Introduction to Programming Using Java

Version 9, JavaFX Edition

May, 2022

David J. Eck
Hobart and William Smith Colleges

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©1996–2022, David J. Eck

David J. Eck ([email protected])

Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Geneva, NY 14456

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Contents

Preface xi

1 The Mental Landscape 1

1.1 Machine Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Asynchronous Events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.3 The Java Virtual Machine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.4 Building Blocks of Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
1.5 Object-oriented Programming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.6 The Modern User Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
1.7 The Internet and Beyond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Quiz on Chapter 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

2 Names and Things 19

2.1 The Basic Java Application . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2.2 Variables and Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
2.2.1 Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
2.2.2 Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
2.2.3 Literals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
2.2.4 Strings and String Literals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
2.2.5 Variables in Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
2.3 Objects and Subroutines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.3.1 Built-in Subroutines and Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
2.3.2 Classes and Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
2.3.3 Operations on Strings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
2.3.4 Text Blocks: Multiline Strings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
2.3.5 Introduction to Enums . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2.4 Text Input and Output . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
2.4.1 Basic Output and Formatted Output . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
2.4.2 A First Text Input Example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
2.4.3 Basic TextIO Input Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
2.4.4 Introduction to File I/O . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
2.4.5 Other TextIO Features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
2.4.6 Using Scanner for Input . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
2.5 Details of Expressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
2.5.1 Arithmetic Operators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
2.5.2 Increment and Decrement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
2.5.3 Relational Operators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
2.5.4 Boolean Operators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

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2.5.5 Conditional Operator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

2.5.6 Assignment Operators and Type Conversion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
2.5.7 Precedence Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
2.6 Programming Environments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
2.6.1 Getting a JDK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
2.6.2 Command Line Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
2.6.3 Eclipse IDE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
2.6.4 BlueJ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
2.6.5 The Problem of Packages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
2.6.6 About jshell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
2.6.7 JavaFX on the Command Line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
2.6.8 Using JavaFX in Eclipse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
Exercises for Chapter 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Quiz on Chapter 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

3 Control 75
3.1 Blocks, Loops, and Branches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
3.1.1 Blocks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
3.1.2 The Basic While Loop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
3.1.3 The Basic If Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
3.1.4 Control Abstractiont . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
3.1.5 Definite Assignment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
3.2 Algorithm Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
3.2.1 Pseudocode and Stepwise Refinement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
3.2.2 The 3N+1 Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
3.2.3 Coding, Testing, Debugging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
3.3 while and do..while . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
3.3.1 The while Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
3.3.2 The do..while Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
3.3.3 break and continue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
3.4 The for Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
3.4.1 For Loops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
3.4.2 Example: Counting Divisors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
3.4.3 Nested for Loops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
3.5 The if Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
3.5.1 The Dangling else Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
3.5.2 Multiway Branching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
3.5.3 If Statement Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
3.5.4 The Empty Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
3.6 The switch Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
3.6.1 The Basic switch Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
3.6.2 Menus and switch Statements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
3.6.3 Enums in switch Statements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
3.6.4 Definite Assignment and switch Statements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
3.6.5 Switch Expressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
3.6.6 The Traditional switch Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
3.7 Exceptions and try..catch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
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3.7.1 Exceptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120

3.7.2 try..catch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
3.7.3 Exceptions in TextIO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
3.8 Introduction to Arrays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
3.8.1 Creating and Using Arrays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
3.8.2 Arrays and For Loops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
3.8.3 Random Access . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
3.8.4 Partially Full Arrays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
3.8.5 Two-dimensional Arrays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
3.9 GUI Programming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
3.9.1 Drawing Shapes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
3.9.2 Drawing in a Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
3.9.3 Animation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
Exercises for Chapter 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
Quiz on Chapter 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144

4 Subroutines 147
4.1 Black Boxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
4.2 Static Subroutines and Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
4.2.1 Subroutine Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
4.2.2 Calling Subroutines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
4.2.3 Subroutines in Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
4.2.4 Member Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
4.3 Parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
4.3.1 Using Parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
4.3.2 Formal and Actual Parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
4.3.3 Overloading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
4.3.4 Subroutine Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
4.3.5 Array Parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
4.3.6 Command-line Arguments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
4.3.7 Throwing Exceptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
4.3.8 Global and Local Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
4.4 Return Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
4.4.1 The return statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
4.4.2 Function Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
4.4.3 3N+1 Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
4.5 Lambda Expressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
4.5.1 First-class Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
4.5.2 Functional Interfaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
4.5.3 Lambda Expressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
4.5.4 Method References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
4.6 APIs, Packages, Modules, and Javadoc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
4.6.1 Toolboxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
4.6.2 Java’s Standard Packages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
4.6.3 Using Classes from Packages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
4.6.4 About Modules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
4.6.5 Javadoc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
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4.6.6 Static Import . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185

4.7 More on Program Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
4.7.1 Preconditions and Postconditions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
4.7.2 A Design Example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
4.7.3 The Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192
4.8 The Truth About Declarations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194
4.8.1 Initialization in Declarations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194
4.8.2 Declaring Variables with var . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196
4.8.3 Named Constants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196
4.8.4 Naming and Scope Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
Exercises for Chapter 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
Quiz on Chapter 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205

5 Objects and Classes 207

5.1 Objects and Instance Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
5.1.1 Objects, Classes, and Instances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208
5.1.2 Fundamentals of Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
5.1.3 Getters and Setters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
5.1.4 Arrays and Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216
5.2 Constructors and Object Initialization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
5.2.1 Initializing Instance Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218
5.2.2 Constructors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
5.2.3 Garbage Collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224
5.3 Programming with Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
5.3.1 Some Built-in Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
5.3.2 The class “Object” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
5.3.3 Writing and Using a Class . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
5.3.4 Object-oriented Analysis and Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230
5.4 Programming Example: Card, Hand, Deck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
5.4.1 Designing the classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
5.4.2 The Card Class . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
5.4.3 Example: A Simple Card Game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238
5.5 Inheritance and Polymorphism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
5.5.1 Extending Existing Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242
5.5.2 Inheritance and Class Hierarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244
5.5.3 Example: Vehicles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245
5.5.4 Polymorphism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
5.5.5 Abstract Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250
5.5.6 Final Methods and Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253
5.6 this and super . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253
5.6.1 The Special Variable this . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253
5.6.2 The Special Variable super . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255
5.6.3 super and this As Constructors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256
5.7 Interfaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
5.7.1 Defining and Implementing Interfaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258
5.7.2 Default Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260
5.7.3 Interfaces as Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261
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5.8 Nested Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262

5.8.1 Static Nested Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
5.8.2 Inner Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263
5.8.3 Anonymous Inner Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264
5.8.4 Local Classes and Lambda Expressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266
Exercises for Chapter 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268
Quiz on Chapter 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272

6 Introduction to GUI Programming 275

6.1 A Basic JavaFX Application . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275
6.1.1 JavaFX Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276
6.1.2 Stage, Scene, and SceneGraph . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278
6.1.3 Nodes and Layout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279
6.1.4 Events and Event Handlers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280
6.2 Some Basic Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281
6.2.1 Color and Paint . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281
6.2.2 Fonts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282
6.2.3 Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283
6.2.4 Canvas and GraphicsContext . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284
6.2.5 A Bit of CSS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289
6.3 Basic Events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
6.3.1 Event Handling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292
6.3.2 Mouse Events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293
6.3.3 Dragging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295
6.3.4 Key Events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 298
6.3.5 AnimationTimer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 300
6.3.6 State Machines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301
6.3.7 Observable Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 304
6.4 Basic Controls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305
6.4.1 ImageView . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306
6.4.2 Label and Button . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306
6.4.3 CheckBox and RadioButton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308
6.4.4 TextField and TextArea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310
6.4.5 Slider . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 312
6.5 Basic Layout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314
6.5.1 Do Your Own Layout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
6.5.2 BorderPane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317
6.5.3 HBox and VBox . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319
6.5.4 GridPane and TilePane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 322
6.6 Complete Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325
6.6.1 A Little Card Game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325
6.6.2 Menus and Menubars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328
6.6.3 Scene and Stage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331
6.6.4 Creating Jar Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333
6.6.5 jpackage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 334
Exercises for Chapter 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 336
Quiz on Chapter 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 342
CONTENTS vi

7 Arrays, ArrayLists, and Records 343

7.1 Array Details . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343
7.1.1 For-each Loops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 344
7.1.2 Variable Arity Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 346
7.1.3 Array Literals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347
7.2 Array Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 349
7.2.1 Some Processing Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 349
7.2.2 Some Standard Array Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352
7.2.3 RandomStrings Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 354
7.2.4 Dynamic Arrays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357
7.3 ArrayList . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 359
7.3.1 ArrayList and Parameterized Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 359
7.3.2 Wrapper Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361
7.3.3 Programming With ArrayList . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363
7.4 Records . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 366
7.4.1 Basic Java Records . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 366
7.4.2 More Record Syntax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 368
7.4.3 A Complex Example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369
7.5 Searching and Sorting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371
7.5.1 Searching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 372
7.5.2 Association Lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 374
7.5.3 Insertion Sort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 376
7.5.4 Selection Sort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 378
7.5.5 Unsorting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 380
7.6 Two-dimensional Arrays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 380
7.6.1 The Truth About 2D Arrays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 381
7.6.2 Conway’s Game Of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 383
7.6.3 Checkers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 387
Exercises for Chapter 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395
Quiz on Chapter 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 399

8 Correctness, Robustness, Efficiency 401

8.1 Introduction to Correctness and Robustness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 401
8.1.1 Horror Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 402
8.1.2 Java to the Rescue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 403
8.1.3 Problems Remain in Java . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 405
8.2 Writing Correct Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 406
8.2.1 Provably Correct Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 407
8.2.2 Preconditions and Postconditions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 407
8.2.3 Invariants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 410
8.2.4 Robust Handling of Input . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 413
8.3 Exceptions and try..catch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 417
8.3.1 Exceptions and Exception Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 417
8.3.2 The try Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419
8.3.3 Throwing Exceptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 423
8.3.4 Mandatory Exception Handling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 424
8.3.5 Programming with Exceptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425
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8.4 Assertions and Annotations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 429

8.4.1 Assertions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 429
8.4.2 Annotations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 432
8.5 Analysis of Algorithms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 434
Exercises for Chapter 8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 440
Quiz on Chapter 8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 444

9 Linked Data Structures and Recursion 445

9.1 Recursion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 445
9.1.1 Recursive Binary Search . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 446
9.1.2 Towers of Hanoi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 448
9.1.3 A Recursive Sorting Algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 451
9.1.4 Blob Counting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 453
9.2 Linked Data Structures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 457
9.2.1 Recursive Linking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 457
9.2.2 Linked Lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 459
9.2.3 Basic Linked List Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 460
9.2.4 Inserting into a Linked List . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 463
9.2.5 Deleting from a Linked List . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 465
9.3 Stacks, Queues, and ADTs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 466
9.3.1 Stacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 467
9.3.2 Queues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 470
9.3.3 Postfix Expressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 475
9.4 Binary Trees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 478
9.4.1 Tree Traversal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 479
9.4.2 Binary Sort Trees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 481
9.4.3 Expression Trees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 485
9.5 A Simple Recursive Descent Parser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 489
9.5.1 Backus-Naur Form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 489
9.5.2 Recursive Descent Parsing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 490
9.5.3 Building an Expression Tree . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 494
Exercises for Chapter 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 498
Quiz on Chapter 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 501

10 Generic Programming and Collection Classes 503

10.1 Generic Programming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 503
10.1.1 Generic Programming in Smalltalk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 504
10.1.2 Generic Programming in C++ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 505
10.1.3 Generic Programming in Java . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 506
10.1.4 The Java Collection Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 507
10.1.5 Iterators and for-each Loops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 509
10.1.6 Equality and Comparison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 511
10.1.7 Generics and Wrapper Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 514
10.2 Lists and Sets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 514
10.2.1 ArrayList and LinkedList . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 515
10.2.2 Sorting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 518
10.2.3 TreeSet and HashSet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 519
10.2.4 Priority Queues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 521
CONTENTS viii

10.3 Maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 522

10.3.1 The Map Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 523
10.3.2 Views, SubSets, and SubMaps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 524
10.3.3 Hash Tables and Hash Codes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 527
10.4 Programming with the JCF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 529
10.4.1 Symbol Tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 529
10.4.2 Sets Inside a Map . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 531
10.4.3 Using a Comparator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 534
10.4.4 Word Counting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 535
10.5 Writing Generic Classes and Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 537
10.5.1 Simple Generic Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 538
10.5.2 Simple Generic Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 540
10.5.3 Wildcard Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 542
10.5.4 Bounded Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 545
10.6 Introduction the Stream API . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 548
10.6.1 Generic Functional Interfaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 549
10.6.2 Making Streams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 550
10.6.3 Operations on Streams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 552
10.6.4 An Experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 555
Exercises for Chapter 10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 557
Quiz on Chapter 10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 562

11 I/O Streams, Files, and Networking 565

11.1 I/O Streams, Readers, and Writers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 565
11.1.1 Character and Byte Streams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 566
11.1.2 PrintWriter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 568
11.1.3 Data Streams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 569
11.1.4 Reading Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 570
11.1.5 The Scanner Class . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 571
11.1.6 Serialized Object I/O . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 573
11.2 Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 574
11.2.1 Reading and Writing Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 574
11.2.2 Files and Directories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 578
11.2.3 File Dialog Boxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 580
11.3 Programming With Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 583
11.3.1 Copying a File . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 583
11.3.2 Persistent Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 586
11.3.3 Storing Objects in Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 588
11.4 Networking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 593
11.4.1 URLs and URLConnections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 594
11.4.2 TCP/IP and Client/Server . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 596
11.4.3 Sockets in Java . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 598
11.4.4 A Trivial Client/Server . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 599
11.4.5 A Simple Network Chat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 603
11.5 A Brief Introduction to XML . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 607
11.5.1 Basic XML Syntax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 608
11.5.2 Working With the DOM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 609
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Exercises for Chapter 11 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 615

Quiz on Chapter 11 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 618

12 Threads and Multiprocessing 619

12.1 Introduction to Threads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 619
12.1.1 Creating and Running Threads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 620
12.1.2 Operations on Threads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 625
12.1.3 Mutual Exclusion with “synchronized” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 627
12.1.4 Volatile Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 631
12.1.5 Atomic Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 632
12.2 Programming with Threads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 633
12.2.1 Threads versus Timers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 633
12.2.2 Recursion in a Thread . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 635
12.2.3 Threads for Background Computation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 637
12.2.4 Threads for Multiprocessing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 639
12.3 Threads and Parallel Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 641
12.3.1 Problem Decomposition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 641
12.3.2 Thread Pools and Task Queues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 642
12.3.3 Producer/Consumer and Blocking Queues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 645
12.3.4 The ExecutorService Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 649
12.3.5 Wait and Notify . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 651
12.4 Threads and Networking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 656
12.4.1 The Blocking I/O Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 656
12.4.2 An Asynchronous Network Chat Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 658
12.4.3 A Threaded Network Server . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 661
12.4.4 Using a Thread Pool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 663
12.4.5 Distributed Computing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 665
12.5 Network Programming Example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 670
12.5.1 The Netgame Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 670
12.5.2 A Simple Chat Room . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 674
12.5.3 A Networked TicTacToe Game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 677
12.5.4 A Networked Poker Game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 680
Exercises for Chapter 12 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 681
Quiz on Chapter 12 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 685

13 GUI Programming Continued 687

13.1 Properties and Bindings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 687
13.1.1 Observable Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 688
13.1.2 Bindable Properties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 689
13.1.3 Bidirectional Bindings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 691
13.2 Fancier Graphics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 693
13.2.1 Fancier Strokes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 694
13.2.2 Fancier Paints . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 695
13.2.3 Transforms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 698
13.2.4 Stacked Canvasses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 701
13.2.5 Pixel Manipulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 702
13.2.6 Image I/O . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 705
13.3 Complex Components and MVC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 707
CONTENTS x

13.3.1 A Simple Custom Component . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 707

13.3.2 The MVC Pattern . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 709
13.3.3 ListView and ComboBox . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 710
13.3.4 TableView . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 714
13.4 Mostly Windows and Dialogs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 719
13.4.1 Dialog Boxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 719
13.4.2 WebView and WebEngine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 722
13.4.3 Managing Multiple Windows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 723
13.5 Finishing Touches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 727
13.5.1 The Mandelbrot Set . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 727
13.5.2 Design of the Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 729
13.5.3 Events, Listeners, and Bindings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 732
13.5.4 A Few More GUI Details . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 733
13.5.5 Internationalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 735
13.5.6 Preferences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 737
Exercises for Chapter 13 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 739
Quiz on Chapter 13 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 741

Appendix: Source Files 743

Glossary 753
Preface

Introduction to Programming Using Java is a free introductory computer programming

textbook that uses Java as the language of instruction. This version of the book covers Java 17.
It is suitable for use in an introductory programming course and for people who are trying to
learn programming on their own. There are no prerequisites beyond a general familiarity with
the ideas of computers and programs. There is more than enough material for a full year of
college-level programming. Chapters 1 through 7 can be used as a textbook in a one-semester
college-level course or in a year-long high school course. The remaining chapters can be covered
in a second course.
The textbook home page, https://math.hws.edu/javanotes/, has links for downloading both
web site and PDF versions of the book. Example programs and solutions to end-of-chapter
exercises are part of the web site download and can also be downloaded separately. Readers are
encouraged to download the source code for the examples and to read and run the programs as
they read the book. Readers are also strongly encouraged to read the exercise solutions if they
want to get the most out of this book.
In style, this is a textbook rather than a tutorial. That is, it concentrates on explaining
concepts rather than giving step-by-step how-to-do-it guides. I have tried to use a conversational
writing style that might be closer to classroom lecture than to a typical textbook. This is
certainly not a Java reference book, and it is not a comprehensive survey of all the features
of Java. It is not written as a quick introduction to Java for people who already know
another programming language. Instead, it is directed mainly towards people who are learning
programming for the first time, and it is as much about general programming concepts as
it is about Java in particular. I believe that Introduction to Programming using Java is
fully competitive with the conventionally published, printed programming textbooks that are
available on the market. (Well, all right, I’ll confess that I think it’s better.)
There are several approaches to teaching Java. One approach uses graphical user interface
programming from the very beginning. And some people believe that object oriented
programming should be emphasized from the very beginning. These are not the approach that I
take. The approach that I favor starts with the more basic building blocks of programming and
builds from there. After an introductory chapter, I cover procedural programming in Chapters
2, 3, and 4. Object-oriented programming is introduced in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 covers the
closely related topic of event-oriented programming and graphical user interfaces. Arrays are
introduced in Chapter 3 with a full treatment in Chapter 7. Chapter 8 is a short chapter that
marks a turning point in the book, moving beyond the fundamental ideas of programming to
cover more advanced topics. Chapter 8 is about writing robust, correct, and efficient programs.
Chapters 9 and 10 cover recursion and data structures, including generic programming and
the Java Collection Framework. Chapter 11 is about files and networking. Chapter 12 covers
threads and parallel processing. Finally, Chapter 13 returns to the topic of graphical user
interface programming to cover some more advanced features.

