How do you structure a java program? [closed] - java

Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 1 year ago.
Improve this question
For quite awhile I have been trying to make a simple "game" in Java that is really just an applet with a square and a grid. What I want it to do in the end is the user clicks and the square will move to where the user clicked rounded to the nearest grid square.
The problem is I am a self taught beginner and I am having a hard time figuring out how to actually structure the program, some examples:
should I have a separate class listening for mouse clicks?
When I receive a click should I send it to some other object that represents the box and let it decide what it wants to do or just call some function that makes the box move?
I really want to learn all this "when to use what" stuff for myself so any links or general advice is appreciated.

What you're really asking is how to develop a game, which is notably different from a typical Java application. However, I'll give you a few ideas to at least point you in the right direction.
Take advantage of the fact that Java is an object-oriented language. That is, objects should each have their own responsibility.
Separate your game into three key layers: the application layer, the game logic layer, and the presentation layer.
The application layer should contain all of your helpers and generic subsystems, things like random number generators, text parsers, file access modules, mesh loaders, etc.
The game logic layer should implement all of the rules of your game, and be responsible for maintaining canonical state. Basically, when you press the "W" on the keyboard to move forward, the game logic layer should receive MOVE_FORWARD_REQUEST from the UI.
The presentation layer should be responsible for two things: getting input, and rendering your world. When it gets input, like the "W" key, it should map that to an action, and send that to the game logic layer to be processed. Then, it should render the world based on whatever the game logic told it to do.
Game development is obviously an entire realm with many books dedicated to it. One of my favorites is Game Coding Complete, which does focus on C/C++, but should give you a good idea about how you ought to structure your game.
Good luck!

One main principle of good software development is the Single Responsibility Priciple. It states that a function or class should only have one responsibility.
This way your classes and objects shouldn't become too big and unmanageable.

I think one of the most important concepts to master when developing software is the concept or Orthogonality. It's not the simplest definition, but in essence it means that one component (such as reading mouse clicks) shouldn't be directly tied to an unrelated component (moving a square on the screen).
In your case, the code reading mouse clicks should be separate from the code that actually moves the box. Whether you implement this as inner/anonymous classes or not is up to you. But if you follow the Orthogonality principle, it will be easy to change at a later date should you change your mind.

One problem here is that all the rules have some leeway in them where you have to use your own best judgement.
For example, the app you are describing now seems to me so simple I'd probably do it in a single class, with perhaps a couple of nested, perhaps anonymous classes. In any event, I could make a decent case for fitting the whole thing into a single source file, claiming that multiple source files would actually increase the complexity of the whole thing.
But if your GUI had a number of different controls, perhaps each controlling different behavior, it would become time to split the functionality up so you're not ending up with a big bowl of spaghetti code.
The Java GUI libraries try to naturally separate (view+controller) from model. You are encouraged to define and display the GUI in one module (= file) but to have your data model and perhaps functionality in another. For complicated GUIs, there may also be multiple GUI implementation modules held together by code.
One way to keep things "clean" is to work in "layers" where each layer "knows" only what it needs to know. To be specific, the GUI layer needs to know about the existence of its underlying models – tables and lists and whatnot need to be connected to TableModels and ListModels, etc. It doesn't need to know about details of these models though, so it can simply refer to those models by interface.
The model layer, on the other hand, need know nothing about the GUI. The less it knows, the better, and this would theoretically enable you to exchange GUIs without needing to touch the models.
My model can also contain ActionListeners to respond to actions undertaken by e.g. pushing buttons in the GUI.
Of course, actions and changes to the model will often result in changes to the GUI. How to communicate these changes to the GUI if the model layer doesn't know about the GUI? You can use bound bean properties here. Here's a short tutorial: http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/t19476.html . So you have the same kind of structure: Changes happen in your model, they're communicated to beans with property change support within the model, and the GUI can attach listeners to those properties to find out something changed.
Whether you perform actual, effective actions (e.g. writing files, converting data, whatever) within your model code or whether you split "processing" code off into yet another module is up to you and will again depend on how cluttered your model already is. If there's a tiny handful of fields and methods feeling lonely in there, you may decide to mash things together but the moment it starts to look messy you'll want to refactor your processing code out into its own module. Processing sounds like the kind of module that doesn't want to know about other modules either; you may end up just calling its methods from the model level.
I've described my basic style for doing GUI development. There are certainly other recommendations out there, and you will likely develop your own style based on your experience. This is just intended to give you an idea and a possible starting point.

