How about we pay the congress to waist a bunch of time passing new tax laws that can’t effect these bonuses that everyone is all wound up about. You see, you can’t pass laws to punish people for things they have already done. It’s called an ex post facto law and it is in violation of article 1, section 9 of the Constitution. So the law will stimulate the economy some by generating more income for lawyers.

In truth, I think congress has the right idea. In reality, they are doing nothing and that is pretty much what should be done. They should just try to do it a little more efficiently. Maybe they could go boating. In the end though, AIG received permission to pay bonuses out of the bailout money from the same congress that now wants to get the money back. They should get the bonuses.

These guys must be awesome at their jobs. The board of AIG is willing to pay millions of dollars to keep them at AIG. I suspect they are so good, they could deal with AIGs problems without any bailout money. Congress should just let them keep the money, banish any ideas of future aid to AIG from their collective congressional mind, and let natrual selection take it’s course.

Also, in your preparation for the test Monday, make certain you can create a project in NetBeans. You have been warned.

• Primitive types
• Conditionals
• Loops
• Strings
• Arrays
• Methods
  • Overloading vs overriding
  • Call by value parameters
• Classes
  • extends vs implements
  • Rules about classes in files
  • this
  • Things you might want to override from the Object class
  • abstract classes
  • interfaces
  • Visibility
    • public
    • private
    • protected
    • (nothing)

Generics

• How they are used with collection classes.

Collections

• Types of collections
• When to use what
• Iterators

Files

• Character oriented I/O
• Byte oriented I/O
• Layering operations

Exceptions

• Types of exceptions
  • Checked exceptions
  • Errors
  • Runtime exceptions
• Sections of a try block
  • try
  • catch
  • finally

1) Create a General Java Application NetBeans project.

2) Use System.getProperty to find the “user directory” for the system you are on.

3) Cut and paste this text into a file called lab.txt in that directory.

4) In your project, write a program that copies that file to the user home directory.

5) Create a class called YearlyRate.

6) Give the class two fields; a year field that is an integer and a rate field that is a float.

7) Wrap both of these in getters and setters using the IDE’s refactoring.

8 ) Create a constructor that takes an integer and a float that assigns values to the two fields.

9) In your main function, create three instances of the YearlyRate with whatever values for year and rate that you like and stick them in a linked list.

10) Use a DataOutputStream to save the count of items in the List plus the binary values for the fields of all the items in the list out to a file.

11) Close the file

12) Use a DataInputStream to find out how many items were written out by reading the first integer out of the file.

13) Read the fields back in from the file, create instances of YearlyRate, and put them in a LinkedList.

14) Print the contents of the linked list back out to the standard out.

Here are some Java IDEs you can you to develop Java programs:

• Free IDEs
  • Netbeans: This is the one we will be using the most in class.
  • Eclipse: Very popular
  • JDeveloper: From Oracle. Some emphasis on database development
  • BlueJ: A simple IDE build around UML
  • DrJava: Another simple environment that lets you run code as you type it.
• Commercial tools
  • JBuilder: From the company formerly known as Borland (now CodeGear)
  • IntellijIDEA Popular commercial IDE

I use a different cross-platform development tool (lets call it DEVtoolx) for my day job. There is a story that one of the people who work for that company (and I am being purposefully vague about what it is right now) asked James Gosling, “Show me a large commercial application written in Java.” Mr. Gosling couldn’t respond. DEVtoolx has several, probably the largest being us.

If anyone does know of commercial desktop apps (not development tools please) that are written in Java, please tell me about them in comments here.