xi
Preface xii

∗ ∗ ∗
Java currently has two major approaches to Graphical User Interface programming: JavaFX
and Swing. This edition of the textbook uses JavaFX, but there is an alternative edition
that uses Swing. The main differences are in Chapters 6 and 13, which are devoted to GUI
programming, but GUI programs and GUI-related material in other chapters also use JavaFX
exclusively. For the Swing edition, much of the GUI material is taken from Version 7 of this
textbook, with some updating and modification.
Swing is a standard part of Java. JavaFX was introduced as a more modern approach to
GUI programming, but it must be downloaded and installed separately from Java itself, which
makes it more complicated to use. Swing and JavaFX can both be used to write complex, fully
functional GUI programs, and either one is a reasonable choice. Version 8 of this textbook used
JavaFX. The alternative edition that uses Swing has been added for Version 9.
GUI programming was never included in the textbook as an end in itself, and it would take
another textbook to cover the topic in its entirety. I cover GUI because it is a great example of
object-oriented programming, it lets me introduce event-driven programs, and it lets students
literally see the effect of the code that they write. JavaFX and Swing both offer good support
for all of those purposes.
∗ ∗ ∗
Version 8 of this textbook originally covered Java 8, but minor updates of that version added
notes about new features in Java 9 through Java 16. Version 9 of the book covers Java 17. The
main change from Version 8 is the addition of the Swing edition. A section on records has been
added to Chapter 7. Many examples have been modified to use text blocks and the new switch
statement syntax. Some references to the general idea of “abstraction” have been added, such
as a short subsection on control abstraction in Section 3.1. A short subsection on final classes
and methods has been added to Section 5.5. There are also small corrections and modifications
throughout.
The majority of this textbook is valid for Java 8, and the book does not cover features
added after Java 8 in as much detail. Note that only Java 8, 11, and 17 are “long-term
support” releases. When I introduce a feature that requires Java 11 or Java 17, I will make
note of that fact. However, I will never refer to any of the non-long-term-support releases.
∗ ∗ ∗
The first version of the book was written in 1996, and there have been several versions since
then. Version 9 will be the last version. All editions are archived (at least until my retirement
in December 2022 and hopefully beyond) at the following Web addresses:
• First edition: https://math.hws.edu/eck/cs124/javanotes1/ (Covers Java 1.0.)
• Second edition: https://math.hws.edu/eck/cs124/javanotes2/ (Covers Java 1.1.)
• Third edition: https://math.hws.edu/eck/cs124/javanotes3/ (Covers Java 1.1.)
• Fourth edition: https://math.hws.edu/eck/cs124/javanotes4/ (Covers Java 1.4.)
• Fifth edition: https://math.hws.edu/eck/cs124/javanotes5/ (Covers Java 5.0.)
• Sixth edition: https://math.hws.edu/eck/cs124/javanotes6/ (Covers Java 5.0, with a bit
of 6.0.)
• Seventh edition: https://math.hws.edu/eck/cs124/javanotes7/ (Covers Java 7.)
• Eighth edition: https://math.hws.edu/eck/cs124/javanotes8/ (Covers Java 8, plus a bit
of 11 and 17.)
Preface xiii

• Ninth edition with JavaFX: https://math.hws.edu/eck/cs124/javanotes9/ (Covers Java

17.)
• Ninth edition with Swing: https://math.hws.edu/eck/cs124/javanotes9-swing/ (Covers
Java 17.)
This textbook is free, but it is not in the public domain. Version 9 is published under the
terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License. To view
a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/. For example,
you can:
• Post an unmodified copy of the on-line version on your own Web site (including the parts
that list the author and state the license under which it is distributed!).
• Give away unmodified copies of this book or sell them at cost of production, as long as
they meet the requirements of the license.
• Use the book as a textbook for a course that you are teaching (even though the students
are paying to take that course).
• Make modified copies of the complete book or parts of it and post them on the web or
otherwise distribute them non-commercially, provided that attribution to the author is
given, the modifications are clearly noted, and the modified copies are distributed under
the same license as the original. This includes translations to other languages.
For uses of the book in ways not covered by the license, permission of the author is required.
∗ ∗ ∗
A technical note on production: The on-line and PDF versions of this book are created
from a single source, which is written largely in XML. To produce the PDF version, the XML
is processed into a form that can be used by the TeX typesetting program. In addition to XML
files, the source includes DTDs, XSLT transformations, Java source code files, image files, a
TeX macro file, and a couple of scripts that are used in processing. The scripts work on Linux
and on MacOS. I have made the complete source files available for download here:
https://math.hws.edu/eck/cs124/downloads/javanotes9-full-source.zip
These files were not originally meant for publication, and therefore are not very cleanly
written. Furthermore, it requires a fair amount of expertise to use them. However, I have had
several requests for the sources and have made them available on an “as-is” basis. For more
information about the sources and how they are used see the README file from the source
download.
The source files for the JavaFX edition and for the Swing edition are actually generated
from a common set of source files that would be even harder to use. If you are interested in
exploring them, those ultimate source files can be found on Github. You can browse the files
online, or you can clone the git repository, using the following URL:
https://github.com/davidjeck/javanotes9
∗ ∗ ∗
Professor David J. Eck
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Email: [email protected]
WWW: https://math.hws.edu/eck/
Chapter 1

Overview: The Mental Landscape

When you begin a journey, it’s a good idea to have a mental map of the terrain you’ll be
passing through. The same is true for an intellectual journey, such as learning to write computer
programs. In this case, you’ll need to know the basics of what computers are and how they
work. You’ll want to have some idea of what a computer program is and how one is created.
Since you will be writing programs in the Java programming language, you’ll want to know
something about that language in particular and about the modern computing environment for
which Java is designed.
As you read this chapter, don’t worry if you can’t understand everything in detail. (In fact,
it would be impossible for you to learn all the details from the brief expositions in this chapter.)
Concentrate on learning enough about the big ideas to orient yourself, in preparation for the
rest of the book. Most of what is covered in this chapter will be covered in much greater detail
later in the book.

1.1 The Fetch and Execute Cycle: Machine Language

A computer is a complex system consisting of many different components. But at the
heart—or the brain, if you want—of the computer is a single component that does the actual
computing. This is the Central Processing Unit, or CPU. In a modern desktop computer,
the CPU is a single “chip” on the order of one square inch in size. The job of the CPU is to
execute programs.
A program is simply a list of unambiguous instructions meant to be followed mechanically
by a computer. A computer is built to carry out instructions that are written in a very simple
type of language called machine language. Each type of computer has its own machine
language, and the computer can directly execute a program only if the program is expressed in
that language. (It can execute programs written in other languages if they are first translated
into machine language.)
When the CPU executes a program, that program is stored in the computer’s main
memory (also called the RAM or random access memory). In addition to the program,
memory can also hold data that is being used or processed by the program. Main memory
consists of a sequence of locations. These locations are numbered, and the sequence number
of a location is called its address. An address provides a way of picking out one particular piece
of information from among the millions stored in memory. When the CPU needs to access the
program instruction or data in a particular location, it sends the address of that information
as a signal to the memory; the memory responds by sending back the value contained in the

1
CHAPTER 1. THE MENTAL LANDSCAPE 2

specified location. The CPU can also store information in memory by specifying the information
to be stored and the address of the location where it is to be stored.
On the level of machine language, the operation of the CPU is fairly straightforward
(although it is very complicated in detail). The CPU executes a program that is stored as a
sequence of machine language instructions in main memory. It does this by repeatedly reading,
or fetching , an instruction from memory and then carrying out, or executing , that instruction.
This process—fetch an instruction, execute it, fetch another instruction, execute it, and so on
forever—is called the fetch-and-execute cycle. With one exception, which will be covered
in the next section, this is all that the CPU ever does. (This is all really somewhat more
complicated in modern computers. A typical processing chip these days contains several CPU
“cores,” which allows it to execute several instructions simultaneously. And access to main
memory is speeded up by memory “caches,” which can be more quickly accessed than main
memory and which are meant to hold data and instructions that the CPU is likely to need soon.
However, these complications don’t change the basic operation.)
A CPU contains an Arithmetic Logic Unit, or ALU, which is the part of the processor
that carries out operations such as addition and subtraction. It also holds a small number of
registers, which are small memory units capable of holding a single number. A typical CPU
might have 16 or 32 “general purpose” registers, which hold data values that are immediately
accessible for processing, and many machine language instructions refer to these registers. For
example, there might be an instruction that takes two numbers from two specified registers,
adds those numbers (using the ALU), and stores the result back into a register. And there
might be instructions for copying a data value from main memory into a register, or from a
register into main memory.
The CPU also includes special purpose registers. The most important of these is the
program counter , or PC. The CPU uses the PC to keep track of where it is in the program
it is executing. The PC simply stores the memory address of the next instruction that the
CPU should execute. At the beginning of each fetch-and-execute cycle, the CPU checks the
PC to see which instruction it should fetch. During the course of the fetch-and-execute cycle,
the number in the PC is updated to indicate the instruction that is to be executed in the next
cycle. Usually, but not always, this is just the instruction that sequentially follows the current
instruction in the program. Some machine language instructions modify the value that is stored
in the PC. This makes it possible for the computer to “jump” from one point in the program
to another point, which is essential for implementing the program features known as loops and
branches that are discussed in Section 1.4.
∗ ∗ ∗
A computer executes machine language programs mechanically—that is without under-
standing them or thinking about them—simply because of the way it is physically put together.
This is not an easy concept. A computer is a machine built of millions of tiny switches called
transistors, which have the property that they can be wired together in such a way that an
output from one switch can turn another switch on or off. As a computer computes, these
switches turn each other on or off in a pattern determined both by the way they are wired
together and by the program that the computer is executing.
Machine language instructions are expressed as binary numbers. A binary number is made
up of just two possible digits, zero and one. Each zero or one is called a bit. So, a machine
language instruction is just a sequence of zeros and ones. Each particular sequence encodes
some particular instruction. The data that the computer manipulates is also encoded as binary
numbers. In modern computers, each memory location holds a byte, which is a sequence of
CHAPTER 1. THE MENTAL LANDSCAPE 3

eight bits. A machine language instruction or a piece of data generally consists of several bytes,
stored in consecutive memory locations. For example, when a CPU reads an instruction from
memory, it might actually read four or eight bytes from four or eight memory locations; the
memory address of the instruction is the address of the first of those bytes.
A computer can work directly with binary numbers because switches can readily represent
such numbers: Turn the switch on to represent a one; turn it off to represent a zero. Machine
language instructions are stored in memory as patterns of switches turned on or off. When a
machine language instruction is loaded into the CPU, all that happens is that certain switches
are turned on or off in the pattern that encodes that instruction. The CPU is built to respond
to this pattern by executing the instruction it encodes; it does this simply because of the way
all the other switches in the CPU are wired together.
So, you should understand this much about how computers work: Main memory holds
machine language programs and data. These are encoded as binary numbers. The CPU
fetches machine language instructions from memory one after another and executes them.
Each instruction makes the CPU perform some very small task, such as adding two numbers or
moving data to or from memory. The CPU does all this mechanically, without thinking about or
understanding what it does—and therefore the program it executes must be perfect, complete
in all details, and unambiguous because the CPU can do nothing but execute it exactly as
written. Here is a schematic view of this first-stage understanding of the computer:

Memory

CPU 10001010
00001100
(Location
(Location
0)
1)
10111000 (Location 2)
Registers Data to Memory 01000001 (Location 3)
00001011 (Location 4)
Data from Memory 11011101 (Location 5)
10110000 (Location 6)
01010010 (Location 7)
ALU 11111010 (Location 8)
01001100 (Location 9)
Address for 00100011 (Location 10)
PC
reading/writing
00011010 (Location 11)
data
. .
. .
. .

1.2 Asynchronous Events: Polling Loops and Interrupts

The CPU spends almost all of its time fetching instructions from memory and executing
them. However, the CPU and main memory are only two out of many components in a real
computer system. A complete system contains other devices such as:
• A hard disk or solid state drive for storing programs and data files. (Note that main
memory holds only a comparatively small amount of information, and holds it only as
long as the power is turned on. A hard disk or solid state drive is used for permanent
storage of larger amounts of information, but programs have to be loaded from there into
main memory before they can actually be executed. A hard disk stores data on a spinning
magnetic disk, while a solid state drive is a purely electronic device with no moving parts.)
CHAPTER 1. THE MENTAL LANDSCAPE 4

• A keyboard and mouse for user input.

• A monitor and printer which can be used to display the computer’s output.
• An audio output device that allows the computer to play sounds.
• A network interface that allows the computer to communicate with other computers
that are connected to it on a network, either wirelessly or by wire.
• A scanner that converts images into coded binary numbers that can be stored and
manipulated on the computer.
The list of devices is entirely open ended, and computer systems are built so that they can
easily be expanded by adding new devices. Somehow the CPU has to communicate with and
control all these devices. The CPU can only do this by executing machine language instructions
(which is all it can do, period). The way this works is that for each device in a system, there
is a device driver , which consists of software that the CPU executes when it has to deal
with the device. Installing a new device on a system generally has two steps: plugging the
device physically into the computer, and installing the device driver software. Without the
device driver, the actual physical device would be useless, since the CPU would not be able to
communicate with it.
∗ ∗ ∗
A computer system consisting of many devices is typically organized by connecting those
devices to one or more busses. A bus is a set of wires that carry various sorts of information
between the devices connected to those wires. The wires carry data, addresses, and control
signals. An address directs the data to a particular device and perhaps to a particular register
or location within that device. Control signals can be used, for example, by one device to alert
another that data is available for it on the data bus. A fairly simple computer system might
be organized like this:

CPU Empty Slot

for future
Memory Disk Drive Expansion

Input/ Data
Output Address
Controller Control

Display Keyboard Network

Interface

Now, devices such as keyboard, mouse, and network interface can produce input that needs
to be processed by the CPU. How does the CPU know that the data is there? One simple idea,
which turns out to be not very satisfactory, is for the CPU to keep checking for incoming data
over and over. Whenever it finds data, it processes it. This method is called polling , since
the CPU polls the input devices continually to see whether they have any input data to report.
Unfortunately, although polling is very simple, it is also very inefficient. The CPU can waste
an awful lot of time just waiting for input.
CHAPTER 1. THE MENTAL LANDSCAPE 5

To avoid this inefficiency, interrupts are generally used instead of polling. An interrupt
is a signal sent by another device to the CPU. The CPU responds to an interrupt signal by
putting aside whatever it is doing in order to respond to the interrupt. Once it has handled
the interrupt, it returns to what it was doing before the interrupt occurred. For example, when
you press a key on your computer keyboard, a keyboard interrupt is sent to the CPU. The
CPU responds to this signal by interrupting what it is doing, reading the key that you pressed,
processing it, and then returning to the task it was performing before you pressed the key.
Again, you should understand that this is a purely mechanical process: A device signals an
interrupt simply by turning on a wire. The CPU is built so that when that wire is turned on,
the CPU saves enough information about what it is currently doing so that it can return to
the same state later. This information consists of the contents of important internal registers
such as the program counter. Then the CPU jumps to some predetermined memory location
and begins executing the instructions stored there. Those instructions make up an interrupt
handler that does the processing necessary to respond to the interrupt. (This interrupt handler
is part of the device driver software for the device that signaled the interrupt.) At the end of
the interrupt handler is an instruction that tells the CPU to jump back to what it was doing;
it does that by restoring its previously saved state.
Interrupts allow the CPU to deal with asynchronous events. In the regular fetch-
and-execute cycle, things happen in a predetermined order; everything that happens is
“synchronized” with everything else. Interrupts make it possible for the CPU to deal efficiently
with events that happen “asynchronously,” that is, at unpredictable times.
As another example of how interrupts are used, consider what happens when the CPU needs
to access data that is stored on a hard disk. The CPU can access data directly only if it is
in main memory. Data on the disk has to be copied into memory before it can be accessed.
Unfortunately, on the scale of speed at which the CPU operates, the disk drive is extremely
slow. When the CPU needs data from the disk, it sends a signal to the disk drive telling it
to locate the data and get it ready. (This signal is sent synchronously, under the control of
a regular program.) Then, instead of just waiting the long and unpredictable amount of time
that the disk drive will take to do this, the CPU goes on with some other task. When the disk
drive has the data ready, it sends an interrupt signal to the CPU. The interrupt handler can
then read the requested data.
∗ ∗ ∗
Now, you might have noticed that all this only makes sense if the CPU actually has several
tasks to perform. If it has nothing better to do, it might as well spend its time polling for input
or waiting for disk drive operations to complete. All modern computers use multitasking to
perform several tasks at once. Some computers can be used by several people at once. Since the
CPU is so fast, it can quickly switch its attention from one user to another, devoting a fraction
of a second to each user in turn. This application of multitasking is called timesharing . But a
modern personal computer with just a single user also uses multitasking. For example, the user
might be typing a paper while a clock is continuously displaying the time and a file is being
downloaded over the network.
Each of the individual tasks that the CPU is working on is called a thread . (Or a process;
there are technical differences between threads and processes, but they are not important here,
since it is threads that are used in Java.) Many CPUs can literally execute more than one
thread simultaneously—such CPUs contain multiple “cores,” each of which can run a thread—
but there is always a limit on the number of threads that can be executed at the same time.
Since there are often more threads than can be executed simultaneously, the computer has to be
CHAPTER 1. THE MENTAL LANDSCAPE 6

able switch its attention from one thread to another, just as a timesharing computer switches
its attention from one user to another. In general, a thread that is being executed will continue
to run until one of several things happens:
• The thread might voluntarily yield control, to give other threads a chance to run.
• The thread might have to wait for some asynchronous event to occur. For example, the
thread might request some data from the disk drive, or it might wait for the user to press
a key. While it is waiting, the thread is said to be blocked , and other threads, if any, have
a chance to run. When the event occurs, an interrupt will “wake up” the thread so that
it can continue running.
• The thread might use up its allotted slice of time and be suspended to allow other threads
to run. Most computers can “forcibly” suspend a thread in this way; computers that
can do that are said to use preemptive multitasking . To do preemptive multitasking,
a computer needs a special timer device that generates an interrupt at regular intervals,
such as 100 times per second. When a timer interrupt occurs, the CPU has a chance to
switch from one thread to another, whether the thread that is currently running likes it
or not. All modern desktop and laptop computers, and even typical smartphones and
tablets, use preemptive multitasking.
Ordinary users, and indeed ordinary programmers, have no need to deal with interrupts and
interrupt handlers. They can concentrate on the different tasks that they want the computer to
perform; the details of how the computer manages to get all those tasks done are not important
to them. In fact, most users, and many programmers, can ignore threads and multitasking
altogether. However, threads have become increasingly important as computers have become
more powerful and as they have begun to make more use of multitasking and multiprocessing.
In fact, the ability to work with threads is fast becoming an essential job skill for programmers.
Fortunately, Java has good support for threads, which are built into the Java programming
language as a fundamental programming concept. Programming with threads will be covered
in Chapter 12.
Just as important in Java and in modern programming in general is the basic concept of
asynchronous events. While programmers don’t actually deal with interrupts directly, they
do often find themselves writing event handlers, which, like interrupt handlers, are called
asynchronously when specific events occur. Such “event-driven programming” has a very
different feel from the more traditional straight-through, synchronous programming. We will
begin with the more traditional type of programming, which is still used for programming
individual tasks, but we will return to threads and events later in the text, starting in Chapter 6
∗ ∗ ∗
By the way, the software that does all the interrupt handling, handles communication with
the user and with hardware devices, and controls which thread is allowed to run is called
the operating system. The operating system is the basic, essential software without which
a computer would not be able to function. Other programs, such as word processors and
Web browsers, are dependent upon the operating system. Common desktop operating systems
include Linux, various versions of Windows, and MacOS. Operating systems for smartphones
and tablets include Android and iOS.
CHAPTER 1. THE MENTAL LANDSCAPE 7

1.3 The Java Virtual Machine

Machine language consists of very simple instructions that can be executed directly by
the CPU of a computer. Almost all programs, though, are written in high-level programming
languages such as Java, Python, or C++. A program written in a high-level language cannot
be run directly on any computer. First, it has to be translated into machine language. This
translation can be done by a program called a compiler . A compiler takes a high-level-language
program and translates it into an executable machine-language program. Once the translation
is done, the machine-language program can be run any number of times, but of course it can
only be run on one type of computer, since each type of computer has its own individual
machine language. (In fact, Java also depends on the particular operating system under which
it is running, since it must work with the operating system to perform certain tasks such as
accessing the computer’s hardware. But let’s ignore that complication here.) If the program is
to run on another type of computer it has to be re-translated, using a different compiler, into
the appropriate machine language.
There is an alternative to compiling a high-level language program. Instead of using a
compiler, which translates the program all at once, you can use an interpreter , which translates
it instruction-by-instruction, as necessary. An interpreter is a program that acts much like a
CPU, with a kind of fetch-and-execute cycle. In order to execute a program, the interpreter
runs in a loop in which it repeatedly reads one instruction from the program, decides what is
necessary to carry out that instruction, and then performs the appropriate machine-language
commands to do so.
(A compiler is like a human translator who translates an entire book from one language to
another, producing a new book in the second language. An interpreter is more like a human
interpreter who translates a speech at the United Nations from one language to another at the
same time that the speech is being given.)
One use of interpreters is to execute high-level language programs. For example, the
programming language Lisp is usually executed by an interpreter rather than a compiler.
However, interpreters have another purpose: They can let you use a machine-language program
meant for one type of computer on a completely different type of computer. For example, one
of the original home computers was the Commodore 64 or “C64”. While you might not find an
actual C64, you can find programs that run on other computers—or even in a web browser—
that “emulate” one. Such an emulator can run C64 programs by acting as an interpreter for
the C64 machine language.
∗ ∗ ∗
The designers of Java chose to use a combination of compiling and interpreting. Programs
written in Java are compiled into machine language, but it is a machine language for a
computer that doesn’t really exist. This so-called “virtual” computer is known as the Java
Virtual Machine, or JVM. The machine language for the Java Virtual Machine is called Java
bytecode. There is no reason why Java bytecode couldn’t be used as the machine language of a
real computer, rather than a virtual computer. But in fact the use of a virtual machine makes
possible one of the main selling points of Java: the fact that it can actually be used on any
computer. All that the computer needs is an interpreter for Java bytecode. Such an interpreter
simulates the JVM in the same way that a C64 emulator simulates a Commodore 64 computer.
(The term JVM is also used for the Java bytecode interpreter program that does the simulation,
so we say that a computer needs a JVM in order to run Java programs. Technically, it would
be more correct to say that the interpreter implements the JVM than to say that it is a JVM.)
CHAPTER 1. THE MENTAL LANDSCAPE 8

Of course, a different Java bytecode interpreter is needed for each type of computer, but
once a computer has a Java bytecode interpreter, it can run any Java bytecode program, and
the same program can be run on any computer that has such an interpreter. This is one of the
essential features of Java: the same compiled program can be run on many different types of
computers.