Step 1 - find the demo applets supplied by Sun. http://java.sun.com/applets/jdk/
Step 2 - read those demo applets. At least three. Preferably all of them.
One you've read several applets, you should see a little more clearly how to organize programs. You can then ask questions with a lot more focus pointing to specific applet examples and your specific programming problem.

Yeah, I'm a beginner programmer myself. Yeah, segregating functionality across multiple classes is a good way to reduce complexity and increase cohesion of individual classes.
Increasing cohesion good because by having more complex data structure your algorithms become less complex and your code is less dependent on each other.
For instance in your case it might be a good idea to separate the classes in accordance to MVC (Model View Controler).
You have a Model which represents the way your game data is structured.
You have a Viewer which present your Model in what ever form you please.
Have a Controller which picks up changes in the Model (via Listeners) and then updates the Viewer
Now you can change your Model and add extra functionality requiring only small changes in the way the Viewer works.
There are many Patterns out there but there isn't a hard rule when to use one over the other. There are some cases in which you can use several and there are cases in which will require you to chose one design pattern over the other.

Every beginning Java programmer should start with the Sun Tutorials. They are quite good.
Another good source, especially among free sources, is Bruce Eckel's "Thinking in Java", available from http://www.mindview.net/Books/TIJ/.
But the latter is a little dated compared to the former. That is why I recommend both.

Related

What is the correct structure of classes in java?

I have been coding in java for about a year and a half, and have made some small games and programs that I think turned out very well. The problem is that I am mostly self taught and I most of my code and class structure is not organized or "correctly structured". This didn't matter to me for the smaller things I made, but if I were to take on a larger project I would want to structure it correctly and make it organized.
In a previous mini-RPG game I had
Main Class (Main loop + Main method)
Player Class (containing player position and player stats)
Engine Class (containing map and collision detection between player and map
Map Class (containing map data)
My Main class contained an instance of Player and of Engine, and Engine had an instance of Map. The problem is that Player then could't tell the Engine where it was, and the Engine couldn't adjust Player's position and stats when something happened on the Map. So I ended up having some static variables and methods in both Player and Engine to get them to communicate.
I guess my overall question is is this the correct structure of classes, and is it correct to use static methods and variables here? If not, how would you structure these classes, or would there need to be more or less classes?
My overall objective is to understand how to structure classes in this previous game so I can better structure classes in a bigger project I want to take on.
It is a rather broad question, but the general answer is no.
As a rule you shouldn't use static fields to connect instances. (There are a couple of possible exceptions, but as a rule of thumb it's a useful one.) The basic idea of OOP is that everybody has a reference to whoever they want to send messages to. So if a Player needs to tell the Engine something, it should have a reference to whichever Engine instance it belongs to. Or you can redesign your architecture so only Engine sends messages to Map and Player, it's difficult to tell without more detail about your setup whether that would be appropriate in this case.
Another piece of general advice is to try to sit down with a piece of paper, write down the name of all three of your classes and in a separate column write down all the things the system has to do. And then you should try to figure out who's responsible for what. In a good design this decision is simple, if you find yourself shoehorning different things into one class, that's a sign that you should maybe need a more detailed model with more classes.
I would also suggest you take a look at the observer pattern and the publish-subscribe pattern, as it might be what you need.
Try take take a look at some design-patterns.
Which design pattern you want to use depends on what you prefer. Some can be found here on Wikipedia.
I also take it that you are familiar with OOP? Some more general info can be found here on Wikipedia.
Looking at your specific story, I think a MVC-design would be a nice solution.
MVC meaning Model View Controller.
Here you have your Model, classes holding different forms of data.
Your Controller, controls your Model, contains all the real logic.
And your View, this is the graphic end of your application.
You'd probably want to put and instance of your player in your engine as well. That way your engine will control everything (the player and the map). Hope that helps!
From what you described there a few possible ways to handle this. One would be to use a messaging system. I would look into Java Messaging Service (JMS). Another would be to make your app event drive. Here is a neat little tutorial on how to do this using spring : https://spring.io/guides/gs/messaging-reactor/. Having said that, if your intent is get a better understanding of problem solving using Java, I would first try and mimic these two approaches on your own, without any bulky frameworks.

