Getting Started

1.  If you do not already have an account on the departmental network, then Mr. Miao Ye, our network technician, has created a logon id and password for you as follows:   logon id:  first initial + first 6 letters of your last name.  (So Alanis Morissette would be amoriss, and Fiona Apple would be fapple, since apple has only 5 characters.  However, Jack Smith may be jsmith99, since perhaps many J. Smith's attend Loyola.  If your name requires a numerical suffix, then Miao has posted this information on the lab bulletin board.)  Your initial password is nabcdef where "abcdef" are the last six characters in your PID, which appears on your schedule.  (Thus if your PID were P000456789, then your initial password is n456789.)  When you first logon, you will be asked to change your password.  Choose a password which you will easily remember. (The password is case-sensitive, so, for example, "Lassie" is different from "laSSie")   If your account does not exist today, you may logon as "Guest", with empty password.

2.  Logon to Windows NT and briefly navigate Windows files and menus.  The drives (E:, F:, and H:) on the machine named "Turing" should be automatically mapped, so you need not worry about this.  Your directory will reside in Turing (H:)  /home/students/.   Create a subdirectory (folder) called myJavaProjects.   Ask your TA (Kevin Sindelar, Yevgeniya Shteynberg) for help if you need it!

3. Launch Symantec Visual Café 3.0:   From the Start menu select Programs, then Programming tools, and then VCafe3.0.

4.  Start a new project:  The first time that you start VCafe, a default project is already started.  We would like to create our own New Project.  So, close the default new project (by clicking on the X in the blue project pane title bar).  There are several steps necessary to create a new project.  Each is important.

• Create a subdirectory, helloWorld, of myJavaProjects. In general, each new project should be saved in a separate directory.
• In the File menu select New Project.   Select an Empty Project.  A project window opens with a name starting with Untitled.  Change this name to HelloWorld as follows:
• In the File menu, choose Save As.  In the pop-up window, navigate to your helloWorld folder and save as HelloWorld after the "File Name:".  The extension (i.e., suffix) ".vep" is added automatically.  After a brief wait, the project name will change.
• We must be aware of the following "naming convention."    The project name, main source file name, and class with the main method have the same name with the first character capitalized.   In our example, the directory name is helloWorld, but the project, main source file and class are each named HelloWorld.  If the three names (project, main source file, class with main method) are not the same, you will usually get an error message (except in special cases).
• In the file menu, choose New File if you want to start with a blank file or Open if you want to modify an existing file.  Particularly in the latter case, do not omit the next step:
• In the file menu choose Save As, and enter the class name (HelloWorld). This time the extension ".java" is added automatically. At this point, the file will be added to the project if the Add to project box in the lower left-hand corner of the SAVE AS window is checked.
• In case the file was not added to the project in the previous step, you can add the file to the project as follows:  In the Project menu, choose Add <HelloWorld.java>.  Now the project "knows" that your file is in it.  Merely having the file open at the same time the project is open is not enough.  If you forget to add the project, then you cannot compile your program.
• Now you may start to edit.  Remember that the class name should match the file name and project.

          class HelloWorld{
                //This is my very first Java program!
                //Author:  Jacob Dylan
                //Date:  May 24, 1999
               public static void main (String[] args){
                    System.out.println("Bonjour");     // Here we print Bonjour.
                    System.out.println("Press enter to terminate program");
                    String junk = SavitchIn.readLine();
                }
                         }

• If there is a message pane on the screen, you do not need it while editing.  You can close it by clicking on its close button, an X.  This provides more space to see your program.
• Basic word processing editing keys and mouse clicks work.  Unlike a word processor, however, the lines do not wrap around if they get long.  You need to press "enter" to break long lines where you want.  The editor also offers you assistance in maintaining appropriate indentation in your program.
• In a program, matching delimiters, " ", { }, ( ), [ ], /* */  are very important.  The editor assists you in a clever way:  when you type the second of any of these pairs, the cursor jumps briefly to the matching delimiter, so you can check that the match is correct.  You can manually check the match by placing the cursor before a paired delimiter and pressing Ctrl-] to make the cursor jump to the corresponding delimiter.  You can get back by pressing Ctrl-] again.
• Braces { } are particularly important.  The line after an opening brace is automatically indented as you type.  If you insert a closing brace at the start of a line, the editor automatically makes it line up under the beginning of the line containing the matching opening brace.

• You can save the active window in the usual Windows ways:  in the file menu or with the floppy disk icon in the toolbar under the menus.  Your file is automatically saved before you compile or run your program.

• The default options also save your altered files every 10 minutes automatically in case of a crash (which can happen).  To recover your saved files from the directory c:\temp, see the VCafe Help topic with index entry:  "saving, backup files for recovery".

8.  Compiling:

•  In the Project menu, choose Build Application.  You will see in the status line at the bottom left of the screen what happened:  "Build Successful" or "Build Failed" along with warnings and error messages.  Examine your message window for a complete listing of errors.

• See the bottom of the Search menu for ways to jump to the location of errors in the source code, and note the keyboard shortcuts, such as Alt-s,x to take you to the next error.  Then the offending source line is highlighted in red, the cursor moves to the line, and the current error description appears at the bottom of the source frame.  Correct the error and press Alt-s,x to go on to the next error. Alternatively, you may double click on the error in the message pane and the cursor will move to the offending source line.

• Choose Execute from the Project menu.

• Running glitch:  If you execute a console text application (one that prints using System.out), you are unlikely to see your last output, because the console window disappears.  This would be true if your main method were:

        One fix is to change it as follows:

            public static void main (String[] args){
                    System.out.println("Bonjour");
                    System.out.println("Press enter to terminate program");
                    String junk = SavitchIn.readLine();
            }

   Then when the program is run, it waits at the end, until you enter a carriage return.

• Open the File menu.  It is easiest to select from the recent files or recent projects in the bottom of the menu.  Otherwise, you can select Open project, and select the project in the file opening dialog window.

• Sometimes a source file is in the project but does not pop up when you want it.  Select the last tab in the Project window pane, which looks like a page of text.  This refers to the source files.  You should see the list of files in the project.  Click on the desired file, and it should become visible.

EXERCISES:

(A)   Create a project, which prints a message such as "I think that I am really going to love Comp 170".
What is an appropriate name for this project?  Compile and run it.

(B)  Create a project, VirusWarning, which prints the following message:

     ----------------------------------
    |                                                  |
    |         W A R N I N G                |
    |    Possible virus detected!          |
    |    Reboot and run virus              |
    |        remover software.              |
    |                                                  |
    ----------------------------------

(C)    Re-examine your helloWorld project.  What happens if you:

• replace the first occurrence of println with printline?
• remove the semi-colon after ("Bonjour") ?
• remove the first brace, {  ?
• omit public ?
• omit static ?
• omit void ?
• remove the line String junk = SavitchIn.readLine(); ?
• remove // from any one of the comments ?
• remove the quotation marks surrounding Bonjour ?

(E)   Create a new project, HelloWorld2 (saved in a new folder, helloWorld2). Open the HelloWorld.java file which you worked on earlier, and save it under the new name HelloWorld2.java in the folder helloWorld2.  Modify this file so that it also announces today's weather in Chicago.  Change the class name to HelloWorld2, and add this file to your new project, HelloWorld2.  Run this project.  (What happens if you forget to change the class name?)

(F)  Try saving your file HelloWorld.java file to a floppy.  Then make sure that this .java file is actually on your floppy by reading the directory of .java files on the A: drive.
 

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