threads? Write a program to find out. Use the following unsynchronized counter class,
which you can include as a nested class in your program:
static class Counter {
int count;
void inc() {
count = count+1;
}
int getCount() {
return count;
}
}
Write a thread class that will repeatedly call the inc() method in an object of type
Counter. The object should be a shared global variable. Create several threads, start
them all, and wait for all the threads to terminate. Print the final value of the counter,
and see whether it is correct.
Let the user enter the number of threads and the number of times that each thread
will increment the counter. You might need a fairly large number of increments to see
an error. And of course there can never be any error if you use just one thread. Your
program can use join() to wait for a thread to terminate (see Subsection 12.1.2).
2. Exercise 3.2 asked you to find the integer in the range 1 to 10000 that has the largest (solution)
number of divisors. Now write a program that uses multiple threads to solve the same
problem, but for the range 1 to 100000. By using threads, your program will take less
time to do the computation when it is run on a multiprocessor computer. At the end of
the program, output the elapsed time, the integer that has the largest number of divisors,
and the number of divisors that it has. The program can be modeled on the sample
prime-counting program ThreadTest2.java from Subsection 12.1.3. For this exercise, you
should simply divide up the problem into parts and create one thread to do each part.
3. In the previous exercise, you divided up a large task into a small number of large pieces (solution)
and created a thread to execute each task. Because of the nature of the problem, this
meant that some threads had much more work to do than others—it is much easier to
find the number of divisors of a small number than it is of a big number. As discussed in
Subsection 12.3.1, a better approach is to break up the problem into a fairly large number
of smaller problems. Subsection 12.3.2 shows how to use a thread pool to execute the
tasks: Each thread in the pool runs in a loop in which it repeatedly takes a task from a
queue and carries out that task. Implement a thread pool strategy for solving the same
maximum-number-of-divisors problem as in the previous exercise.
To make things even more interesting, you should try a new technique for combining
the results from all the tasks: Use two queues in your program. Use a queue of tasks, as
usual, to hold the tasks that will be executed by the thread pool (Subsection 12.3.2). But
also use a queue of results produced by the threads. When a task completes, the result
Exercises 689
from that task should be placed into the result queue. The main program can read results
from the second queue as they become available, and combine all the results to get the
final answer. The result queue will have to be a blocking queue (Subsection 12.3.3), since
the main program will have to wait for results to become available. Note that the main
program knows the exact number of results that it expects to read from the queue, so it
can do so in a for loop; when the for loop completes, the main program knows that all
the tasks have been executed.
4. In previous exercise, you used a thread pool and a queue of tasks to find the integer in the (solution)
range 1 to 100000 that has the largest number of divisors. Subsection 12.3.4 discusses a
higher-level approach that uses an ExecutorService. Write one more program to solve the
problem, this time using an ExecutorService and Futures. The program should still break
up the computation into a fairly large number of fairly small tasks, and it should still print
out the largest number of divisors and the integer that has that number of divisors.
(There is yet another way to solve the same problem: the stream API from Section 10.6.
My on-line solution of this exercise also discusses how to use streams to solve the problem.)
5. In Exercise 11.3, you wrote a network server program that can send text files from a (solution)
specified directory to clients. That program used a single thread, which handled all the
communication with each client. Modify the program to turn it into a multithreaded
server. Use a thread pool of connection-handling threads and use an ArrayBlockingQueue
to get connected sockets from the main() routine to the threads. The sample program
DateServerWithThreads.java from Subsection 12.4.3 is an example of a multithreaded
server that works in this way. Your server program will work with the same client program
as the original server. You wrote the client program as the solution to Exercise 11.4.
6. It is possible to get an estimate of the mathematical constant π by using a random process. (solution)
The idea is based on the fact that the area of a circle of radius 1 is equal to π, and the
area of a quarter of that circle is π/4. Here is a picture of a quarter of a circle of radius 1,
inside a 1-by-1 square:
The area of the whole square is one, while the area of the part inside the circle is π/4. If
we choose a point in the square at random, the probability that it is inside the circle is
π/4. If we choose N points in the square at random, and if C of them are inside the circle,
we expect the fraction C/N of points that fall inside the circle to be about π/4. That is,
we expect 4*C/N to be close to π. If N is large, we can expect 4*C/N to be a good estimate
for π, and as N gets larger and larger, the estimate is likely to improve.
We can pick a random point in the square by choosing numbers x and y in the range
0 to 1 (using Math.random()). Since the equation of the circle is x*x+y*y=1, the point
lies inside the circle if x*x+y*y is less than 1. One trial consists of picking x and y and
testing whether x*x+y*y is less than 1. To get an estimate for π, you have to do many
trials, count the trials, and count the number of trials in which x*x+y*y is less than 1,
Exercises 690
For this exercise, you should write a GUI program that does this computation and
displays the result. The computation should be done in a separate thread, and the results
should be displayed periodically. The program can use JLabels to the display the results.
It should set the text on the labels after running each batch of, say, one million trials.
(Setting the text after each trial doesn’t make sense, since millions of trials can be done in
one second, and trying to change the display millions of times per second would be silly.
Your program should have a “Run”/”Pause” button that controls the computation.
When the program starts, clicking “Run” will start the computation and change the text
on the button to “Pause”. Clicking “Pause” will cause the computation to pause. The
thread that does the computation should be started at the beginning of the program, but
should immediately go into the paused state until the “Run” button is pressed. Use the
wait() method in the thread to make it wait until “Run” is pressed. Use the notify()
method when the “Run” button is pressed to wake up the thread. Use a boolean signal
variable, running, to control whether the computation thread is paused. (The wait()
and notify() methods are covered in Subsection 12.3.5.)
Here is a picture of the program after it has run many trials:
You might want to start with a version of the program with no control button. In that
version, the computation thread can run continually from the time it is started. Once that
is working, you can add the button and the control feature.
To get you started, here is the code from the thread in my solution that runs one batch
of trials and updates the display labels:
for (int i = 0; i < BATCH SIZE; i++) {
double x = Math.random();
double y = Math.random();
trialCount++;
if (x*x + y*y < 1)
inCircleCount++;
}
double estimateForPi = 4 * ((double)inCircleCount / trialCount);
countLabel.setText( " Number of Trials: " + trialCount);
piEstimateLabel.setText( " Current Estimate: " + estimateForPi);
The variables trialCount and inCircleCount are of type long in order to allow the
number of trials to be more than the two billion or so that would be possible with a
variable of type int.
(I was going to ask you to use multiple computation threads, one for each available
processor, but I ran into an issue when using the Math.random() method in several threads.
This method requires synchronization, which causes serious performance problems when
several threads are using it to generate large amounts of random numbers. A solution
Exercises 691
to this problem is to have each thread use its own object of type java.util.Random to
generate its random numbers (see Subsection 5.3.1). My on-line solution to this exercise
discusses this problem further.)
7. The chat room example from Subsection 12.5.2 can be improved in several ways. First, it (solution)
would be nice if the participants in the chat room could be identified by name instead of
by number. Second, it would be nice if one person could send a private message to another
person that would be seen just by that person rather than by everyone. Make these two
changes. You can start with a copy of the package netgame.chat. You will also need the
package netgame.common, which defines the netgame framework.
To make the first change, you will have to implement a subclass of Hub that can keep
track of client names as well as numbers. To get the name of a client to the hub, you
can override the extraHandshake() method both in the Hub subclass and in the Client
subclass. The extraHandshake() method is called as part of setting up the connection
between the client and the hub. It is called after the client has been assigned an ID
number but before the connection is considered to be fully established. It should throw an
IOException if some error occurs during the setup process. Note that any messages that
are sent by the hub as part of the handshake must be read by the client and vice versa.
The extraHandshake() method in the Client is defined as:
protected void extraHandshake(ObjectInputStream in, ObjectOutputStream out)
throws IOException
while in the Hub, there is an extra parameter that tells the ID number of the client whose
connection is being set up:
protected void extraHandshake(in playerID, ObjectInputStream in,
ObjectOutputStream out) throws IOException
In the ChatRoomWindow class, the main() routine asks the user for the name of the
computer where the server is running. You can add some code there to ask the user their
name. (Just imitate the code that asks for the host name.) You will have to decide what
to do if two users want to use the same name.
For the second improvement, personal messages, I suggest writing a new PrivateMessage
class. A PrivateMessage object would include both the string that represents the message
and the ID numbers of the player to whom the message is being sent and of the player who
sent the message. The hub will have to be programmed to know how to deal with such
messages. A PrivateMessage should only be sent by the hub to the client who is listed as
the recipient of the message. You need to decide how the user will input a private message
and how the user will select the recipient of the message. Don’t forget that PrivateMessage
needs to be declared to implement Serializable.
If you attempt this exercise, you are likely to find it quite challenging.
Quiz 692
Quiz on Chapter 12
(answers)
1. Write a complete subclass of Thread to represent a thread that writes out the numbers
from 1 to 10. Then write some code that creates and starts a thread belonging to that
class.
2. Suppose that thrd is an object of type Thread. Explain the difference between calling
thrd.start() and calling thrd.run().
4. How does synchronization prevent race conditions, and what does it mean to say that
synchronization only provides mutual exclusion?
5. Suppose that a program uses a single thread that takes 4 seconds to run. Now suppose
that the program creates two threads and divides the same work between the two threads.
What can be said about the expected execution time of the program that uses two threads?
8. Network server programs are often multithreaded. Explain what this means and why it is
true.
9. Why does a multithreaded network server program often use many times more threads
than the number of available processors?
It’s possible to program a wide variety of GUI applications using only the techniques
covered in Chapter 6. In many cases, the basic events, components, layouts, and graphics
routines covered in that chapter suffice. But the Swing graphical user interface library is
far richer than what we have seen so far, and it can be used to build highly sophisticated
applications. This chapter is a further introduction to Swing and other aspects of GUI
programming. Although the title of the chapter is “Advanced GUI Programming,” it is still
just an introduction. Full coverage of this topic would require at least another complete book.
693
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 694
computer’s memory that can be used as a drawing surface. It is possible to draw to an off-screen
image using the same Graphics class that is used for drawing on the screen.
An Image of either type can be copied onto the screen (or onto an off-screen canvas)
using methods that are defined in the Graphics class. This is most commonly done in the
paintComponent() method of a JComponent. Suppose that g is the Graphics object that is
a parameter to the paintComponent() method, and that img is of type Image. Then the
statement
g.drawImage(img, x, y, this);
will draw the image img in a rectangular area in the component. The integer-valued parameters
x and y give the position of the upper-left corner of the rectangle in which the image is displayed,
and the rectangle is just large enough to hold the image. The fourth parameter, this is there
for technical reasons. In all cases in this book it will be either this or null. The parameter
is of type ImageObserver and a non-null value is needed only when the complete image might
not be available when the drawImage() method is called. This can happen, for example, if the
image is being read from a file or downloaded over the network. You don’t need it for an image
that the program has created itself in the computer’s memory or for an image that you are sure
has already been completely loaded. In those cases, the image observer parameter can be null.
However, even in those cases, using a non-null value does not cause any problems.
(In cases where you do need a non-null image observer, the special variable this, from
Subsection 5.6.1, is usually appropriate. The image observer parameter is there for technical
reasons having to do with the funny way Java treats image files. For most applications, you don’t
need to understand this, but here is how it works: g.drawImage() does not actually draw the
image in all cases. In some circumstances, it is possible that the complete image is not available
when this method is called. In that case, g.drawImage() merely initiates the drawing of the
image and returns immediately. Pieces of the image are drawn later, asynchronously, as they
become available. The question is, how do they get drawn? That’s where the image observer
comes in. When a piece of the image becomes available to be drawn, the system will inform the
ImageObserver, and it is the responsibility of the observer to make sure that the new piece of the
image will appear on the screen. Any JComponent object can act as an ImageObserver ; it will
call its repaint() method when notified that more of the image is available. The drawImage
method returns a boolean value to indicate whether the image has actually been drawn or not
when the method returns.)
There are a few useful variations of the drawImage() method. For example, it is possible to
scale the image as it is drawn to a specified width and height. This is done with the command
g.drawImage(img, x, y, width, height, imageObserver);
The parameters width and height give the size of the rectangle in which the image is displayed.
Another version makes it possible to draw just part of the image. In the command:
g.drawImage(img, dest x1, dest y1, dest x2, dest y2,
source x1, source y1, source x2, source y2, imageObserver);
the integers source x1, source y1, source x2, and source y2 specify the top-left and bottom-
right corners of a rectangular region in the source image. The integers dest x1, dest y1,
dest x2, and dest y2 specify opposite corners of a region in the destination graphics context.
The specified rectangle in the image is drawn, with scaling if necessary, to the specified rectangle
in the graphics context. For an example in which this is useful, consider a card game that needs
to display 52 different cards. Dealing with 52 image files can be cumbersome and inefficient,
especially for downloading over the Internet. So, all the cards might be put into a single image:
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 695
(This image is from the Gnome desktop project, http://www.gnome.org, and is shown here
much smaller than its actual size.) Now, just one Image object is needed. Drawing one card
means drawing a rectangular region from the image. This technique is used in a variation
of the sample program HighLowGUI.java from Subsection 6.6.6. In the original version, the
cards are represented by textual descriptions such as “King of Hearts.” In the new version,
HighLowWithImages.java, the cards are shown as images. You should try the program, but
here’s how it looks with the card images:
In the program, the pictures of the cards are drawn using the following method. The instance
variable cardImages is a variable of type Image that represents the image that is shown above,
containing 52 cards, plus two Jokers and a face-down card. Each card is 79 by 123 pixels. These
numbers are used, together with the suit and value of the card, to compute the corners of the
source rectangle for the drawImage() command:
/**
* Draws a playing card in a 79x123 rectangle, with its
* upper left corner at a specified point (x,y). Drawing the
* card requires the image file "cards.png".
* @param g The graphics context used for drawing the card.
* @param card The card that is to be drawn. If the value is null, then a
* face-down card is drawn.
* @param x the x-coord of the upper left corner of the card
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 696
keeping enough information around to enable you to redraw the picture. One way to do this
is to keep a copy of the picture in an off-screen canvas. Whenever the on-screen picture needs
to be redrawn, you just have to copy the contents of the off-screen canvas onto the screen.
Essentially, the off-screen canvas allows you to save a copy of the color of every individual
pixel in the picture. The sample program PaintWithOffScreenCanvas.java is a little painting
program that uses an off-screen canvas in this way. In this program, the user can draw curves,
lines, and various shapes; a “Tool” menu allows the user to select the thing to be drawn. There
is also an “Erase” tool and a “Smudge” tool that I will get to later. A BufferedImage is used
to store the user’s picture. When the user changes the picture, the changes are made to the
image, and the changed image is then copied to the screen. No record is kept of the shapes
that the user draws; the only record is the color of the individual pixels in the off-screen image.
(You should contrast this with the program SimplePaint2.java in Subsection 7.3.3, where the
user’s drawing is recorded as a list of objects that represent the shapes that the user drew.)
You should try the program. Try drawing a Filled Rectangle on top of some other shapes.
As you drag the mouse, the rectangle stretches from the starting point of the mouse drag to the
current mouse location. As the mouse moves, the underlying picture seems to be unaffected—
parts of the picture can be covered up by the rectangle and later uncovered as the mouse moves,
and they are still there. What this means is that the rectangle that is shown as you drag the
mouse can’t actually be part of the off-screen canvas, since drawing something into an image
means changing the color of some pixels in the image. The previous colors of those pixels are
not stored anywhere else and so are permanently lost. In fact, as you draw a line, rectangle,
or oval in PaintWithOffScreenCanvas, the shape that is shown as you drag the mouse is not
drawn to the off-screen canvas at all. Instead, the paintComponent() method draws the shape
on top of the contents of the canvas. Only when you release the mouse does the shape become
a permanent part of the off-screen canvas. This illustrates the point that when an off-screen
canvas is used, not everything that is visible on the screen has to be drawn on the canvas.
Some extra stuff can be drawn on top of the contents of the canvas by the paintComponent()
method. The other tools are handled differently from the shape tools. For the curve, erase, and
smudge tools, the changes are made to the canvas immediately, as the mouse is being dragged.
Let’s look at how an off-screen canvas is used in this program. The canvas is represented
by an instance variable, OSC, of type BufferedImage. The size of the canvas must be the same
size as the panel on which the canvas is displayed. The size can be determined by calling the
getWidth() and getHeight() instance methods of the panel. Furthermore, when the canvas is
first created, it should be filled with the background color, which is represented in the program
by an instance variable named fillColor. All this is done by the method:
/**
* This method creates the off-screen canvas and fills it with the current
* fill color.
*/
private void createOSC() {
OSC = new BufferedImage(getWidth(),getHeight(),BufferedImage.TYPE INT RGB);
Graphics osg = OSC.createGraphics();
osg.setColor(fillColor);
osg.fillRect(0,0,getWidth(),getHeight());
osg.dispose();
}
Note how it uses OSC.createGraphics() to obtain a graphics context for drawing to the image.