Does the use of ObservableList in JavaFX go against Model-View-Controller separation?

I am attempting a study of JavaFX because I want to use it as the GUI of my program. My question is essentially a conceptual one:
To date my program is mostly the "Model" part of the MVC pattern; that is, almost all of my code is the OO-representation of abstractions in the sense of classes, and all of that code is logical code.
Since I do not want to be the only user of my program, I want to add the "View" part of MVC so that people can easily use and manipulate the "Model" part of my program. For this, I want to use JavaFX.
In my "Model" classes I obviously use various Lists, Maps, and other classes from the Java Collections API. In order to let the users of my program manipulate these underlying Lists and Maps I want to use the Observable(List/Map) interfaces in JavaFX.
A concrete example to bring clarity to the situation:
Let's say that I have a MachineMonitor class that every 3 minutes checks certain properties of a Machine, such as if the connection is still good, the speed that the gears are turning, etc. If certain inequalities are met (say that the speed of the gears has fallen to a rate of 1 turn/sec) the MachineMonitor fires a RestartMachineEvent.
Currently I use an ArrayList<MachineMonitor> to keep track of all of the individual MachineMonitor's. Now extending to the "View" part of MVC, I want the User to be able to manipulate a TableView that displays the list of MachineMonitors so that they can, for instance, create and remove new MachineMonitor's to monitor various Machines.
So that I can keep track of what the user of my program wants to do (say, create a MachineMonitor for Machine #5 that checks to see if the turn/sec of the gears falls below 0.5) I use an ObservableList<MachineMonitor> as the underlying List for the TableView.
The easiest way to link the "Model" and "View" of my program would simply be to change the "Model" class to have an ObservableList<MachineMonitor> and not an ArrayList<MachineMonitor> but (getting to the topic of the question) I feel that this is very messy because it mixes "Model" and "View" code.
A naïve approach would be to use an ObservableList<MachineMonitor> for the TableView and retain the use of my ArrayList<MachineMonitor>. However, changes made to the ObservableList<MachineMonitor> do not affect the underlying List as per the JavaFX specifications.
Given this, is the best way to solve this conundrum to make a ChangeListener for the ObservableList<MachineMonitor> that "propagates" the changes made to the ObservableList<MachineMonitor> to the underlying "Model" ArrayList<MachineMonitor>? Perhaps put this in a class called MachineMonitorController?
This ad-hoc solution seems very messy and non-ideal.
My question is: What is the best way to retain nearly complete separation between the "Model" and "View" in this scenario?
Briefly, I don't think use of ObservableList breaks the MVC contract.
The rest, you may read or not as you wish, as it is quite annoyingly long.
Architectural Pattern Background
Observables are useful in MVC style architectures because they provide a way of feeding data back and forth between the MVC components through loose couplings where the model and view classes don't need to refer directly to each other, but can instead work with some shared data model which communicates data flow. It's not a coincidence that the Observable pattern and the MVC style architecture concept both originated around the same time at Xerox PARC - the things are linked.
As noted in Martin Fowler's GUI architectures, there are numerous different approaches to building GUIs. MVC is just one of these, kind of the granddaddy of them all. It is nice to understand MVC well (it is often misunderstood) and MVC concepts are applicable in many places. For your application you should use the system which feels best for you rather than rigidly following a given pattern (unless you are using a particular framework which enforces a given pattern) and also be open to adopting different patterns within an application rather than trying to shoehorn everything into a single conceptual framework.
Java Beans are a fundamental part of almost all Java programs. Though traditionally often only used in client apps, the observer pattern, through PropertyChangeListeners, has been, for good reason, a part of the Java Bean specification since it was created. The observable and binding elements of JavaFX are a rework of that earlier work, learning from it to build something that is both more convenient to work with and easier to understand. Perhaps, if the JavaFX observable and binding elements had existed ten or twelve years ago as part of the JDK, such concepts would be more generally used in a wider variety of libraries and frameworks than a couple of pure GUI frameworks.
