Course pages 2014–15
Further Java
Lecturers: Dr A.R. Beresford and Dr A.C. Rice
No. of practical classes: 5 x 2-hour sessions
Prerequisite course: Programming in Java, Further Java Briefing
Companion courses: Concurrent and Distributed Systems
This course is a prerequisite for the Group Project.
Aims
The goal of this course is to provide students with the ability to understand the advanced programming features available in the Java programming language, completing the coverage of the language started in the Programming in Java course. The course is designed to accommodate students with diverse programming backgrounds; consequently Java is taught from first principles in a practical class setting where students can work at their own pace from a course handbook. Each practical class will culminate in an assessed exercise.
Practical classes
- Communication and client applications.
This class will introduce the Eclipse development environment.
Students will write a simple client to send and receive data to a
server via TCP.
- Serialisation, reflection and class loaders.
This class will introduce object serialisation. Students will
use a class loader and reflection to inspect an object which
is only available at run-time.
- Concurrency and synchronisation.
This class introduces the concurrency and synchronisation primitives
found in Java. Students will implement a thread-safe
first-in-first-out queue and learn about Java generics.
- Server applications.
Students implement a server in Java which is capable of communicating
concurrently with mulitple clients.
- Databases.
This week students will use Java annotations and a relational database
to build a persistent store.
Objectives
At the end of the course students should
- understand different mechanisms for communication between
distributed applications and be able to evaluate their trade-offs;
- be able to use Java generics and annotations to improve software
usability, readability and safety;
- understand and be able to exploit the Java class-loading mechansim;
- understand and be able to use concurrency control correctly;
- understand the concept of transactions and their application in a
range of systems.
Recommended reading
* Goetz, B. (2006). Java concurrency in practice. Addison-Wesley.
Gosling, J., Joy, B., Steele, G., Bracha, G. & Buckley, A. (2014). The Java language specification, Java SE 8 Edition. Addison-Wesley.
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se8/html/