Also note that the graphics context is disposed at the end of the method. When you create
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 698
a graphics context, it is good practice to dispose of it when you are finished with it. There
still remains the problem of where to call this method. The problem is that the width and
height of the panel object are not set until some time after the panel object is constructed. If
createOSC() is called in the constructor, getWidth() and getHeight() will return the value
zero and we won’t get an off-screen image of the correct size. The approach that I take in
PaintWithOffScreenCanvas is to call createOSC() in the paintComponent() method, the
first time the paintComponent() method is called. At that time, the size of the panel has
definitely been set, but the user has not yet had a chance to draw anything. With this in mind
you are ready to understand the paintComponent() method:
public void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
/* First create the off-screen canvas, if it does not already exist. */
if (OSC == null)
createOSC();
/* Copy the off-screen canvas to the panel. Since we know that the
image is already completely available, the fourth, "ImageObserver"
parameter to g.drawImage() can be null. Since the canvas completely
fills the panel, there is no need to call super.paintComponent(g). */
g.drawImage(OSC,0,0,null);
/* If the user is currently dragging the mouse to draw a line, oval,
or rectangle, draw the shape on top of the image from the off-screen
canvas, using the current drawing color. (This is not done if the
user is drawing a curve or using the smudge, curve, or erase tool.) */
if (dragging && shapeTools.contains(currentTool)) {
g.setColor(currentColor);
putCurrentShape(g);
}
}
Here, dragging is a boolean instance variable that is set to true while the user is dragging the
mouse, and currentTool tells which tool is currently in use. The possible tools are defined by
an enum named Tool, and shapeTools is a variable of type ArrayList<Tool> that contains the
line, oval, rectangle, filled oval, and filled rectangle tools.
You might notice that there is a problem if the size of the panel is ever changed, since the
size of the off-screen canvas will not be changed to match. The PaintWithOffScreenCanvas
program does not allow the user to resize the program’s window, so this is not an issue in
that program. If we want to allow resizing, however, a new off-screen canvas must be created
whenever the size of the panel changes. One simple way to do this is to check the size of the
canvas in the paintComponent() method and to create a new canvas if the size of the canvas
does not match the size of the panel:
if (OSC == null || getWidth() != OSC.getWidth() || getHeight() != OSC.getHeight())
createOSC();
Of course, this will discard the picture that was contained in the old canvas unless some
arrangement is made to copy the picture from the old canvas to the new one before the old
canvas is discarded.
The other point in the program where the off-screen canvas is used is during a mouse-drag
operation, which is handled in the mousePressed(), mouseDragged(), and mouseReleased()
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 699
methods. The strategy that is implemented was discussed above. Shapes are drawn to the off-
screen canvas only at the end of the drag operation, in the mouseReleased() method. However,
as the user drags the mouse, the part of the image over which the shape appears is re-copied
from the canvas onto the screen each time the mouse is moved. Then the paintComponent()
method draws the shape that the user is creating on top of the image from the canvas. For
the non-shape (curve, smudge, and erase) tools, on the other hand, changes are made directly
to the canvas, and the region that was changed is repainted so that the change will appear on
the screen. (By the way, the program uses a version of the repaint() method that repaints
just a part of a component. The command repaint(x,y,width,height) tells the system to
repaint the rectangle with upper left corner (x,y) and with the specified width and height.
This can be substantially faster than repainting the entire component.) See the source code,
PaintWithOffScreenCanvas.java, if you want to see how it’s all done.
∗ ∗ ∗
One traditional use of off-screen canvasses is for double buffering . In double-buffering, the
off-screen image is an exact copy of the image that appears on screen; whenever the on-screen
picture needs to be redrawn, the new picture is drawn step-by-step to an off-screen image.
This can take some time. If all this drawing were done on screen, the user might see the image
flicker as it is drawn. Instead, the long drawing process takes place off-screen and the completed
image is then copied very quickly onto the screen. The user doesn’t see all the steps involved
in redrawing. This technique can be used to implement smooth, flicker-free animation.
The term “double buffering” comes from the term “frame buffer,” which refers to the
region in memory that holds the image on the screen. In fact, true double buffering uses
two frame buffers. The video card can display either frame buffer on the screen and can switch
instantaneously from one frame buffer to the other. One frame buffer is used to draw a new
image for the screen. Then the video card is told to switch from one frame buffer to the other.
No copying of memory is involved. Double-buffering as it is implemented in Java does require
copying, which takes some time and is not perfectly flicker-free.
In Java’s older AWT graphical API, it was up to the programmer to do double buffering by
hand. In the Swing graphical API, double buffering is applied automatically by the system, and
the programmer doesn’t have to worry about it. (It is possible to turn this automatic double
buffering off in Swing, but there is seldom a good reason to do so.)
∗ ∗ ∗
An example of using pixel colors in a BufferedImage is provided by the smudge tool in
the sample program PaintWithOffScreenCanvas.java. The purpose of this tool is to smear the
colors of an image, as if it were drawn in wet paint. For example, if you rub the middle of a
black rectangle with the smudge tool, you’ll get something like this:
This is an effect that can only be achieved by manipulating the colors of individual pixels! Here’s
how it works: when the user presses the mouse using the smudge tool, the color components
of a 9-by-9 block of pixels are copied from the off-screen canvas into arrays named smudgeRed,
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 701
smudgeGreen and smudgeBlue. This is done in the mousePressed() routine with the following
code:
int w = OSC.getWidth();
int h = OSC.getHeight();
int x = evt.getX();
int y = evt.getY();
for (int i = 0; i < 9; i++)
for (int j = 0; j < 9; j++) {
int r = y + j - 4;
int c = x + i - 4;
if (r < 0 || r >= h || c < 0 || c >= w) {
// A -1 in the smudgeRed array indicates that the
// corresponding pixel was outside the canvas.
smudgeRed[i][j] = -1;
}
else {
int color = OSC.getRGB(c,r);
smudgeRed[i][j] = (color >> 16) & 0xFF;
smudgeGreen[i][j] = (color >> 8) & 0xFF;
smudgeBlue[i][j] = color & 0xFF;
}
}
The arrays are of type double[ ][ ] because I am going to do some computations with them that
require real numbers. As the user moves the mouse, the colors in the array are blended with
the colors in the image, just as if you were mixing wet paint by smudging it with your finger.
That is, the colors at the new mouse position in the image are replaced with a weighted average
of the current colors in the image and the colors in the arrays. This has the effect of moving
some of the color from the previous mouse position to the new mouse position. At the same
time, the colors in the arrays are replaced by a weighted average of the old colors in the arrays
and the colors from the image. This has the effect of moving some color from the image into
the arrays. This is done using the following code for each pixel position, (c,r), in a 9-by-9
block around the new mouse location:
int curCol = OSC.getRGB(c,r);
int curRed = (curCol >> 16) & 0xFF;
int curGreen = (curCol >> 8) & 0xFF;
int curBlue = curCol & 0xFF;
int newRed = (int)(curRed*0.8 + smudgeRed[i][j]*0.2);
int newGreen = (int)(curGreen*0.8 + smudgeGreen[i][j]*0.2);
int newBlue = (int)(curBlue*0.8 + smudgeBlue[i][j]*0.2);
int newCol = newRed << 16 | newGreen << 8 | newBlue;
OSC.setRGB(c,r,newCol);
smudgeRed[i][j] = curRed*0.2 + smudgeRed[i][j]*0.8;
smudgeGreen[i][j] = curGreen*0.2 + smudgeGreen[i][j]*0.8;
smudgeBlue[i][j] = curBlue*0.2 + smudgeBlue[i][j]*0.8;
13.1.3 Resources
Throughout this textbook, up until now, we have been thinking of a program as made up
entirely of Java code. However, programs often use other types of data, including images,
sounds, and text, as part of their basic structure. These data are referred to as resources. An
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 702
example is the image file, cards.png, that was used in the HighLowWithImages.java program
earlier in this section. This file is part of the program. The program needs it in order to run.
The user of the program doesn’t need to know that this file exists or where it is located; as far
as the user is concerned, it is just part of the program. The program of course, does need some
way of locating the resource file and loading its data.
Resources are ordinarily stored in files that are in the same locations as the compiled class
files for the program. Class files are located and loaded by something called a class loader ,
which is represented in Java by an object of type ClassLoader. A class loader has a list of
locations where it will look for class files. This list is called the class path. It includes the
location where Java’s standard classes are stored. It generally includes the current directory.
If the program is stored in a jar file, the jar file is included on the class path. In addition to
class files, a ClassLoader is capable of finding resource files that are located on the class path
or in subdirectories of locations that are on the class path.
The first step in using a resource is to obtain a ClassLoader and to use it to locate the
resource file. In the HighLowWithImages program, this is done with:
ClassLoader cl = getClass().getClassLoader();
URL imageURL = cl.getResource("cards.png");
The idea of the first line is that in order to get a class loader, you have to ask a class that
was loaded by the class loader. Here, getClass() is a reference to the object that represents
the actual class, HighLowWithImages. The getClass() method is an instance method in class
Object and so can be used with any object. Another way to get a reference to a class loader is
to use ClassName.class, where ClassName is the name of any class. For example, I could have
used HighLoadWithImages.class.getClassLoader() to get the class loader in this case.
The second line in the above code uses the class loader to locate the resource file named
cards.png. The return value of cl.getResource() is of type java.net.URL, and it represents
the location of the resource rather than the resource itself. If the resource file cannot be found,
then the return value is null. The class URL was discussed in Subsection 11.4.1.
Often, resources are stored not directly on the class path but in a subdirectory. In that
case, the parameter to getResource() must be a path name that includes the directory path
to the resource. For example, suppose that the image file “cards.png” were stored in a directory
named images inside a directory named resources, where resources is directly on the class
path. Then the path to the file is “resources/images/cards.png” and the command for locating
the resource would be
URL imageURL = cl.getResource("resources/images/cards.png");
Once you have a URL that represents the location of a resource file, you could use a
URLConnection, as discussed in Subsection 11.4.1, to read the contents of that file. However,
Java provides more convenient methods for loading several types of resources. For loading image
resources, a convenient method is available in the class java.awt.Toolkit. It can be used as
in the following line from HighLowWithImages, where cardImages is an instance variable of
type Image and imageURL is the URL that represents the location of the image file:
cardImages = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().createImage(imageURL);
This still does not load the image completely—that will only be done later, for example
when cardImages is used in a drawImage command. Another technique, which does read
the image completely, is to use the ImageIO.read() method, which will be discussed below in
Subsection 13.1.5
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 703
An icon is represented by an object of type Icon, which is actually an interface rather than
a class. The class ImageIcon, which implements the Icon interface, is used to create icons from
Images. If image is a (rather small) Image, then the constructor call new ImageIcon(image)
creates an ImageIcon whose picture is the specified image. Often, the image comes from a
resource file. We will see examples of this later in this chapter.
*/
private void doSaveFile(BufferedImage image, String format) {
if (fileDialog == null)
fileDialog = new JFileChooser();
fileDialog.setSelectedFile(new File("image." + format.toLowerCase()));
fileDialog.setDialogTitle("Select File For Saved Image");
int option = fileDialog.showSaveDialog(this);
if (option != JFileChooser.APPROVE OPTION)
return; // User canceled or clicked the dialog’s close box.
File selectedFile = fileDialog.getSelectedFile();
if (selectedFile.exists()) { // Ask the user whether to replace the file.
int response = JOptionPane.showConfirmDialog( null,
"The file \"" + selectedFile.getName()
+ "\" already exists.\nDo you want to replace it?",
"Confirm Save",
JOptionPane.YES NO OPTION,
JOptionPane.WARNING MESSAGE );
if (response != JOptionPane.YES OPTION)
return; // User does not want to replace the file.
}
try {
boolean hasFormat = ImageIO.write(image,format,selectedFile);
if ( ! hasFormat )
throw new Exception(format + " format is not available.");
}
catch (Exception e) {
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(this,
"Sorry, an error occurred while trying to save image.");
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
∗ ∗ ∗
The ImageIO class also has a static read() method for reading an image from a file into
a program. The method
ImageIO.read( inputFile )
takes a variable of type File as a parameter and returns a BufferedImage. The return value
is null if the file does not contain an image that is stored in a supported format. Again, no
exception is thrown in this case, so you should always be careful to check the return value. It
is also possible for an IOException to occur when the attempt is made to read the file. There
is another version of the read() method that takes an InputStream instead of a file as its
parameter, and a third version that takes a URL.
Earlier in this section, we encountered another method for reading an image from a URL,
the createImage() method from the Toolkit class. The difference is that ImageIO.read()
reads the image data completely and stores the result in a BufferedImage. On the other hand,
createImage() does not actually read the data; it really just stores the image location and
the data won’t be read until later, when the image is used. This has the advantage that the
createImage() method itself can complete very quickly. ImageIO.read(), on the other hand,
can take some time to execute.
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 706
üýþÿA
DÿýþÿA
Measuring
Leading
LAÿÿ
The dashed lines in the illustration are the baselines of the two lines of text. The baseline
of a string is the line on which the bases of the characters rest. The suggested distance between
two baselines, for single-spaced text, is known as the lineheight of the font. The ascent is
the distance that tall characters can rise above the baseline, and the descent is the distance
that tails like the one on the letter “g” can descend below the baseline. The ascent and descent
do not add up to the lineheight, because there should be some extra space between the tops of
characters in one line and the tails of characters on the line above. The extra space is called
leading . (The term comes from the time when lead blocks were used for printing. Characters
were formed on blocks of lead that were lined up to make up the text of a page, covered with
ink, and pressed onto paper to print the page. Extra, blank “leading” was used to separate the
lines of characters.) All these quantities can be determined by calling instance methods in a
FontMetrics object. There are also methods for determining the width of a character and the
total width of a string of characters.
Recall that a font in Java is represented by the class Font. A FontMetrics object is
associated with a given font and is used to measure characters and strings in that font. If
font is of type Font and g is a graphics context, you can get a FontMetrics object for the
font by calling g.getFontMetrics(font). If fm is the variable that refers to the FontMetrics
object, then the ascent, descent, leading, and lineheight of the font can be obtained by
calling fm.getAscent(), fm.getDescent(), fm.getLeading(), and fm.getHeight(). If ch
is a character, then fm.charWidth(ch) is the width of the character when it is drawn in that
font. If str is a string, then fm.stringWidth(str) is the width of the string when drawn in
that font. For example, here is a paintComponent() method that shows the message “Hello
World” in the exact center of the component:
public void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
super.paintComponent(g);
int strWidth, strHeight; // Width and height of the string.
int centerX, centerY; // Coordinates of the center of the component.
int baseX, baseY; // Coordinates of the baseline of the string.
int topOfString; // y-coordinate of the top of the string.
centerX = getWidth() / 2;
centerY = getHeight() / 2;
Font font = g.getFont(); // What font will g draw in?
FontMetrics fm = g.getFontMetrics(font);
strWidth = fm.stringWidth("Hello World");
strHeight = fm.getAscent(); // Note: There are no tails on and
// of the chars in the string! So we
// don’t need to account for descent.
baseX = centerX - (strWidth/2); // Move back from center by half the
// width of the string.
topOfString = centerY - (strHeight/2); // Move up from center by half
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 708
13.2.2 Transparency
A color is represented by red, blue, and green components. In Java’s usual representation, each
component is an eight-bit number in the range 0 to 255. The three color components can be
packed into a 32-bit integer, but that only accounts for 24 bits in the integer. What about the
other eight bits? They don’t have to be wasted. They can be used as a fourth component of
the color, the alpha component. The alpha component can be used in several ways, but it
is most commonly associated with transparency . When you draw with a transparent color,
it’s like laying down a sheet of colored glass. It doesn’t completely obscure the part of the
image that is colored over. Instead, the background image is blended with the transparent
color that is used for drawing—as if you were looking at the background through colored glass.
This type of drawing is properly referred to as alpha blending , and it is not equivalent to true
transparency; nevertheless, most people refer to it as transparency.
The value of the alpha component determines how transparent that color is. Actually,
the alpha component gives the opaqueness of the color. Opaqueness is the opposite of
transparency. If something is fully opaque, you can’t see through it at all; if something is
almost fully opaque, then it is just a little transparent; and so on. When the alpha component
of a color has the maximum possible value, the color is fully opaque. When you draw with
a fully opaque color, that color simply replaces the color of the background over which you
draw. Except for a little example in Subsection 5.3.3, this is the only type of color that we
have used up until now. If the alpha component of a color is zero, then the color is perfectly
transparent, and drawing with that color has no effect at all. Intermediate values of the alpha
component give partially opaque colors that will blend with the background when they are used
for drawing.
The sample program TransparencyDemo.java can help you to understand transparency.
When you run the program you will see a display area containing a triangle, an oval, a
rectangle, and some text. Sliders at the bottom of the window allow you to control the degree of
transparency of each shape. When a slider is moved all the way to the right, the corresponding
shape is fully opaque; all the way to the left, and the shape is fully transparent.
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 709
∗ ∗ ∗
Colors with alpha components were introduced in Java along with Graphics2D, but they can
be used with ordinary Graphics objects as well. To specify the alpha component of a color, you
can create the Color object using one of the following constructors from the Color class:
public Color(int red, int green, int blue, int alpha);
public Color(float red, float green, float blue, float alpha);
In the first constructor, all the parameters must be integers in the range 0 to 255. In the second,
the parameters must be in the range 0.0 to 1.0. For example,
Color transparentRed = new Color( 255, 0, 0, 200 );
makes a slightly transparent red, while
Color tranparentCyan = new Color( 0.0F, 1.0F, 1.0F, 0.5F);
makes a blue-green color that is 50% opaque. (The advantage of the constructor that takes
parameters of type float is that it lets you think in terms of percentages.) When you create an
ordinary RGB color, as in new Color(255,0,0), you just get a fully opaque color.
Once you have a transparent color, you can use it in the same way as any other color. That
is, if you want to use a Color c to draw in a graphics context g, you just say g.setColor(c),
and subsequent drawing operations will use that color. As you can see, transparent colors are
very easy to use.
∗ ∗ ∗
A BufferedImage with image type BufferedImage.TYPE INT ARGB can use transparency.
The color of each pixel in the image can have its own alpha component, which tells how
transparent that pixel will be when the image is drawn over some background. A pixel whose
alpha component is zero is perfectly transparent, and has no effect at all when the image is
drawn; in effect, it’s not part of the image at all. It is also possible for pixels to be partly
transparent. When an image is saved to a file, information about transparency might be lost,
depending on the file format. The PNG image format supports transparency; JPEG does not.