Advice
I suggest considering the MVVM model and other GUI architectures.
If you want a dead-easy framework which follows a model, view, presenter style, definitely give afterburner.fx a spin.
I think the correct choice of architecture depends on your application, your experience and the size and complexity of the problems you are trying to solve. For instance, if you have a distributed system, then you could follow REST principles rather than (or in addition to) MVC. Whichever you choose, the architecture should aid you in solving the problem at hand (and possibly future problems) and not the converse. Over-architecting a solution is a common trap and is very easy to do, so try to avoid it.
Caveat
One caveat to consider is that observables necessarily work via side-effects which can be difficult to reason about and can be antithetical to the concept of isolation. JavaFX features some good tools, such as ReadOnlyObjectWrapper and ReadOnlyListWrapper, to help limit the impact (damage control if you like) on observables so they don't run amok in your system. Use such tools (and immutable objects) with reckless abandon.
Learn from Examples
For a simple JavaFX application which is built using observables, refer to tic-tac-toe.
For a good way to structure a large and complex JavaFX application with FXML based components, refer to the source code for SceneBuilder and SceneBuilderKit. The source code is available in the JavaFX mercurial source tree, just check it out and start learning.
Read up on the JavaFX UI controls architecture. Examine the JavaFX controls source code (e.g. Button and ButtonSkin or ListView and ListViewSkin) to see how concepts such as MVC can be applied using JavaFX structures. Based on that learning, try creating some of your own custom controls using the architecture that the JavaFX controls framework provides. Often, when you are building your own application you don't need to create your own controls (at least ones which derive form JavaFX Control). The JavaFX Controls architecture is specially crafted to support building libraries of reusable controls, so it is not necessarily generally suitable for all purposes; instead it provides a concrete demonstration of one proven way to get certain things done. Adopting and adapting proven solutions goes a long way to ensuring you don't reinvent stuff needlessly and allows you to build on a solid base and learn from the trials of others.
Regarding your Concrete Example
I advise you to go with:
The easiest way to link the "Model" and "View" of my program would simply be to change the "Model" class to have an ObservableList and not an ArrayList
Maybe use a ReadOnlyListWrapper to expose the ObservableList from the MachineMonitor to the outside world, so that nothing can modify it unduly.
Setup some other structure which encapsulates the view (for example a ControlPanel and ControlPanelSkin) and provide it a reference to the read only observable list of MachineMonitors. The ControlPanelSkin can encapsulate a TableView, a graph or whatever visual knobs and widgets you want to use for the user to monitor the machines.
Using such a structure effectively isolates your view from the model. The model really doesn't know anything about the UI at all and ControlPanelSkin implementation could be changed out to a completely different visual representation or technology without changing the core MachineMonitor system at all.
The above just outlines a general approach, you'll need to tweak it for your specific example.
I disagree that using an ObservableList in your "model" class violates MVC separation. An ObservableList is purely data representation; it is part of the model and not part of the view. I (and others) use JavaFX properties and collections in model representations in all tiers of my applications. Among other things in there, I point out how I use JavaFX properties that are (or can be, at least) bound to JSF. (I should mention that not everyone agrees with the approach of using FX properties on the server side; however I don't really see any way to make the argument that they are somehow part of the view.)
Also, if you do
List<MachineMonitor> myNonObservableList = ... ;
ObservableList<MachineMonitor> myObservableList = FXCollections.observableList(myNonObservableList);
myObservableList.add(new MachineMonitor());
the observable list is backed by the non-observable list, so the change occurs in myNonObservableList too. So you can use this approach if you prefer.