Java Interpreter
for Mac OS

Java
Java Java Interpreter
Compiler Bytecode
Program for Windows
Program

Java Interpreter
for Linux

Why, you might wonder, use the intermediate Java bytecode at all? Why not just distribute
the original Java program and let each person compile it into the machine language of whatever
computer they want to run it on? There are several reasons. First of all, a compiler has to
understand Java, a complex high-level language. The compiler is itself a complex program.
A Java bytecode interpreter, on the other hand, is a relatively small, simple program. This
makes it easy to write a bytecode interpreter for a new type of computer; once that is done,
that computer can run any compiled Java program. It would be much harder to write a Java
compiler for the same computer.
Furthermore, Java was created with the idea that some programs would be downloaded over
a network. This leads to obvious security concerns: you don’t want to download and run a
program that will damage your computer or your files. The bytecode interpreter acts as a buffer
between you and the program you download. You are really running the interpreter, which runs
the downloaded program indirectly. The interpreter can protect you from potentially dangerous
actions on the part of that program.
When Java was still a new language, it was criticized for being slow: Since Java bytecode was
executed by an interpreter, it seemed that Java bytecode programs could never run as quickly
as programs compiled into native machine language (that is, the actual machine language of the
computer on which the program is running). However, this problem has been largely overcome
by the use of just-in-time compilers for executing Java bytecode. A just-in-time compiler
translates Java bytecode into native machine language. It does this while it is executing the
program. Just as for a normal interpreter, the input to a just-in-time compiler is a Java bytecode
program, and its task is to execute that program. But as it is executing the program, it also
translates parts of it into the native machine language. The translated parts of the program
can then be executed much more quickly than they could be interpreted. Since a given part
of a program is often executed many times as the program runs, a just-in-time compiler can
significantly speed up the overall execution time.
I should note that there is no necessary connection between Java and Java bytecode. A
program written in Java could certainly be compiled into the machine language of a real
computer. And programs written in other languages can be compiled into Java bytecode.
However, the combination of Java and Java bytecode is platform-independent, secure, and
CHAPTER 1. THE MENTAL LANDSCAPE 9

network-compatible while allowing you to program in a modern high-level object-oriented

language.
There are even some other programming languages that compile into Java bytecode. The
compiled bytecode programs can then be executed by a standard JVM. New languages that
have been developed specifically for programming the JVM include Scala, Groovy, Clojure, and
Processing. Jython and JRuby are versions of older languages, Python and Ruby, that target
the JVM. These languages make it possible to enjoy many of the advantages of the JVM while
avoiding some of the technicalities of the Java language. In fact, the use of other languages
with the JVM has become important enough that several new features have been added to the
JVM specifically to add better support for some of those languages. And this improvement to
the JVM has in turn made possible some new features in Java.
∗ ∗ ∗
I should also note that the really hard part of platform-independence is providing a
“Graphical User Interface”—with windows, buttons, etc.—that will work on all the platforms
that support Java. You’ll see more about this problem in Section 1.6.

1.4 Fundamental Building Blocks of Programs

There are two basic aspects of programming: data and instructions. To work with
data, you need to understand variables and types; to work with instructions, you need to
understand control structures and subroutines. You’ll spend a large part of the course
becoming familiar with these concepts.
A variable is just a memory location (or several consecutive locations treated as a unit)
that has been given a name so that it can be easily referred to and used in a program. The
programmer only has to worry about the name; it is the compiler’s responsibility to keep track
of the memory location. As a programmer, you just need to keep in mind that the name refers
to a kind of “box” in memory that can hold data, even though you don’t have to know where
in memory that box is located.
In Java and in many other programming languages, a variable has a type that indicates
what sort of data it can hold. One type of variable might hold integers—whole numbers such as
3, -7, and 0—while another holds floating point numbers—numbers with decimal points such as
3.14, -2.7, or 17.0. (Yes, the computer does make a distinction between the integer 17 and the
floating-point number 17.0; they actually look quite different inside the computer.) There could
also be types for individual characters (’A’, ’;’, etc.), strings (“Hello”, “A string can include
many characters”, etc.), and less common types such as dates, colors, sounds, or any other kind
of data that a program might need to store.
Programming languages always have commands for getting data into and out of variables
and for doing computations with data. For example, the following “assignment statement,”
which might appear in a Java program, tells the computer to take the number stored in the
variable named “principal”, multiply that number by 0.07, and then store the result in the
variable named “interest”:
interest = principal * 0.07;
There are also “input commands” for getting data from the user or from files on the computer’s
disks, and there are “output commands” for sending data in the other direction.
These basic commands—for moving data from place to place and for performing
computations—are the building blocks for all programs. These building blocks are combined
CHAPTER 1. THE MENTAL LANDSCAPE 10

into complex programs using control structures and subroutines.

∗ ∗ ∗
A program is a sequence of instructions. In the ordinary “flow of control,” the computer
executes the instructions in the sequence in which they occur in the program, one after the
other. However, this is obviously very limited: the computer would soon run out of instructions
to execute. Control structures are special instructions that can change the flow of control.
There are two basic types of control structure: loops, which allow a sequence of instructions
to be repeated over and over, and branches, which allow the computer to decide between two
or more different courses of action by testing conditions that occur as the program is running.
For example, it might be that if the value of the variable “principal” is greater than 10000,
then the “interest” should be computed by multiplying the principal by 0.05; if not, then the
interest should be computed by multiplying the principal by 0.04. A program needs some
way of expressing this type of decision. In Java, it could be expressed using the following “if
statement”:
if (principal > 10000)
interest = principal * 0.05;
else
interest = principal * 0.04;
(Don’t worry about the details for now. Just remember that the computer can test a condition
and decide what to do next on the basis of that test.)
Loops are used when the same task has to be performed more than once. For example,
if you want to print out a mailing label for each name on a mailing list, you might say, “Get
the first name and address and print the label; get the second name and address and print
the label; get the third name and address and print the label. . . ” But this quickly becomes
ridiculous—and might not work at all if you don’t know in advance how many names there are.
What you would like to say is something like “While there are more names to process, get the
next name and address, and print the label.” A loop can be used in a program to express such
repetition.
∗ ∗ ∗
Large programs are so complex that it would be almost impossible to write them if there
were not some way to break them up into manageable “chunks.” Subroutines provide one way to
do this. A subroutine consists of the instructions for performing some task, grouped together
as a unit and given a name. That name can then be used as a substitute for the whole set of
instructions. For example, suppose that one of the tasks that your program needs to perform
is to draw a house on the screen. You can take the necessary instructions, make them into
a subroutine, and give that subroutine some appropriate name—say, “drawHouse()”. Then
anyplace in your program where you need to draw a house, you can do so with the single
command:
drawHouse();
This will have the same effect as repeating all the house-drawing instructions in each place.
The advantage here is not just that you save typing. Organizing your program into
subroutines also helps you organize your thinking and your program design effort. While writing
the house-drawing subroutine, you can concentrate on the problem of drawing a house without
worrying for the moment about the rest of the program. And once the subroutine is written,
you can forget about the details of drawing houses—that problem is solved, since you have a
CHAPTER 1. THE MENTAL LANDSCAPE 11

subroutine to do it for you. A subroutine becomes just like a built-in part of the language which
you can use without thinking about the details of what goes on “inside” the subroutine.
∗ ∗ ∗
Variables, types, loops, branches, and subroutines are the basis of what might be called
“traditional programming.” However, as programs become larger, additional structure is needed
to help deal with their complexity. One of the most effective tools that has been found is object-
oriented programming, which is discussed in the next section.

1.5 Objects and Object-oriented Programming

Programs must be designed. No one can just sit down at the computer and compose a
program of any complexity. The discipline called software engineering is concerned with
the construction of correct, working, well-written programs. The software engineer tries to
use accepted and proven methods for analyzing the problem to be solved and for designing a
program to solve that problem.
During the 1970s and into the 80s, the primary software engineering methodology was
structured programming . The structured programming approach to program design was
based on the following advice: To solve a large problem, break the problem into several pieces
and work on each piece separately; to solve each piece, treat it as a new problem which can itself
be broken down into smaller problems; eventually, you will work your way down to problems
that can be solved directly, without further decomposition. This approach is called top-down
programming .
There is nothing wrong with top-down programming. It is a valuable and often-used
approach to problem-solving. However, it is incomplete. For one thing, it deals almost entirely
with producing the instructions necessary to solve a problem. But as time went on, people
realized that the design of the data structures for a program was at least as important as the
design of subroutines and control structures. Top-down programming doesn’t give adequate
consideration to the data that the program manipulates.
Another problem with strict top-down programming is that it makes it difficult to reuse
work done for other projects. By starting with a particular problem and subdividing it into
convenient pieces, top-down programming tends to produce a design that is unique to that
problem. It is unlikely that you will be able to take a large chunk of programming from another
program and fit it into your project, at least not without extensive modification. Producing
high-quality programs is difficult and expensive, so programmers and the people who employ
them are always eager to reuse past work.
∗ ∗ ∗
So, in practice, top-down design is often combined with bottom-up design. In bottom-up
design, the approach is to start “at the bottom,” with problems that you already know how to
solve (and for which you might already have a reusable software component at hand). From
there, you can work upwards towards a solution to the overall problem.
The reusable components should be as “modular” as possible. A module is a component of a
larger system that interacts with the rest of the system in a simple, well-defined, straightforward
manner. The idea is that a module can be “plugged into” a system. The details of what goes on
inside the module are not important to the system as a whole, as long as the module fulfills its
assigned role correctly. This is called information hiding , and it is one of the most important
principles of software engineering.
CHAPTER 1. THE MENTAL LANDSCAPE 12

One common format for software modules is to contain some data, along with some
subroutines for manipulating that data. For example, a mailing-list module might contain
a list of names and addresses along with a subroutine for adding a new name, a subroutine for
printing mailing labels, and so forth. In such modules, the data itself is often hidden inside
the module; a program that uses the module can then manipulate the data only indirectly, by
calling the subroutines provided by the module. This protects the data, since it can only be
manipulated in known, well-defined ways. And it makes it easier for programs to use the module,
since they don’t have to worry about the details of how the data is represented. Information
about the representation of the data is hidden.
Modules that could support this kind of information-hiding became common in program-
ming languages in the early 1980s. Since then, a more advanced form of the same idea has
more or less taken over software engineering. This latest approach is called object-oriented
programming , often abbreviated as OOP.
The central concept of object-oriented programming is the object, which is a kind of module
containing data and subroutines. The point-of-view in OOP is that an object is a kind of self-
sufficient entity that has an internal state (the data it contains) and that can respond to
messages (calls to its subroutines). A mailing list object, for example, has a state consisting
of a list of names and addresses. If you send it a message telling it to add a name, it will
respond by modifying its state to reflect the change. If you send it a message telling it to print
itself, it will respond by printing out its list of names and addresses.
The OOP approach to software engineering is to start by identifying the objects involved in
a problem and the messages that those objects should respond to. The program that results is
a collection of objects, each with its own data and its own set of responsibilities. The objects
interact by sending messages to each other. There is not much “top-down” in the large-scale
design of such a program, and people used to more traditional programs can have a hard time
getting used to OOP. However, people who use OOP would claim that object-oriented programs
tend to be better models of the way the world itself works, and that they are therefore easier
to write, easier to understand, and more likely to be correct.
∗ ∗ ∗
You should think of objects as “knowing” how to respond to certain messages. Different
objects might respond to the same message in different ways. For example, a “print” message
would produce very different results, depending on the object it is sent to. This property of
objects—that different objects can respond to the same message in different ways—is called
polymorphism.
It is common for objects to bear a kind of “family resemblance” to one another. Objects
that contain the same type of data and that respond to the same messages in the same way
belong to the same class. (In actual programming, the class is primary; that is, a class is
created and then one or more objects are created using that class as a template.) But objects
can be similar without being in exactly the same class.
For example, consider a drawing program that lets the user draw lines, rectangles, ovals,
polygons, and curves on the screen. In the program, each visible object on the screen could be
represented by a software object in the program. There would be five classes of objects in the
program, one for each type of visible object that can be drawn. All the lines would belong to
one class, all the rectangles to another class, and so on. These classes are obviously related;
all of them represent “drawable objects.” They would, for example, all presumably be able to
respond to a “draw yourself” message. Another level of grouping, based on the data needed to
represent each type of object, is less obvious, but would be very useful in a program: We can
CHAPTER 1. THE MENTAL LANDSCAPE 13

group polygons and curves together as “multipoint objects,” while lines, rectangles, and ovals
are “two-point objects.” (A line is determined by its two endpoints, a rectangle by two of its
corners, and an oval by two corners of the rectangle that contains it. The rectangles that I am
talking about here have sides that are vertical and horizontal, so that they can be specified by
just two points; this is the common meaning of “rectangle” in drawing programs.) We could
diagram these relationships as follows:

DrawableObject

MultipointObject TwoPointObject

Polygon Curve Line Rectangle Oval

DrawableObject, MultipointObject, and TwoPointObject would be classes in the program.

MultipointObject and TwoPointObject would be subclasses of DrawableObject. The class
Line would be a subclass of TwoPointObject and (indirectly) of DrawableObject. A subclass of
a class is said to inherit the properties of that class. The subclass can add to its inheritance and
it can even “override” part of that inheritance (by defining a different response to some message).
Nevertheless, lines, rectangles, and so on are drawable objects, and the class DrawableObject
expresses this relationship.
Inheritance is a powerful means for organizing a program. It is also related to the problem
of reusing software components. A class is the ultimate reusable component. Not only can it
be reused directly if it fits exactly into a program you are trying to write, but if it just almost
fits, you can still reuse it by defining a subclass and making only the small changes necessary
to adapt it exactly to your needs.
So, OOP is meant to be both a superior program-development tool and a partial solution
to the software reuse problem. Objects, classes, and object-oriented programming will be
important themes throughout the rest of this text. You will start using objects that are built
into the Java language in the next chapter, and in Chapter 5 you will begin creating your own
classes and objects.

1.6 The Modern User Interface

When computers were first introduced, ordinary people—including most programmers—
couldn’t get near them. They were locked up in rooms with white-coated attendants who would
take your programs and data, feed them to the computer, and return the computer’s response
some time later. When timesharing—where the computer switches its attention rapidly from
one person to another—was invented in the 1960s, it became possible for several people to
interact directly with the computer at the same time. On a timesharing system, users sit at
“terminals” where they type commands to the computer, and the computer types back its re-
sponse. Early personal computers also used typed commands and responses, except that there
CHAPTER 1. THE MENTAL LANDSCAPE 14

was only one person involved at a time. This type of interaction between a user and a computer
is called a command-line interface.
Today, of course, most people interact with computers in a completely different way. They
use a Graphical User Interface, or GUI. The computer draws interface components on the
screen. The components include things like windows, scroll bars, menus, buttons, and icons.
Usually, a mouse is used to manipulate such components or, on “touchscreens,” your fingers.
Assuming that you have not just been teleported in from the 1970s, you are no doubt already
familiar with the basics of graphical user interfaces!
A lot of GUI interface components have become fairly standard. That is, they have similar
appearance and behavior on many different computer platforms including MacOS, Windows,
and Linux. Java programs, which are supposed to run on many different platforms without
modification to the program, can use all the standard GUI components. They might vary a
little in appearance from platform to platform, but their functionality should be identical on
any computer on which the program runs.
Shown below is an image of a very simple Java program that demonstrates a few standard
GUI interface components. When the program is run, a window similar to the picture shown
here will open on the computer screen. There are four components in the window with which the
user can interact: a button, a checkbox, a text field, and a pop-up menu. These components
are labeled. There are a few other components in the window. The labels themselves are
components (even though you can’t interact with them). The right half of the window is a
text area component, which can display multiple lines of text. A scrollbar component appears
alongside the text area when the number of lines of text becomes larger than will fit in the text
area. And in fact, the whole window can itself be considered to be a “component.”

