CST 338 - Week 5

Java and Swing

As our book introduces, Java's development was not aimed for user-end development. It was developed to be compiled on a wide range of machines on which representing information visually wasn't very important. Appliances of the time, that had the computers Java was designed for, could at most visualize integers and maybe short strings.
I have a biased answer to this question because this assignment was difficult for me, but Swing does not seem very intuitive in Java. I'm almost certain that I don't have a great understanding of Swing since this is all new to me, but it seems awkward to have to instantiate so many different objects on top of each other to support relatively simple information and interaction. The OOP nature of Java means you need Frame objects that support Panel objects that support Label objects that support Button objects that support Events the support Listeners that finally let you click on something.

That rant aside, I would still like to put the time in to understand Swing better since I have an interest in similar event-driven programming.

The past four weeks (e.g. the majority of this course) has been difficult. Our family had a quick and recent loss that we've all been trying to deal with. Between trying to be supportive of my immediate home and family, I've had very little time or energy left over to keep up with the most intensive course of the program so far. I'm adding this as less of an excuse and more of a disappointment that I know I haven't gotten as much out of this course as I was hoping. Now that things are starting to settle down, I'm hoping to finish the course strong.