(If you look at the images of playing cards that are used in the program HighLowWithImages in
Subsection 13.1.1, you might notice that the tips of the corners of the cards are fully transparent.
The card images are from a PNG file, cards.png.)
An ARGB BufferedImage should be fully transparent when it is first created, but if you want
to make sure, here is one way of doing so: The Graphics2D class has a method setBackground()
that can be used to set a background color for the graphics context, and it has a clearRect()
method that fills a rectangle with the current background color. To create a fully transparent
image with width w and height h, you can use:
BufferedImage image = new BufferedImage(w, h, BufferedImage.TYPE INT ARGB);
Graphics2D g2 = image.createGraphics();
g2.setBackground(new Color(0,0,0,0)); // (The R, G, and B values don’t matter.)
g2.clearRect(0, 0, w, h);
(Note that simply drawing with a transparent color will not make pixels in the image
transparent. The alpha component of a Color makes the color transparent when it is used
for drawing; it does not change the transparency of the pixels that are modified by the drawing
operation.)
As an example, just for fun, here is a method that will set the cursor of a component to be
a red square with a transparent interior:
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 710
13.2.3 Antialiasing
To draw a geometric figure such as a line or circle, you just have to color the pixels that are part
of the figure, right? Actually, there is a problem with this. Pixels are little squares. Geometric
figures, on the other hand, are made of geometric points that have no size at all. Think about
drawing a circle, and think about a pixel on the boundary of that circle. The infinitely thin
geometric boundary of the circle cuts through the pixel. Part of the pixel lies inside the circle,
part lies outside. So, when we are filling the circle with color, do we color that pixel or not?
A possible solution is to color the pixel if the geometric circle covers 50% or more of the pixel.
Following this procedure, however, leads to a visual defect known as aliasing . It is visible in
images as a jaggedness or “staircasing” effect along the borders of curved shapes. Lines that are
not horizontal or vertical also have a jagged, aliased appearance. (The term “aliasing” seems
to refer to the fact that many different geometric points map to the same pixel. If you think of
the real-number coordinates of a geometric point as a “name” for the pixel that contains that
point, then each pixel has many different names or “aliases.”)
It’s not possible to build a circle out of squares, but there is a technique that can eliminate
some of the jaggedness of aliased images. The technique is called antialiasing . Antialiasing is
based on transparency. The idea is simple: If 50% of a pixel is covered by the geometric figure
that you are trying to draw, then color that pixel with a color that is 50% transparent. If 25%
of the pixel is covered, use a color that is 75% transparent (25% opaque). If the entire pixel
is covered by the figure, of course, use a color that is 100% opaque—antialiasing only affects
pixels that are only partly covered by the geometric shape.
In antialiasing, the color that you are drawing with is blended with the original color of the
pixel, and the amount of blending depends on the fraction of the pixel that is covered by the
geometric shape. (The fraction is difficult to compute exactly, so in practice, various methods
are used to approximate it.) Of course, you still don’t get a picture of the exact geometric
shape, but antialiased images do tend to look better than jagged, aliased images.
For an example, look at the picture in the next subsection. Antialiasing is used to draw
the panels in the second and third row of the picture, but it is not used in the top row. You
should note the jagged appearance of the lines in the top row. (By the way, when antialiasing
is applied to a line, the line is treated as a geometric rectangle whose width is equal to the line
width.)
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 711
This illustration is a screenshot from the sample program StrokeDemo.java. In that program,
you can click and drag in any of the small panels, and the lines in all the panels will be redrawn
as you move the mouse. In addition, if you right-click and drag, then rectangles will be drawn
instead of lines; this shows that strokes are used for drawing the outlines of shapes and not just
for straight lines. If you look at the corners of the rectangles that are drawn by the program,
you’ll see that there are several ways of drawing a corner where two wide line segments meet.
All the options that you want for a BasicStroke have to be specified in the constructor. Once
the stroke object is created, there is no way to change the options. There is one constructor
that lets you specify all possible options:
public BasicStroke( float width, int capType, int joinType, float miterlimit,
float[] dashPattern, float dashPhase )
I don’t want to cover all the options in detail, but here’s some basic info:
• width specifies the thickness of the line
• capType specifies how the ends of a line are “capped.” The possible values are
BasicStroke.CAP SQUARE, BasicStroke.CAP ROUND and BasicStroke.CAP BUTT. These
values are used, respectively, in the first, second, and third rows of the above picture. The
default is BasicStroke.CAP SQUARE.
• joinType specifies how two line segments are joined together at corners. Possible values
are BasicStroke.JOIN MITER, BasicStroke.JOIN ROUND, and BasicStroke.JOIN BEVEL.
Again, these are used in the three rows of panels in the sample program; you will
only see the effect if you run the program and draw some rectangles. The default is
BasicStroke.JOIN MITER.
• miterLimit is used only if the value of joinType is JOIN MITER; just use the default value,
10.0F.
• dashPattern is used to specify dotted and dashed lines. The values in the array specify
lengths in the dot/dash pattern. The numbers in the array represent the length of a solid
piece, followed by the length of a transparent piece, followed by the length of a solid piece,
and so on. At the end of the array, the pattern wraps back to the beginning of the array.
If you want a solid line, use a different constructor that has fewer parameters.
• dashPhase tells the computer where to start in the dashPattern array, for the first
segment of the line. Use 0 for this parameter in most cases.
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 713
For the third row in the above picture, the dashPattern is set to new float[] {5,5}. This
means that the lines are drawn starting with a solid segment of length 5, followed by a
transparent section of length 5, and then repeating the same pattern. A simple dotted line
would have thickness 1 and dashPattern new float[] {1,1}. A pattern of short and long
dashes could be made by using new float[] {10,4,4,4}. For more information, see the Java
documentation, or try experimenting with the source code for the sample program.
∗ ∗ ∗
So now we can draw fancier lines. But any drawing operation is still restricted to drawing
with a single color. We can get around that restriction by using Paint. An object of type Paint
is used to assign color to each pixel that is “hit” by a drawing operation. Paint is an interface,
and the Color class implements the Paint interface. When a color is used for painting, it applies
the same color to every pixel that is hit. However, there are other types of paint where the
color that is applied to a pixel depends on the coordinates of that pixel. Standard Java includes
several classes that define paint with this property: TexturePaint and several types of gradient
paint. In a texture, the pixel colors come from an image, which is repeated, if necessary, like
a wallpaper pattern to cover the entire xy-plane. In a gradient, the color that is applied to
pixels changes gradually from one color to another color as you move from point to point. Java
has three types of gradient paints: GradientPaint, LinearGradientPaint, and RadialGradientPaint.
It will be helpful to look at some examples. This illustration shows a polygon filled with
two different paints. The polygon on the left uses a GradientPaint while the one on the right
uses a TexturePaint. Note that in this picture, the paint is used only for filling the polygon.
The outline of the polygon is drawn in a plain black color. However, Paint objects can be used
for drawing lines as well as for filling shapes. These pictures were made by the sample program
PaintDemo.java. In that program, you can select among several different paints, and you can
control certain properties of the paints.
endpoint, (x1,y1).) In most cases, you will set cyclic to true. Note that you can vary the
points (x1,y1) and (x2,y2) to change the width and direction of the gradient. For example,
to create a cyclic gradient that varies from black to light gray along the line from (0,0) to
(100,100), use:
new GradientPaint( 0, 0, Color.BLACK, 100, 100, Color.LIGHT GRAY, true)
The other two gradient paint classes, LinearGradientPaint and RadialGradientPaint, are more
sophisticated. Linear gradient paints are similar to GradientPaint but can be based on more
than two colors. Radial gradients color pixels based on their distance from a central point, which
produces rings of constant color instead of lines of constant color. See the API documentation
for details.
∗ ∗ ∗
To construct a TexturePaint, you need a BufferedImage that contains the image that will be
used for the texture. You also specify a rectangle in which the image will be drawn. The image
will be scaled, if necessary, to exactly fill the rectangle. Outside the specified rectangle, the
image will be repeated horizontally and vertically to fill the plane. You can vary the size and
position of the rectangle to change the scale of the texture and its positioning on the plane.
Ordinarily, however the upper left corner of the rectangle is placed at (0,0), and the size of
the rectangle is the same as the actual size of the image. The constructor for TexturePaint is
defined as
public TexturePaint( BufferedImage textureImage, Rectangle2D anchorRect)
The Rectangle2D class is part of the Graphics2D framework and will be discussed at the end
of this section. Often, a call to the constructor takes the following form, which will show the
image at its actual size:
new TexturePaint( image,
new Rectangle2D.Double(0,0,image.getWidth(),image.getHeight() )
Once you have a Paint object, you can use the setPaint() method of a Graphics2D object
to install the paint in a graphics context. For example, if g2 is of type Graphics2D, then the
command
g2.setPaint( new GradientPaint(0,0,Color.BLUE,100,100,Color.GREEN,true) );
sets up g2 to use a gradient paint. Subsequent drawing operations with g2 will draw using a
blue/green gradient.
transform changes the scale, that is, the unit of distance. And a rotation transform applies a
rotation about some point. You can make more complex transforms by combining transforms
of the three basic types. For example, you can apply a rotation, followed by a scale, followed by
a translation, followed by another rotation. When you apply several transforms in a row, their
effects are cumulative. It takes a fair amount of study to fully understand complex transforms,
and transforms are a major topic in a course in computer graphics. I will limit myself here to
discussing a few of the most simple cases, just to give you an idea of what transforms can do.
Suppose that g2 is of type Graphics2D. Then g2.translate(x,y) moves the origin,
(0,0), to the point (x,y). This means that if you use coordinates (0,0) after saying
g2.translate(x,y), then you are referring to the point that used to be (x,y), before the
translation was applied. All other coordinate pairs are moved by the same amount. For example
saying
g.translate(x,y);
g.drawLine( 0, 0, 100, 200 );
draws the same line as
g.drawLine( x, y, 100+x, 200+y );
In the second case, you are just doing the same translation “by hand.” A translation (like all
transforms) affects all subsequent drawing operations. Instead of thinking in terms of coordinate
systems, you might find it clearer to think of what happens to the objects that are drawn. After
you say g2.translate(x,y), any objects that you draw are displaced x units horizontally and
y units vertically. Note that the parameters x and y can be real numbers.
As an example, perhaps you would prefer to have (0,0) at the center of a component, instead
of at its upper left corner. To do this, just use the following command in the paintComponent()
method of the component:
g2.translate( getWidth()/2, getHeight()/2 );
To apply a scale transform to a Graphics2D g2, use g2.scale(s,s), where s is the real
number that specifies the scaling factor. If s is greater than 1, everything is magnified by a
factor of s, while if s is between 0 and 1, everything is shrunk by a factor of s. The center of
scaling is (0,0). That is, the point (0,0) is unaffected by the scaling, and other points move
toward or away from (0,0) by a factor of s. Again, it can be clearer to think of the effect
on objects that are drawn after a scale transform is applied. Those objects will be magnified
or shrunk by a factor of s. Note that scaling affects everything, including thickness of lines
and size of fonts. It is possible to use different scale factors in the horizontal and vertical
direction with a command of the form g2.scale(sx,sy), although that will distort the shapes
of objects. By the way, it is even possible to use scale factors that are less than 0, which results
in reflections. For example, after calling g2.scale(-1,1), objects will be reflected horizontally
through the line x=0.
The third type of basic transform is rotation. The command g2.rotate(r) rotates all
subsequently drawn objects through an angle of r about the point (0,0). You can rotate
instead about the point (x,y) with the command g2.rotate(r,x,y). All the parameters can
be real numbers. Angles are measured in radians, where π radians are equal to 180 degrees. To
rotate through an angle of d degrees, use
g2.rotate( d * Math.PI / 180 );
Positive angles are clockwise rotations, while negative angles are counterclockwise (unless you
have applied a negative scale factor, which reverses the orientation).
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 716
Rotation is not as common as translation or scaling, but there are a few things that you
can do with it that can’t be done any other way. For example, you can use it to draw an image
“on the slant.” Rotation also makes it possible to draw text that is rotated so that its baseline
is slanted or even vertical. To draw the string “Hello World” with its basepoint at (x,y) and
rising at an angle of 30 degrees, use:
g2.rotate( -30 * Math.PI / 180, x, y );
g2.drawString( "Hello World", x, y );
To draw the message vertically, with the center of its baseline at the point (x,y), we can use
FontMetrics to measure the string, and say:
FontMetrics fm = g2.getFontMetrics( g2.getFont() );
int baselineLength = fm.stringWidth("Hello World");
g2.rotate( -90 * Math.PI / 180, x, y);
g2.drawString( "Hello World", x - baselineLength/2, y );
Sometimes you might want to apply several transforms to get the effect you want. Suppose,
for example, that you would like to scale a string to be twice its usual size, with its basepoint
at (x,y). This won’t do it:
g.scale(2,2);
g.drawString("Hello World", x, y);
The problem is that the scaling doens’t just make the string bigger; it also move the point (x,y)
so that the basepoint of the string ends up at (2x,2y). What you should do is make a scaled
string with its basepoint at (0,0), and then translate by (x,y), which will move the basepoint
from (0,0) to (x,y). That can be done as follows:
g.translate(x,y);
g.scale(2,2);
g.drawString("Hello World", 0, 0);
The important thing to note is the order of the transforms. The translation applies to everything
that comes after the translate command. What comes after it is some code that draws a scaled
string with its basepoint at (0,0). That scaled string will be translated by (x,y). In effect, the
image is first scaled, then translated. The rule for multiple transforms is that transforms are
applied to objects in the opposite of the order in which the transform commands
occur in the code.
Java has one other transform method for applying shear transformations. Shearing is not
considered a basic transform, since it can be done (with some difficulty) by a series of rotations
and scalings. The effect of a horizontal shear is to shift horizontal lines to the left or right
by an amount that is proportional to the distance from the x-axis. That is, the point (x,y)
is transformed to (x+a*y,y), where a is the amount of shear. Similarly, a vertical shear will
shift vertical lines up or down by an amount proportional to the distance from the y-axis. The
method g2.shear(a,b) will apply a horizontal shear by a and a vertical shear by b.
The sample program TransformDemo.java demonstrates transforms, including scaling,
rotation, translation, and horizontal shear. A set of sliders lets you control the amount of each
transformation that is applied to a drawing. Running the program might help you understand
transformations.
∗ ∗ ∗
The drawing operations in the Graphics class use integer coordinates only. Graphics2D makes
it possible to use real numbers as coordinates. This becomes particularly important once you
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 717
start using transforms, since after you apply a scaling transform, a square of size one might
cover many pixels instead of just a single pixel. Unfortunately, the designers of Java couldn’t
decide whether to use numbers of type float or double as coordinates, and their indecision makes
things a little more complicated than they need to be. (My guess is that they really wanted to
use float, since values of type float have enough accuracy for graphics and are probably used
in the underlying graphical computations of the computer. However, in Java programming, it’s
easier to use double than float, so they wanted to make it possible to use double values too.)
To use real number coordinates, you have to use classes defined in the package
java.awt.geom. Among the classes in this package are classes that represent geometric shapes
such as lines and rectangles. For example, the class Line2D represents a line whose endpoints
are given as real number coordinates. The unfortunate thing is that Line2D is an abstract
class, which means that you can’t create objects of type Line2D directly. However, Line2D
has two concrete subclasses that can be used to create objects. One subclass uses coordinates
of type float, and one uses coordinates of type double. The most peculiar part is that these
subclasses are defined as static nested classes inside Line2D. Their names are Line2D.Float and
Line2D.Double. This means that Line2D objects can be created, for example, with:
Line2D line1 = new Line2D.Float( 0.17F, 1.3F, -2.7F, 5.21F );
Line2D line2 = new Line2D.Double( 0, 0, 1, 0);
Line2D line3 = new Line2D.Double( x1, y1, x2, y2 );
where x1, y1, x2, y2 are any numeric variables. In my own code, I generally use Line2D.Double
rather than Line2D.Float.
Other shape classes in java.awt.geom are similar. The class that represents rectangles
is Rectangle2D. To create a rectangle object, you have to use either Rectangle2D.Float or
Rectangle2D.Double. For example,
Rectangle2D rect = new Rectangle2D.Double( -0.5, -0.5, 1.0, 1.0 );
creates a rectangle with a corner at (-0.5,-0.5) and with width and height both equal to 1.
Other classes include Point2D, which represents a single point; Ellipse2D, which represents an
oval; and Arc2D, which represents an arc of a circle.
If g2 is of type Graphics2D and shape is an object belonging to one of the 2D shape classes,
then the command
g2.draw(shape);
draws the shape. For a shape such as a rectangle or ellipse that has an interior, only the outline
is drawn. To fill in the interior of such a shape, use
g2.fill(shape)
For example, to draw a line from (x1,y1) to (x2,y2), use
g2.draw( new Line2D.Double(x1,y1,x2,y2) );
and to draw a filled rectangle with a corner at (3.5,7), with width 5 and height 3, use
g2.fill( new Rectangle2D.Double(3.5, 7, 5, 3) );
The package java.awt.geom also has a very nice class Path2D that can be used to draw
polygons and curves defined by any number of points. See the Java documentation if you want
to find out how to use it.
This section has introduced you to many of the interesting features of Graphics2D, but there
is still a large part of the Graphics2D framework for you to explore.
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 718
in the Action interface. As another example, you can change the name of an action by using
Action.NAME as the key in the putValue() method.
Once you have an Action, you can use it in the constructor of a button. For example, using
the action clearAction defined above, we can create the JButton
JButton clearButton = new JButton( clearAction );
The name of the action will be used as the text of the button, and some other properties of
the button will be taken from properties of the action. For example, if the SHORT DESCRIPTION
property of the action has a value, then that value is used as the tooltip text for the button.
