INFSCI 2470 - Interactive System Design

(Spring 2013, CRN 15953)

Course Tools

Teaching Tools

All course information, homeworks, assignments, etc, will be accessible from the Knowledge Tree Course Portal or Pitt CourseWeb. These two systems will also provide all interfaces for submitting your homework and projects. Below you will find some brief information about these tooks.

CourseWeb

The key tool for the course is the Pitt CourseWeb powered by Blackboard Course Management System, a product of Blackboard, Inc. A set of course materials and tools is available on the CourseWeb course site. You need to have Pitt University Computer Account to login to CourseInfo site. Use Account Managament Page to check the status of your account. We will use CourseWeb for all communication during this course, to take quizzes and to submit solutions for the assignments.

Knowledge Tree Course Portal

We provide a range of online learning resources with this course to support both distance and on-site learning. These resources should be accessed through Knowledge Tree Course Portal. Knowledge Tree uses adaptive navigation support to guide you to the most relevant resources. Due to limitatioin of CourseWeb, we can't integrate Knowledge Tree into CourseWeb, so you will need to access this system separately and will be provided with a separate account.

Java Development Tools

To complete the second part of the course you will need to write and debug Java programs. To do that you need either

an professional development environment (IDE) for Java such as IBM Eclipse
an educational IDE (such as JGRASP, BlueJ or Dr. Java)
an editor that you can use to work with javac compiler that comes with JDK

Eclipse

We strongly recommend you using Eclipse, one of the most popular Java IDEs used by both students and professionals. While Eclipse is relatively complicated, it is not more complicated than Microsoft Word or other high-functionality application. Use our guide or free online tutorials to locate a small subset of functionalities that you need for your work with examples and problems. Once you learn the core functionality of Eclipse, you can explore some of the useful pluguns

Download Eclipse here: From there there you can download the IDE for your computer.

There are many other free and commercial IDE for Java and you are welcome to use any of them if it is something you get used to. However, if this your first IDE, we recommend Eclipse.

Educational IDEs

An alternative for Eclipse and other professional IDEs is a small set of educational IDE that are specifically developed for the needs of students learning Java. These IDEs do not have many components that students do not need while also offering some additional useful tools that the professionals do not need. As a result, many introductory classes use educational IDEs and many Java programming textbooks are written with a specific educational IDE in mind. BlueJ, jGrasp, and DrJava are among the most popular educational IDE. You are welcome to try any of these IDEs, but I would recommend jGRASP developed in Auburn University.

It supports several languages including C and Java and is written in Java itself - so it runs on all platforms.
jGRASP allows to show Control Structure Diagrams, a good tool for beginners!
jGRASP has very nice program visualization.

Using an editor and a compiler

An editor -- compiler/runtime environment pair is the simplest way to work with Java. It is easier to use than any IDE, but this option provides little debugging support. We do not recommend this option unless you have special reason to use it. Here are some free software options for this way.

Sun Java Runtime Environment and SDK

SUN provides free set of development tools (that used to be known as Software Development Kit) for all versions of Java. You can download the most recent version (1.5) from Sun's Web site using the link below. Note that the earlier version 1.4.2 is also sufficient. Please, download J2SE SDK, not the one with NetBeans or J2EE. On the same pages you can download API specifications and Documentation.

Sun's Donwload page for Java SDK 1.5

Program Editor

You can use any text editor that you are familiar with. For bare-bones editig you can even use Notepad and Wordpad that belong to Windows accesoiries would work (if you are using WordPad, make sure that your programs are saved as textfile with suffix .java). If you want a little bit more comfort and functionality, use one of the following free editors that are specially designed for editing programs.

Home page of JPad Editor from ModelWorks
Home page of jEdit - open source Java-oriented programmer's editor
Home page of JED Editor from MIT

Visualization Tools

Visualization tools will let you to look inside the working program. Some educational IDE offer some extended visualization. However, for a really advanced level of visualization details, please, try Jeliot. Jeliot is a great visualization system for beginner-level Java programs.

Check Jeliot on the Web - visualize programs inside your browser!
Download Jeliot (will require SUN Java SDK to work)