How to set up simulation architecture, OO design [closed]

Closed. This question needs to be more focused. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by editing this post.
Closed 9 years ago.
Improve this question
I'm building a simulation in Java. So, I'll break my simulation into two parts:
1) The simulation engine
2) The simulation model
Basically I want a little help (tips/advice) about how to split it up i.e. what goes where.
So I'm thinking that the engine will keep track of time. It will listen for events and when events arrive it will update the state of the simulation ( I'm building a discrete event simulation). The simulation model will have the GUI and it will get the logic and data from the actual engine. I'm thinking that the model will provide the actual events as input to the engine. I've been thinking about a car analogy where the engine is the body of the car and the model the driver. So I want it to behave like the driver(model) telling the car(engine) what to do i.e. when to turn when to break and what speed to go at etc
Do you think I'm tackling this in the right way? I can sense that I sound a little confusing and not very clear. So I'll just clarify that what I'm looking for is just some input to how I should split this up and what the responsibility of engine and model should actually be.
Also, I was wondering, if I were to implement the MVC design pattern, how would that fit in with the way I'm trying to break it up?
EDIT:
By model I mean that I want the simulation to have a set of specific rules which the engine then follows. As I'm building a road traffic simulator, the rules could be like, the distribution of cars, driver profiles, what cars may and may not do ( e.g. stop for red light) etc. So the model is like the "brain" of the simulation if you get what I mean, and then the engine being the actual simulation of the set of "rules" specified by the model. I hope this makes more sense.
May be not very applicable, but for MVC approach (Model-View-Controller), which is rather wide-spread and accepted, controller seems to correspond to what you call engine. And model is just that -- bunch of simple dump Java objects with as little logic as possible, containing only attributes of real-world objects they represent.
So, employing this analogy with MVC you'll get your model as set of roads, cars, containing just coordinates of objects and the engine will move cars, detect collisions etc.
After round of moves is finished, you'll get an updated version of model (some cars are in new positions with new velocity, some buildings are burning (heh), etc). And you'll handle this updated model to your view (whatever it may be) for rendering.
The only thing I'm unsure here is what part of the system is going to provide input events. In usual MVC this is some external entity (usually human operator). If by events you mean human input, it will be the same for your application. If you mean events like collisions because of, say, car's movements -- then it's engine itself who will produce such events as the result of calculations on each step of simulation.
Although, this not very classic OO design. In classic OO design, you would get model classes, such as cars, having their internal logic, which would define that, say, car is suddenly changes it's velocity out of the blue. I wouldn't go this route, because it makes logic of your code distributed between model classes and controller classes. You have set of model objects at the start of the world and the only way forward is to either influence them with engine decisions or to have real external input (like GUI input from human). If you need model object to change it's behavior, it should be responsibility of engine code, not model code.
Sorry for this rather incohesive speculation, this is rather wide topic and there are lots of books about such things.
You haven't given us enough information to REALLY help sketch out your simulation, but here's a good tip: Anything that you can identify as a thing should be an object. So make a class Car. And a class TrafficLight. Then make a class Driver, each Car has a field Driver. And a Road would have a List<Car>
Before you start thinking about how to implement an MVC framework, make sure you understand what it is.. The most important thing about MVC is that it's about how the user interacts with a universe. So you'd want MVC if, for example, you were writing a game called SimTraffic, because not only do you need a traffic simulation, but the user needs to control it somehow too. If you were just watching a simulation occur (with no interaction), don't worry about MVC.
Forget about the GUI. Please start from the physics - there are scores of traffic simulations; I assume you have read at least one book on the subject, if not it is high time to do so: a starting point could be a Springer-published collection of essays on various modern models called Fundamentals of Traffic Simulation (ISBN 1441961410), Jaume Barcelo (ed.) (2010).
EDIT: Would advise first deciding on the scope of your sim; what are the constant assumptions? For what time periods will it be tuned? Will road network change? Do you allow for car crashes, DUI idiots, onlookers taking movies from the crash site for Youtube?
What accuracy do you need from the sim - do you want it to be used for city planning, environmental control or traffic management? What are the variables and parameters that you set? Have you got statistical data to validate your simulation and test predictions against? Do you have ready data on physical characteristics of cars/drivers in your modelled universe/city (acceleration, linear size, propensity to break traffic rules)? There are a bunch of questions that should be answered before you sit down to code...
EDIT #2: from your comment to #Victor Sorokin 's answer, I gather you have a nice idea of adding driver's expectations into the model - would make the driver's AI the first thing to code: yes, shortest path, but the solution to the shortest path problem comes from stale data (with possibly variable delay). If you give drivers perfect foresight, there won't be any crashes; if you make them imperfect, you will have to model sensory input, perhaps boiled down to direction-specific probabilities of detecting an incoming car. It makes for some huge expenditure of CPU cycles, for sure.

