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COMP 501: Production Programming

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Home — Spring 2014

Contact

Please send all questions and comments to: corky.cartwright at gmail dot com (replace the "at" with "@" and the "dot" with "." — this was necessary to reduce spam).

Documents Discussed in Class

JavaPLT Coding Standards
JavaPLT Coding Standards
Former Thread Synchronization Policies in DrJava (doc), (pdf)

Prerequisites

The official prerequisite for this course is Comp 411, a course on the Principles of Programming Languages that includes a major software engineering component. With my permission, this requirement can be waived. The students who pre-registered for the course all pass muster; they have either taken Comp 411 or demonstrated significant software engineering prowess in Java by taking other classes.

For new students who have not taken Comp 411, there is a qualifying assignment due Friday in class. For someone who an experienced OO Java software developer, the assignment borders on trivial. In my Notes on Object-Oriented Program Design, there is a finger exercise at the bottom of p. 83. Do that exercise including writing a JUnit test class to show that your program works.

If you are familiar with the composite, singleton, and interpreter design patterns, you can begin reading at Section 1.11 that begins at the bottom of p. 75. You can use jDrJava if you choose, but any IDE is acceptable. I want a program in a form that will let me run your JUnit tests (and some that I write). No "main" method is necessary since I will not execute your program from the command line.

Course Protocol

By the end of the day each Friday, each student must file a report on what he or she has accomplished during that week. I want you to tell me what source code you studied, what code you wrote, what bugs that you isolated, what references you consulted, {\it etc}. A few sentences will typically suffice.

Recommended Texts

The first book is the primary text for the course; we recommend that you buy it. The second text is very accessible and entertaining (and cheap if purchased used!) but much of the content is available elsewhere. The last text is an important reference; we recommend that you buy it as well.

Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master. 1999, ISBN-13: 978-0201616224 ISBN-10: 020161622X.
Ron Jeffries, Ann Anderson, and Chet Hendrickson. Extreme Programming Installed, Addison-Wesley, 2001.
Brian Goetz, et al. Java Concurrency in Practice, Addison-Wesley, 2006.

Project List

Finish a project started last year and integrate its results into the DrJava code base and/or documentation. Some possibilities include
- Code coverage (using JaCoCo).
- A new project web page (replacing the existing drjava.org page) based on Ruby on Rails.
- A build script that performs parallel testing.
- A version of DrJava testing that conducts tests in parallel.
- An Eclipse plugin supporting a DrJava Interactions Pane.
Extend the interpreter to support Java 8 extensions (primarily lambda expressions). Parsing here is hard unless we switch from using JavaCC to ANTLR for which a Java 8 parser reportedly exists. I favor the switch.
Clean up DrScala including ($i$) eliminating the DynamicJava interpreter (which is NOT used), ($ii$) revising the debugger to work with Scala (possible?), ($iii$) eliminating djapp or revising it to work with Scala, ($iv) eliminating the language-levels code base and jar file, ($iv$) eliminating miscellaneous code that is irrelevant in DrScala, {\it e.g.}, support for old file formats for profiles, projects, {\it etc.}
Write a DrX initially in Java/Scala and convert it to Swift once Swift support on Linux is released by Apple.

References

Corky Cartwright. Notes on Object-Oriented Program Design.
Doug Lea. Concurrent Programming in Java: Design Principles and Patterns (2nd Edition), Addision-Wesley, 1999. (Online Book Supplement)
Eric Allen. Bug Patterns in Java, APress, 2002.
Martin Folwer. Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, Addison-Wesley, 1999.

Historical References

Edsger Dijkstra, Go To Statement Considered Harmful.
Robert Floyd, Assigning Meaning to Programs.
C.A.R. Hoare, An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming.
C.A.R. Hoare, Structured Programming.
Per Brinch Hansen, The Architecture of Concurrent Programs.

Topics Mentioned in Lectures

Hoare Logic. See the reference to "An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming" above and the Wikipedia article on Hoare logic.
Gentzen's Proof of the Consistency of First-order Arithmetic. See the Wikipedia article on Gentzen's consistency proof.
Structural vs nominal object typing. See the web article Nominative and Structural Typing. This article contains a minor error in comparing nominative (nominal) and structural typing. The nominal object model is strictly richer than the structural one. As a result, it is easy to define a local structural type over the universe of nominal objects. Such a type simply ignores the name of the class attached to a nominal type and only specifies the signatures (names and types) of the class members. Note that the typing of members are unchanged (still nominal), but all of these types can be converted to locally structural form as well yielding a purely structural type.