(The tooltip text appears when the user hovers the mouse over the button.) Furthermore,
when you change a property of the action, the corresponding property of the button will also
be changed. For example, changing the Action’s property associated with the key Action.NAME
will also change the text on the button.
The Action interface defines a setEnabled() method that is used to enable and
disable the action. The clearAction action can be enabled and disabled by calling
clearAction.setEnabled(true) and clearAction.setEnabled(false). When you do this,
any button that has been created from the action is also enabled or disabled at the same time.
Now of course, the question is, why should you want to use Actions at all? One advantage
is that using actions can help you to organize your code better. You can create separate objects
that represent each of the actions that can be performed in your program. This represents a nice
division of responsibility. Of course, you could do the same thing with individual ActionListener
objects, but then you couldn’t associate descriptions and other properties with the actions.
More important is the fact that Actions can also be used in other places in the Java API.
You can use an Action to create a JMenuItem in the same way as for a JButton:
JMenuItem clearCommand = new JMenuItem( clearAction );
A JMenuItem, in fact, is a kind of button and shares many of the same properties that a JButton
can have. You can use the same Action to create both a button and a menu item (or even
several of each if you want). Whenever you enable or disable the action or change its name, the
button and the menu item will both be changed to match. If you change the NAME property of
the action, the text of both the menu item and the button will be set to the new name of the
action. If you disable the action, both menu item and button will be disabled. You can think
of the button and the menu items as being two presentations of the Action, and you don’t have
to keep track of the button or menu item after you create them. You can do everything that
you need to do by manipulating the Action object.
By the way, if you want to add a menu item that is defined by an Action to a menu, you
don’t even need to create the JMenuItem yourself. You can add the action object directly to
the menu, and the menu item will be created from the properties of the action. For example, if
menu is a JMenu and clearAction is an Action, you can simply say menu.add(clearAction).
Actions have some other useful properties that we will encounter later in this section.
The icon for a button can be set by calling the button’s setIcon() method, or by passing the
icon object as a parameter to the constructor when the button is created. To create the button
shown above, I created an ImageIcon from a BufferedImage on which I drew the picture that
I wanted, and I constructed the JButton using a constructor that takes both the text and the
icon for the button as parameters. Here’s the code segment that does it:
BufferedImage image = new BufferedImage(24,24,BufferedImage.TYPE INT RGB);
Graphics2D g2 = (Graphics2D)image.getGraphics();
g2.setColor(Color.LIGHT GRAY); // Draw the image for the icon.
g2.fillRect(0,0,24,24);
g2.setStroke( new BasicStroke(3) ); // Use thick lines.
g2.setColor(Color.BLACK);
g2.drawLine(4,4,20,20); // Draw the "X".
g2.drawLine(4,20,20,4);
g2.dispose();
Icon clearIcon = new ImageIcon(image); // Create the icon.
JButton clearButton = new JButton("Clear the Display", clearIcon);
You can create a button with an icon but no text by using a constructor that takes just the
icon as parameter. Another alternative is for the button to get its icon from an Action. When
a button is constructed from an action, it takes its icon from the value of the action property
Action.SMALL ICON. For example, suppose that we want to use an action named clearAction
to create the button shown above. This could be done with:
clearAction.putValue( Action.SMALL ICON, clearIcon );
JButton clearButton = new JButton( clearAction );
The icon could also be associated with the action by passing it as a parameter to the constructor
of an AbstractAction:
Action clearAction = new AbstractAction("Clear the Display", clearIcon) {
public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent evt) {
.
. // Carry out the action.
.
}
}
JButton clearButton = new JButton( clearAction );
The SMALL ICON for an Action will also be used by a JMenuItem created from the action. (An
action can also have an icon associated with the key Action.LARGE ICON KEY. If it does, then
a JButton will use the “large” icon in preference to the “small” icon. However, a JMenuItem
will only use a small icon.)
The appearance of buttons can be tweaked in many ways. For example, you can change the
size of the gap between the button’s text and its icon. You can associate additional icons with
a button that are used when the button is in certain states, such as when it is pressed or when
it is disabled. It is even possible to change the positioning of the text with respect to the icon.
For example, to place the text centered below the icon on a button, you can say:
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 721
button.setHorizontalTextPosition(JButton.CENTER);
button.setVerticalTextPosition(JButton.BOTTOM);
These methods and many others are defined in the class AbstractButton. This class is a
superclass for JMenuItem, as well as for JButton and for the classes that define check boxes
and radio buttons.
Finally, I will mention that it is possible to use icons on JLabels in much the same way that
they can be used on JButtons. Placing an ImageIcon on a JLabel can be a convenient way to
add a static image to your GUI.
∗ ∗ ∗
When it’s drawn on the screen, a JCheckBox includes a little box that is either checked or
unchecked to show the state of the box. That box is actually a pair of Icons. One icon is shown
when the check box is unselected; the other is shown when it is selected. You can change the
appearance of the check box by substituting different icons for the standard ones.
The icon that is shown when the check box is unselected is just the main icon for the
JCheckBox. You can provide a different unselected icon in the constructor or you can change
the icon using the setIcon() method of the JCheckBox object. To change the icon that is
shown when the check box is selected, use the setSelectedIcon() method of the JCheckBox.
All this applies equally to JRadioButton, JCheckBoxMenuItem, and JRadioButtonMenuItem.
An example of this can be found in the sample program ToolBarDemo.java, which is
discussed in the next subsection. That program creates a set of radio buttons that use custom
icons. The buttons are created by the following method:
/**
* Create a JRadioButton and add it to a specified button group. The button
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 723
* is meant for selecting a drawing color in the display. The color is used to
* create two custom icons, one for the unselected state of the button and one
* for the selected state. These icons are used instead of the usual
* radio button icons.
* @param c the color of the button, and the color to be used for drawing.
* (Note that c has to be "final" since it is used in the anonymous inner
* class that defines the response to ActionEvents on the button.)
* @param grp the ButtonGroup to which the radio button will be added.
* @param selected if true, then the state of the button is set to selected.
* @return the radio button that was just created; sorry, but the button
* is not as pretty as I would like!
*/
private JRadioButton makeColorRadioButton(final Color c,
ButtonGroup grp, boolean selected) {
/* Create an ImageIcon for the normal, unselected state of the button,
using a BufferedImage that is drawn here from scratch. */
BufferedImage image = new BufferedImage(30,30,BufferedImage.TYPE INT RGB);
Graphics g = image.getGraphics();
g.setColor(Color.LIGHT GRAY);
g.fillRect(0,0,30,30);
g.setColor(c);
g.fill3DRect(1, 1, 24, 24, true);
g.dispose();
Icon unselectedIcon = new ImageIcon(image);
/* Create an ImageIcon for the selected state of the button. */
image = new BufferedImage(30,30,BufferedImage.TYPE INT RGB);
g = image.getGraphics();
g.setColor(Color.DARK GRAY);
g.fillRect(0,0,30,30);
g.setColor(c);
g.fill3DRect(3, 3, 24, 24, false);
g.dispose();
Icon selectedIcon = new ImageIcon(image);
/* Create and configure the button. */
JRadioButton button = new JRadioButton(unselectedIcon);
button.setSelectedIcon(selectedIcon);
button.addActionListener( new ActionListener() {
public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
// The action for this button sets the current drawing color
// in the display to c.
display.setCurrentColor(c);
}
});
grp.add(button);
if (selected)
button.setSelected(true);
return button;
} // end makeColorRadioButton
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 724
∗ ∗ ∗
It is possible to create radio buttons and check boxes—both the regular sort and the
corresponding menu items—from Actions. The button or checkbox takes its name, main icon,
tooltip text, and enabled/disabled state from the action. And the Action’s actionPerformed()
method is called when the user changes the state. Furthermore, an action has a property named
Action.SELECTED KEY, which means that the action itself can have a selected state. By default,
the value of the SELECTED KEY property is null and is not used for anything. However, you
can set the value to be true or false by calling action.putValue(Action.SELECTED KEY,true)
or action.putValue(Action.SELECTED KEY,false). Once you have done so, the action’s
SELECTED KEY property and the selected state of any checkbox or radio button created from the
action will automatically be kept in sync. You can find out the current value of the property by
calling action.getValue(Action.SELECTED KEY). Note that the value of a property is actually
an object. When you set the value to true or false, the value is wrapped in an object of type
Boolean. The return type of action.getValue() is Object, so you will probably need to type-
cast the return value to Boolean.
∗ ∗ ∗
Java has another component that lets the user choose from a set of options: the JComboBox.
A combo box contains a list of items, but only displays the currently selected items. The user
clicks the combo box to see a pop-up list of options and can then select from the list. The
functionality is similar to a group of radio buttons.
JComboBox is a parameterized class, where the type parameter specifies the type of items
that that combo box can hold. Most commonly, the items are strings, and the type is
JComboBox<String>. This is the only case I will discuss. When a JComboBox<String> object
is first constructed, it initially contains no items. An item is added to the bottom of the list
of options by calling the combo box’s instance method, addItem(str), where str is the string
that will be displayed in the menu.
For example, the following code will create an object of type JComboBox that contains the
options Red, Blue, Green, and Black:
JComboBox<String> colorChoice = new JComboBox<String>();
colorChoice.addItem("Red");
colorChoice.addItem("Blue");
colorChoice.addItem("Green");
colorChoice.addItem("Black");
You can call the getSelectedIndex() method of a JComboBox to find out which item
is currently selected. This method returns an integer that gives the position of the selected
item in the list, where the items are numbered starting from zero. Alternatively, you can
call getSelectedItem() to get the selected item itself. (This method returns a value of type
Object—even when the items are limited to being strings.) You can change the selection by
calling the method setSelectedIndex(n), where n is an integer giving the position of the item
that you want to select.
The most common way to use a JComboBox is to call its getSelectedIndex() method when
you have a need to know which item is currently selected. However, JComboBox components
generate ActionEvents when the user selects an item, and you can register an ActionListener
with the JComboBox if you want to respond to such events as they occur.
JComboBoxes have a nifty feature, which is probably not all that useful in practice. You can
make a JComboBox “editable” by calling its method setEditable(true). If you do this, the
user can edit the selection by clicking on the JComboBox and typing. This allows the user to
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 725
make a selection that is not in the pre-configured list that you provide. (The “Combo” in the
name “JComboBox” refers to the fact that it’s a kind of combination of menu and text-input
box.) If the user has edited the selection in this way, then the getSelectedIndex() method
will return the value -1, and getSelectedItem() will return the string that the user typed.
An ActionEvent is triggered if the user presses return while typing in the JComboBox.
∗ ∗ ∗
There is a lot of information in this section. The sample program ChoiceDemo.java
demonstrates the use of combo boxes, check boxes, and radio buttons—including the use of
Actions with check boxes and radio buttons. I encourage you to run the program to see how
these things work and to read the source code. The source code has a lot of comments to
explain what is going on.
13.3.4 Toolbars
It has become increasingly common for programs to have a row of small buttons along the top
or side of the program window that offer access to some of the commonly used features of the
program. The row of buttons is known as a tool bar . Typically, the buttons in a tool bar are
presented as small icons, with no text. Tool bars can also contain other components, such as
JTextFields and JLabels.
In Swing, tool bars are represented by the class JToolBar. A JToolBar is a container that can
hold other components. It is also itself a component, and so can be added to other containers.
In general, the parent component of the tool bar should use a BorderLayout. The tool bar
should occupy one of the edge positions—NORTH, SOUTH, EAST, or WEST—in the BorderLayout.
Furthermore, the other three edge positions should be empty. The reason for this is that it
might be possible (depending on the platform and configuration) for the user to drag the tool
bar from one edge position in the parent container to another. It might even be possible for
the user to drag the tool bar off its parent entirely, so that it becomes a separate window.
Here is a picture of a toolbar. This is from the sample program ToolBarDemo.java, which
I discuss below:
In the demo program, the user can draw colored curves in a large drawing area. The first
three buttons in the tool bar are a set of radio buttons that control the drawing color. The
fourth button is a push button that the user can click to clear the drawing.
Tool bars are easy to use. You just have to create the JToolBar object, add it to a container,
and add some buttons and possibly other components to the tool bar. One fine point is adding
space to a tool bar, such as the gap between the radio buttons and the push button in the
above picture. You can leave a gap by adding a separator to the tool bar. For example:
toolbar.addSeparator(new Dimension(20,20));
This adds an invisible 20-by-20 pixel block to the tool bar. This will appear as a 20 pixel gap
between components.
Here is the constructor from the ToolBarDemo program. It shows how to create the tool
bar and place it in a container. Note that class ToolBarDemo is a subclass of JPanel, and the
tool bar and display are added to the panel object that is being constructed:
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 726
public ToolBarDemo() {
setLayout(new BorderLayout(2,2));
setBackground(Color.GRAY);
setBorder(BorderFactory.createLineBorder(Color.GRAY,2));
display = new Display(); // the area where the user draws.
add(display, BorderLayout.CENTER);
JToolBar toolbar = new JToolBar();
add(toolbar, BorderLayout.NORTH);
ButtonGroup group = new ButtonGroup();
toolbar.add( makeColorRadioButton(Color.RED,group,true) );
toolbar.add( makeColorRadioButton(Color.GREEN,group,false) );
toolbar.add( makeColorRadioButton(Color.BLUE,group,false) );
toolbar.addSeparator(new Dimension(20,20));
toolbar.add( makeClearButton() );
}
If you want a vertical tool bar that can be placed in the EAST or WEST position of a
BorderLayout, you should specify the orientation in the tool bar’s constructor:
JToolBar toolbar = new JToolBar( JToolBar.VERTICAL );
The default orientation is JToolBar.HORIZONTAL. The orientation is adjusted automatically
when the user drags the tool bar into a new position. If you want to prevent the user from
dragging the tool bar, just say toolbar.setFloatable(false).
represents the action of pressing the “Z” key while holding down both the control and the shift
keys. When the key stroke involves pressing a character key, the character must appear in the
string in upper case form. You can also have key strokes that correspond to non-character keys.
The number keys can be referred to as “1”, “2”, etc., while certain special keys have names
such as “F1”, “ENTER”, and “LEFT” (for the left arrow key). The class KeyEvent defines
many constants such as VK ENTER, VK LEFT, and VK S. The names that are used for keys in the
keystroke description are just these constants with the leading “VK ” removed.
There are at least two ways to associate a keyboard accelerator with a menu item. One is
to use the setAccelerator() method of the menu item object:
JMenuItem saveCommand = new JMenuItem( "Save..." );
saveCommand.setAccelerator( KeyStroke.getKeyStroke("ctrl S") );
The other technique can be used if the menu item is created from an Action. The action property
Action.ACCELERATOR KEY can be used to associate a KeyStroke with an Action. When a menu
item is created from the action, the keyboard accelerator for the menu item is taken from the
value of this property. For example, if redoAction is an Action representing a “Redo” action,
then you might say:
redoAction.putValue( Action.ACCELERATOR KEY,
KeyStroke.getKeyStroke("ctrl shift Z") );
JMenuItem redoCommand = new JMenuItem( redoAction );
or, alternatively, you could simply add the action to a JMenu, editMenu, with
editMenu.add(redoAction). (Note, by the way, that accelerators apply only to menu items,
not to push buttons. When you create a JButton from an action, the ACCELERATOR KEY property
of the action is ignored.)
Note that you can use accelerators for JCheckBoxMenuItems and JRadioButtonMenuItems,
as well as for simple JMenuItems.
For examples of using keyboard accelerators, see ChoiceDemo.java and the solution to
Exercise 13.2.
∗ ∗ ∗
By the way, as noted above, in the Mac OS operating system, the meta (or apple) key is
usually used for keyboard accelerators instead of the control key. Java has a way of determining
the correct modifier for the computer on which it is running. However, it requires the use of a
different method for constructing the KeyStroke. The function call
int shortcutMask = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getMenuShortcutKeyMaskEx()
returns a “mask” that can be used to represent the correct modifier key when the keystroke is
created by the function
KeyStroke stoke = KeyStroke( keyCode, shortcutMask );
The first parameter, keyCode, is one of the constants such as KeyEvent.VK Z that represent keys
on the keyboard. For example, KeyStroke.getKeyStroke(KeyEvent.VK Z,shortcutMask)
represents the action of pressing the Z key while holding down the meta key on a Mac or the
control key on Windows or Linux. It is possible to add other modifiers to the shortcutMask
to account for holding down the shift or alt keys; see the documentation.
As an example, here is a code segment that is used in ChoiceDemo.java to make a “Quit”
menu item that will have the appropriate modifier key for the computer on which the program
is running
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 728
If the string of text that is applied to a button starts with “<html>”, then the string is
interpreted as HTML. The string does not have to use strict HTML format; for example, you
don’t need a closing </html> at the end of the string. To get multi-line text, use <br> in the
string to represent line breaks. If you would like the lines of text to be center justified, include
the entire text (except for the <html>) between <center> and </center>. For example,
JButton button = new JButton(
"<html><center>This button has<br>two lines of text</center>" );
creates a button that displays two centered lines of text. You can apply italics to part of the
string by enclosing that part between <i> and </i>. Similarly, use <b>...</b> for bold text and
<u>...</u> for underlined text. For green text, enclose the text between <font color=green>
and </font>. You can, of course, use other colors in place of “green.” The “Java” button that
is shown above was created using:
JButton javaButton = new JButton( "<html><u>Now</u> is the time for<br>" +
"a nice cup of <font color=red>coffee</font>." );
and then adding the Java image as an icon for the button.