Why do we sometimes separate behaviour from classes in Java [closed]

Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 4 years ago.
Improve this question
Its a pretty basic question but I am new to Java designing to please excuse me. :)
I want to know in which scenarios we need to separate the class behavior from the class itself.
for e.g.
If I have an class Employee, I will have some data in it like - name, age etc. Also this class will have some behavior like doWork() etc. Now in what scenario we can have data and the behavior inside once class (Employee) only and in which scenario we need to have 2 different classes for Employee data (EmployeeDTO) and behavior (EmployeeService)
Very subjective question but am looking for some inputs on a design of a small application where I am taking data from a text file. Should I put the data and behavior in different classes or same? What will be your reason to justify this decision?
PS: Any links to information on this will also be very useful :)
Thankyou
Good object-oriented design advocates that each class obey the Single Responsibility Principle. Which I can't summarize any more eloquently than the wikipedia entry:
Martin defines a responsibility as a reason to change, and concludes
that a class or module should have one, and only one, reason to
change. As an example, consider a module that compiles and prints a
report. Such a module can be changed for two reasons. First, the
content of the report can change. Second, the format of the report can
change. These two things change for very different causes; one
substantive, and one cosmetic. The single responsibility principle
says that these two aspects of the problem are really two separate
responsibilities, and should therefore be in separate classes or
modules. It would be a bad design to couple two things that change for
different reasons at different times.
If you think about it, you could jam all of your Java code into one class file, but you don't. Why? Because you want to be able to change, maintain, adapt and test it. This principle says that instead of dividing your code up arbitrarily into different modules, you should take the tact that things should be broken up by their logical responsibilities. This generally means more, small modules which we know to be easier to change, maintain, adapt and test.
I personally would recommend that you factor your code out into smaller discrete classes and combine them later if this proves to be unreasonable -- this will become obvious to you. Its much easier to combine loosely-coupled code in the future than it is to factor out tightly-coupled code.
Do the simplest thing possible. You can always make your code more generalized later and there's a good chance you won't even have to do it.
Apply YAGNI principle every time you need to make a decision. Extreme Programming wiki is also a nice reading.
Put everything into one class right now. When you see your Employee is getting too fat then you can do some refactoring - for example, move method to another class. In statically typed languages like Java it is super easy because compiler helps a lot and IDE support is great.
Reading from file, for example, looks like an obvious candidate to extract to a separate loader class. On the other hand if you have a very common format as input such as XML or JSON you could just create static method List<Employee> Employee.loadFromFile(string fileName) and implement reading logic in a couple of lines of code. It's good enough right now: simple, short and works fine.
May The Real Ultimate Programming Power be with you!
By keeping business logics out of pojo, thus making it a pure transfer object, you have the benefit of loose coupling should one day you find yourself in the situation for the need to switch from Spring framework to EJB JavaBeans.
By putting data and business logic together, it becomes a domain object. The simplest form of managed bean usage promoted in JSF2 uses the domain model whereby the "action" is fused together with form data.
If you choose the first model, you can cleanly separate concerns for designing inheritence and polymorphism for your data objects, while not being bothered if the behaviors defined are making sense, and vice versa.
You use a DTO (like the acronym suggests) when you want to move data around using the lightest weight way possible, such as over the wire to a service.
For the record
Its the classic rich domain object vs anemic domain object.
In general, if you have an UI Object or a Library Object (for example the class Date or the class TextButton), and may be some other kind of Objects then may be you can wrap all in a single Class instead of relies in different classes just for commodity to have all the attributes and methods in the same class.
However, for a classic Business Object (BO) is different. Even if you want a rich domain object, excluding some other problems that i don't want to mention at this point, is the fact that the Business Service (BS) Layer acts as a "fat burning diet plan" and it turns every rich BO into a anemic BO.
Rich BO -------> BS ----------> Anemic BO.