(If you would like to run this program, the source code, GUIDemo.java, is available on line.
For more information on using this and other examples from this textbook, see Section 2.6.)
In fact, there are three complete sets of GUI components that can be used with Java. One
of these, the AWT or Abstract Windowing Toolkit, was part of the original version of Java.
The second, which is known as Swing , builds on the AWT; it was introduced in Java version
1.2, and was the standard GUI toolkit for many years. The third GUI toolkit, JavaFX, briefly
became a standard part of Java in Version 8 but is now distributed separately. JavaFX is meant
as a more modern way to write GUI applications, but using it is complicated by the fact that
it has to be downloaded and installed separately. This textbook covers JavaFX exclusively, but
an alternative version of the textbook is available that covers Swing instead. Either version of
the textbook can be a reasonable choice.
When a user interacts with GUI components, “events” are generated. For example, clicking
a push button generates an event, and pressing a key on the keyboard generates an event.
Each time an event is generated, a message is sent to the program telling it that the event has
occurred, and the program responds according to its program. In fact, a typical GUI program
CHAPTER 1. THE MENTAL LANDSCAPE 15

consists largely of “event handlers” that tell the program how to respond to various types of
events. In the above example, the program has been programmed to respond to each event by
displaying a message in the text area. In a more realistic example, the event handlers would
have more to do.
The use of the term “message” here is deliberate. Messages, as you saw in the
previous section, are sent to objects. In fact, Java GUI components are implemented as objects.
Java includes many predefined classes that represent various types of GUI components. Some
of these classes are subclasses of others. Here is a diagram showing just a few of the JavaFX
GUI classes and their relationships:

Control

Label ButtonBase Slider TextInputControl ComboBox

Button CheckBox TextField TextArea

Don’t worry about the details for now, but try to get some feel about how object-oriented
programming and inheritance are used here. Note that all the GUI classes shown here are
subclasses, directly or indirectly, of a class called Control, which represents general properties
that are shared by many JavaFX components. In the diagram, two of the direct subclasses
of Control themselves have subclasses. The classes TextField and TextArea, which have certain
behaviors in common, are grouped together as subclasses of TextInputControl. Similarly Button
and CheckBox are subclasses of ButtonBase, which represents properties common to both
buttons and checkboxes. (ComboBox, by the way, is the class that represents pop-up menus.)
Just from this brief discussion, perhaps you can see how GUI programming can make
effective use of object-oriented design. In fact, GUIs, with their “visible objects,” are probably
a major factor contributing to the popularity of OOP.
Programming with GUI components and events is one of the most interesting aspects of
Java. However, we will spend several chapters on the basics before returning to this topic in
Chapter 6.

1.7 The Internet and Beyond

Computers can be connected together on networks. A computer on a network can
communicate with other computers on the same network by exchanging data and files or by
sending and receiving messages. Computers on a network can even work together on a large
computation.
Today, millions of computers throughout the world are connected to a single huge network
that we know as the Internet. New computers are being connected to the Internet every day,
both by wireless communication and by physical connection using technologies such as DSL,
cable modems, and Ethernet.
CHAPTER 1. THE MENTAL LANDSCAPE 16

There are elaborate protocols for communication over the Internet. A protocol is simply a
detailed specification of how communication is to proceed. For two computers to communicate
at all, they must both be using the same protocols. The most basic protocols on the Internet are
the Internet Protocol (IP), which specifies how data is to be physically transmitted from one
computer to another, and the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which ensures that
data sent using IP is received in its entirety and without error. These two protocols, which are
referred to collectively as TCP/IP, provide a foundation for communication. Other protocols
use TCP/IP to send specific types of information such as web pages, electronic mail, and data
files.
All communication over the Internet is in the form of packets. A packet consists of some
data being sent from one computer to another, along with addressing information that indicates
where on the Internet that data is supposed to go. Think of a packet as an envelope with an
address on the outside and a message on the inside. (The message is the data.) The packet
also includes a “return address,” that is, the address of the sender. A packet can hold only
a limited amount of data; longer messages must be divided among several packets, which are
then sent individually over the Net and reassembled at their destination.
Every computer on the Internet has an IP address, a number that identifies it uniquely
among all the computers on the Net. (Actually, the claim about uniqueness is not quite true, but
the basic idea is valid, and the full truth is complicated.) The IP address is used for addressing
packets. A computer can only send data to another computer on the Internet if it knows that
computer’s IP address. Since people prefer to use names rather than numbers, most computers
are also identified by names, called domain names. For example, the main computer of
the Mathematics Department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges has the domain name
math.hws.edu. (Domain names are just for convenience; your computer still needs to know
IP addresses before it can communicate. There are computers on the Internet whose job it
is to translate domain names to IP addresses. When you use a domain name, your computer
sends a message to a domain name server to find out the corresponding IP address. Then, your
computer uses the IP address, rather than the domain name, to communicate with the other
computer.)
The Internet provides a number of services to the computers connected to it (and, of course,
to the users of those computers). These services use TCP/IP to send various types of data over
the Net. Among the most popular services are instant messaging, file sharing, electronic mail,
and the World-Wide Web. Each service has its own protocols, which are used to control
transmission of data over the network. Each service also has some sort of user interface, which
allows the user to view, send, and receive data through the service.
For example, the email service uses a protocol known as SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer
Protocol) to transfer email messages from one computer to another. Other protocols, such as
POP and IMAP, are used to fetch messages from an email account so that the recipient can
read them. A person who uses email, however, doesn’t need to understand or even know about
these protocols. Instead, they are used behind the scenes by computer programs to send and
receive email messages. These programs provide the user with an easy-to-use user interface to
the underlying network protocols.
The World-Wide Web is perhaps the most exciting of network services. The World-Wide
Web allows you to request pages of information that are stored on computers all over the
Internet. A Web page can contain links to other pages on the same computer from which it
was obtained or to other computers anywhere in the world. A computer that stores such pages
of information is called a web server . The user interface to the Web is the type of program
CHAPTER 1. THE MENTAL LANDSCAPE 17

known as a web browser . Common web browsers include Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Chrome,
and Safari. You use a Web browser to request a page of information. The browser sends a
request for that page to the computer on which the page is stored, and when a response is
received from that computer, the web browser displays it to you in a neatly formatted form.
A web browser is just a user interface to the Web. Behind the scenes, the web browser uses a
protocol called HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) to send each page request and to receive
the response from the web server.
∗ ∗ ∗
Now just what, you might be thinking, does all this have to do with Java? In fact, Java
is intimately associated with the Internet and the World-Wide Web. When Java was first
introduced, one of its big attractions was the ability to write applets. An applet was a small
program that is transmitted over the Internet and that runs on a web page. Applets made it
possible for a web page to perform complex tasks and have complex interactions with the user.
Alas, applets suffered from a variety of problems, and they are no longer used. There are now
other options for running programs on Web pages.
But applets were only one aspect of Java’s relationship with the Internet. Java can be
used to write complex, stand-alone applications that do not depend on a Web browser. Many
of these programs are network-related. For example many of the largest and most complex
web sites use web server software that is written in Java. Java includes excellent support for
network protocols, and its platform independence makes it possible to write network programs
that work on many different types of computer. You will learn about Java’s network support
in Chapter 11.
Its support for networking is not Java’s only advantage. But many good programming
languages have been invented only to be soon forgotten. Java had the good luck to ride on the
coattails of the Internet’s immense and increasing popularity.
∗ ∗ ∗
As Java has matured, its applications have reached far beyond the Net. The standard
version of Java already comes with support for many technologies, such as cryptography, data
compression, sound processing, and graphics. And programmers have written Java libraries to
provide additional capabilities. Complex, high-performance systems can be developed in Java.
For example, Hadoop, a system for large scale data processing, is written in Java. Hadoop
has been used by Yahoo, Facebook, and other Web sites to process the huge amounts of data
generated by their users.
Furthermore, Java is not restricted to use on traditional computers. For example, Java can
be used to write programs for Android smartphones (though not for the iPhone). (Android uses
Google’s own version of Java and does not use the same graphical user interface components
as standard Java.)
At this time, Java certainly ranks as one of the most widely used programming languages.
It is a good choice for almost any programming project that is meant to run on more than
one type of computing device, and is a reasonable choice even for many programs that will
run on only one device. It is probably still the most widely taught language at Colleges and
Universities. It is similar enough to other popular languages, such as C++, JavaScript, and
Python, that knowing it will give you a good start on learning those languages as well. Overall,
learning Java is a great starting point on the road to becoming an expert programmer. I hope
you enjoy the journey!
Quiz 18

Quiz on Chapter 1
(answers)

1. One of the components of a computer is its CPU. What is a CPU and what role does it
play in a computer?

2. Explain what is meant by an “asynchronous event.” Give some examples.

3. What is the difference between a “compiler” and an “interpreter”?

4. Explain the difference between high-level languages and machine language.

5. If you have the source code for a Java program, and you want to run that program, you
will need both a compiler and an interpreter. What does the Java compiler do, and what
does the Java interpreter do?

6. What is a subroutine?

7. Java is an object-oriented programming language. What is an object?

8. What is a variable? (There are four different ideas associated with variables in Java. Try
to mention all four aspects in your answer. Hint: One of the aspects is the variable’s
name.)

9. Java is a “platform-independent language.” What does this mean?

10. What is the “Internet”? Give some examples of how it is used. (What kind of services
does it provide?)
Chapter 2

Programming in the Small I:

Names and Things

On a basic level (the level of machine language), a computer can perform only very simple
operations. A computer performs complex tasks by stringing together large numbers of such
operations. Such tasks must be “scripted” in complete and perfect detail by programs. Creating
complex programs will never be really easy, but the difficulty can be handled to some extent by
giving the program a clear overall structure. The design of the overall structure of a program
is what I call “programming in the large.”
Programming in the small, which is sometimes called coding , would then refer to filling in
the details of that design. The details are the explicit, step-by-step instructions for performing
fairly small-scale tasks. When you do coding, you are working “close to the machine,” with some
of the same concepts that you might use in machine language: memory locations, arithmetic
operations, loops and branches. In a high-level language such as Java, you get to work with
these concepts on a level several steps above machine language. However, you still have to
worry about getting all the details exactly right.
This chapter and the next examine the facilities for programming in the small in the Java
programming language. Don’t be misled by the term “programming in the small” into thinking
that this material is easy or unimportant. This material is an essential foundation for all types
of programming. If you don’t understand it, you can’t write programs, no matter how good
you get at designing their large-scale structure.
The last section of this chapter discusses programming environments. That section
contains information about how to compile and run Java programs, and you should take a look
at it before trying to write and use your own programs or trying to use the sample programs
in this book.

2.1 The Basic Java Application

A program is a sequence of instructions that a computer can execute to perform some
task. A simple enough idea, but for the computer to make any use of the instructions, they
must be written in a form that the computer can use. This means that programs have to be
written in programming languages. Programming languages differ from ordinary human
languages in being completely unambiguous and very strict about what is and is not allowed
in a program. The rules that determine what is allowed are called the syntax of the language.
Syntax rules specify the basic vocabulary of the language and how programs can be constructed

19
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 20

using things like loops, branches, and subroutines. A syntactically correct program is one that
can be successfully compiled or interpreted; programs that have syntax errors will be rejected
(hopefully with a useful error message that will help you fix the problem).
So, to be a successful programmer, you have to develop a detailed knowledge of the syntax
of the programming language that you are using. However, syntax is only part of the story. It’s
not enough to write a program that will run—you want a program that will run and produce
the correct result! That is, the meaning of the program has to be right. The meaning of
a program is referred to as its semantics. More correctly, the semantics of a programming
language is the set of rules that determine the meaning of a program written in that language.
A semantically correct program is one that does what you want it to.
Furthermore, a program can be syntactically and semantically correct but still be a pretty
bad program. Using the language correctly is not the same as using it well. For example, a
good program has “style.” It is written in a way that will make it easy for people to read and
to understand. It follows conventions that will be familiar to other programmers. And it has
an overall design that will make sense to human readers. The computer is completely oblivious
to such things, but to a human reader, they are paramount. These aspects of programming are
sometimes referred to as pragmatics. (I will often use the more common term style.)
When I introduce a new language feature, I will explain the syntax, the semantics, and
some of the pragmatics of that feature. You should memorize the syntax; that’s the easy part.
Then you should get a feeling for the semantics by following the examples given, making sure
that you understand how they work, and, ideally, writing short programs of your own to test
your understanding. And you should try to appreciate and absorb the pragmatics—this means
learning how to use the language feature well, with style that will earn you the admiration of
other programmers.
Of course, even when you’ve become familiar with all the individual features of the language,
that doesn’t make you a programmer. You still have to learn how to construct complex programs
to solve particular problems. For that, you’ll need both experience and taste. You’ll find hints
about software development throughout this textbook.
∗ ∗ ∗
We begin our exploration of Java with the problem that has become traditional for such
beginnings: to write a program that displays the message “Hello World!”. This might seem like
a trivial problem, but getting a computer to do this is really a big first step in learning a new
programming language (especially if it’s your first programming language). It means that you
understand the basic process of:
1. getting the program text into the computer,
2. compiling the program, and
3. running the compiled program.
The first time through, each of these steps will probably take you a few tries to get
right. I won’t go into the details here of how you do each of these steps; it depends on the
particular computer and Java programming environment that you are using. See Section 2.6 for
information about creating and running Java programs in specific programming environments.
But in general, you will type the program using some sort of text editor and save the program
in a file. Then, you will use some command to try to compile the file. You’ll either get
a message that the program contains syntax errors, or you’ll get a compiled version of the
program. In the case of Java, the program is compiled into Java bytecode, not into machine
language. Finally, you can run the compiled program by giving some appropriate command.
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 21

For Java, you will actually use an interpreter to execute the Java bytecode. Your programming
environment might automate some of the steps for you—for example, the compilation step is
often done automatically—but you can be sure that the same three steps are being done in the
background.
Here is a Java program to display the message “Hello World!”. Don’t expect to understand
what’s going on here just yet; some of it you won’t really understand until a few chapters from
now:
/** A program to display the message
* "Hello World!" on standard output.
*/
public class HelloWorld {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("Hello World!");
}
} // end of class HelloWorld
The command that actually displays the message is:
System.out.println("Hello World!");
This command is an example of a subroutine call statement. It uses a “built-in subroutine”
named System.out.println to do the actual work. Recall that a subroutine consists of the
instructions for performing some task, chunked together and given a name. That name can be
used to “call” the subroutine whenever that task needs to be performed. A built-in subroutine
is one that is already defined as part of the language and therefore automatically available for
use in any program.
When you run this program, the message “Hello World!” (without the quotes) will be
displayed on standard output. Unfortunately, I can’t say exactly what that means! Java is
meant to run on many different platforms, and standard output will mean different things on
different platforms. However, you can expect the message to show up in some convenient or
inconvenient place. (If you use a command-line interface, like that in a Java Development Kit,
you type in a command to tell the computer to run the program. The computer will type
the output from the program, Hello World!, on the next line. In an integrated development
environment such as Eclipse, the output might appear somewhere in one of the environment’s
windows.)
You must be curious about all the other stuff in the above program. Part of it consists of
comments. Comments in a program are entirely ignored by the computer; they are there for
human readers only. This doesn’t mean that they are unimportant. Programs are meant to be
read by people as well as by computers, and without comments, a program can be very difficult
to understand. Java has two types of comments. The first type begins with // and extends to
the end of a line. There is a comment of this form on the last line of the above program. The
computer ignores the // and everything that follows it on the same line. The second type of
comment starts with /* and ends with */, and it can extend over more than one line. The first
three lines of the program are an example of this second type of comment. (A comment that
actually begins with /**, like this one does, has special meaning; it is a “Javadoc” comment
that can be used to produce documentation for the program. See Subsection 4.6.5.)
Everything else in the program is required by the rules of Java syntax. All programming in
Java is done inside “classes.” The first line in the above program (not counting the comment)
says that this is a class named HelloWorld. “HelloWorld,” the name of the class, also serves as
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 22

the name of the program. Not every class is a program. In order to define a program, a class
must include a subroutine named main, with a definition that takes the form:
public static void main(String[] args) {
hstatements i
}
When you tell the Java interpreter to run the program, the interpreter calls this main()
subroutine, and the statements that it contains are executed. Those statements make up the
script that tells the computer exactly what to do when the program is executed. The main()
routine can call other subroutines that are defined in the same class or even in other classes,
but it is the main() routine that determines how and in what order the other subroutines are
used.
The word “public” in the first line of main() means that this routine can be called from
outside the program. This is essential because the main() routine is called by the Java
interpreter, which is something external to the program itself. The remainder of the first
line of the routine is harder to explain at the moment; for now, just think of it as part of
the required syntax. The definition of the subroutine—that is, the instructions that say what
it does—consists of the sequence of “statements” enclosed between braces, { and }. Here,
I’ve used hstatementsi as a placeholder for the actual statements that make up the program.
Throughout this textbook, I will always use a similar format: anything that you see in hthis
style of texti (italic in angle brackets) is a placeholder that describes something you need to
type when you write an actual program.
As noted above, a subroutine can’t exist by itself. It has to be part of a “class”. A program
is defined by a public class that takes the form:
hoptional-package-declaration i
hoptional-imports i
public class hprogram-name i {
hoptional-variable-declarations-and-subroutines i
public static void main(String[] args) {
hstatements i
}
hoptional-variable-declarations-and-subroutines i
}
The first two lines have to do with using packages. A package is a group of classes. You will
start learning about packages in Section 2.4, but our first few example programs will not use
them.
The hprogram-namei in the line that begins “public class” is the name of the program, as
well as the name of the class. (Remember, again, that hprogram-namei is a placeholder for the
actual name!) If the name of the class is HelloWorld, then the class must be saved in a file
called HelloWorld.java. When this file is compiled, another file named HelloWorld.class
will be produced. This class file, HelloWorld.class, contains the translation of the program
into Java bytecode, which can be executed by a Java interpreter. HelloWorld.java is called
the source code for the program. To execute the program, you only need the compiled class
file, not the source code.
The layout of the program on the page, such as the use of blank lines and indentation, is not
part of the syntax or semantics of the language. The computer doesn’t care about layout—you
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 23

could run the entire program together on one line as far as it is concerned. However, layout is
important to human readers, and there are certain style guidelines for layout that are followed
by most programmers.
Also note that according to the above syntax specification, a program can contain other
subroutines besides main(), as well as things called “variable declarations.” You’ll learn more
about these later, but not until Chapter 4.

2.2 Variables and the Primitive Types

Names are fundamental to programming. In programs, names are used to refer to many
different sorts of things. In order to use those things, a programmer must understand the rules
for giving names to them and the rules for using the names to work with them. That is, the
programmer must understand the syntax and the semantics of names.
According to the syntax rules of Java, the most basic names are identifiers. Identifiers
can be used to name classes, variables, and subroutines. An identifier is a sequence of one or
more characters. It must begin with a letter or underscore and must consist entirely of letters,
digits, and underscores. (“Underscore” refers to the character ’ ’.) For example, here are some
legal identifiers:
N n rate x15 quite a long name HelloWorld
No spaces are allowed in identifiers; HelloWorld is a legal identifier, but “Hello World” is
not. Upper case and lower case letters are considered to be different, so that HelloWorld,
helloworld, HELLOWORLD, and hElloWorLD are all distinct names. Certain words are reserved
for special uses in Java, and cannot be used as identifiers. These reserved words include:
class, public, static, if, else, while, and several dozen other words. (Remember that
reserved words are not identifiers, since they can’t be used as names for things.)
Java is actually pretty liberal about what counts as a letter or a digit. Java uses the
Unicode character set, which includes thousands of characters from many different languages
and different alphabets, and many of these characters count as letters or digits. However, I will
be sticking to what can be typed on a regular English keyboard.
The pragmatics of naming includes style guidelines about how to choose names for things.
For example, it is customary for names of classes to begin with upper case letters, while names
of variables and of subroutines begin with lower case letters; you can avoid a lot of confusion by
following this standard convention in your own programs. Most Java programmers do not use
underscores in names, although some do use them at the beginning of the names of certain kinds
of variables. When a name is made up of several words, such as HelloWorld or interestRate,
it is customary to capitalize each word, except possibly the first; this is sometimes referred
to as camel case, since the upper case letters in the middle of a name are supposed to look
something like the humps on a camel’s back.
Finally, I’ll note that in addition to simple identifiers, things in Java can have compound
names which consist of several simple names separated by periods. (Compound names are also
called qualified names.) You’ve already seen an example: System.out.println. The idea
here is that things in Java can contain other things. A compound name is a kind of path to an
item through one or more levels of containment. The name System.out.println indicates that
something called “System” contains something called “out” which in turn contains something
called “println”.
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 24

2.2.1 Variables
Programs manipulate data that are stored in memory. In machine language, data can only be
referred to by giving the numerical address of the location in memory where the data is stored.
In a high-level language such as Java, names are used instead of numbers to refer to data. It
is the job of the computer to keep track of where in memory the data is actually stored; the
programmer only has to remember the name. A name used in this way—to refer to data stored
in memory—is called a variable.
Variables are actually rather subtle. Properly speaking, a variable is not a name for the
data itself but for a location in memory that can hold data. You should think of a variable as
a container or box where you can store data that you will need to use later. The variable refers
directly to the box and only indirectly to the data in the box. Since the data in the box can
change, a variable can refer to different data values at different times during the execution of
the program, but it always refers to the same box. Confusion can arise, especially for beginning
programmers, because when a variable is used in a program in certain ways, it refers to the
container, but when it is used in other ways, it refers to the data in the container. You’ll see
examples of both cases below.
In Java, the only way to get data into a variable—that is, into the box that the variable
names—is with an assignment statement. An assignment statement takes the form:
hvariable i = hexpression i;
where hexpressioni represents anything that refers to or computes a data value. When the
computer comes to an assignment statement in the course of executing a program, it evaluates
the expression and puts the resulting data value into the variable. For example, consider the
simple assignment statement
rate = 0.07;
The hvariablei in this assignment statement is rate, and the hexpressioni is the number 0.07.
The computer executes this assignment statement by putting the number 0.07 in the variable
rate, replacing whatever was there before. Now, consider the following more complicated
assignment statement, which might come later in the same program:
interest = rate * principal;
Here, the value of the expression “rate * principal” is being assigned to the variable
interest. In the expression, the * is a “multiplication operator” that tells the computer
to multiply rate times principal. The names rate and principal are themselves variables,
and it is really the values stored in those variables that are to be multiplied. We see that when
a variable is used in an expression, it is the value stored in the variable that matters; in this
case, the variable seems to refer to the data in the box, rather than to the box itself. When
the computer executes this assignment statement, it takes the value of rate, multiplies it by
the value of principal, and stores the answer in the box referred to by interest. When a
variable is used on the left-hand side of an assignment statement, it refers to the box that is
named by the variable.
(Note, by the way, that an assignment statement is a command that is executed by the
computer at a certain time. It is not a statement of fact. For example, suppose a program
includes the statement “rate = 0.07;”. If the statement “interest = rate * principal;”
is executed later in the program, can we say that the principal is multiplied by 0.07? No!
The value of rate might have been changed in the meantime by another statement. The
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 25

meaning of an assignment statement is completely different from the meaning of an equation

in mathematics, even though both use the symbol ”=”.)

