Reviews : Java Books :
Beginning Java Objects : Chapters 2 and 3

Buy this book Title: Beginning Java Objects ISBN: 1861004176 US Price: $ 39.99 Canadian Price: C$ 59.95 UK Price: £ 28.99 Publication Date: November 2000 Pages: 800 © Wrox Press Limited, US and UK.

What Does It Take to Be a Successful Object Modeler?

• Insight into the problem domain: ideally, you'll be able to draw upon your own real-world experience, such as your former or current experience as a student, which will come in handy when determining the requirements for the SRS.
• Creativity: to enable us to think 'outside the box', in case the future users that we are interviewing have been immersed in the problem area for so long, that they fail to see innovations that might be made.
• Good listening skills: as future users of the system describe how they do their jobs currently, or how they envision doing their jobs in the future, with the aid of the system that we're about to develop.
• Good observational skills: actions often speak louder than words; just by observing users going about their daily business, we may pick up an essential detail that they have neglected to mention because they do it so routinely that it has become a habit.

• An organized process for determining what the abstraction should be. If we follow a proven checklist of steps for producing a model, then we greatly reduce the probability that we'll omit some important feature or neglect a critical requirement.
• A way to communicate the resultant model concisely and unambiguously to our fellow software developers, and to the intended users of our application. While it is certainly possible to describe an abstraction in narrative text, a picture is worth 1000 words, and so the language with which we communicate a model is often a graphical notation. Throughout this book, we'll focus on the Unified Modeling Language (UML — see following figure) notation as our model communication language (you'll learn the basics of UML in Chapters 10 and 11). Think of a graphical model as a 'blueprint' of the software application to be built.

  Summary

  In this chapter, we've learned that:
  • Abstraction is a fundamental technique that people use to perceive the world, and is a necessary first step of all software development.
  • We naturally organize information into classification hierarchies based upon rules that we carefully structure, so that they are neither too general nor too restrictive.
  • We often reuse abstractions when attempting to model a new concept.
  • Producing an abstraction of a system to be built, known as a model, is in some senses second nature to us, and yet paradoxically is one of the hardest things that software developers have to do in the lifecycle of an information systems project. Yet, it is also one of the most important.
    
    
    
    
    
    

    Applet Index (sorted alphabetically) A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z #s

    The Java Source (applets w/source code) A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

    How to Add Java Applets to Your Site

    New on the Java Boutique:

    New Review:
    

    Time Management Made Easy with the Quartz Enterprise Job Scheduler
    Why not just use the Java timer API? This open source scheduling API boasts simplicity, ease-of-integration, a well-rounded feature set, and it's free!

    New Applet:
    

    Reverse Complement
    Reverse Complement is a simple applet that converts DNA or RNA sequences into three useful formats.

    Elsewhere on internet.com:

    WebDeveloper Java
    Lots of Java information on webdeveloper.com

    WDVL Java
    Thorough Java resource at the Web Developer's Virtual Library.

    ScriptSearch Java
    Hundreds of free Java code files to download.

    jGuru: Your View of the Java Universe
    Customizable portal with online training, FAQs, regular news updates, and tutorials.