How can I best apply OOP principles to games and other input-driven GUI apps?

Whenever I try to write graphical programs (whether a game or really any GUI app) I always wind up with one or two god classes with way too many methods (and long methods, too), and each class having far too many responsibilities. I have graphics being done at the same time as calculations and logic, and I feel like this is a really bad way to go about organizing my code. I want to get better at organizing my code and abstracting out responsibilities to different classes. Here's an example of where I'd like to start - I want to write a Minesweeper clone, just sort of as practice and to try to improve my software engineering skills. How would I go about making this nice and object-oriented? For the sake of discussion, let's just say I'm using Java (because I probably will, either that or C#). Here's some things I would think about:
should each tile inherit from JButton or JComponent and handle drawing itself?
or should the tiles just be stored as some non-graphical MinesweeperTile object and some other class handles drawing them?
is the 8-segment display countdown timer (pre-Vista, at least) a separate class that handles drawing itself?
when the user clicks, do the tiles have mouse event listeners or does some other collision detection method loop through the tiles and check each one to see if it's been hit?
I realize that there's not just one way to write a GUI application, but what are some pretty basic things I can start doing to make my code more organized, manageable, object-oriented, and just over all write better programs?
edit: I guess I should add that I'm familiar with MVC, and I was originally going to incorporate that into my question, but I guess I didn't want to shoehorn myself into MVC if that's not necessarily what I need. I did searched for topics on MVC with GUI apps but didn't really find anything that answers my specific question.
edit2: Thanks to everyone who answered. I wish I could accept more than one answer..
Here is a simple (but effective) OO design to get you started:
First create a Game object that is pure Java/C# code. With no UI or anything else platform specific. The Game object handles a Board object and a Player object. The Board object manages a number of Tile objects (where the mines are). The Player object keeps track of "Number of turns", "Score" etc. You will also need a Timer object to keep track of the game time.
Then create a separate UI object that doesn't know anything about the Game object. It is completely stand alone and completely platform dependent. It has its own UIBoard, UITile, UITimer etc. and can be told how to change its states. The UI object is responsible for the User Interface (output to the screen/sound and input from the user).
And finally, add the top level Application object that reads input from the UI object, tells the Game what to do based on the input, is notified by the Game about state changes and then turns around and tells the UI how to update itself.
This is (by the way) an adaption of the MVP (Model, View, Presenter) pattern. And (oh by the way) the MVP pattern is really just a specialization of the Mediator pattern. And (another oh by the way) the MVP pattern is basically the MVC (Model, View, Control) pattern where the View does NOT have access to the model. Which is a big improvement IMHO.
Have fun!
use a MVC framework that handles all the hard organization work for you. there's a ton of MVC framework topics on SO.
using high quality stuff written by others will probably teach you faster - you will get further and see more patterns with less headache.
I'm not suggesting this is the only way to do it, but what I would suggest is something like the following. Other people, please feel free to comment on this and make corrections.
Each tile should inherit from something and handle drawing itself. A button seems like the best solution because it already has the button drawing functionality (pressed, unpressed, etc) built in.
Each tile should also be aware of its neighbors. You would have eight pointers to each of its eight neighbors, setting them to null of course if there is no neighbor. When it goes to draw, it would query each neighbor's IsMine() function and display the count.
If none of its neighbors are a mine, it would then recurse into each neighbor's Reveal() method.
For the 7-segment display, each digit is its own class that handles drawing. Then I would make a CountdownSegmentDigit class that inherits from this class, but has additional functionality, namely CountDown(), Set(), and Reset() methods, as well as a HitZero event. Then the display timer itself is a collection of these digits, wired up to propagate zeroes left. Then have a Timer within the timer class which ticks every second and counts down the rightmost digit.
When the user clicks, see above. The tile itself will handle the mouse click (it is a button after all) and call its Reveal() method. If it is a mine, it will fire the MineExploded event, which your main form will be listening to.