2.2.2 Types
A variable in Java is designed to hold only one particular type of data; it can legally hold that
type of data and no other. The compiler will consider it to be a syntax error if you try to
violate this rule by assigning a value of the wrong type to a variable. We say that Java is a
strongly typed language because it enforces this rule.
There are eight so-called primitive types built into Java. The primitive types are named
byte, short, int, long, float, double, char, and boolean. The first four types hold integers
(whole numbers such as 17, -38477, and 0). The four integer types are distinguished by the
ranges of integers they can hold. The float and double types hold real numbers (such as 3.6 and
-145.99). Again, the two real types are distinguished by their range and accuracy. A variable
of type char holds a single character from the Unicode character set. And a variable of type
boolean holds one of the two logical values true or false.
Any data value stored in the computer’s memory must be represented as a binary number,
that is as a string of zeros and ones. A single zero or one is called a bit. A string of eight
bits is called a byte. Memory is usually measured in terms of bytes. Not surprisingly, the byte
data type refers to a single byte of memory. A variable of type byte holds a string of eight
bits, which can represent any of the integers between -128 and 127, inclusive. (There are 256
integers in that range; eight bits can represent 256—two raised to the power eight—different
values.) As for the other integer types,
• short corresponds to two bytes (16 bits). Variables of type short have values in the range
-32768 to 32767.
• int corresponds to four bytes (32 bits). Variables of type int have values in the range
-2147483648 to 2147483647.
• long corresponds to eight bytes (64 bits). Variables of type long have values in the range
-9223372036854775808 to 9223372036854775807.
You don’t have to remember these numbers, but they do give you some idea of the size of
integers that you can work with. Usually, for representing integer data you should just stick to
the int data type, which is good enough for most purposes.
The float data type is represented in four bytes of memory, using a standard method for
encoding real numbers. The maximum value for a float is about 10 raised to the power 38.
A float can have about 7 significant digits. (So that 32.3989231134 and 32.3989234399 would
both have to be rounded off to about 32.398923 in order to be stored in a variable of type
float.) A double takes up 8 bytes, can range up to about 10 to the power 308, and has about
15 significant digits. Ordinarily, you should stick to the double type for real values.
A variable of type char occupies two bytes in memory. The value of a char variable is a
single character such as A, *, x, or a space character. The value can also be a special character
such a tab or a carriage return or one of the many Unicode characters that come from different
languages. Values of type char are closely related to integer values, since a character is actually
stored as a 16-bit integer code number. In fact, we will see that chars in Java can actually be
used like integers in certain situations.
It is important to remember that a primitive type value is represented using only a certain,
finite number of bits. So, an int can’t be an arbitrary integer; it can only be an integer
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 26

in a certain finite range of values. Similarly, float and double variables can only take on
certain values. They are not true real numbers in the mathematical sense. For example, the
mathematical constant π can only be approximated by a value of type float or double, since
it would require an infinite number of decimal places to represent it exactly. For that matter,
many simple numbers such as 1/3 can only be approximated by floats and doubles.

2.2.3 Literals
A data value is stored in the computer as a sequence of bits. In the computer’s memory, it
doesn’t look anything like a value written on this page. You need a way to include constant
values in the programs that you write. In a program, you represent constant values as literals.
A literal is something that you can type in a program to represent a value. It is a kind of name
for a constant value.
For example, to type a value of type char in a program, you must surround it with a pair
of single quote marks, such as ’A’, ’*’, or ’x’. The character and the quote marks make up a
literal of type char. Without the quotes, A would be an identifier and * would be a multiplication
operator. The quotes are not part of the value and are not stored in the variable; they are just
a convention for naming a particular character constant in a program. If you want to store the
character A in a variable ch of type char, you could do so with the assignment statement
ch = ’A’;
Certain special characters have special literals that use a backslash, \, as an “escape character.”
In particular, a tab is represented as ’\t’, a carriage return as ’\r’, a linefeed as ’\n’, the
single quote character as ’\’’, and the backslash itself as ’\\’. Note that even though you
type two characters between the quotes in ’\t’, the value represented by this literal is a single
tab character.
Numeric literals are a little more complicated than you might expect. Of course, there
are the obvious literals such as 317 and 17.42. But there are other possibilities for expressing
numbers in a Java program. First of all, real numbers can be represented in an exponential
form such as 1.3e12 or 12.3737e-108. The “e12” and “e-108” represent powers of 10, so that
1.3e12 means 1.3 times 1012 and 12.3737e-108 means 12.3737 times 10−108 . This format can be
used to express very large and very small numbers. Any numeric literal that contains a decimal
point or exponential is a literal of type double. To make a literal of type float, you have to
append an “F” or “f” to the end of the number. For example, “1.2F” stands for 1.2 considered
as a value of type float. (Occasionally, you need to know this because the rules of Java say that
you can’t assign a value of type double to a variable of type float, so you might be confronted
with a ridiculous-seeming error message if you try to do something like “x = 1.2;” if x is a
variable of type float. You have to say “x = 1.2F;". This is one reason why I advise sticking
to type double for real numbers.)
Even for integer literals, there are some complications. Ordinary integers such as 177777
and -32 are literals of type byte, short, or int, depending on their size. You can make a literal
of type long by adding “L” as a suffix. For example: 17L or 728476874368L. As another
complication, Java allows binary, octal (base-8), and hexadecimal (base-16) literals. I don’t
want to cover number bases in detail, but in case you run into them in other people’s programs,
it’s worth knowing a few things: Octal numbers use only the digits 0 through 7. In Java, a
numeric literal that begins with a 0 is interpreted as an octal number; for example, the octal
literal 045 represents the number 37, not the number 45. Octal numbers are rarely used, but
you need to be aware of what happens when you start a number with a zero. Hexadecimal
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 27

numbers use 16 digits, the usual digits 0 through 9 and the letters A, B, C, D, E, and F. Upper
case and lower case letters can be used interchangeably in this context. The letters represent
the numbers 10 through 15. In Java, a hexadecimal literal begins with 0x or 0X, as in 0x45
or 0xFF7A. Finally, binary literals start with 0b or 0B and contain only the digits 0 and 1; for
example: 0b10110.
As a final complication, numeric literals can include the underscore character (“ ”), which
can be used to separate groups of digits. For example, the integer constant for two billion could
be written 2 000 000 000, which is a good deal easier to decipher than 2000000000. There is
no rule about how many digits have to be in each group. Underscores can be especially useful
in long binary numbers; for example, 0b1010 1100 1011.
I will note that hexadecimal numbers can also be used to represent arbitrary Unicode
characters. A Unicode literal consists of \u followed by four hexadecimal digits. For example,
the character literal ’\u00E9’ represents the Unicode character that is an “e” with an acute
accent.
For the type boolean, there are precisely two literals: true and false. These literals
are typed just as I’ve written them here, without quotes, but they represent constant values,
not variables. Boolean values occur most often as the values of conditional expressions. For
example,
rate > 0.05
is a boolean-valued expression that evaluates to true if the value of the variable rate is greater
than 0.05, and to false if the value of rate is less than or equal to 0.05. As you’ll see in
Chapter 3, boolean-valued expressions are used extensively in control structures. Of course,
boolean values can also be assigned to variables of type boolean. For example, if test is a
variable of type boolean, then both of the following assignment statements are legal:
test = true;
test = rate > 0.05;

2.2.4 Strings and String Literals

Java has other types in addition to the primitive types, but all the other types represent objects
rather than “primitive” data values. For the most part, we are not concerned with objects for
the time being. However, there is one predefined object type that is very important: the type
String. (String is a type, but not a primitive type; it is in fact the name of a class, and we will
return to that aspect of strings in the next section. The fact that String is a class explains why
the name begins with an upper case “S” rather than lower case.)
A value of type String is a sequence of characters. You’ve already seen a string literal:
"Hello World!". The double quotes are part of the literal; they have to be typed in the
program. However, they are not part of the actual String value, which consists of just the
characters between the quotes. A string can contain any number of characters, even zero. A
string with no characters is called the empty string and is represented by the literal "", a pair
of double quote marks with nothing between them. Remember the difference between single
quotes and double quotes! Single quotes are used for char literals and double quotes for String
literals! There is a big difference between the String "A" and the char ’A’.
Within a string literal, special characters can be represented using the backslash notation.
Within this context, the double quote is itself a special character. For example, to represent
the string value
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 28

I said, "Are you listening!"

with a linefeed at the end, you would have to type the string literal:
"I said, \"Are you listening!\"\n"
You can also use \t, \r, \\, and Unicode sequences such as \u00E9 to represent other
special characters in string literals.

2.2.5 Variables in Programs

A variable can be used in a program only if it has first been declared . A variable declaration
statement is used to declare one or more variables and to give them names. When the computer
executes a variable declaration, it sets aside memory for the variable and associates the variable’s
name with that memory. A simple variable declaration takes the form:
htype-name i hvariable-name-or-names i;
The hvariable-name-or-namesi can be a single variable name or a list of variable names
separated by commas. (We’ll see later that variable declaration statements can actually be
somewhat more complicated than this.) Good programming style is to declare only one variable
in a declaration statement, unless the variables are closely related in some way. For example:
int numberOfStudents;
String name;
double x, y;
boolean isFinished;
char firstInitial, middleInitial, lastInitial;
It is also good style to include a comment with each variable declaration to explain its
purpose in the program, or to give other information that might be useful to a human reader.
For example:
double principal; // Amount of money invested.
double interestRate; // Rate as a decimal, not percentage.
In this chapter, we will only use variables declared inside the main() subroutine of a
program. Variables declared inside a subroutine are called local variables for that subroutine.
They exist only inside the subroutine, while it is running, and are completely inaccessible from
outside. Variable declarations can occur anywhere inside the subroutine, as long as each variable
is declared before it is used in any way. Some people like to declare all the variables at the
beginning of the subroutine. Others like to wait to declare a variable until it is needed. My
preference: Declare important variables at the beginning of the subroutine, and use a comment
to explain the purpose of each variable. Declare “utility variables” which are not important to
the overall logic of the subroutine at the point in the subroutine where they are first used. Here
is a simple program using some variables and assignment statements:
/**
* This class implements a simple program that
* will compute the amount of interest that is
* earned on $17,000 invested at an interest
* rate of 0.027 for one year. The interest and
* the value of the investment after one year are
* printed to standard output.
*/
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 29

public class Interest {

public static void main(String[] args) {
/* Declare the variables. */
double principal; // The value of the investment.
double rate; // The annual interest rate.
double interest; // Interest earned in one year.
/* Do the computations. */
principal = 17000;
rate = 0.027;
interest = principal * rate; // Compute the interest.
principal = principal + interest;
// Compute value of investment after one year, with interest.
// (Note: The new value replaces the old value of principal.)
/* Output the results. */
System.out.print("The interest earned is $");
System.out.println(interest);
System.out.print("The value of the investment after one year is $");
System.out.println(principal);
} // end of main()
} // end of class Interest
This program uses several subroutine call statements to display information to the user of the
program. Two different subroutines are used: System.out.print and System.out.println.
The difference between these is that System.out.println adds a linefeed after the end of the
information that it displays, while System.out.print does not. Thus, the value of interest,
which is displayed by the subroutine call “System.out.println(interest);”, follows on
the same line as the string displayed by the previous System.out.print statement. Note
that the value to be displayed by System.out.print or System.out.println is provided in
parentheses after the subroutine name. This value is called a parameter to the subroutine. A
parameter provides a subroutine with information it needs to perform its task. In a subroutine
call statement, any parameters are listed in parentheses after the subroutine name. Not all
subroutines have parameters. If there are no parameters in a subroutine call statement, the
subroutine name must be followed by an empty pair of parentheses.
All the sample programs for this textbook are available in separate source code files in the
on-line version of this text at https://math.hws.edu/javanotes/source. They are also included
in the downloadable archive of the web site, in a folder named source. The source code for
the Interest program, for example, can be found in the file Interest.java in subfolder named
chapter2 inside the source folder.

2.3 Strings, Classes, Objects, and Subroutines

The previous section introduced the eight primitive data types and the type String. There
is a fundamental difference between the primitive types and String : Values of type String
are objects. While we will not study objects in detail until Chapter 5, it will be useful for
you to know a little about them and about a closely related topic: classes. This is not just
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 30

because strings are useful but because objects and classes are essential to understanding another
important programming concept, subroutines.

2.3.1 Built-in Subroutines and Functions

Recall that a subroutine is a set of program instructions that have been chunked together and
given a name. A subroutine is designed to perform some task. To get that task performed
in a program, you can “call” the subroutine using a subroutine call statement. In Chapter 4,
you’ll learn how to write your own subroutines, but you can get a lot done in a program just
by calling subroutines that have already been written for you. In Java, every subroutine is
contained either in a class or in an object. Some classes that are standard parts of the Java
language contain predefined subroutines that you can use. A value of type String, which is an
object, contains subroutines that you can use to manipulate that string. These subroutines
are “built into” the Java language. You can call all these subroutines without understanding
how they were written or how they work. Indeed, that’s the whole point of subroutines: A
subroutine is a “black box” which can be used without knowing what goes on inside.
Let’s first consider subroutines that are part of a class. One of the purposes of a class is
to group together some variables and subroutines, which are contained in that class. These
variables and subroutines are called static members of the class. You’ve seen one example:
In a class that defines a program, the main() routine is a static member of the class. The parts
of a class definition that define static members are marked with the reserved word “static”,
such as the word “static” in public static void main...
When a class contains a static variable or subroutine, the name of the class is part of the full
name of the variable or subroutine. For example, the standard class named System contains
a subroutine named exit. To use that subroutine in your program, you must refer to it as
System.exit. This full name consists of the name of the class that contains the subroutine,
followed by a period, followed by the name of the subroutine. This subroutine requires an
integer as its parameter, so you would actually use it with a subroutine call statement such as
System.exit(0);
Calling System.exit will terminate the program and shut down the Java Virtual Machine. You
could use it if you had some reason to terminate the program before the end of the main routine.
(The parameter tells the computer why the program was terminated. A parameter value of 0
indicates that the program ended normally. Any other value indicates that the program was
terminated because an error was detected, so you could call System.exit(1) to indicate that
the program is ending because of an error. The parameter is sent back to the operating system;
in practice, the value is usually ignored by the operating system.)
System is just one of many standard classes that come with Java. Another useful class
is called Math. This class gives us an example of a class that contains static variables: It
includes the variables Math.PI and Math.E whose values are the mathematical constants π
and e. Math also contains a large number of mathematical “functions.” Now, any subroutine
performs some specific task, but for some subroutines, the task is to compute or retrieve some
data value. Subroutines of this type are called functions. We say that a function returns a
value. Generally, the returned value is meant to be used somehow in the program that calls
the function.
You are familiar with the mathematical function that computes the square root of a number.
The corresponding function in Java is called Math.sqrt. This function is a static member
subroutine in the class named Math. If x is any numerical value, then Math.sqrt(x) computes
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 31

and returns the square root of that value. Since Math.sqrt(x) represents a value, it doesn’t
make sense to put it on a line by itself in a subroutine call statement such as
Math.sqrt(x); // This doesn’t make sense!
What, after all, would the computer do with the value computed by the function in this case?
You have to tell the computer to do something with the value. You might tell the computer to
display it:
System.out.print( Math.sqrt(x) ); // Display the square root of x.
or you might use an assignment statement to tell the computer to store that value in a variable:
lengthOfSide = Math.sqrt(x);
The function call Math.sqrt(x) represents a value of type double, and it can be used anyplace
where a numeric literal of type double could be used. The x in this formula represents the
parameter to the subroutine; it could be a variable named “x”, or it could be replaced by any
expression that represents a numerical value. For example, Math.sqrt(2) computes the square
root of 2, and Math.sqrt(a*a+b*b) would be legal as long as a and b are numeric variables.
The Math class contains many static member functions. Here is a list of some of the more
important of them:
• Math.abs(x), which computes the absolute value of x.
• The usual trigonometric functions, Math.sin(x), Math.cos(x), and Math.tan(x). (For
all the trigonometric functions, angles are measured in radians, not degrees.)
• The inverse trigonometric functions arcsin, arccos, and arctan, which are written as:
Math.asin(x), Math.acos(x), and Math.atan(x). The return value is expressed in
radians, not degrees.
• The exponential function Math.exp(x) for computing the number e raised to the power
x, and the natural logarithm function Math.log(x) for computing the logarithm of x in
the base e.
• Math.pow(x,y) for computing x raised to the power y.
• Math.floor(x), which rounds x down to the nearest integer value that is less than or
equal to x. Even though the return value is mathematically an integer, it is returned
as a value of type double, rather than of type int as you might expect. For example,
Math.floor(3.76) is 3.0, and Math.floor(-4.2) is -5.0. The function Math.round(x)
returns the integer that is closest to x, and Math.ceil(x) rounds x up to an integer.
(“Ceil” is short for “ceiling”, the opposite of “floor.”)
• Math.random(), which returns a randomly chosen double in the range 0.0 <=
Math.random() < 1.0. (The computer actually calculates so-called “pseudorandom”
numbers, which are not truly random but are effectively random enough for most pur-
poses.) We will find a lot of uses for Math.random in future examples.
For these functions, the type of the parameter—the x or y inside the parentheses—can be
any value of any numeric type. For most of the functions, the value returned by the function
is of type double no matter what the type of the parameter. However, for Math.abs(x), the
value returned will be the same type as x; if x is of type int, then so is Math.abs(x). So, for
example, while Math.sqrt(9) is the double value 3.0, Math.abs(9) is the int value 9.
Note that Math.random() does not have any parameter. You still need the parentheses,
even though there’s nothing between them. The parentheses let the computer know that this is
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 32

a subroutine rather than a variable. Another example of a subroutine that has no parameters
is the function System.currentTimeMillis(), from the System class. When this function is
executed, it retrieves the current time, expressed as the number of milliseconds that have passed
since a standardized base time (the start of the year 1970, if you care). One millisecond is one-
thousandth of a second. The return value of System.currentTimeMillis() is of type long (a
64-bit integer). This function can be used to measure the time that it takes the computer to
perform a task. Just record the time at which the task is begun and the time at which it is
finished and take the difference. For more accurate timing, you can use System.nanoTime()
instead. System.nanoTime() returns the number of nanoseconds since some arbitrary starting
time, where one nanosecond is one-billionth of a second. However, you should not expect the
time to be truly accurate to the nanosecond.
Here is a sample program that performs a few mathematical tasks and reports the time that
it takes for the program to run.
/**
* This program performs some mathematical computations and displays the
* results. It also displays the value of the constant Math.PI. It then
* reports the number of seconds that the computer spent on this task.
*/
public class TimedComputation {
public static void main(String[] args) {
long startTime; // Starting time of program, in nanoseconds.
long endTime; // Time when computations are done, in nanoseconds.
long compTime; // Run time in nanoseconds.
double seconds; // Time difference, in seconds.
startTime = System.nanoTime();
double width, height, hypotenuse; // sides of a triangle
width = 42.0;
height = 17.0;
hypotenuse = Math.sqrt( width*width + height*height );
System.out.print("A triangle with sides 42 and 17 has hypotenuse ");
System.out.println(hypotenuse);
System.out.println("\nMathematically, sin(x)*sin(x) + "
+ "cos(x)*cos(x) - 1 should be 0.");
System.out.println("Let’s check this for x = 100:");
System.out.print(" sin(100)*sin(100) + cos(100)*cos(100) - 1 is: ");
System.out.println( Math.sin(100)*Math.sin(100)
+ Math.cos(100)*Math.cos(100) - 1 );
System.out.println("(There can be round-off errors when"
+ " computing with real numbers!)");
System.out.print("\nHere is a random number: ");
System.out.println( Math.random() );
System.out.print("\nThe value of Math.PI is ");
System.out.println( Math.PI );
endTime = System.nanoTime();
compTime = endTime - startTime;
seconds = compTime / 1000000000.0;
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 33