Swing defines several component classes that are much more complex than those we have
looked at so far, but even the most complex components are not very difficult to use for many
purposes. In this section, we’ll look at components that support display and manipulation of
lists, tables, and text documents. To use these complex components effectively, you’ll need to
know something about the Model-View-Controller pattern that is used as a basis for the design
of many Swing components. This pattern is discussed in the first part of this section.
This section is our last look at Swing components, but there are a number of component
classes that have not even been touched on in this book. Some useful ones that you might want
to look into include: JTabbedPane, JSplitPane, JTree, JSpinner, JPopupMenu, JProgressBar, and
JScrollBar.
At the end of the section, we’ll look briefly at the idea of writing custom component classes—
something that you might consider when even the large variety of components that are already
defined in Swing don’t do quite what you want (or when they do too much, and you want
something simpler).
13.4.1 Model-View-Controller
One of the principles of object-oriented design is division of responsibilities. Ideally, an object
should have a single, clearly defined role, with a limited realm of responsibility. One application
of this principle to the design of graphical user interfaces is the MVC pattern. “MVC” stands
for “Model-View-Controller” and refers to three different realms of responsibility in the design
of a graphical user interface.
When the MVC pattern is applied to a component, the model consists of the data that
represents the current state of the component. The view is simply the visual presentation of
the component on the screen. And the controller is the aspect of the component that carries
out actions in response to events generated by the user (or by other sources such as timers). The
idea is to assign responsibility for the model, the view, and the controller to different objects.
The view is the easiest part of the MVC pattern to understand. It is often represented by
the component object itself, and its responsibility is to draw the component on the screen. In
doing this, of course, it has to consult the model, since the model represents the state of the
component, and that state can determine what appears on the screen. To get at the model
data—which is stored in a separate object according to the MVC pattern—the component
object needs to keep a reference to the model object. Furthermore, when the model changes,
the view often needs to be redrawn to reflect the changed state. The component needs some way
of knowing when changes in the model occur. Typically, in Java, this is done with events and
listeners. The model object is set up to generate events when its data changes. The view object
registers itself as a listener for those events. When the model changes, an event is generated,
the view is notified of that event, and the view responds by updating its appearance on the
screen.
When MVC is used for Swing components, the controller is generally not so well defined as
the model and view, and its responsibilities are often split among several objects. The controller
might include mouse and keyboard listeners that respond to user events on the view; Actions
that respond to menu commands or buttons; and listeners for other high-level events, such as
those from a slider, that affect the state of the component. Usually, the controller responds
to events by making modifications to the model, and the view is changed only indirectly, in
response to the changes in the model.
The MVC pattern is used in many places in the design of Swing. It is even used for buttons.
The state of a Swing button is stored in an object of type ButtonModel. The model stores such
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 730
information as whether the button is enabled, whether it is selected, and what ButtonGroup it
is part of, if any. If button is of type JButton (or one of the other subclasses of AbstractButton),
then its ButtonModel can be obtained by calling button.getModel(). In the case of buttons,
you might never need to use the model or even know that it exists. But for the list and table
components that we will look at next, knowledge of the model is essential.
Note that the scrollbar in this program is not part of the JList. To add a scrollbar to a list,
the list must be placed into a JScrollPane. See Subsection 6.5.4, where the use of JScrollPane
to hold a JTextArea was discussed. Scroll panes are used in the same way with lists and with
other components. In this case, the JList, iconList, was added to a scroll pane and the scroll
pane was added to a panel with the single command:
add( new JScrollPane(iconList), BorderLayout.EAST );
JList is a parameterized type, where the type parameter indicates what type of object can
be displayed in the list. The most common types are JList<String> and JList<Icon>. Other types
can be used, but they will be converted to strings for display. (It’s possible to “teach” a JList
how to display other types of items; see the setCellRenderer() method in the JList class.)
One way to construct a JList is from an array that contains the objects that will appear in
the list. In the SillyStamper program, the images for the icons are read from resource files,
the icons are placed into an array, and the array is used to construct a JList<Icon>. This is done
by the following method:
private JList<Icon> createIconList() {
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 731
those items are, but it can’t do much else. In particular, there is no way to add items to the
list or to delete items from the list! If you need that capability, you will have to use a different
list model.
The class DefaultListModel defines list models that support adding items to and removing
items from the list. Like JList, it is a parameterized class. (Note that the list model that
you get when you create a JList from an array is not of this type.) If dlmodel is of type
DefaultListModel, the following methods, among others, are defined:
• dlmodel.getSize() — returns the number of items.
• dlmodel.getElementAt(index) — returns the item at position index in the list.
• dlmodel.addElement(item) — Adds item to the end of the list.
• dlmodel.insertElementAt(item, index) — inserts the specified item into the list at
the specified index; items that come after that position in the list are moved down to
make room for the new item.
• dlmodel.setElementAt(item, index) — Replaces the item that is currently at position
index in the list with item.
• dlmodel.remove(index) — removes the item at position index in the list.
• dlmodel.removeAllElements() — removes everything from the list, leaving it empty.
To use a modifiable JList<T>, you should create a DefaultListModel<T>, add any items to it
that should be in the list initially, and pass it to the JList constructor. For example:
DefaultListModel<String> listModel;
JList<String> flavorList;
listModel = new DefaultListModel<String>(); // Create the model object.
listModel.addElement("Chocolate"); // Add items to the model.
listModel.addElement("Vanilla");
listModel.addElement("Strawberry");
listModel.addElement("Rum Raisin");
flavorList = new JList<String>(listModel); // Create the list component.
By keeping a reference to the model around in an instance variable, you will be able to add and
delete flavors as the program is running by calling the appropriate methods in listModel. Keep
in mind that changes that are made to the model will automatically be reflected in the view.
Behind the scenes, when a list model is modified, it generates an event of type ListDataEvent.
The JList registers itself with its model as a listener for these events, and it responds to an
event by redrawing itself to reflect the changes in the model. The programmer doesn’t have to
take any extra action, beyond changing the model.
By the way, the model for a JList actually has another part in addition to the ListModel: An
object of type ListSelectionModel stores information about which items in the list are currently
selected. When the model is complex, it’s not uncommon to use several model objects to store
different aspects of the state.
position is called a cell of the table. Each column can have a header , which appears at the
top of the column and contains a name for the column.
It is easy to create a JTable from an array that contains the names of the columns and a
two-dimensional array that contains the items that go into the cells of the table. As an example,
the sample program StatesAndCapitalsTableDemo.java creates a table with two columns named
“State” and “Capital City.” The first column contains a list of the states of the United States
and the second column contains the name of the capital city of each state. The table can be
created as follows:
String[][] statesAndCapitals = new String[][] {
{ "Alabama", "Montgomery" },
{ "Alaska", "Juneau" },
{ "Arizona", "Phoenix" },
.
.
.
{ "Wisconsin", "Madison" },
{ "Wyoming", "Cheyenne" }
};
String[] columnHeads = new String[] { "State", "Capital City" };
JTable table = new JTable(statesAndCapitals, columnHeads);
Since a table does not come with its own scroll bars, it is almost always placed in a JScrollPane
to make it possible to scroll the table. For example:
add( new JScrollPane(table), BorderLayout.CENTER );
The column headers of a JTable are not actually part of the table; they are in a separate
component. But when you add the table to a JScrollPane, the column headers are automatically
placed at the top of the scroll pane.
Using the default settings, the user can edit any cell in the table by clicking that cell. When
editing a cell, the arrow keys can be used to move from one cell to another. The user can
change the order of the columns by dragging a column header to a new position. The user can
also change the width of the columns by dragging the line that separates neighboring column
headers. You can try all this in StatesAndCapitalsTableDemo.java.
Allowing the user to edit all entries in the table is not always appropriate; certainly it’s not
appropriate in the “states and capitals” example. A JTable uses an object of type TableModel
to store information about the contents of the table. The model object is also responsible for
deciding whether or not the user should be able to edit any given cell in the table. TableModel
includes the method
public boolean isCellEditable(int rowNum, int columnNum)
where rowNum and columnNum are the position of a cell in the grid of rows and columns that
make up the table. When the controller wants to know whether a certain cell is editable, it
calls this method in the table model. If the return value is true, the user is allowed to edit the
cell.
The default model that is used when the table is created from an array of objects allows
editing of all cells. For this model, the return value of isCellEditable() is true in all cases. To
make some cells non-editable, you have to provide a different model for the table. One way to do
this is to create a subclass of DefaultTableModel and override the isCellEditable() method.
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 734
(DefaultTableModel and some other classes that are discussed in this section are defined in
the package javax.swing.table.) Here is how this might have been done in the “states and
capitals” program to make all cells non-editable:
TableModel model = new DefaultTableModel(statesAndCapitals,columnHeads) {
public boolean isCellEditable(int row, int col) {
return false;
}
};
JTable table = new JTable(model);
Here, an anonymous subclass of DefaultTableModel is created in which the isCellEditable()
method returns false in all cases, and the model object that is created from that class is passed
as a parameter to the JTable constructor.
The DefaultTableModel class defines many methods that can be used to modify the table,
including for example: setValueAt(item,rowNum,colNum) to change the item in a given cell;
removeRow(rowNum) to delete a row; and addRow(itemArray) to add a new row at the end of
the table that contains items from the array itemArray. Note that if the item in a given cell is
set to null, then that cell will be empty. Remember, again, that when you modify the model,
the view is automatically updated to reflect the changes.
In addition to the isCellEditable() method, the table model method that you are most
likely to want to override is getColumnClass(), which is defined as
public Class<?> getColumnClass(columnNum)
The purpose of this method is to specify what kind of values are allowed in the specified
column. The return value from this method is of type Class. (The “<?>” is there for technical
reasons having to do with generic programming. See Section 10.5, but don’t worry about
understanding it here.) Although class objects have crept into this book in a few places—
in the discussion of ClassLoaders in Subsection 13.1.3 for example—this is the first time we
have directly encountered the class named Class. An object of type Class represents a class.
A Class object is usually obtained from the name of the class using expressions of the form
“Double.class” or “JTable.class”. If you want a three-column table in which the column
types are String, Double, and Boolean, you can use a table model in which getColumnClass is
defined as:
public Class<?> getColumnClass(columnNum) {
if (columnNum == 0)
return String.class;
else if (columnNum == 1)
return Double.class;
else
return Boolean.class;
}
The table will call this method and use the return value to decide how to display and edit
items in the table. For example, if a column is specified to hold Boolean values, the cells in that
column will be displayed and edited as check boxes. For numeric types, the table will not accept
illegal input when the user types in the value. (It is possible to change the way that a table
edits or displays items. See the methods setDefaultEditor() and setDefaultRenderer() in
the JTable class.)
As an alternative to using a subclass of DefaultTableModel, a custom table model can
also be defined using a subclass of AbstractTableModel. Whereas DefaultTableModel provides
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 735
Note, by the way, that in this program, the scatter plot can be considered to be a view of the
table model, in the same way that the table itself is. The scatter plot registers itself as a listener
with the model, so that it will receive notification whenever the model changes. When that
happens, the scatter plot redraws itself to reflect the new state of the model. It is an important
property of the MVC pattern that several views can share the same model, offering alternative
presentations of the same data. The views don’t have to know about each other or communicate
with each other except by sharing the model. Although I didn’t do it in this program, it would
even be possible to add a controller to the scatter plot view. This could let the user add a
point by clicking the mouse on the scatter plot or drag a point to change its coordinates. The
controller would update the table model, based on the user actions. Since the scatter plot and
table share the same model, the values displayed in the table would automatically change to
match.
Here is the definition of the class that defines the model in the scatter plot program. All
the methods in this class must be defined in any subclass of AbstractTableModel except for
setValueAt(), which only has to be defined if the table is modifiable.
/**
* This class defines the TableModel that is used for the JTable in this
* program. The table has three columns. Column 0 simply holds the
* row number of each row. Column 1 holds the x-coordinates of the
* points for the scatter plot, and Column 2 holds the y-coordinates.
* The table has 25 rows. No support is provided for adding more rows.
*/
private class CoordInputTableModel extends AbstractTableModel {
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 736
There are a lot of web pages that a JEditorPane won’t be able to display correctly, but it
can be very useful in cases where you have control over the pages that will be displayed. A
nice application is to distribute HTML-format help and information files with a program. The
files can be stored as resource files in the jar file of the program, and a URL for a resource
file can be obtained in the usual way, using the getResource() method of a ClassLoader. (See
Subsection 13.1.3.)
It turns out, by the way, that SimpleWebBrowser.java is a little too simple. A modified
version, SimpleWebBrowserWithThread.java, improves on the original by using a thread to
load a page and by checking the content type of a page before trying to load it. It actually does
work as a simple web browser. Try it!
The model for a JTextComponent is an object of type Document. If you want to be notified
of changes in the model, you can add a listener to the model using
textComponent.getDocument().addDocumentListener(listener)
where textComponent is of type JTextComponent and listener is of type DocumentListener.
The Document class also has methods that make it easy to read a document from a file and
write a document to a file. I won’t discuss all the things you can do with text components here.
For one more peek at their capabilities, see the sample program SimpleRTFEdit.java, a very
minimal editor for files that contain styled text of type “text/rtf.”
instance variable, running, to keep track of this aspect of the component’s state. There is
one more item of interest: How do I know what time the mouse was clicked? The method
System.currentTimeMillis() returns the current time. But there can be some delay between
the time the user clicks the mouse and the time when the mousePressed() routine is called.
To make my stopwatch as accurate as possible, I don’t want to know the current time. I want
to know the exact time when the mouse was pressed. When I wrote the StopWatchLabel class,
this need sent me on a search in the Java documentation. I found that if evt is an object of
type MouseEvent, then the function evt.getWhen() returns the time when the event occurred.
I call this function in the mousePressed() routine to determine the exact time when the user
clicked on the label. The complete StopWatch class is rather short:
import java.awt.event.*;
import javax.swing.*;
/**
* A custom component that acts as a simple stop-watch. When the user clicks
* on it, this component starts timing. When the user clicks again,
* it displays the time between the two clicks. Clicking a third time
* starts another timer, etc. While it is timing, the label just
* displays the message "Timing....".
*/
public class StopWatchLabel extends JLabel implements MouseListener {
private long startTime; // Start time of timer.
// (Time is measured in milliseconds.)
private boolean running; // True when the timer is running.
/**
* Constructor sets initial text on the label to
* "Click to start timer." and sets up a mouse listener
* so the label can respond to clicks.
*/
public StopWatchLabel() {
super(" Click to start timer. ", JLabel.CENTER);
addMouseListener(this);
}
/**
* Tells whether the timer is currently running.
*/
public boolean isRunning() {
return running;
}
/**
* React when the user presses the mouse by starting or stopping
* the timer and changing the text that is shown on the label.
*/
public void mousePressed(MouseEvent evt) {
if (running == false) {
// Record the time and start the timer.
running = true;
startTime = evt.getWhen(); // Time when mouse was clicked.
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 740
setText("Timing....");
}
else {
// Stop the timer. Compute the elapsed time since the
// timer was started and display it.
running = false;
long endTime = evt.getWhen();
double seconds = (endTime - startTime) / 1000.0;
setText("Time: " + seconds + " sec.");
}
}
public void mouseReleased(MouseEvent evt) { }
public void mouseClicked(MouseEvent evt) { }
public void mouseEntered(MouseEvent evt) { }
public void mouseExited(MouseEvent evt) { }
}
Don’t forget that since StopWatchLabel is a subclass of JLabel, you can do anything with a
StopWatchLabel that you can do with a JLabel. You can add it to a container. You can set its
font, foreground color, and background color. You can set the text that it displays (although
this would interfere with its stopwatch function). You can even add a Border if you want.
Let’s look at one more example of defining a custom component. Suppose that—for no
good reason whatsoever—I want a component that acts like a JLabel except that it displays
its text in mirror-reversed form. Since no standard component does anything like this, the
MirrorText class is defined as a subclass of JPanel. It has a constructor that specifies the text to
be displayed and a setText() method that changes the displayed text. The paintComponent()
method draws the text mirror-reversed, in the center of the component. This uses techniques
discussed in Subsection 13.1.1 and Subsection 13.2.1. Information from a FontMetrics object
is used to center the text in the component. The reversal is achieved by using an off-screen
canvas. The text is drawn to the off-screen canvas, in the usual way. Then the image is copied
to the screen with the following command, where OSC is the variable that refers to the off-screen
canvas, and width and height give the size of both the component and the off-screen canvas:
g.drawImage(OSC, width, 0, 0, height, 0, 0, width, height, null);
This is the version of drawImage() that specifies corners of destination and source
rectangles. The corner (0,0) in OSC is matched to the corner (width,0) on the screen, while
(width,height) is matched to (0,height). This reverses the image left-to-right. Here is the
complete class:
import java.awt.*;
import javax.swing.*;
import java.awt.image.BufferedImage;
/**
* A component for displaying a mirror-reversed line of text.
* The text will be centered in the available space. This component
* is defined as a subclass of JPanel. It respects any background
* color, foreground color, and font that are set for the JPanel.
* The setText(String) method can be used to change the displayed
* text. Changing the text will also call revalidate() on this
* component.
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 741
*/
public class MirrorText extends JPanel {
private String text; // The text displayed by this component.
private BufferedImage OSC; // Holds an un-reversed picture of the text.
/**
* Construct a MirrorText component that will display the specified
* text in mirror-reversed form.
*/
public MirrorText(String text) {
if (text == null)
text = "";
this.text = text;
}
/**
* Change the text that is displayed on the label.
* @param text the new text to display
*/
public void setText(String text) {
if (text == null)
text = "";
if ( ! text.equals(this.text) ) {
this.text = text; // Change the instance variable.
revalidate(); // Tell container to recompute its layout.
repaint(); // Make sure component is redrawn.
}
}
/**
* Return the text that is displayed on this component.