For me, when I think of how to encapsulate objects, it helps to imagine it as a manufacturing process for physical parts. Ask yourself, "How can I design this system so it can be most efficiently built and reused?" Think about future reuse possibilities too. Remember the assembly process takes small pieces and builds them up into larger and larger pieces until the entire object is built. Each bit should be as independent as possible and handle its own logic, but be able to talk to the outside world when necessary.
Take the 7-segment display bit, you could have another use for it later that does not count down. Say you want a speedometer in a car or something. You will already have the digits that you can wire up together. (Think hardware: stock 7-segment displays that do nothing but light up. Then you attach a controller to them and they get functionality.)
In fact if you think hard enough, you might find you want CountUp() functionality too. And an event argument in HitZero to tell whether it was by counting up or down. But you can wait until later to add this functionality when you need it. This is where inheritance shines: inherit for your CountDownDigit and make a CountUpOrDownDigit.
Thinking about how I might design it in hardware, you might want to design each digit so it knows about its neighbors and count them up or down when appropriate. Have them remember a max value (remember, 60 seconds to a minute, not 100) so when they roll over 0, they reset appropriately. There's a world of possibilites.
The central concern of a Graphic User Interface is handling events. The user does X and you need to response or not respond to it. The games have the added complexity in that it needs to change state in real time. In a lot of cases it does this by transforming the current state into a new state and telling the UI to display the results. It does this in a very short amount of time.
You start off with a model. A collection of classes that represents the data the user wants to manipulate. This could represent the accounts of a business or vast frontiers of an unknown world.
The UI starts with defining a series of forms or screens. The idea is that is for each form or screen you create a interface that defines how the UI Controller will interact with it. In general there is one UI Controller classes for each form or screen.
The form passes the event to the UI Controller. The UI Controller then decides which command to execute. This is best done through the Command design pattern where each command is it own class.
The Command then is executed and manipulate the model. The Command then tells the UI Controller that a screen or a portion of a screen needs to be redraw. The UI Control then looks at the data in the model and uses the Screen Interface to redraw the screen.
By putting all the forms and screen behind a interface you can rip out what you have and put something different in. This includes even not having any forms at all but rather mock objects. This is good for automated testing. As long as something implements the Screen Interface properly the rest of the software will be happy.
Finally a game that has to operate in real time will have a loop (or loops) running that will be continually transforming the state of the game. It will use the UI Controller to redraw what it updated. Commands will insert or change information in the model. The next time the loop comes around the new information will be used. For example altering a vector of a object traveling through the air.
I don't like the MVC architecture as I feel it doesn't handle the issues of GUIs well. I prefer the use of a Supervising Controller which you can read about here. The reason for this is that I believe automated tests are one of the most important tools you have. The more you can automate the better off you are. The supervising presenter pattern makes the forms a thin shell so there is very little that can't be tested automatically.
Sorry to say it, but it seems you have mess in your head trying to improve your coding too much in one step.
There is no way to answer your question as such, but here we go.
First start with OOP, think about what objects are required for your game/GUI and start implementing them a little at a time, see if there are chances to break up these objects further, or perhaps reunite some objects that make no sense on their own, then try to figure out if you have repeated functionality among your objects, if you do, figure out if this repeated functionality is a (or many) base class or not.
Now this will take you a few days, or weeks to really grok it well, then worry about dividing your logic and rendering.
I have some tutorials that are written in C#. It discusses this very same topic. It is a starting point for a RogueLike game.
Object Oriented Design in C# Converting Legacy Game
Object Oriented Design: Domain Type Objects
Object Oriented Design: Rethinking Design Issues
BROKEN LINK - Object Oriented Design: Baby Steps in Acceptance Testing

Categories