System.out.print("\nRun time in nanoseconds was: ");

System.out.println(compTime);
System.out.println("(This is probably not perfectly accurate!");
System.out.print("\nRun time in seconds was: ");
System.out.println(seconds);
} // end main()
} // end class TimedComputation

2.3.2 Classes and Objects

Classes can be containers for static variables and subroutines. However classes also have another
purpose. They are used to describe objects. In this role, the class is a type, in the same way
that int and double are types. That is, the class name can be used to declare variables. Such
variables can only hold one type of value. The values in this case are objects. An object is
a collection of variables and subroutines. Every object has an associated class that tells what
“type” of object it is. The class of an object specifies what subroutines and variables that
object contains. All objects defined by the same class are similar in that they contain similar
collections of variables and subroutines. For example, an object might represent a point in the
plane, and it might contain variables named x and y to represent the coordinates of that point.
Every point object would have an x and a y, but different points would have different values for
these variables. A class, named Point for example, could exist to define the common structure
of all point objects, and all such objects would then be values of type Point.
As another example, let’s look again at System.out.println. System is a class, and out
is a static variable within that class. However, the value of System.out is an object, and
System.out.println is actually the full name of a subroutine that is contained in the object
System.out. You don’t need to understand it at this point, but the object referred to by
System.out is an object of the class PrintStream. PrintStream is another class that is a standard
part of Java. Any object of type PrintStream is a destination to which information can be
printed; any object of type PrintStream has a println subroutine that can be used to send
information to that destination. The object System.out is just one possible destination, and
System.out.println is a subroutine that sends information to that particular destination.
Other objects of type PrintStream might send information to other destinations such as files
or across a network to other computers. This is object-oriented programming: Many different
things which have something in common—they can all be used as destinations for output—can
all be used in the same way—through a println subroutine. The PrintStream class expresses
the commonalities among all these objects.
The dual role of classes—to contain static variables and subroutines and to describe objects
that can also contain variables and subroutines—can be confusing, and in practice most
classes are designed to perform primarily or exclusively in only one of the two possible roles.
Fortunately, you will not need to worry too much about it until we start working with objects
in a more serious way, in Chapter 5.
By the way, since class names and variable names are used in similar ways, it might be hard
to tell which is which. Remember that all the built-in, predefined names in Java follow the rule
that class names begin with an upper case letter while variable names begin with a lower case
letter. While this is not a formal syntax rule, I strongly recommend that you follow it in your
own programming. Subroutine names should also begin with lower case letters. There is no
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 34

possibility of confusing a variable with a subroutine, since a subroutine name in a program is

always followed by a left parenthesis.
As one final general note, you should be aware that subroutines in Java are often referred
to as methods. Generally, the term “method” means a subroutine that is contained in a class
or in an object. Since this is true of every subroutine in Java, every subroutine in Java is a
method. The same is not true for other programming languages, and for the time being, I will
prefer to use the more general term, “subroutine.” However, I should note that some people
prefer to use the term “method” from the beginning.

2.3.3 Operations on Strings

String is a class, and a value of type String is an object. That object contains data, namely
the sequence of characters that make up the string. It also contains subroutines. All of these
subroutines are in fact functions. For example, every string object contains a function named
length that computes the number of characters in that string. Suppose that advice is a
variable that refers to a String. For example, advice might have been declared and assigned a
value as follows:
String advice;
advice = "Seize the day!";
Then advice.length() is a function call that returns the number of characters in the string
“Seize the day!”. In this case, the return value would be 14. In general, for any variable str
of type String, the value of str.length() is an int equal to the number of characters in the
string. Note that this function has no parameter; the particular string whose length is being
computed is the value of str. The length subroutine is defined by the class String, and it
can be used with any value of type String. It can even be used with String literals, which are,
after all, just constant values of type String. For example, you could have a program count the
characters in “Hello World” for you by saying
System.out.print("The number of characters in ");
System.out.print("the string \"Hello World\" is ");
System.out.println( "Hello World".length() );
The String class defines a lot of functions. Here are some that you might find useful. Assume
that s1 and s2 are variables of type String :
• s1.equals(s2) is a function that returns a boolean value. It returns true if s1 consists
of exactly the same sequence of characters as s2, and returns false otherwise.
• s1.equalsIgnoreCase(s2) is another boolean-valued function that checks whether s1
is the same string as s2, but this function considers upper and lower case letters
to be equivalent. Thus, if s1 is “cat”, then s1.equals("Cat") is false, while
s1.equalsIgnoreCase("Cat") is true.
• s1.length(), as mentioned above, is an integer-valued function that gives the number of
characters in s1.
• s1.charAt(N), where N is an integer, returns a value of type char. It returns the Nth
character in the string. Positions are numbered starting with 0, so s1.charAt(0) is
actually the first character, s1.charAt(1) is the second, and so on. The final position is
s1.length() - 1. For example, the value of "cat".charAt(1) is ’a’. An error occurs if
the value of the parameter is less than zero or is greater than or equal to s1.length().
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 35

• s1.substring(N,M), where N and M are integers, returns a value of type String. The
returned value consists of the characters of s1 in positions N, N+1,. . . , M-1. Remember
that character positions are numbered starting from zero. Note that the character in
position M is not included. The returned value is called a substring of s1. The subroutine
s1.substring(N), with just one parameter, returns the substring of s1 consisting of
characters starting at position N up until the end of the string.
• s1.indexOf(s2) returns an integer. If s2 occurs as a substring of s1, then the returned
value is the starting position of that substring. Otherwise, the returned value is -1. You
can also use s1.indexOf(ch) to search for a char, ch, in s1. To find the first occurrence
of x at or after position N, you can use s1.indexOf(x,N). To find the last occurrence of
x in s1, use s1.lastIndexOf(x).
• s1.compareTo(s2) is an integer-valued function that compares the two strings. If the
strings are equal, the value returned is zero. If s1 is less than s2, the value returned is
a number less than zero, and if s1 is greater than s2, the value returned is some number
greater than zero. There is also a function s1.compareToIgnoreCase(s2). (If both of
the strings consist entirely of lower case letters, or if they consist entirely of upper case
letters, then “less than” and “greater than” refer to alphabetical order. Otherwise, the
ordering is more complicated; it compares individual characters using their Unicode code
numbers.)
• s1.toUpperCase() is a String -valued function that returns a new string that is equal to s1,
except that any lower case letters in s1 have been converted to upper case. For example,
"Cat".toUpperCase() is the string "CAT". There is also a function s1.toLowerCase().
• s1.trim() is a String -valued function that returns a new string that is equal to s1 except
that any non-printing characters such as spaces and tabs have been trimmed from the
beginning and from the end of the string. Thus, if s1 has the value "fred ", then
s1.trim() is the string "fred", with the spaces at the end removed.
For the functions s1.toUpperCase(), s1.toLowerCase(), and s1.trim(), note that the
value of s1 is not changed. Instead a new string is created and returned as the value of
the function. The returned value could be used, for example, in an assignment statement
such as “smallLetters = s1.toLowerCase();”. To change the value of s1, you could use an
assignment “s1 = s1.toLowerCase();”.
∗ ∗ ∗
Here is another extremely useful fact about strings: You can use the plus operator, +, to
concatenate two strings. The concatenation of two strings is a new string consisting of all the
characters of the first string followed by all the characters of the second string. For example,
"Hello" + "World" evaluates to "HelloWorld". (Gotta watch those spaces, of course—if you
want a space in the concatenated string, it has to be somewhere in the input data, as in
"Hello " + "World".)
Let’s suppose that name is a variable of type String and that it already refers to the name
of the person using the program. Then, the program could greet the user by executing the
statement:
System.out.println("Hello, " + name + ". Pleased to meet you!");
Even more surprising is that you can actually concatenate values of any type onto a String
using the + operator. The value is converted to a string, just as it would be if you printed it to
the standard output, and then that string is concatenated with the other string. For example,
the expression "Number" + 42 evaluates to the string "Number42". And the statements
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 36

System.out.print("After ");
System.out.print(years);
System.out.print(" years, the value is ");
System.out.print(principal);
can be replaced by the single statement:
System.out.print("After " + years +
" years, the value is " + principal);
Obviously, this is very convenient. It would have shortened some of the examples presented
earlier in this chapter.

2.3.4 Text Blocks: Multiline Strings

Representing long strings that extend over several lines can be tedious. The end-of-line
characters in the string can be represented by an escaped “n” (that is, by \n), and the full
string could be broken into several parts that are concatenated together using + operators. For
example,
String poem = "As I was walking down the stair,\n"
+ " I met a man who wasn’t there.\n"
+ "He wasn’t there again today.\n"
+ " I wish, I wish he’d go away!";
However, Java 17 defines a new kind of string literal that makes it easier to represent multiline
strings. (Recall that a “literal” is something you type in program to represent a constant
value.) The new literals are called text blocks. A text block starts with a string of three
double-quote characters, followed by optional white space and then a new line. The white
space and newline are not part of the string constant that is represented by the text block. The
text block is terminated by another string of three double-quote characters. A text block can
be used anywhere an ordinary string literal could be used. For example,
String poem = """
As I was walking down the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
I wish, I wish he’d go away!""";
This is easier to write and to read than the previous way of writing the value of poem.
Remember that you can’t have anything except white space (that is, spaces and tabs) on
the same line after the three double-quotes that start the text block. Also, note that any extra
white space that occurs at the beginning of every line of the text block is removed from the
string that is represented by the literal. In the example, the first four spaces are removed from
each line of the text block, but the three extra spaces at the beginning of the second and fourth
lines are not removed. This means that you can indent the lines of the text block to match the
indentation of your program, without including that indentation in the string represented by
the text block.
A text block can include escaped characters such as \t or \\, but aside from the backslash
character, ’\’, nothing in the text block has special meaning. For example, something in the text
block that looks like a Java comment is not actually a comment; it is just ordinary characters
that are part of the string.
TextBlockDemo.java is a short demo program that uses text blocks.
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 37

2.3.5 Introduction to Enums

Java comes with eight built-in primitive types and a huge collection of types that are defined
by classes, such as String. But even this large collection of types is not sufficient to cover all
the possible situations that a programmer might have to deal with. So, an essential part of
Java, just like almost any other programming language, is the ability to create new types. For
the most part, this is done by defining new classes; you will learn how to do that in Chapter 5.
But, to give an example of defining a new type, we will look here at one particular case: the
ability to define enums (short for enumerated types).
Technically, an enum is considered to be a special kind of class, but that is not important
for now. In this section, we will look at enums in a simplified form. In practice, most uses of
enums will only need the simplified form that is presented here.
An enum is a type that has a fixed list of possible values, which is specified when the enum
is created. In some ways, an enum is similar to the boolean data type, which has true and
false as its only possible values. However, boolean is a primitive type, while an enum is not.
The definition of an enum type has the (simplified) form:
enum henum-type-name i { hlist-of-enum-values i }
The definition can be in the same class as the program that uses it, but outside the main()
routine, or it can be in a separate .java file. (In Java 17, it is also possible to put the definition
inside main().) The henum-type-namei in the definition of an enum can be any simple identifier.
This identifier becomes the name of the enum type, in the same way that “boolean” is the name
of the boolean type and “String” is the name of the String type. Each value in the hlist-of-enum-
valuesi must be a simple identifier, and the identifiers in the list are separated by commas. For
example, here is the definition of an enum type named Season whose values are the names of
the four seasons of the year:
enum Season { SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER }
By convention, enum values are given names that are made up of upper case letters, but that
is a style guideline and not a syntax rule. An enum value is a constant; that is, it represents
a fixed value that cannot be changed. The possible values of an enum type are usually referred
to as enum constants.
Note that the enum constants of type Season are considered to be “contained in” Season,
which means—following the convention that compound identifiers are used for things that are
contained in other things—the names that you actually use in your program to refer to them
are Season.SPRING, Season.SUMMER, Season.FALL, and Season.WINTER.
Once an enum type such as Season has been created, it can be used to declare variables
in exactly the same ways that other types are used. For example, you can declare a variable
named vacation of type Season with the statement:
Season vacation;
After declaring the variable, you can assign a value to it using an assignment statement. The
value on the right-hand side of the assignment can be one of the enum constants of type Season.
Remember to use the full name of the constant, including “Season”! For example:
vacation = Season.SUMMER;
You can print out an enum value with an output statement such as System.out.print(vacation).
The output value will be the name of the enum constant (without the “Season.”). In this case,
the output would be “SUMMER”.
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 38

Because an enum is technically a class, the enum values are technically objects. As objects,
they can contain subroutines. One of the subroutines in every enum value is named ordinal().
When used with an enum value, it returns the ordinal number of the value in the list
of values of the enum. The ordinal number simply tells the position of the value in the
list. That is, Season.SPRING.ordinal() is the int value 0, Season.SUMMER.ordinal() is
1, Season.FALL.ordinal() is 2, and Season.WINTER.ordinal() is 3. (You will see over and
over again that computer scientists like to start counting at zero!) You can, of course, use the
ordinal() method with a variable of type Season, such as vacation.ordinal().
Using enums can make a program more readable, since you can use meaningful names for
the values. And it can prevent certain types of errors, since a compiler can check that the values
assigned to an enum variable are in fact legal values for that variable. For now, you should just
appreciate them as the first example of an important concept: creating new types. Here is a
little example that shows enums being used in a complete program:
public class EnumDemo {
// Define two enum types for use in this program.
enum Day { SUNDAY, MONDAY, TUESDAY, WEDNESDAY, THURSDAY, FRIDAY, SATURDAY }
enum Month { JAN, FEB, MAR, APR, MAY, JUN, JUL, AUG, SEP, OCT, NOV, DEC }
public static void main(String[] args) {
Day tgif; // Declare a variable of type Day.
Month libra; // Declare a variable of type Month.
tgif = Day.FRIDAY; // Assign a value of type Day to tgif.
libra = Month.OCT; // Assign a value of type Month to libra.
System.out.print("My sign is libra, since I was born in ");
System.out.println(libra); // Output value will be: OCT
System.out.print("That’s the ");
System.out.print( libra.ordinal() );
System.out.println("-th month of the year.");
System.out.println(" (Counting from 0, of course!)");
System.out.print("Isn’t it nice to get to ");
System.out.println(tgif); // Output value will be: FRIDAY
System.out.println( tgif + " is the " + tgif.ordinal()
+ "-th day of the week.");
}
}
(As I mentioned, an enum can actually be defined in a separate file. The sample program
SeparateEnumDemo.java is identical to EnumDemo.java, except that the enum types that it
uses are defined in files named Month.java and Day.java.)

2.4 Text Input and Output

We have seen that it is very easy to display text to the user with the functions
System.out.print and System.out.println. But there is more to say on the topic of
outputting text. Furthermore, most programs use data that is input to the program at run time
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 39

rather than built into the program. So you need to know how to do input as well as output.
This section explains how to get data from the user, and it covers output in more detail than
we have seen so far. It also has a section on using files for input and output.