* The return value is non-null but can be an empty string.
*/
public String getText() {
return text;
}
/**
* The paintComponent method makes a new off-screen canvas, if necessary,
* writes the text to the off-screen canvas, then copies the canvas onto
* the screen in mirror-reversed form.
*/
public void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
int width = getWidth();
int height = getHeight();
if (OSC == null || width != OSC.getWidth()
|| height != OSC.getHeight()) {
OSC = new BufferedImage(width,height,BufferedImage.TYPE INT RGB);
}
Graphics OSG = OSC.getGraphics();
OSG.setColor(getBackground());
OSG.fillRect(0, 0, width, height);
OSG.setColor(getForeground());
OSG.setFont(getFont());
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 742
FontMetrics fm = OSG.getFontMetrics(getFont());
int x = (width - fm.stringWidth(text)) / 2;
int y = (height + fm.getAscent() - fm.getDescent()) / 2;
OSG.drawString(text, x, y);
OSG.dispose();
g.drawImage(OSC, width, 0, 0, height, 0, 0, width, height, null);
}
/**
* Compute a preferred size that includes the size of the text, plus
* a boundary of 5 pixels on each edge.
*/
public Dimension getPreferredSize() {
FontMetrics fm = getFontMetrics(getFont());
return new Dimension(fm.stringWidth(text) + 10,
fm.getAscent() + fm.getDescent() + 10);
}
} // end MirrorText
This class defines the method “public Dimension getPreferredSize()”. This method is
called by a layout manager when it wants to know how big the component would like to be.
Standard components come with a way of computing a preferred size. For a custom component
based on a JPanel, it’s a good idea to provide a custom preferred size. Every component has
a method setPreferredSize() that can be used to set the preferred size of the component.
For our MirrorText component, however, the preferred size depends on the font and the text
of the component, and these can change from time to time. We need a way to compute a
preferred size on demand, based on the current font and text. That’s what we do by defining
a getPreferredSize() method. The system calls this method when it wants to know the
preferred size of the component. In response, we can compute the preferred size based on the
current font and text.
The StopWatchLabel and MirrorText classes define components. Components don’t stand
on their own. You have to add them to a panel or other container. The sample program Cus-
tomComponentTest.java demonstrates using a MirrorText and a StopWatchLabel component,
which are defined by the source code files MirrorText.java and StopWatchLabel.java.
In this program, the two custom components and a button are added to a panel that uses
a FlowLayout as its layout manager, so the components are not arranged very neatly. If you
click the button labeled “Change Text in this Program”, the text in all the components will
be changed. You can also click on the stopwatch label to start and stop the stopwatch. When
you do any of these things, you will notice that the components will be rearranged to take the
new sizes into account. This is known as “validating” the container. This is done automatically
when a standard component changes in some way that requires a change in preferred size or
location. This may or may not be the behavior that you want. (Validation doesn’t always
cause as much disruption as it does in this program. For example, in a GridLayout, where all
the components are displayed at the same size, it will have no effect at all. I chose a FlowLayout
for this example to make the effect more obvious.) When the text is changed in a MirrorText
component, there is no automatic validation of its container. A custom component such as
MirrorText must call the revalidate() method to indicate that the container that contains
the component should be validated. In the MirrorText class, revalidate() is called in the
setText() method.
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 743
After this loop ends, if count is less than or equal to maxIterations, we can say that (a,b)
is definitely not in the Mandelbrot set. If count is greater than maxIterations, then (a,b)
might or might not be in the Mandelbrot set, but the larger maxIterations is, the more likely
that (a,b) is actually in the set.
To make a picture from this procedure, use a rectangular grid of pixels to represent some
rectangle in the plane. Each pixel corresponds to some real number coordinates (a,b). (Use
the coordinates of the center of the pixel.) Run the above loop for each pixel. If the count goes
past maxIterations, color the pixel black; this is a point that is possibly in the Mandelbrot
set. Otherwise, base the color of the pixel on the value of count after the loop ends, using
different colors for different counts. In some sense, the higher the count, the closer the point
is to the Mandelbrot set, so the colors give some information about points outside the set and
about the shape of the set. However, it’s important to understand that the colors are arbitrary
and that colored points are definitely not in the set. Here is a picture that was produced by
the Mandelbrot Viewer program using this computation. The black region is the Mandelbrot
set (except that not all black points are known to be definitely in the set):
When you use the program, you can “zoom in” on small regions of the plane. To do so, just
click-and-drag the mouse on the picture. This will draw a rectangle around part of the picture.
When you release the mouse, the part of the picture inside the rectangle will be zoomed to fill
the entire display. If you simply click a point in the picture, you will zoom in on the point where
you click by a magnification factor of two. (Shift-click or use the right mouse button to zoom
out instead of zooming in.) The interesting points are along the boundary of the Mandelbrot
set. In fact, the boundary is infinitely complex. (Note that if you zoom in too far, you will
exceed the capabilities of the double data type; nothing is done in the program to prevent this.
As you zoom in further, the picture will first become “blocky” and then meaningless.)
Use the “MaxIterations” menu to increase the maximum number of iterations in the
loop. Remember that black pixels might or might not be in the set; when you increase
“MaxIterations,” you might find that a black region becomes filled with color. The “Palette”
menu determines the set of colors that are used. Different palettes give very different
visualizations of the set. The “PaletteLength” menu determines how many different colors
are used. In the default setting, a different color is used for each possible value of count in
the algorithm. Sometimes, you can get a much better picture by using a different number of
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 745
colors. If the palette length is less than maxIterations, the palette is repeated to cover all the
possible values of count; if the palette length is greater than maxIterations, only part of of
the palette will be used. (If the picture is of an almost uniform color, try decreasing the palette
length, since that makes the color vary more quickly as count changes. If you see what look
like randomly colored dots instead of bands of color, try increasing the palette length.)
The program has a “File” menu that can be used to save the picture as a PNG image file.
You can also save a “param” file which simply saves the settings that produced the current
picture. A param file can be read back into the program using the “Open” command.
The Mandelbrot set is named after Benoit Mandelbrot, who was the first person to note the
incredible complexity of the set. It is astonishing that such complexity and beauty can arise
out of such a simple algorithm.
∗ ∗ ∗
The work of computing and displaying images of the Mandelbrot set is done in Mandelbrot-
Display.java. The MandelbrotDisplay class is a subclass of JPanel. It uses an off-screen canvas to
hold a copy of the image. (See Subsection 13.1.1.) The paintComponent() method copies this
image onto the panel. Then, if the user is drawing a “zoom box” with the mouse, the zoom box
is drawn on top of the image. In addition to the image, the class uses a two-dimensional array
to store the iteration count for each pixel in the image. If the range of xy-values changes, or if
the size of the window changes, all the counts must be recomputed. Since the computation can
take quite a while, it would not be acceptable to block the user interface while the computation
is being performed. The solution is to do the computation in separate “worker” threads, as
discussed in Chapter 12. The program uses one worker thread for each available processor.
When the computation begins, the image is filled with gray. Every so often, about twice a
second, the data that has been computed by the computation threads is gathered and applied
to the off-screen canvas, and the part of the canvas that has been modified is copied to the
screen. A Timer is used to control this process—each time the timer fires, the image is updated
with any new data that has been computed by the threads. The user can continue to use the
menus and even the mouse while the image is being computed.
The file MandelbrotPanel.java defines the main panel of the Mandelbrot Viewer window.
MandelbrotPanel is another subclass of JPanel. A MandelbrotPanel is mostly filled with a
MandelbrotDisplay. It also adds a JLabel beneath the display. The JLabel is used as a “status
bar” that shows some information that might be interesting to the user. The MandelbrotPanel
also defines the program’s mouse listener. In addition to handling zooming, the mouse listener
puts the x and y coordinates of the current mouse location in the status bar as the user moves
or drags the mouse. Also, when the mouse exits the drawing area, the text in the status bar is
set to read “Idle”. This is the first time that we have seen an actual use for mouseMoved and
mouseExited events. (See Subsection 6.3.2 and Subsection 6.3.4.)
The menu bar for the program is defined in Menus.java. Commands in the “File” and
“Control” menu are defined as Actions. (See Subsection 13.3.1.) Note that among the actions are
file manipulation commands that use techniques from Subsection 11.2.3, Subsection 11.5.2, and
Subsection 13.1.5. The “MaxIterations,” “Palette,” and “PaletteLength” menus each contain a
group of JRadioButtonMenuItems. (See Subsection 13.3.3.) I have tried several approaches for
handling such groups, and none of them have satisfied me completely. In this program, I have
defined a nested class inside Menus to represent each group. For example, the PaletteManager
class contains the menu items in the “Palette” menu as instance variables. It registers an action
listener with each item, and it defines a few utility routines for operating on the menu. The
classes for the three menus are very similar and should probably have been defined as subclasses
of some more general class. There is an “Examples” menu that contains settings for several
sample views of pieces of the Mandelbrot set.
The MandelbrotPanel that is being used in the program is a parameter to the Menus
constructor. Many of the menu commands operate on this panel or on the MandelbrotDisplay
that it contains. In order to carry out these commands, the Menus object needs a reference to
the MandelbrotPanel. And to allow access to the MandelbrotDisplay, the MandelbrotPanel has a
method getDisplay() that returns a reference to the MandelbrotDisplay that it contains. So
as long as the menu bar has a reference to the panel, it can obtain a reference to the display. In
previous examples, everything was written as one large class file, so all the objects were directly
available to all the code. When a program is made up of multiple interacting files, getting
access to the necessary objects can be more of a problem.
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 747
MandelbrotPanel, MandelbrotDisplay, and Menus are the main classes that make up the
Mandelbrot Viewer program. MandelbrotFrame.java defines a simple subclass of JFrame that
shows a MandelbrotPanel and its menu bar. And Main.java contains the main() routine that
actually runs the program. There are a few other classes that I will discuss below.
This brief discussion of the design of the Mandelbrot Viewer has shown that it uses a wide
variety of techniques that were covered earlier in this book. In the rest of this section, we’ll
look at a few new features of Java that were used in the program.
13.5.3 Internationalization
Internationalization refers to writing a program that is easy to adapt for running in different
parts of the world. Internationalization is often referred to as I18n, where 18 is the number of
letters between the “I” and the final “n” in “Internationalization.” The process of adapting the
program to a particular location is called localization, and the locations are called locales.
Locales differ in many ways, including the type of currency used and the formats used for
numbers and dates, but the most obvious difference is language. Here, I will discuss how to
write a program so that it can be easily translated into other languages.
The key idea is that strings that will be presented to the user should not be coded into
the program source code. If they were, then a translator would have to search through the
entire source code, replacing every string with its translation. Then the program would have
to be recompiled. In a properly internationalized program, all the strings are stored together
in one or more files that are separate from the source code, where they can easily be found and
translated. And since the source code doesn’t have to be modified to do the translation, no
recompilation is necessary.
To implement this idea, the strings are stored in one or more properties files. A properties
file is just a list of key/value pairs. For translation purposes, the values are strings that will be
presented to the user; these are the strings that have to be translated. The keys are also strings,
but they don’t have to be translated because they will never be presented to the user. Since
they won’t have to be modified, the key strings can be used in the program source code. Each
key uniquely identifies one of the value strings. The program can use the key string to look up
the corresponding value string from the properties file. The program only needs to know the
key string; the user will only see the value string. When the properties file is translated, the
user of the program will see different value strings.
The format of a properties file is very simple. The key/value pairs take the form
key.string=value string
There are no spaces in the key string or before the equals sign. Periods are often used to divide
words in the key string. The value string can contain spaces or any other characters. If the line
ends with a backslash (“\”), the value string is continued on the next line; in this case, spaces
at the beginning of that line are ignored. A properties files should use the UTF-8 charset (see
Subsection 11.1.3).
Suppose that the program wants to present a string to the user (as the name of a menu
command, for example). The properties file would contain a key/value pair such as
menu.saveimage=Save PNG Image...
where “Save PNG Image. . . ” is the string that will appear in the menu. The program would
use the key string, “menu.saveimage”, to look up the corresponding value string and would then
use the value string as the text of the menu item. In Java, the look up process is supported
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 748
by the ResourceBundle class, which knows how to retrieve and use properties files. Sometimes
a string that is presented to the user contains substrings that are not known until the time
when the program is running. A typical example is the name of a file. Suppose, for example,
that the program wants to tell the user, “Sorry, the file, hfilenamei, cannot be loaded”, where
hfilenamei is the name of a file that was selected by the user at run time. To handle cases like
this, value strings in properties files can include placeholders that will be replaced by strings
to be determined by the program at run time. The placeholders take the form “{0}”, “{1}”,
“{2}”, . . . . For the file error example, the properties file might contain:
error.cantLoad=Sorry, the file, {0}, cannot be loaded
The program would fetch the value string for the key error.cantLoad. It would then substitute
the actual file name for the placeholder, “{0}”. Note that when the string is translated, the
word order might be completely different. By using a placeholder for the file name, you can be
sure that the file name will be put in the correct grammatical position for the language that is
being used. Placeholder substitution is not handled by the ResourceBundle class, but Java has
another class, MessageFormat, that makes such substitutions easy.
For the Mandelbrot Viewer program, the properties file is strings.properties. (Any properties
file should have a name that ends in “.properties”.) Any string that you see when you run
the program comes from this file. For handling value string lookup, I wrote I18n.java. The I18n
class has a static method
public static tr( String key, Object... args )
that handles the whole process. Here, key is the key string that will be looked up in
strings.properties. Additional parameters, if any, will be substituted for placeholders in
the value string. (Recall that the formal parameter declaration “Object...” means that there
can be any number of actual parameters after key; see Subsection 7.1.2.) Typical uses would
include:
String saveImageCommandText = I18n.tr( "menu.saveimage" );
String errMess = I18n.tr( "error.cantLoad" , selectedFile.getName() );
You will see function calls like this throughout the Mandelbrot Viewer source code. The I18n
class is written in a general way so that it can be used in any program. As long as you provide
a properties file as a resource, the only things you need to do are change the resource file name
in I18n.java and put the class in your own package.
It is actually possible to provide several alternative properties files in the same program.
For example, you might include French and Japanese versions of the properties file along
with an English version. If the English properties file is named strings.properties, then
the names for the French and Japanese versions should be strings fr.properties and
strings ja.properties. Every language has a two-letter code, such as “fr” and “ja”, that is
used in constructing properties file names for that language. The program asks for the properties
file using the simple name “strings”. If the program is being run on a Java system in which
the preferred language is French, the program will try to load “strings fr.properties”; if
that fails, it will look for “strings.properties”. This means that the program will use the
French properties files in a French locale; it will use the Japanese properties file in a Japanese
locale; and in any other locale it will use the default properties file.
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 749
Only about one-third of a second after the size has stopped changing will a new, resized image
be produced. Here is how this works: The display sets up a ComponentListener to listen for
resize events on itself. When a resize occurs, the listener starts a Timer that has a delay of 1/3
second. (See Subsection 6.4.1.) While this timer is running, the paintComponent() method
does not resize the image; instead, it reuses the image that already exists. If the timer fires 1/3
second later, the image will be resized at that time. However, if another resize event occurs
while the first timer is running, then the first timer will be stopped before it has a chance to
fire, and a new timer will be started with a delay of 1/3 second. The result is that the image
does not get resized until 1/3 second after the size of the window stops changing.
The Mandelbrot Viewer program also uses events of type WindowEvent, which are generated
by a window when it opens or closes (among other things). Window events are used by Main.java
to trigger an action that has to be taken when the program is ending; this will be discussed
below.
Perhaps the most interesting use of events in the Mandelbrot Viewer program is to enable
and disable menu commands based on the status of the display. For this, events of type
PropertyChangeEvent are used. This event class is part of a “bean” framework that Java uses
for some advanced work with objects; class PropertyChangeEvent and related classes are defined
in the package java.beans. The idea is that bean objects are defined by their “properties”
(which are just aspects of the state of the bean). When a bean property changes, the bean can
emit a PropertyChangeEvent to notify other objects of the change. Properties for which property
change events are emitted are known technically as bound properties. A bound property has
a name that identifies that particular property among all the properties of the bean. When
a property change event is generated, the event object includes the name of the property that
has changed, the previous value of the property, and the new value of the property.
The MandelbrotDisplay class has a bound property whose name is given by the constant
MandelbrotDisplay.STATUS PROPERTY. A display emits a property change event when its
status changes. The possible values of the status property are given by other constants,
such as MandelbrotDisplay.STATUS READY. The READY status indicates that the display is
not currently running a computation and is ready to do another one. There are several menu
commands that should be enabled only when the status of the display is READY. To implement
this, the Menus class defines a PropertyChangeListener to listen for property change events from
the display. When this listener hears an event, it responds by enabling or disabling menu
commands according to the new value of the status property.
All of Java’s GUI components are beans and are capable of emitting property change events.
In any subclass of Component, this can be done simply by calling the method
public void firePropertyChange(String propertyName,
Object oldValue, Object newValue)
For example, the MandelbrotDisplay class uses the following method for setting its current status:
private void setStatus(String status) {
if (status == this.status) {
// Note: Event should be fired only if status actually changes.
return;
}
String oldStatus = this.status;
this.status = status;
firePropertyChange(STATUS PROPERTY, oldStatus, status);
}
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 751
When writing bean classes from scratch, you have to add support for property change
events, if you need them. To make this easier, the java.beans package provides the
PropertyChangeSupport class.
13.5.6 Preferences
Most serious programs allow the user to set preferences. A preference is really just a piece of
the program’s state that is saved between runs of the program. In order to make preferences
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 752
persistent from one run of the program to the next, the preferences could simply be saved to a
file in the user’s home directory. However, there would then be the problem of locating the file.
