Tag Archives: object-oriented programming

Ode to the IDE

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Fellow coders, I welcome thee, to a post, an ode, to the IDE! (Integrated Development Environment, not the fish, although I’m sure they are lovely.)

It’s been a while since I posted and I’ll just say it’s been a great year of interesting projects and bursts of creative energy that have kept me busy, but I did squeeze in some Java here and there! For a while I was quite mesmerized with some tutorials I found on Creating a Game in Java using the game engine LibGDX. I then completed the next series of Java tutorials on teamtreehouse.com called Build a Blog Reader Android App. Both of these projects were extensive and showed me the power of a language like Java to accomplish so many things (in often varying and interesting ways!) Another take-away from these tutorials, in particular from working through the blog app, was gaining even more experience in the Eclipse IDE.

Now in my years of Javascript, HTML and CSS, generally the most complex of an environment I used for my coding was Dreamweaver, which had a few bells and whistles. When you get into a language like Java however, you really need an IDE like Eclipse, for one because it requires tools for compiling etc. but also to help you find all those crazy coding pieces you need, show you the error of your ways, and basically make your life a little easier with so many hints and tips. It’s just brilliant, having the help of the IDE along the way.

Thus fair reader, to summarize my favorite things about that experience, I give you my ode to the IDE, Eclipse in this case, enjoy!

E is for the error detection, beckoning me to fix! Red text oh my! But a right click and I can select an option that does the trick.

C is for the code hints, how they popped up left and right. Quickly creating code, but without so much might.

L is the last letter of control, as in Ctrl-Shift-o, the wonderful shortcut to ensure all my imports were in tow.

I is part of strings.xml, and that was the best. I could store all my interface text in that great treasure chest.

P is for a pause, whew! Doesn’t every ode need one?…

S is for the simulators, Android emulators to be exact. Don’t have that phone to test on, no problem! These mock ones have your back.

E rhymes with “re”, and that is my favorite part. Refactoring code is the way to go, cleans up what you missed at the start.

Happy coding!

PHP: Objects and AJAX and Doodles – Oh My!

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Screen capture of artsyCoderDoodles Web App with small canvas
Chapter six in “PHP The Good Parts” (MacIntyre, Peter B. PHP: The Good Parts. USA: O’Reilly, 2010) is about PHP objects. We visited object-oriented programming back in my posts on the ASP.NET/C# “Magic Menu” where I discussed some behind-the-scenes on object-oriented (or “oo”) concepts.

This post will be about what I programmed after reading about PHP objects – a doodle web app which started out as a simple little combination of PHP oo programming and some HTML5 canvas and turned into a wild blend of PHP, HTML5, Javascript, jQuery, CSS, AJAX and XML. The final result could have probably been accomplished with less technologies, but in the end it was fun to try out some “extras” in combination with the PHP and HTML5 and learn about those as well. You could say the code is a bit of “doodle” itself! Or I may be getting carried away with the doodle metaphor – on to the doodling app and it’s doodles (but not oodles) of code!

artsyCoderDoodles Web App

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ASP.NET/C#: Magic Menu Web App: Part Three

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Welcome to episode three of our series on the “Magic Menu” web app – the C# code!

Please check out part two before we begin if you like.

Default.aspx.cs

We start out by importing a standard set of namespaces, which generally hold tons of standard .NET classes we may want to use within the rest of our code.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
using System.Drawing;

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ASP.NET/C#: Magic Menu Web App: A little aside…

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Okay, let’s try a little analogy first before we get into the “Magic Menu” C# code to refresh our understanding of object-oriented programming!

A car is an object.

The car has a color – red, beige, purple – whatever you like. “color” is a property of our car object.

Say you don’t like the color anymore of that car, so you decide to get it painted. “Paint car” could be thought of as an action on the car, or a method. We might pass a parameter to “Paint car” that indicates to paint the whole car, maybe “all car”. That “Paint car” method will change the value of the “color” property (and paint our whole car).

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