2.4.1 Basic Output and Formatted Output

The most basic output function is System.out.print(x), where x can be a value or expression
of any type. If the parameter, x, is not already a string, it is converted to a value of type String,
and the string is then output to the destination called standard output. (Generally, this
means that the string is displayed to the user; however, in GUI programs, it outputs to a place
where a typical user is unlikely to see it. Furthermore, standard output can be “redirected”
to write to a different output destination. Nevertheless, for the type of program that we are
working with now, the purpose of System.out is to display text to the user.)
System.out.println(x) outputs the same text as System.out.print, but it follows that
text by a line feed, which means that any subsequent output will be on the next line. It is
possible to use this function with no parameter, System.out.println(), which outputs nothing
but a line feed. Note that System.out.println(x) is equivalent to
System.out.print(x);
System.out.println();
You might have noticed that System.out.print outputs real numbers with as many digits
after the decimal point as necessary, so that for example π is output as 3.141592653589793, and
numbers that are supposed to represent money might be output as 1050.0 or 43.575. You might
prefer to have these numbers output as, for example, 3.14159, 1050.00, and 43.58. Java has a
“formatted output” capability that makes it easy to control how real numbers and other values
are printed. A lot of formatting options are available. I will cover just a few of the simplest
and most commonly used possibilities here.
The function System.out.printf can be used to produce formatted output. (The name
“printf,” which stands for “print formatted,” is copied from the C and C++ programming
languages, where this type of output originated.) System.out.printf takes one or more
parameters. The first parameter is a String that specifies the format of the output. This
parameter is called the format string . The remaining parameters specify the values that are
to be output. Here is a statement that will print a number in the proper format for a dollar
amount, where amount is a variable of type double:
System.out.printf( "%1.2f", amount );
The output format for a value is given by a format specifier in the format string. In this
example, the format specifier is %1.2f. The format string (in the simple cases that I cover here)
contains one format specifier for each of the values that is to be output. Some typical format
specifiers are %d, %12d, %10s, %1.2f, %15.8e and %1.8g. Every format specifier begins with
a percent sign (%) and ends with a letter, possibly with some extra formatting information in
between. The letter specifies the type of output that is to be produced. For example, in %d
and %12d, the “d” specifies that an integer is to be written. The “12” in %12d specifies the
minimum number of spaces that should be used for the output. If the integer that is being
output takes up fewer than 12 spaces, extra blank spaces are added in front of the integer to
bring the total up to 12. We say that the output is “right-justified in a field of length 12.” A
very large value is not forced into 12 spaces; if the value has more than 12 digits, all the digits
will be printed, with no extra spaces. The specifier %d means the same as %1d—that is, an
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 40

integer will be printed using just as many spaces as necessary. (The “d,” by the way, stands
for “decimal”—that is, base-10—numbers. You can replace the “d” with an “x” to output an
integer value in hexadecimal form.)
The letter “s” in a format specifier can be used with any type of value. It means that
the value should be output in its default format, just as it would be in unformatted output. A
number, such as the “20” in %20s, can be added to specify the (minimum) number of characters.
The “s” stands for “string,” and it can be used for values of type String. It can also be used for
values of other types; in that case the value is converted into a String value in the usual way.
The format specifiers for values of type double are more complicated. An “f”, as in %1.2f,
is used to output a number in “floating-point” form, that is with digits after a decimal point. In
%1.2f, the “2” specifies the number of digits to use after the decimal point. The “1” specifies
the (minimum) number of characters to output; a “1” in this position effectively means that
just as many characters as are necessary should be used. Similarly, %12.3f would specify a
floating-point format with 3 digits after the decimal point, right-justified in a field of length 12.
Very large and very small numbers should be written in exponential format, such as
6.00221415e23, representing “6.00221415 times 10 raised to the power 23.” A format specifier
such as %15.8e specifies an output in exponential form, with the “8” telling how many digits
to use after the decimal point. If you use “g” instead of “e”, the output will be in exponential
form for very small values and very large values and in floating-point form for other values. In
%1.8g, the 8 gives the total number of digits in the answer, including both the digits before the
decimal point and the digits after the decimal point.
For numeric output, the format specifier can include a comma (“,”), which will cause the
digits of the number to be separated into groups, to make it easier to read big numbers. In
the United States, groups of three digits are separated by commas. For example, if x is one
billion, then System.out.printf("%,d",x) will output 1,000,000,000. In other countries, the
separator character and the number of digits per group might be different. The comma should
come at the beginning of the format specifier, before the field width; for example: %,12.3f.
If you want the output to be left-justified instead of right justified, add a minus sign to the
beginning of the format specifier: for example, %-20s.
In addition to format specifiers, the format string in a printf statement can include other
characters. These extra characters are just copied to the output. This can be a convenient way
to insert values into the middle of an output string. For example, if x and y are variables of
type int, you could say
System.out.printf("The product of %d and %d is %d", x, y, x*y);
When this statement is executed, the value of x is substituted for the first %d in the string, the
value of y for the second %d, and the value of the expression x*y for the third, so the output
would be something like “The product of 17 and 42 is 714” (quotation marks not included in
output!).
To include an actual percent sign in the output, use the format specifier %% in the format
string. You can use %n to output a line feed. You can also use a backslash, \, as usual in strings
to output special characters such as tabs and double quote characters.
The format string in a System.printf statement can be given by a text block, which makes
it easier to output multiple lines of text. For example,
System.out.printf("""
The equivalent of %d miles is:
%,d yards,
%,d feet, or
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 41

%,d inches
""", miles, 1760*miles, 5280*miles, 12*5280*miles);

2.4.2 A First Text Input Example

For some unfathomable reason, Java has traditionally made it difficult to read data typed
in by the user of a program. You’ve already seen that output can be displayed to the user
using the subroutine System.out.print. This subroutine is part of a predefined object called
System.out. The purpose of this object is precisely to display output to the user. There is
a corresponding object called System.in that exists to read data input by the user, but it
provides only very primitive input facilities, and it requires some advanced Java programming
skills to use it effectively.
Java 5.0 finally made input a little easier with a new Scanner class. However, it requires
some knowledge of object-oriented programming to use this class, so it’s not ideal for use here
at the beginning of this course. Java 6 introduced the Console class for communicating with
the user, but Console has its own problems. (It is not always available, and it can only read
strings, not numbers.) Furthermore, in my opinion, Scanner and Console still don’t get things
quite right. Nevertheless, I will introduce Scanner briefly at the end of this section, in case you
want to start using it now. However, we start with my own version of text input.
Fortunately, it is possible to extend Java by creating new classes that provide subroutines
that are not available in the standard part of the language. As soon as a new class is available,
the subroutines that it contains can be used in exactly the same way as built-in routines. Along
these lines, I’ve written a class named TextIO that defines subroutines for reading values typed
by the user. The subroutines in this class make it possible to get input from the standard input
object, System.in, without knowing about the advanced aspects of Java that are needed to
use Scanner or to use System.in directly.
TextIO is defined in a “package” named textio. This means that when you look for the
file TextIO.java, you will find it inside a folder named textio. Furthermore, it means that a
program that uses TextIO must “import” it from the textio package. This is done with the
import directive
import textio.TextIO;
This directive must come before the “public class” that begins your program. Most of Java’s
standard classes, including Scanner, are defined in packages and are imported into programs in
the same way.
Because TextIO is not a built-in part of Java, you must make sure that the TextIO class is
available to your program. What this means depends on the Java programming environment
that you are using. In general, you just have to add the folder textio to the same folder that
contains your main program. This folder contains the file TextIO.java. See Section 2.6 for
information about how to use TextIO.
The input routines in the TextIO class are static member functions. (Static member
functions were introduced in the previous section.) Let’s suppose that you want your program
to read an integer typed in by the user. The TextIO class contains a static member function
named getlnInt that you can use for this purpose. Since this function is contained in the
TextIO class, you have to refer to it in your program as TextIO.getlnInt. The function has
no parameters, so a complete call to the function takes the form “TextIO.getlnInt()”. This
function call represents the int value typed by the user, and you have to do something with
the returned value, such as assign it to a variable. For example, if userInput is a variable
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 42

of type int (created with a declaration statement “int userInput;”), then you could use the
assignment statement
userInput = TextIO.getlnInt();
When the computer executes this statement, it will wait for the user to type in an integer value.
The user must type a number and press return before the program can continue. The value
that the user typed will then be returned by the function, and it will be stored in the variable,
userInput. Here is a complete program that uses TextIO.getlnInt to read a number typed
by the user and then prints out the square of that number. Note the import directive on the
first line:
import textio.TextIO;
/**
* A program that reads an integer that is typed in by the
* user and computes and prints the square of that integer.
*/
public class PrintSquare {
public static void main(String[] args) {
int userInput; // The number input by the user.
int square; // The userInput, multiplied by itself.
System.out.print("Please type a number: ");
userInput = TextIO.getlnInt();
square = userInput * userInput;
System.out.println();
System.out.println("The number that you entered was " + userInput);
System.out.println("The square of that number is " + square);
System.out.println();
} // end of main()
} //end of class PrintSquare
When you run this program, it will display the message “Please type a number:” and will pause
until you type a response, including a carriage return after the number. Note that it is good
style to output a question or some other prompt to the user before reading input. Otherwise,
the user will have no way of knowing exactly what the computer is waiting for, or even that it
is waiting for the user to do something.

2.4.3 Basic TextIO Input Functions

TextIO includes a variety of functions for inputting values of various types. Here are the
functions that you are most likely to use:
j = TextIO.getlnInt(); // Reads a value of type int.
y = TextIO.getlnDouble(); // Reads a value of type double.
a = TextIO.getlnBoolean(); // Reads a value of type boolean.
c = TextIO.getlnChar(); // Reads a value of type char.
w = TextIO.getlnWord(); // Reads one "word" as a value of type String.
s = TextIO.getln(); // Reads an entire input line as a String.
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 43

For these statements to be legal, the variables on the left side of each assignment statement
must already be declared and must be of the same type as that returned by the function on
the right side. Note carefully that these functions do not have parameters. The values that
they return come from outside the program, typed in by the user as the program is running.
To “capture” that data so that you can use it in your program, you have to assign the return
value of the function to a variable. You will then be able to refer to the user’s input value by
using the name of the variable.
When you call one of these functions, you are guaranteed that it will return a legal value of
the correct type. If the user types in an illegal value as input—for example, if you ask for an
int and the user types in a non-numeric character or a number that is outside the legal range
of values that can be stored in a variable of type int—then the computer will ask the user to
re-enter the value, and your program never sees the first, illegal value that the user entered. For
TextIO.getlnBoolean(), the user is allowed to type in any of the following: true, false, t, f, yes,
no, y, n, 1, or 0. Furthermore, they can use either upper or lower case letters. In any case, the
user’s input is interpreted as a true/false value. It’s convenient to use TextIO.getlnBoolean()
to read the user’s response to a Yes/No question.
You’ll notice that there are two input functions that return Strings. The first, getlnWord(),
returns a string consisting of non-blank characters only. When it is called, it skips over any
spaces and carriage returns typed in by the user. Then it reads non-blank characters until
it gets to the next space or carriage return. It returns a String consisting of all the non-
blank characters that it has read. The second input function, getln(), simply returns a string
consisting of all the characters typed in by the user, including spaces, up to the next carriage
return. It gets an entire line of input text. The carriage return itself is not returned as part of
the input string, but it is read and discarded by the computer. Note that the String returned
by TextIO.getln() might be the empty string , "", which contains no characters at all. You
will get this return value if the user simply presses return, without typing anything else first.
TextIO.getln() does not skip blanks or end-of-lines before reading a value. But the
input functions getlnInt(), getlnDouble(), getlnBoolean(), and getlnChar() behave like
getlnWord() in that they will skip past any blanks and carriage returns in the input before
reading a value. When one of these functions skips over an end-of-line, it outputs a ’ ?’ to let
the user know that more input is expected.
Furthermore, if the user types extra characters on the line after the input value, all the
extra characters will be discarded, along with the carriage return at the end of the
line. If the program executes another input function, the user will have to type in another line
of input, even if they had typed more than one value on the previous line. It might not sound
like a good idea to discard any of the user’s input, but it turns out to be the safest thing to do
in most programs.
∗ ∗ ∗
Using TextIO for input and output, we can now improve the program from Section 2.2 for
computing the value of an investment. We can have the user type in the initial value of the
investment and the interest rate. The result is a much more useful program—for one thing, it
makes sense to run it more than once! Note that this program uses formatted output to print
out monetary values in their correct format.
import textio.TextIO;
/**
* This class implements a simple program that will compute
* the amount of interest that is earned on an investment over
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 44

* a period of one year. The initial amount of the investment

* and the interest rate are input by the user. The value of
* the investment at the end of the year is output. The
* rate must be input as a decimal, not a percentage (for
* example, 0.05 rather than 5).
*/
public class Interest2 {
public static void main(String[] args) {
double principal; // The value of the investment.
double rate; // The annual interest rate.
double interest; // The interest earned during the year.
System.out.print("Enter the initial investment: ");
principal = TextIO.getlnDouble();
System.out.print("Enter the annual interest rate (as a decimal): ");
rate = TextIO.getlnDouble();
interest = principal * rate; // Compute this year’s interest.
principal = principal + interest; // Add it to principal.
System.out.printf("The amount of interest is $%1.2f%n", interest);
System.out.printf("The value after one year is $%1.2f%n", principal);
} // end of main()
} // end of class Interest2
(You might be wondering why there is only one output routine, System.out.println, which
can output data values of any type, while there is a separate input routine for each data type.
For the output function, the computer can tell what type of value is being output by looking
at the parameter. However, the input routines don’t have parameters, so the different input
routines can only be distinguished by having different names.)

2.4.4 Introduction to File I/O

System.out sends its output to the output destination known as “standard output.” But
standard output is just one possible output destination. For example, data can be written
to a file that is stored on the user’s hard drive. The advantage to this, of course, is that the
data is saved in the file even after the program ends, and the user can print the file, email it
to someone else, edit it with another program, and so on. Similarly, System.in has only one
possible source for input data.
TextIO has the ability to write data to files and to read data from files. TextIO includes
output functions TextIO.put, TextIO.putln, and TextIO.putf. Ordinarily, these functions
work exactly like System.out.print, System.out.println, and System.out.printf and are
interchangeable with them. However, they can also be used to output text to files and to other
destinations.
When you write output using TextIO.put, TextIO.putln, or TextIO.putf, the output
is sent to the current output destination. By default, the current output destination is
standard output. However, TextIO has subroutines that can be used to change the current
output destination. To write to a file named “result.txt”, for example, you would use the
statement:
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 45

TextIO.writeFile("result.txt");
After this statement is executed, any output from TextIO output statements will be sent to the
file named “result.txt” instead of to standard output. The file will be created if it does not
already exist. Note that if a file with the same name already exists, its previous contents will
be erased without any warning!
When you call TextIO.writeFile, TextIO remembers the file and automatically sends any
output from TextIO.put or other output functions to that file. If you want to go back to
writing to standard output, you can call
TextIO.writeStandardOutput();
Here is a simple program that asks the user some questions and outputs the user’s responses to
a file named “profile.txt.” As an example, it uses TextIO for output to standard output as well
as to the file, but System.out could also have been used for the output to standard output.
import textio.TextIO;
public class CreateProfile {
public static void main(String[] args) {
String name; // The user’s name.
String email; // The user’s email address.
double salary; // the user’s yearly salary.
String favColor; // The user’s favorite color.
TextIO.putln("Good Afternoon! This program will create");
TextIO.putln("your profile file, if you will just answer");
TextIO.putln("a few simple questions.");
TextIO.putln();
/* Gather responses from the user. */
TextIO.put("What is your name? ");
name = TextIO.getln();
TextIO.put("What is your email address? ");
email = TextIO.getln();
TextIO.put("What is your yearly income? ");
salary = TextIO.getlnDouble();
TextIO.put("What is your favorite color? ");
favColor = TextIO.getln();
/* Write the user’s information to the file named profile.txt. */
TextIO.writeFile("profile.txt"); // subsequent output goes to file
TextIO.putln("Name: " + name);
TextIO.putln("Email: " + email);
TextIO.putln("Favorite Color: " + favColor);
TextIO.putf( "Yearly Income: %,1.2f%n", salary);
/* Print a final message to standard output. */
TextIO.writeStandardOutput();
TextIO.putln("Thank you. Your profile has been written to profile.txt.");
}
}
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 46

In many cases, you want to let the user select the file that will be used for output. You
could ask the user to type in the file name, but that is error-prone, and users are more familiar
with selecting a file from a file dialog box. The statement
TextIO.writeUserSelectedFile();
will open a typical graphical-user-interface file selection dialog where the user can specify the
output file. This also has the advantage of alerting the user if they are about to replace
an existing file. It is possible for the user to cancel the dialog box without selecting a file.
TextIO.writeUserSelectedFile is a function that returns a boolean value. The return value
is true if the user selected a file, and is false if the user canceled the dialog box. Your program
can check the return value if it needs to know whether it is actually going to write to a file or
not.
∗ ∗ ∗
TextIO can also read from files, as an alternative to reading from standard input. You can
specify an input source for TextIO’s various “get” functions. The default input source is standard
input. You can use the statement TextIO.readFile("data.txt") to read from a file named
“data.txt” instead, or you can let the user select the input file with a GUI-style dialog box by
saying TextIO.readUserSelectedFile(). After you have done this, any input will come from
the file instead of being typed by the user. You can go back to reading the user’s input with
TextIO.readStandardInput().
When your program is reading from standard input, the user gets a chance to correct any
errors in the input. This is not possible when the program is reading from a file. If illegal data
is found when a program tries to read from a file, an error occurs that will crash the program.
(Later, we will see that it is possible to “catch” such errors and recover from them.) Errors can
also occur, though more rarely, when writing to files.
A complete understanding of input/output in Java requires a knowledge of object oriented
programming. We will return to the topic later, in Chapter 11. The file I/O capabilities in
the TextIO class are rather primitive by comparison. Nevertheless, they are sufficient for many
applications, and they will allow you to get some experience with files sooner rather than later.

2.4.5 Other TextIO Features

The TextIO input functions that we have seen so far can only read one value from a line of
input. Sometimes, however, you do want to read more than one value from the same line of
input. For example, you might want the user to be able to type something like “42 17” to input
the two numbers 42 and 17 on the same line. TextIO provides the following alternative input
functions to allow you to do this:
j = TextIO.getInt(); // Reads a value of type int.
y = TextIO.getDouble(); // Reads a value of type double.
a = TextIO.getBoolean(); // Reads a value of type boolean.
c = TextIO.getChar(); // Reads a value of type char.
w = TextIO.getWord(); // Reads one "word" as a value of type String.
The names of these functions start with “get” instead of “getln”. “Getln” is short for “get line”
and should remind you that the functions whose names begin with “getln” will consume an
entire line of data. A function without the “ln” will read an input value in the same way, but
will then save the rest of the input line in a chunk of internal memory called the input buffer .
The next time the computer wants to read an input value, it will look in the input buffer before
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 47

prompting the user for input. This allows the computer to read several values from one line
of the user’s input. Strictly speaking, the computer actually reads only from the input buffer.
The first time the program tries to read input from the user, the computer will wait while the
user types in an entire line of input. TextIO stores that line in the input buffer until the data
on the line has been read or discarded (by one of the “getln” functions). The user only gets to
type when the buffer is empty.
Previously, I said that TextIO.getln() reads a full line of input. Given the way that
TextIO uses the input buffer, that is not quite true. In fact, if TextIO.getln() is called when
the buffer is not empty, then it will simply return whatever characters remain in the buffer
without getting a new line of input from the user. If you ever want to empty the input buffer
and simply discard the input, you can call TextIO.getln() as a subroutine, without assigning
the returned value to a variable:
TextIO.getln();
Note, by the way, that although most TextIO input functions will skip past blank spaces and
carriage returns while looking for input, they will not skip past other characters. For example,
if you try to read two ints and the user types “42,17”, the computer will read the first number
correctly, but when it tries to read the second number, it will see the comma. It will regard this
as an error and will force the user to retype the number. If you want to input several numbers
from one line, you should make sure that the user knows to separate them with spaces, not
commas. Alternatively, if you want to require a comma between the numbers, use getChar()
to read the comma before reading the second number.
There is another character input function, TextIO.getAnyChar(), which does not skip past
blanks or carriage returns. It simply reads and returns the next character typed by the user,
even if it’s a blank or carriage return. If the user typed a carriage return, then the char returned
by getAnyChar() is the special linefeed character ’\n’. There is also a function, TextIO.peek(),
that lets you look ahead at the next character in the input without actually reading it. After
you “peek” at the next character, it will still be there when you read the next item from input.
This allows you to look ahead and see what’s coming up in the input, so that you can take
different actions depending on what’s there.
The TextIO class provides a number of other functions. To learn more about them, you can
look at the comments in the source code file, TextIO.java.
Clearly, the semantics of input is much more complicated than the semantics of output!
Fortunately, for the majority of applications, it’s pretty straightforward in practice. You only
need to follow the details if you want to do something fancy. In particular, I strongly advise
you to use the “getln” versions of the input routines, rather than the “get” versions, unless you
really want to read several items from the same line of input, precisely because the semantics
of the “getln” versions is much simpler.