There would be the problem of naming the file in a way that avoids conflicts with file names
used by other programs. And there would be the problem of cluttering up the user’s home
directory with files that the user shouldn’t even have to know about.
To deal with these problems, Java has a standard means of handling preferences. It is
defined by the package java.util.prefs. In general, the only thing that you need from this
package is the class named Preferences.
In the Mandelbrot Viewer program, the file Main.java has an example of using Preferences.
Main.java contains the main() routine for the program.
In most programs, the user sets preferences in a custom dialog box. However, the
Mandelbrot program doesn’t have any preferences that are appropriate for that type of
treatment. Instead, as an example, I automatically save a few aspects of the program’s state
as preferences. Every time the program starts up, it reads the preferences, if any are available.
Every time the program terminates, it saves the preferences. (Saving the preferences poses an
interesting problem because the program ends when the MandelbrotFrame window closes, not
when the main() routine ends. In fact, the main() routine ends as soon as the window appears
on the screen. So, it isn’t possible to save the preferences at the end of the main program.
The solution is to use events: A listener listens for WindowEvents from the frame. When a
window-closed event is received, indicating that the program is ending, the listener saves the
preferences.)
Preferences for Java programs are stored in some platform-dependent form in some platform-
dependent location. As a Java programmer, you don’t have to worry about it; the Java
preferences system knows where to store the data. There is still the problem of identifying
the preferences for one program among all the possible Java programs that might be running
on a computer. Java solves this problem in the same way that it solves the package naming
problem. In fact, by convention, the preferences for a program are identified by the package
name of the program, with a slight change in notation. For example, the Mandelbrot Viewer
program is defined in the package edu.hws.eck.mdb, and its preferences are identified by the
string “/edu/hws/eck/mdb”. (The periods have been changed to “/”, and an extra “/” has
been added at the beginning.)
The preferences for a program are stored in something called a “node.” The user preferences
node for a given program identifier can be accessed as follows:
Preferences root = Preferences.userRoot();
Preferences prefnode = root.node(pathName);
where pathname is the string, such as “/edu/hws/eck/mdb”, that identifies the node. The node
itself consists of a simple list of key/value pairs, where both the key and the value are strings.
You can store any strings you want in preferences nodes—they are really just a way of storing
some persistent data between program runs. In general, though, the key string identifies some
particular preference item, and the associated value string is the value of that preference. A
Preferences object, prefnode, contains methods prefnode.get(key) for retrieving the value
string associated with a given key and prefnode.put(key,value) for setting the value string
for a given key.
In Main.java, I use preferences to store the shape and position of the program’s window.
This makes the size and shape of the window persistent between runs of the program; when
you run the program, the window will be right where you left it the last time you ran it. I also
store the name of the directory that is currently selected in the file dialog box that is used by
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 753
the program for the Save and Open commands. This is particularly satisfying, since the default
behavior for a file dialog box is to start in the user’s home directory, which is hardly ever the
place where the user wants to keep a program’s files. With the preferences feature, I can switch
to the right directory the first time I use the program, and from then on I’ll automatically
be back in that directory when I use the program again. You can look at the source code in
Main.java for the details.
∗ ∗ ∗
And that’s it. . . . There’s a lot more that I could say about Java and about programming
in general, but this book is only “An Introduction to Programming Using Java,” and it’s time
for our journey to end. I hope that it has been a pleasant journey for you, and I hope that I
have helped you establish a foundation that you can use as a basis for further exploration.
Exercises 754
1. The sample program PaintWithOffScreenCanvas.java from Section 13.1 is a simple paint (solution)
program. Make two improvements to this program: First, add a “File” menu that lets
the user open an image file and save the current image in either PNG or JPEG format.
Second, add a basic one-level “Undo” command that lets the user undo the most recent
operation that was applied to the image. (Do not try to make a multilevel Undo, which
would allow the user to undo several operations.)
When you read a file into the program, you should copy the image that you read into
the program’s off-screen canvas. Since the canvas in the program has a fixed size, you
should scale the image that you read so that it exactly fills the canvas.
2. For this exercise, you should continue to work on the program from the previous exercise. (solution)
Add a “StrokeWidth” menu that allows the user to draw lines of varying thicknesses. Make
it possible to use different colors for the interior of a filled shape and for the outline of that
shape. To do this, change the “Color” menu to “StrokeColor” and add a “FillColor” menu.
(My solution adds two new tools, “Stroked Filled Rectangle” and “Stroked Filled Oval”,
to represent filled shapes that are outlined with the current stroke.) Add support for filling
shapes with transparent color. A simple approach to this is to use a JCheckboxMenuItem to
select either fully opaque or 50% opaque fill. (Don’t try to apply transparency to stokes—
it’s very difficult to make transparency work correctly for the Curve tool, and in any case,
shape outlines look better if they are opaque.) Finally, make the menus more user friendly
by adding keyboard accelerators to some commands and by using JRadioButtonMenuItems
where appropriate, such as in the color and tool menus. This exercise takes quite a bit of
work to get it all right, so you should tackle the problem in pieces.
3. The StopWatchLabel component from Subsection 13.4.5 displays the text “Timing. . . ” (solution)
when the stop watch is running. It would be nice if it displayed the elapsed time since
the stop watch was started. For that, you need to create a Timer. (See Subsection 6.4.1.)
Add a Timer to the original source code, StopWatchLabel.java, to drive the display of the
elapsed time in seconds. Create the timer in the mousePressed() routine when the stop
watch is started. Stop the timer in the mousePressed() routine when the stop watch
is stopped. The elapsed time won’t be very accurate anyway, so just show the integral
number of seconds. You only need to set the text a few times per second. For my Timer
method, I use a delay of 200 milliseconds for the timer.
4. The custom component example MirrorText.java, from Subsection 13.4.5, uses an off- (solution)
screen canvas to show mirror-reversed text in a JPanel. An alternative approach would
be to draw the text after applying a transform to the graphics context that is used for
drawing. (See Subsection 13.2.5.) With this approach, the custom component can be
defined as a subclass of JLabel in which the paintComponent() method is overridden.
Write a version of the MirrorText component that takes this approach. The solution is
very short, but tricky. Note that the scale transform g2.scale(-1,1) does a left-right
reflection through the left edge of the component.
5. The sample program PhoneDirectoryFileDemo.java from Subsection 11.3.2 keeps data for (solution)
a “phone directory” in a file in the user’s home directory. Exercise 11.5 asked you to
Exercises 755
revise that program to use an XML format for the data. Both programs have a simple
command-line user interface. For this exercise, you should provide a GUI interface for the
phone directory data. You can base your program either on the original sample program
or on the modified XML version from the exercise. Use a JTable to hold the data. The
user should be able to edit all the entries in the table. Also, the user should be able
to add and delete rows. Include either buttons or menu commands that can be used to
perform these actions. The delete command should delete the selected row, if any. New
rows should be added at the end of the table. For this program, you can use a standard
DefaultTableModel.
Your program should load data from the file when it starts and save data to the file
when it ends, just as the two previous programs do. For a GUI program, you can’t simply
save the data at the end of the main() routine, since main() terminates as soon as the
window shows up on the screen. You want to save the data when the user closes the window
and ends the program. There are several approaches. One is to use a WindowListener to
detect the event that occurs when the window closes. Another is to use a “Quit” command
to end the program; when the user quits, you can save the data and close the window (by
calling its dispose() method), and end the program. If you use the “Quit” command
approach, you don’t want the user to be able to end the program simply by closing the
window. To accomplish this, you should call
frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.DO NOTHING ON CLOSE);
where frame refers to the JFrame that you have created for the program’s user interface.
When using a WindowListener, you want the close box on the window to close the window,
not end the program. For this, you need
frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.DISPOSE ON CLOSE);
When the listener is notified of a window closed event, it can save the data and end the
program.
Most of the JTable and DefaultTableModel methods that you need for this exercise are
discussed in Subsection 13.4.3, but there are a few more that you need to know about. To
determine which row is selected in a JTable, call table.getSelectedRow(). This method
returns the row number of the selected row, or returns -1 if no row is selected. To specify
which cell is currently being edited, you can use:
table.setRowSelectionInterval(rowNum, rowNum); // Selects row number rowNum.
table.editCellAt( rowNum, colNum ); // Edit cell at position (rowNum,colNum).
phoneTable.getEditorComponent().requestFocus(); // Put input cursor in cell.
One particularly troublesome point is that the data that is in the cell that is currently
being edited is not in the table model. The value in the edit cell is not put into the table
model until after the editing is finished. This means that even though the user sees the
data in the cell, it’s not really part of the table data yet. If you lose that data, the user
would be justified in complaining. To make sure that you get the right data when you
save the data at the end of the program, you have to turn off editing before retrieving the
data from the model. This can be done with the following method:
private void stopEditing() {
if (table.getCellEditor() != null)
table.getCellEditor().stopCellEditing();
}
Exercises 756
This method must also be called before modifying the table by adding or deleting rows; if
such modifications are made while editing is in progress, the effect can be very strange.
Quiz 757
Quiz on Chapter 13
(answers)
1. Describe the object that is created by the following statement, and give an example of
how it might be used in a program:
BufferedImage OSC = new BufferedImage(32,32,BufferedImage.TYPE INT RGB);
2. Many programs depend on resource files. What is meant by a resource in this sense? Give
an example.
5. What is antialiasing?
7. What does the acronym MVC stand for, and how does it apply to the JTable class?
10. Suppose that the class that you are writing has an instance method doOpen() (with no
parameters) that is meant to be used to open a file selected by the user. Write a code
segment that creates an Action that represents the action of opening a file. Then show
how to create a button and a menu item from that action.
Appendix: Source Files
This appendix contains a list of the examples appearing in the free, on-line textbook
Introduction to Programming Using Java, Version 9, Swing Edition.
The web site for the book, https://math.hws.edu/javanotes-swing, has links for downloading
the entire web site. If you do that, you will find the source code files in a directory named source.
There is also a link for downloading just the source code files. The README file from the
download includes some instructions for compiling and running the programs. Note however
that some of these examples depend on other source files, such as TextIO.java, that are not
built into Java. These are classes that I have written. All necessary files are included in the
downloads, and links to the individual files are provided below.
The solutions to end-of-chapter exercises are not listed in this appendix. Each end-of-
chapter exercise has its own Web page, which discusses its solution. The source code of a
sample solution of each exercise is given on the solution page for that exercise. If you want to
compile the solution, you should be able to copy-and-paste the solution out of a Web browser
window and into a text editing program. (You can’t copy-and-paste from the HTML source
of the solution page, since it contains extra HTML markup commands that the Java compiler
won’t understand; the HTML markup does not appear when the page is displayed in a Web
browser.) Exercise solutions are also available as a download from the front page of the web
site. The README file from the download has more information.
759
Source Code Listing 760
• HighLow.java, from Section 5.4, a simple card game. It uses the classes Card.java and
Deck.java, which are given as examples of object-oriented programming. Also available,
the card-related classes Hand.java and, from Subsection 5.5.1, BlackjackHand.java.
• ReverseWithDynamicArray.java, from Section 7.2, reads numbers from the user then
prints them out in reverse order. It does this using the class DynamicArrayOfInt.java
as an example of using dynamic arrays. ReverseWithArrayList.java, from Section 7.3, is
functionally identical, but it uses an ArrayList<Integer> instead of a DynamicArrayOfInt.
• SymmetricMatrix.java, from Section 7.6, implements a symmetric 2D array of double.
The program TestSymmetricMatrix.java tests the SymmetricMatrix class.
• LengthConverter2.java, from Section 8.2, converts measurements input by the user to
inches, feet, yards, and miles. This improvement on LengthConverter.java allows inputs
combining several measurements, such as “3 feet 7 inches,” and it detects illegal inputs.
• TryStatementDemo.java, from Section 8.3, a small demo program with a try..catch
statement that includes autoclosing of a resource.
• LengthConverter3.java, from Section 8.3, is a revision of LengthConverter2.java that uses
exceptions to handle errors in the user’s input.
• TowersOfHanoi.java, from Section 9.1, prints out the steps in a solution to the Towers of
Hanoi problem; an example of recursion.
• StringList.java, from Section 9.2, implements a linked list of strings. The program
ListDemo.java tests this class.
• PostfixEval.java, from Section 9.3, evaluates postfix expressions using a stack. Depends
on the StackOfDouble class defined in StackOfDouble.java.
• SortTreeDemo.java, from Section 9.4, demonstrates a binary sort tree of strings.
• SimpleParser1.java, SimpleParser2.java, and SimpleParser3.java, from Section 9.5, are
three programs that parse and evaluate arithmetic expressions input by the user.
SimpleParser1 only handles fully parenthesized expressions. SimpleParser2 evaluates
ordinary expressions where some parentheses can be omitted. SimpleParser3 constructs
expression trees to represent input expressions and uses the expression trees to evaluate
the expressions.
• WordListWithTreeSet.java, from Section 10.2, makes an alphabetical list of words from a
file. A TreeSet is used to eliminate duplicates and sort the words.
• WordListWithPriorityQueue.java, from Section 10.2, makes an alphabetical list of words
from a file. This is a small modification of the previous example that uses a PriorityQueue
instead of a TreeSet. The result is an alphabetical list of words in which duplicates are
not removed.
• SimpleInterpreter.java, from Section 10.4, demonstrates the use of a HashMap as a symbol
table in a program that interprets simple commands from the user.
• WordCount.java, from Section 10.4, counts the number of occurrences of each word in a
file. The program uses several features from the Java Collection Framework.
• RiemannSumStreamExperiment.java, from Section 10.6, demos Java’s stream API. Runs
an experiment to measure the compute time for a problem when it is solved using a for
loop, using a sequential stream, and using a parallel stream.
• ReverseFileWithScanner.java, from Section 11.2, shows how to read and write files in a
simple command-line application. ReverseFileWithResources.java is a version that uses
the “resource” pattern in try..catch statements.
Source Code Listing 762
• DirectoryList.java, from Section 11.2, lists the contents of a directory specified by the user;
demonstrates the use of the File class.
• CopyFile.java, from Section 11.3, is a program that makes a copy of a file, using file names
that are given as command-line arguments. CopyFileAsResources.java is a version of the
program that also demonstrates uses the “resource” pattern in a try..catch statement.
• PhoneDirectoryFileDemo.java, from Section 11.3, demonstrates the use of a file for storing
data between runs of a program.
• FetchURL.java, from Section 11.4, reads and displays the contents of a specified URL, if
the URL refers to a text file.
• ShowMyNetwork.java, mentioned in Section 11.4, is a short program that prints informa-
tion about each network interface on the computer where it is run, including IP addresses
associated with each interface.
• DateClient.java and DateServer.java, from Section 11.4, are very simple first examples of
network client and server programs.
• CLChatClient.java and CLChatServer.java, from Section 11.4, demonstrate two-way
communication over a network by letting users send messages back and forth; however,
no threading is used and the messages must strictly alternate.
• ThreadTest1.java, from section Section 12.1, runs one or more threads that all perform the
same task, to demonstrate that they run simultaneously and finish in an indeterminate
order.
• ThreadTest2.java, from section Section 12.1, divides up a task (counting primes) among
several threads, to demonstrate parallel processing and the use of synchronization.
ThreadTest3.java, from the same section, is a minor modification of ThreadTest2.java
that uses an AtomicInteger instead of synchronization to safely add up values from several
threads.
• DateServerWithThreads.java and DateServerWithThreadPool.java, from Section 12.4, are
modifications of chapter11/DateServer.java (Subsection 11.4.4) that use threads to handle
communication with clients. The first program creates a new thread for each connection.
The second uses a thread pool, and it uses a blocking queue to send connections from the
main program to the pool. The threaded servers will work with original client program,
chapter11/DateClient.java.
• CLMandelbrotMaster.java, CLMandelbrotWorker.java, and CLMandelbrotTask.java,
from Section 12.4, are a demonstration of distributed computing in which pieces of a
large computation are sent over a network to be computed by “worker” programs.
• BorderDemo.java and
• BorderDemo.java, from Section 6.6, a very simple program that demonstrates six types of
border.
• SliderAndButtonDemo.java, from Section 6.6, shows how to create several components
and lay them out in a GridLayout.
• SimpleCalc.java, from Section 6.6, lets the user add, subtract, multiply, or divide two
numbers input by the user. A demo of text fields, buttons, and layout with nested
subpanels.
• NullLayoutDemo.java, from Section 6.6, shows how to lay out the components in a
container for which the layout manager has been set to null. BashfulButton.java is
another, cute, example that uses a null layout.
• HighLowGUI.java, from Section 6.6, implements a GUI version of the card game
HighLow.java, in which the user sees a playing card and guesses whether the next card
will be higher or lower in value. This program depends on Card.java, Hand.java, and
Deck.java.
• MosaicDraw.java, from Section 6.7, demonstrates menus and a color chooser dialog. This
is used in a program where the user colors the squares of a mosaic by clicking-and-
dragging the mouse. It uses MosaicCanvas.java to define the mosaic panel itself, and
it uses MosaicDrawController.java to create the panel and menu bar and to handle events.
• SimpleDialogDemo.java, from Section 6.7, is a small program that demonstrates JColor-
Chooser and some dialogs from JOptionPane.
• RandomStringsWithArray.java, from Section 7.2, shows multiple copies of a message in
random colors, sizes, and positions. There is an animation in which the copies move
around in the window. This is an improved version of RandomStrings.java that uses an
array to keep track of the data.
• SimplePaint2.java, from Section 7.3, lets the user draw colored curves and stores the data
needed for repainting the drawing surface in a list of type ArrayList<CurveData>.
• Complex.java and FullName.java are examples of record classes, from Section 7.4.
RecordDemo.java is a simple program that tests the two record classes.
