This week-long course provides a thorough coverage of the Java programming language. It will be of interest to programmers, analysts and anyone involved with the development of Java applications and applets.

Java provides an object-oriented, portable and robust framework for application development. Participants will learn how to integrate Java technology into corporate web pages and how Java can be used as a powerful cross-platform distributed development engine.

The course is designed to leverage the participants' existing programming skills and to highlight the new and extended features of Java as compared to other common languages. Ambitious hands-on lab exercises using the Java Development Kit enable the participant to develop expertise with Java during the course of the training session.

Participants are expected to have prior knowledge and experience of a programming language. Familiarity with C and/or Object-Oriented Design (OOD) are particularly useful. No knowledge of object oriented programming or C++ is required, since it is covered in the course.

Course Content

Introduction to Java

• What is Java?
• Why use Java?
• Comparing C, C++ and Java
• The Java Developers Kit (JDK)
• JDK versions
• Overview of 3rd party Java tools
• Java applications & web applets

Java language fundamentals

• Writing a simple Java program
• Data types
• Blocks and scope
• Expressions & operators
• Control structures (if, switch, for, while).

Exception handling:

• Try, catch & throw
• The finally clause
• Types of exception.

Classes, packages and interfaces

• Object oriented systems (objects, methods, encapsulation, messages, classes, inheritance)
• Classes in Java (Declaring, deriving, overriding, overloading)
• Access modifiers (default, public, protected, private, static, final, synchronized, native, abstract)
• Object creation (Constructors, the new operator destruction)
• Packages (declaring, importing).

Overview of the Java standard package

• Language
• Utilities
• IO
• Networking
• Windowing and Applet packages.

The language package

• The object class • Data type wrapper classes • The math class • String classes • System and runtime classes.

The IO package

• Input & output stream classes
• File classes.

The windowing (AWT) package

• The component class (simple widgets and text controls)
• The container class (panels and windows)
• Layout classes (flow, border, card, grid, gridbag)
• Menu classes.

Applet programming

• Applet methods (init, destroy, stop, start, paint)
• Basic HTML overview
• The <APPLET> tag and parameters
• Simple components (buttons, text fields, text areas, labels, check-boxes, scrolling lists, scroll bars, canvases)
• Applet event handling.

Java graphics

• Graphics coordinate system and colours
• The graphics class (lines, rectangles, polygons, ovals, arcs, text, images).

The networking package (introduction)

• Web interface classes
• Raw network interface classes.