• Life.java, from Section 7.6, implements John H. Conway’s game of life and is an example
of using 2D arrays. This program depends on MosaicCanvas.java.
• Checkers.java, from Section 7.6, lets two users play a game of checkers against each other.
Illustrates the use of a two-dimensional array and a variety of programming techniques.
(This is the longest program in the book so far, at over 700 lines!)
• Maze.java and LittlePentominos.java are demo programs mentioned in Section 9.1 as
examples of recursion. They use techniques that have not covered until Chapter 12. Note
that LittlePentominos depends on MosaicCanvas.java.
• Blobs.java, from Section 9.1, uses recursion to count groups of colored squares in a grid.
• DepthBreadth.java, from Section 9.3, demonstrates stacks and queues.
• TrivialEdit.java, from Section 11.3, lets the user edit short text files. This program
demonstrates reading and writing files and using file dialogs.
• SimplePaintWithFiles.java, from Section 11.3, demonstrates saving data from a program
to a file in both binary and character form. The program is a simple sketching program
based on SimplePaint2.java.
Source Code Listing 765
769
Glossary 770
ALU. Arithmetic Logic Unit. The ALU is the part of the CPU that performs arithmetic
operations such as addition and subtraction and logical operations such as AND and
OR.
API. Application Programming Interface. A specification of the interface to a software package
or “toolbox.” The API says what classes or subroutines are provided in the toolbox and
how to use them.
applet. A type of Java program that is meant to run on a Web page in a Web browser, as
opposed to a stand-alone application.
animation. An apparently moving picture created by rapidly showing a sequence of still
images, called frames, one after the other. In Java, animations are often driven by Timer
objects; a new frame of the animation is shown each time the timer fires.
antialiasing. Adjusting the color of pixels to reduce the “jagged” effect that can occur when
shapes and text are represented by pixels. For antialiased drawing, when the shape covers
only part of a pixel, the color of the shape is blended with the previous color of the pixel.
The degree of blending depends on how much of the pixel is covered.
array. A list of items, sequentially numbered. Each item in the list can be identified by its
index, that is, its sequence number. In Java, all the items in array must have the same
type, called the base type of the array. An array is a random access data structure; that
is, you can get directly at any item in the array at any time.
array type. A data type whose possible values are arrays. If Type is the name of a type, then
Type[ ] is the array type for arrays that have base type Type.
assignment statement. A statement in a computer program that retrieves or computes a
value and stores that value in a variable. An assignment statement in Java has the form:
hvariable-namei = hexpressioni;
asynchronous event. An event that can occur at an unpredictable time, outside the control
of a computer program. User input events, such as pressing a button on the mouse, are
asynchronous.
ASCII. American Standard Code for Information Interchange. A way of encoding characters
using 7 bits for characters. ASCII code only supports 128 characters, with no
accented letters, non-English alphabets, special symbols, or ideograms for non-alphabetic
languages such as Chinese. Java uses the much larger and more complete Unicode code
for characters.
base case. In a recursive algorithm, a simple case that is handled directly rather than by
applying the algorithm recursively.
binary number. A number encoded as a sequence of zeros and ones. A binary number is
represented in the “base 2” in the same way that ordinary numbers are represented in
the “base 10.”
binary tree. A linked data structure that is either empty or consists of a root node that
contains pointers to two smaller (possibly empty) binary trees. The two smaller binary
trees are called the left subtree and the right subtree.
bit. A single-digit binary number, which can be either 0 or 1.
black box. A system or component of a system that can be used without understanding what
goes on inside the box. A black box has an interface and an implementation. A black
box that is meant to be used as a component in a system is called a module.
Glossary 771
compiler. A computer program that translates programs written in some computer language
(generally a high-level language) into programs written in machine language.
component. General term for a visual element of a GUI, such as a window, button, or menu.
constructor. A special kind of subroutine in a class whose purpose is to construct objects
belonging to that class. A constructor is called using the new operator, and is not
considered to be a “method.”
container. A component, such as a BorderPane, that can contain other GUI components.
contract of a method. The semantic component of the method’s interface. The contract
specifies the responsibilities of the method and of the caller of the method. It says how
to use the method correctly and specifies the task that the method will perform when
it is used correctly. The contract of a method should be fully specified by its Javadoc
comment.
control structure. A program structure such as an if statement or a while loop that affects
the flow of control in a program (that is, the order in which the instructions in the
program are executed).
CPU. Central Processing Unit. The CPU is the part of the computer that actually performs
calculations and carries out programs.
CSS. Cascading Style Sheets, a language that can be used to control the visual appearance of
components in JavaFX or of elements on a web page.
data structure. An organized collection of data, that can be treated as a unit in a program.
deadlock. A situation in which several threads hang indefinitely, for example because each of
them is waiting for some resource that is locked by one of the other threads.
default method. A method in a Java interface that has an implementation. The default
implementation is used in any class that implements the interface but does not override
the method. Default methods are marked with the reserved word default. Not supported
in Java 7 and earlier.
default package. The unnamed package. A class that does not declare itself to be in a named
package is considered to be in the default package.
definite assignment. Occurs at a particular point in a program if it is definitely true that
a given variable must have been assigned a value before that point in the program. It
is only legal to use the value of a local variable if that variable has “definitely” been
assigned a value before it is used. For this to be true, the compiler must be able to verify
that every path through the program from the declaration of the variable to its use must
pass through a statement that assigns a value to that variable.
deprecated. Considered to be obsolete, but still available for backwards compatibility. A
deprecated Java class or method is still part of the Java language, but it is not advisable
to use it in new code. Deprecated items might be removed in future versions of Java.
dialog box. A window that is dependent on another window, called its parent owner. Dialog
boxes are usually popped up to get information from the user or to display a message to
the user.
distributed computing. A kind of parallel processing in which several computers, connected
by a network, work together to solve a problem.
dummy parameter. Identifier that is used in a subroutine definition to stand for the value of
an actual parameter that will be passed to the subroutine when the subroutine is called.
Glossary 773
Dummy parameters are also called “formal parameters” (or sometimes just “parameters,”
when the term “argument” is used instead of actual parameter).
enum. Enumerated type. A type that is defined by listing every possible value of that type.
An enum type in Java is a class, and the possible values of the type are objects.
event. In GUI programming, something that happens outside the control of the program, such
as a mouse click, and that the program must respond to when it occurs.
exception. An error or exceptional condition that is outside the normal flow of control of a
program. In Java, an exception can be represented by an object of type Throwable that
can be caught and handled in a try..catch statement.
factory method. A method, usually a static function, that returns an object. Factory methods
are an alternative to constructors.
fetch-and-execute cycle. The process by which the CPU executes machine language
programs. It fetches (that is, reads) an instruction from memory and carries out (that
is, executes) the instruction, and it repeats this over and over in a continuous cycle.
fill. A drawing operation that applies a color (or other type of fill) to each of the pixels inside
a shape.
flag. A boolean value that is set to true to indicate that some condition or event is true. A
single bit in a binary number can also be used as a flag.
formal parameter. Another term for “dummy parameter.”
frame. One of the images that make up an animation. Also used as another name for activation
record.
function. A subroutine that returns a value.
functional interface. A Java interface that defines only a single subroutine (where the term
“interface” here means an interface that defines a Java type.)
garbage collection. The automatic process of reclaiming memory that is occupied by objects
that can no longer be accessed.
generic programming. Writing code that will work with various types of data, rather than
with just a single type of data. The Java Collection Framework, and classes that use
similar techniques, are examples of generic programming in Java.
getter. An instance method in a class that is used to read the value of some property of that
class. Usually the property is just the value of some instance variable. By convention, a
getter is named getXyz() where xyz is the name of the property.
global variable. Another name for member variable, emphasizing the fact that a member
variable in a class exists outside the methods of that class.
graphics context. The data and methods necessary for drawing to some particular
destination. A graphics context in Swing is an object belonging to the Graphics class.
GUI. Graphical User Interface. The modern way of interacting with a computer, in which the
computer displays interface components such as buttons and menus on a screen and the
user interacts with them—for example by clicking on them with a mouse.
hash table. A data structure optimized for efficient search, insertion, and deletion of objects.
A hash table consists of an array of locations, and the location in which an object is stored
is determined by that object’s “hash code,” an integer that can be efficiently computed
from the contents of the object.
Glossary 774
heap. The section of the computer’s memory in which objects are stored.
high level language. A programming language, such as Java, that is convenient for human
programmers but that has to be translated into machine language before it can be
executed.
HSB. A color system in which colors are specified by three numbers (in Java, real numbers in
the range 0.0 to 1.0) giving the hue, saturation, and brightness.
IDE. Integrated Development Environment. A programming environment with a graphical
user interface that integrates tools for creating, compiling, and executing programs.
identifier. A sequence of characters that can be used as a name in a program. Identifiers are
used as names of variables, methods, and classes.
index. The position number of one item in an array.
implementation. The inside of a black box, such as the code that defines a subroutine.
immutable object. An immutable object cannot be modified after it is constructed, because
all of its instance variables are final. (In my use of the term, an immutable object can
contain pointers to other objects that are not immutable.)
infinite loop. A loop that never ends, because its continuation condition always evaluates to
true.
inheritence. The fact that one class can extend another. It then inherits the data and behavior
of the class that it extends.
instance of a class. An object that belongs to that class (or a subclass of that class). An
object belongs to a class in this sense when the class is used as a template for the object
when the object is created by a constructor defined in that class.
instance method. A non-static method in a class and hence a method in any object that is
an instance of that class.
instance variable. A non-static variable in a class and hence a variable in any object that is
an instance of that class.
interface. As a general term, how to use a black box such as a subroutine. Knowing the
interface tells you nothing about what goes on inside the box. “Interface” is also a
reserved word in Java; in this sense, an interface is a type that specifies one or more
abstract methods. An object that implements the interface must provide definitions
for those methods.
interpreter. A computer program that executes program written in some computer language
by reading instructions from the program, one-by-one, and carrying each one out (by
translating it into equivalent machine language instructions).
I/O. Input/Output, the way a computer program communicates with the rest of the world,
such as by displaying data to the user, getting information from the user, reading and
writing files, and sending and receiving data over a network.
I/O stream. An abstraction representing a source of input data or a destination for output
data. Java has four basic IO stream classes representing input and output of character
and binary data. These classes form the foundation for Java’s input/output API.
iterator. An object associated with a collection, such a list or a set, that can be used to
traverse that collection. The iterator will visit each member of the collection in turn.
Java Collection Framework (JCF). A set of standard classes that implement generic data
structures, including ArrayList and TreeSet, for example.
Glossary 775
JavaFX. A toolkit for GUI applications, which was introduced as a more modern alternative
to the Swing GUI toolkit. JavaFX is not a standard part of Java and is not covered in
this textbook.
JDK. Java Development Kit. Basic software that supports both compiling and running Java
programs. A JDK includes a command-line programming environment as well as a JRE.
You need a JDK if you want to compile Java source code, as well as executing pre-
compiled programs.
JRE. Java Runtime Environment. Basic software that supports running standard Java
programs that have already been compiled. A JRE includes a Java Virtual Machine
and all the standard Java classes.
just-in-time compiler. A kind of combination interpreter/compiler that compiles parts of a
program as it interprets them. This allows subsequent executions of the same parts of
the program to be executed more quickly than they were the first time. This can result
is greatly increased speed of execution. Modern JVMs use a just-in-time compiler.
JVM. Java Virtual Machine. The imaginary computer whose machine language is Java
bytecode. Also used to refer to computer programs that act as interpreters for programs
written in bytecode; to run Java programs on your computer, you need a JVM.
lambda expression. A notation that defines an anonymous method. More precisely, a lambda
expression is a kind of literal that represents a value whose type is given by a functional
interface.
linked data structure. A collection of data consisting of a number of objects that are linked
together by pointers which are stored in instance variables of the objects. Examples
include linked lists and binary trees.
linked list. A linked data structure in which nodes are linked together by pointers into a linear
chain.
listener. In GUI programming, an object that can be registered to be notified when events of
some given type occur. The object is said to “listen” for the events.
literal. A sequence of characters that is typed in a program to represent a constant value. For
example, ’A’ is a literal that represents the constant char value, A, when it appears in
a Java program.
location (in memory). The computer’s memory is made up of a sequence of locations. These
locations are sequentially numbered, and the number that identifies a particular location
is called the address of that location.
local class. A class that is defined inside a method definition. Local classes are often
anonymous, but that is not required.
local variable. A variable declared within a method, for use only inside that method. A
variable declared inside a block is valid from the point where it is declared until the end
of block in which the declaration occurs.
loop. A control structure that allows a sequence of instructions to be executed repeatedly.
Java has three kinds of loops: for loops, while loops, and do loops
loop control variable. A variable in a for loop whose value is modified as the loop is executed
and is checked to determine whether or not to end the loop.
loop invariant. A statement such that, if the statement is true before a loop executes, then
it will remain true after each execution of the loop, and therefore will still be true after
the loop ends. Loop invariants can be a tool for proving correctness of loops.
Glossary 776
polymorphism. The fact that the meaning of a call to an instance method can depend on
the actual type of the object that is used to make the call at run time. That is, if
var is a variable of object type, then the method that is called by a statement such as
var.action() depends on the type of the object to which var refers when the statement
is executed at run time, not on the type of variable var.
pointer. A value that represents an address in the computer’s memory, and hence can be
thought of as “pointing” to the location that has that address. A variable in Java can
never hold an object; it can only hold a pointer to the location where the object is stored.
A pointer is also called a “reference.”
pragmatics. Rules of thumb that describe what it means to write a good program. For
example, style rules and guidelines about how to structure a program are part of the
pragmatics of a programming language.
precedence. The precedence of operators determines the order in which they are applied,
when several operators occur in an expression, in the absence of parentheses.
precondition. A condition that must be true at some point in the execution of a program,
in order for the program to proceed correctly from that point. A precondition of a
subroutine is something that must be true when the subroutine is called, in order for the
subroutine to function properly. Subroutine preconditions are often restrictions on the
values of the actual parameters that can be passed into the subroutine.
predicate. A function that outputs a boolean value. Predicates in Java can be represented
by the parameterized functional interface Predicate<T>.
priority queue. A data structure representing a collection of items where each item has a
“priority.” A priority queue has operations add and remove. Items can be added in any
order, but the remove operation always removes an item of minimal priority. (Some
version of priority queue use maximum instead of minimum priority.)
postcondition. A condition that is known to be true at some point in the execution of a
program, as a result of the computation that has come before that point. A postcondition
of a subroutine is something that must be true after the subroutine finishes its execution.
A postcondition of a function often describe the return value of the function.
primitive type. One of the eight basic built-in data types in Java, double, float, long, int,
short, byte, boolean, and char. A variable of primitive type holds an actual value, as
opposed to a pointer to that value.
priority of a thread. An integer associated with a thread that can affect the order in which
threads are executed. A thread with greater priority is executed in preference to a thread
with lower priority.
producer/consumer. A classic pattern in parallel programming in which one or more
producers produce items that are consumed by one or more consumers, and the producers
and consumers are meant to run in parallel. The problem is to get items safely and
efficiently from the producers to the consumers. In Java, the producer/consumer pattern
is implemented by blocking queues.
program. A set of instructions to be carried out by a computer, written in an appropriate
programming language. Used as a verb, it means to create such a set of instructions.
programming language. A language that can be used to write programs for a computer.
Programming languages range in complexity from machine language to high-level
languages such as Java.
Glossary 779
sentinel value. A special value that marks the end of a sequence of data values, to indicate
the end of the data.
setter. An instance method in a class that is used to set the value of some property of that
class. Usually the property is just the value of some instance variable. By convention, a
setter is named setXyz() where xyz is the name of the property.
signature of a method. The name of the method, the number of formal parameters in its
definition, and the type of each formal parameter. Method signatures are the information
needed by a compiler to tell which method is being called by a given subroutine call
statement.
socket. An abstraction representing one end of a connection between two computers on a
network. A socket represents a logical connection between computer programs, not a
physical connection between computers.
stack. A data structure consisting of a list of items where items can only be added and removed
at one end of the list, which is known as the “top” of the stack. Adding an item to a
stack is called “pushing,” and removing an item is called “popping.” The term stack also
refers to the stack of activation records that is used to implement subroutine calls.
standard input. The standard source from which a program reads input data. It is represented
by the object System.in. Usually, standard input comes from text typed by the user, but
standard input can be “redirected” to read from another source, such as a file, instead.
standard output. The standard destination to which a program writes output text. It is
represented by the object System.out. Usually, standard output is displayed to the user,
but standard output can be “redirected” to write to another destination, such as a file,
instead. There is also an object System.err that is meant for writing error messages.
state machine. A model of computation where an abstract “machine” can be in any of some
finite set of different states. The behavior of the machine depends on its state, and the
state can change in response to inputs or events. The basic logical structure of a GUI
program can often be represented as a state machine.
step-wise refinement. A technique for developing an algorithm by starting with a general
outline of the procedure, often expressed in pseudocode, and then gradually filling in the
details.
stream. In Java 8, an abstraction representing a stream of values that can be processed. A
stream can be created from a Collection, an array, or some other data source. Java’s
stream API includes many predefined operations that can be applied to streams. The
term “stream” also refers to I/O streams, which are used for input and output.
stroke. A drawing operation that applies a color (or other type of paint) to pixels along the
boundary of a shape.
source code. Text written in a high-level programming language, which must be translated
into a machine language such as Java bytecode before it can be executed by a computer.
subclass. A class that extends another class, directly or indirectly, and therefore inherits its
data and behaviors. The first class is said to be a subclass of the second.
subroutine. A sequence of program instructions that have been grouped together and given a
name. The name can then be used to “call” the subroutine. Subroutines are also called
methods in the context of object-oriented programming.
Glossary 781