2.4.6 Using Scanner for Input

TextIO makes it easy to get input from the user. However, since it is not a standard class, you
have to remember to make TextIO.java available to any program that uses it. Another option
for input is the Scanner class. One advantage of using Scanner is that it’s a standard part of
Java and so is always there when you want it.
It’s not that hard to use a Scanner for user input, and it has some nice features, but using
it requires some syntax that will not be introduced until Chapter 4 and Chapter 5. I’ll tell you
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 48

how to do it here, without explaining why it works. You won’t understand all the syntax at
this point. (Scanners will be covered in more detail in Subsection 11.1.5.)
First, since Scanner is defined in the package java.util, you should add the following import
directive to your program at the beginning of the source code file, before the “public class. . . ”:
import java.util.Scanner;
Then include the following statement at the beginning of your main() routine:
Scanner stdin = new Scanner( System.in );
This creates a variable named stdin of type Scanner. (You can use a different name for the
variable if you want; “stdin” stands for “standard input.”) You can then use stdin in your
program to access a variety of subroutines for reading user input. For example, the function
stdin.nextInt() reads one value of type int from the user and returns it. It is almost the
same as TextIO.getInt() except for two things: If the value entered by the user is not a legal
int, then stdin.nextInt() will crash rather than prompt the user to re-enter the value. And
the integer entered by the user must be followed by a blank space or by an end-of-line, whereas
TextIO.getInt() will stop reading at any character that is not a digit.
There are corresponding methods for reading other types of data, including
stdin.nextDouble(), stdin.nextLong(), and stdin.nextBoolean(). (stdin.nextBoolean()
will only accept “true” or “false” as input.) These subroutines can read more than one value
from a line, so they are more similar to the “get” versions of TextIO subroutines rather than
the “getln” versions. The method stdin.nextLine() is equivalent to TextIO.getln(), and
stdin.next(), like TextIO.getWord(), returns a string of non-blank characters.
As a simple example, here is a version of the sample program Interest2.java that uses Scanner
instead of TextIO for user input:
import java.util.Scanner;
public class Interest2WithScanner {
public static void main(String[] args) {
Scanner stdin = new Scanner( System.in ); // Create the Scanner.
double principal; // The value of the investment.
double rate; // The annual interest rate.
double interest; // The interest earned during the year.
System.out.print("Enter the initial investment: ");
principal = stdin.nextDouble();
System.out.print("Enter the annual interest rate (as a decimal): ");
rate = stdin.nextDouble();
interest = principal * rate; // Compute this year’s interest.
principal = principal + interest; // Add it to principal.
System.out.printf("The amount of interest is $%1.2f%n", interest);
System.out.printf("The value after one year is $%1.2f%n", principal);
} // end of main()
} // end of class Interest2WithScanner
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 49

Note the inclusion of the two lines given above to import Scanner and create stdin.
Also note the substitution of stdin.nextDouble() for TextIO.getlnDouble(). (In fact,
stdin.nextDouble() is really equivalent to TextIO.getDouble() rather than to the “getln”
version, but this will not affect the behavior of the program as long as the user types just one
number on each line of input.)
I will continue to use TextIO for input for the time being, but I will give a few more examples
of using Scanner in the on-line solutions to the end-of-chapter exercises. There will be more
detailed coverage of Scanner later in the book.

2.5 Details of Expressions

This section takes a closer look at expressions. Recall that an expression is a piece of
program code that represents or computes a value. An expression can be a literal, a variable,
a function call, or several of these things combined with operators such as + and >. The value
of an expression can be assigned to a variable, used as a parameter in a subroutine call, or
combined with other values into a more complicated expression. (The value can even, in some
cases, be ignored, if that’s what you want to do; this is more common than you might think.)
Expressions are an essential part of programming. So far, this book has dealt only informally
with expressions. This section tells you the more-or-less complete story (leaving out some of
the less commonly used operators).
The basic building blocks of expressions are literals (such as 674, 3.14, true, ’X’, and
"Hello"), variables, and function calls. Recall that a function is a subroutine that returns a
value. You’ve already seen some examples of functions, such as the input routines from the
TextIO class and the mathematical functions from the Math class.
The Math class also contains a couple of mathematical constants that are useful in
mathematical expressions: Math.PI represents π (the ratio of the circumference of a circle to
its diameter), and Math.E represents e (the base of the natural logarithms). These “constants”
are actually member variables in Math of type double. They are only approximations for
the mathematical constants, which would require an infinite number of digits to specify
exactly. The standard class Integer contains a couple of constants related to the int data
type: Integer.MAX VALUE is the largest possible int, 2147483647, and Integer.MIN VALUE
is the smallest int, -2147483648. Similarly, the class Double contains some constants
related to type double. Double.MAX VALUE is the largest value of type double, and
Double.MIN VALUE is the smallest positive value. It also has constants to represent infinite
values, Double.POSITIVE INFINITY and Double.NEGATIVE INFINITY, and the special value
Double.NaN to represent an undefined value. For example, the value of Math.sqrt(-1) is
Double.NaN.
Literals, variables, and function calls are simple expressions. More complex expressions
can be built up by using operators to combine simpler expressions. Operators include + for
adding two numbers, > for comparing two values, and so on. When several operators appear
in an expression, there is a question of precedence, which determines how the operators are
grouped for evaluation. For example, in the expression “A + B * C”, B*C is computed first
and then the result is added to A. We say that multiplication (*) has higher precedence
than addition (+). If the default precedence is not what you want, you can use parentheses to
explicitly specify the grouping you want. For example, you could use “(A + B) * C” if you
want to add A to B first and then multiply the result by C.
The rest of this section gives details of operators in Java. The number of operators in Java
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 50

is quite large. I will not cover them all here, but most of the important ones are here.

2.5.1 Arithmetic Operators

Arithmetic operators include addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. They are
indicated by +, -, *, and /. These operations can be used on values of any numeric type: byte,
short, int, long, float, or double. They can also be used with values of type char, which are
treated as integers in this context; a char is converted into its Unicode code number when
it is used with an arithmetic operator. When the computer actually calculates one of these
operations, the two values that it combines must be of the same type. If your program tells
the computer to combine two values of different types, the computer will convert one of the
values from one type to another. For example, to compute 37.4 + 10, the computer will convert
the integer 10 to a real number 10.0 and will then compute 37.4 + 10.0. This is called a type
conversion. Ordinarily, you don’t have to worry about type conversion in expressions, because
the computer does it automatically.
When two numerical values are combined (after doing type conversion on one of them, if
necessary), the answer will be of the same type. If you multiply two ints, you get an int; if you
multiply two doubles, you get a double. This is what you would expect, but you have to be
very careful when you use the division operator /. When you divide two integers, the answer
will always be an integer; if the quotient has a fractional part, it is discarded. For example, the
value of 7/2 is 3, not 3.5. If N is an integer variable, then N/100 is an integer, and 1/N is equal
to zero for any N greater than one! This fact is a common source of programming errors. You
can force the computer to compute a real number as the answer by making one of the operands
real: For example, when the computer evaluates 1.0/N, it first converts N to a real number in
order to match the type of 1.0, so you get a real number as the answer.
Java also has an operator for computing the remainder when one number is divided by
another. This operator is indicated by %. If A and B are integers, then A % B represents the
remainder when A is divided by B. (However, for negative operands, % is not quite the same
as the usual mathematical “modulus” operator, since if A is negative, then the value of A % B
will be negative.) For example, 7 % 2 is 1, while 34577 % 100 is 77, and 50 % 8 is 2. A
common use of % is to test whether a given integer is even or odd: N is even if and only if
N % 2 is zero. (If N is odd, then N % 2 is plus or minus 1, depending on whether N is positive or
negative.) More generally, you can check whether an integer N is evenly divisible by an integer
M by checking whether N % M is zero.
The % operator also works with real numbers. In general, A % B is what is left over after
you remove as many copies of B as possible from A. For example, 7.52 % 0.5 is 0.02.
Finally, you might need the unary minus operator, which takes the negative of a number.
For example, -X has the same value as (-1)*X. For completeness, Java also has a unary plus
operator, as in +X, even though it doesn’t really do anything.
By the way, recall that the + operator can also be used to concatenate a value of any type
onto a String. When you use + to combine a string with a value of some other type, it is another
example of type conversion, since any type can be automatically converted into type String.

2.5.2 Increment and Decrement

You’ll find that adding 1 to a variable is an extremely common operation in programming.
Subtracting 1 from a variable is also pretty common. You might perform the operation of
adding 1 to a variable with assignment statements such as:
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 51

counter = counter + 1;
goalsScored = goalsScored + 1;
The effect of the assignment statement x = x + 1 is to take the old value of the variable
x, compute the result of adding 1 to that value, and store the answer as the new value of
x. The same operation can be accomplished by writing x++ (or, if you prefer, ++x). This
actually changes the value of x, so that it has the same effect as writing “x = x + 1”. The two
statements above could be written
counter++;
goalsScored++;
Similarly, you could write x-- (or --x) to subtract 1 from x. That is, x-- performs the same
computation as x = x - 1. Adding 1 to a variable is called incrementing that variable,
and subtracting 1 is called decrementing . The operators ++ and -- are called the increment
operator and the decrement operator, respectively. These operators can be used on variables
belonging to any of the numerical types and also on variables of type char. (If ch is ’A’ then
ch++ changes the value of ch to ’B’.)
Usually, the operators ++ or -- are used in statements like “x++;” or “x--;”. These
statements are commands to change the value of x. However, it is also legal to use x++,
++x, x--, or --x as expressions, or as parts of larger expressions. That is, you can write things
like:
y = x++;
y = ++x;
TextIO.putln(--x);
z = (++x) * (y--);
The statement “y = x++;” has the effects of adding 1 to the value of x and, in addition, assigning
some value to y. The value assigned to y is defined to be the old value of x, before the 1 is
added. Thus, if the value of x is 6, the statement “y = x++;” will change the value of x to 7,
but it will change the value of y to 6, because the value assigned to y is the old value of x. On
the other hand, the value of ++x is defined to be the new value of x, after the 1 is added. So if
x is 6, then the statement “y = ++x;” changes the values of both x and y to 7. The decrement
operator, --, works in a similar way.
Note in particular that the statement x = x++; does not change the value of x! This is
because the value that is being assigned to x is the old value of x, the one that it had before the
statement was executed. The net result is that x is incremented but then immediately changed
back to its previous value! You also need to remember that x++ is not the same as x + 1. The
expression x++ changes the value of x; the expression x + 1 does not.
This can be confusing, and I have seen many bugs in student programs resulting from the
confusion. My advice is: Don’t be confused. Use ++ and -- only as stand-alone statements,
not as expressions. I will follow this advice in almost all examples in these notes.

2.5.3 Relational Operators

Java has boolean variables and boolean-valued expressions that can be used to express
conditions that can be either true or false. One way to form a boolean-valued expression
is to compare two values using a relational operator . Relational operators are used to test
whether two values are equal, whether one value is greater than another, and so forth. The
relational operators in Java are: ==, !=, <, >, <=, and >=. The meanings of these operators are:
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 52

A == B Is A "equal to" B?
A != B Is A "not equal to" B?
A < B Is A "less than" B?
A > B Is A "greater than" B?
A <= B Is A "less than or equal to" B?
A >= B Is A "greater than or equal to" B?
These operators can be used to compare values of any of the numeric types. They can also be
used to compare values of type char. For characters, < and > are defined according the numeric
Unicode values of the characters. (This might not always be what you want. It is not the same
as alphabetical order because all the upper case letters come before all the lower case letters.)
When using boolean expressions, you should remember that as far as the computer is
concerned, there is nothing special about boolean values. In the next chapter, you will see
how to use them in loop and branch statements. But you can also assign boolean-valued
expressions to boolean variables, just as you can assign numeric values to numeric variables.
And functions can return boolean values.
By the way, the operators == and != can be used to compare boolean values too. This is
occasionally useful. For example, can you figure out what this does:
boolean sameSign;
sameSign = ((x > 0) == (y > 0));
One thing that you cannot do with the relational operators <, >, <=, and >= is to use them
to compare values of type String. You can legally use == and != to compare Strings, but
because of peculiarities in the way objects behave, they might not give the results you want.
(The == operator checks whether two objects are stored in the same memory location, rather
than whether they contain the same value. Occasionally, for some objects, you do want to
make such a check—but rarely for strings. I’ll get back to this in a later chapter.) Instead,
you should compare strings using subroutines such as equals() and compareTo(), which were
described in Subsection 2.3.3.
Another place where == and != don’t always work as you would expect is with Double.NaN,
the constant that represents an undefined value of type double. The value of x == Double.NaN
is defined to be false for any x, and x != Double.NaN is defined to be true in all cases. Those
values hold even when x is Double.NaN! To test whether a real value x is the undefined value
Double.NaN, use the boolean-valued function Double.isNaN(x).

2.5.4 Boolean Operators

In English, complicated conditions can be formed using the words “and”, “or”, and “not.” For
example, “If there is a test and you did not study for it. . . ”. “And”, “or”, and “not” are
boolean operators, and they exist in Java as well as in English.
In Java, the boolean operator “and” is represented by &&. The && operator is used to
combine two boolean values. The result is also a boolean value. The result is true if both
of the combined values are true, and the result is false if either of the combined values is
false. For example, “(x == 0) && (y == 0)” is true if and only if both x is equal to 0 and
y is equal to 0.
The boolean operator “or” is represented by ||. (That’s supposed to be two of the vertical
line characters, |.) The expression “A || B” is true if either A is true or B is true, or if both
are true. “A || B” is false only if both A and B are false.
The operators && and || are said to be short-circuited versions of the boolean operators.
This means that the second operand of && or || is not necessarily evaluated. Consider the test
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 53

(x != 0) && (y/x > 1)

Suppose that the value of x is in fact zero. In that case, the division y/x is undefined
mathematically. However, the computer will never perform the division, since when the
computer evaluates (x != 0), it finds that the result is false, and so it knows that
((x != 0) && anything) has to be false. Therefore, it doesn’t bother to evaluate the second
operand. The evaluation has been short-circuited and the division by zero is avoided. (This
may seem like a technicality, and it is. But at times, it will make your programming life a little
easier.)
The boolean operator “not” is a unary operator. In Java, it is indicated by ! and is written
in front of its single operand. For example, if test is a boolean variable, then
test = ! test;
will reverse the value of test, changing it from true to false, or from false to true.

2.5.5 Conditional Operator

Any good programming language has some nifty little features that aren’t really necessary but
that let you feel cool when you use them. Java has the conditional operator. It’s a ternary
operator—that is, it has three operands—and it comes in two pieces, ? and :, that have to be
used together. It takes the form
hboolean-expression i ? hexpression1 i : hexpression2 i
The computer tests the value of hboolean-expressioni. If the value is true, it evaluates
hexpression1 i; otherwise, it evaluates hexpression2 i. The two expressions must be of the same
type. For example:
next = (N % 2 == 0) ? (N/2) : (3*N+1);
will assign the value N/2 to next if N is even (that is, if N % 2 == 0 is true), and it will assign
the value (3*N+1) to next if N is odd. (The parentheses in this example are not required, but
they do make the expression easier to read.)

2.5.6 Assignment Operators and Type Conversion

You are already familiar with the assignment statement, which uses the symbol “=” to assign
the value of an expression to a variable. In fact, = is really an operator in the sense that an
assignment can itself be used as an expression or as part of a more complex expression. The
value of an assignment such as A=B is the same as the value that is assigned to A. So, if you
want to assign the value of B to A and test at the same time whether that value is zero, you
could say:
if ( (A=B) == 0 )...
Usually, I would say, don’t do things like that!
In general, the type of the expression on the right-hand side of an assignment statement
must be the same as the type of the variable on the left-hand side. However, in some cases,
the computer will automatically convert the value computed by the expression to match the
type of the variable. Consider the list of numeric types: byte, short, int, long, float, double.
A value of a type that occurs earlier in this list can be converted automatically to a value that
occurs later. For example:
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 54

int A;
double X;
short B;
A = 17;
X = A; // OK; A is converted to a double
B = A; // illegal; no automatic conversion
// from int to short
The idea is that conversion should only be done automatically when it can be done without
changing the semantics of the value. Any int can be converted to a double with the same
numeric value. However, there are int values that lie outside the legal range of shorts. There
is simply no way to represent the int 100000 as a short, for example, since the largest value of
type short is 32767.
In some cases, you might want to force a conversion that wouldn’t be done automatically.
For this, you can use what is called a type cast. A type cast is indicated by putting a type
name, in parentheses, in front of the value you want to convert. For example,
int A;
short B;
A = 17;
B = (short)A; // OK; A is explicitly type cast
// to a value of type short
You can do type casts from any numeric type to any other numeric type. However, you should
note that you might change the numeric value of a number by type-casting it. For example,
(short)100000 is -31072. (The -31072 is obtained by taking the 4-byte int 100000 and throwing
away two of those bytes to obtain a short—you’ve lost the real information that was in those
two bytes.)
When you type-cast a real number to an integer, the fractional part is discarded. For
example, (int)7.9453 is 7. As another example of type casts, consider the problem of
getting a random integer between 1 and 6. The function Math.random() gives a real number
between 0.0 and 0.9999. . . , and so 6*Math.random() is between 0.0 and 5.999. . . . The type-
cast operator, (int), can be used to convert this to an integer: (int)(6*Math.random()).
Thus, (int)(6*Math.random()) is one of the integers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. To get a number
between 1 and 6, we can add 1: “(int)(6*Math.random()) + 1”. (The parentheses around
6*Math.random() are necessary because of precedence rules; without the parentheses, the type
cast operator would apply only to the 6.)
The type char is almost an integer type. You can assign char values to int variables, and you
can assign integer constants in the range 0 to 65535 to char variables. You can also use explicit
type-casts between char and the numeric types. For example, (char)97 is ’a’, (int)’+’ is
43, and (char)(’A’ + 2) is ’C’.
∗ ∗ ∗
Type conversion between String and other types cannot be done with type-casts. One way to
convert a value of any type into a string is to concatenate it with an empty string. For example,
"" + 42 is the string "42". But a better way is to use the function String.valueOf(x), a static
member function in the String class. String.valueOf(x) returns the value of x, converted into
a string. For example, String.valueOf(42) is the string "42", and if ch is a char variable,
then String.valueOf(ch) is a string of length one containing the single character that is the
value of ch.
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 55

It is also possible to convert certain strings into values of other types. For example, the
string "10" should be convertible into the int value 10, and the string "17.42e-2" into the
double value 0.1742. In Java, these conversions are handled by built-in functions.
The standard class Integer contains a static member function for converting from String to
int. In particular, if str is any expression of type String, then Integer.parseInt(str) is a
function call that attempts to convert the value of str into a value of type int. For example, the
value of Integer.parseInt("10") is the int value 10. If the parameter to Integer.parseInt
does not represent a legal int value, then an error occurs.
Similarly, the standard class Double includes a function Double.parseDouble. If str is a
String, then the function call Double.parseDouble(str) tries to convert str into a value of
type double. An error occurs if str does not represent a legal double value.
∗ ∗ ∗
Getting back to assignment statements, Java has several variations on the assignment
operator, which exist to save typing. For example, “A += B” is defined to be the same as
“A = A + B”. Many of Java’s operators give rise to similar assignment operators. For example:
x -= y; // same as: x = x - y;
x *= y; // same as: x = x * y;
x /= y; // same as: x = x / y;
x %= y; // same as: x = x % y;
The combined assignment operator += even works with strings. Recall that when the + operator
is used with a string as one of the operands, it represents concatenation. Since str += x is
equivalent to str = str + x, when += is used with a string on the left-hand side, it appends
the value on the right-hand side onto the string. For example, if str has the value “tire”, then
the statement str += ’d’; changes the value of str to “tired”.

2.5.7 Precedence Rules

If you use several operators in one expression, and if you don’t use parentheses to explicitly
indicate the order of evaluation, then you have to worry about the precedence rules that
determine the order of evaluation. (Advice: don’t confuse yourself or the reader of your
program; use parentheses liberally.)
Here is a listing of the operators discussed in this section, listed in order from highest
precedence (evaluated first) to lowest precedence (evaluated last):
Unary operators: ++, --, !, unary -, unary +, type-cast
Multiplication and division: *, /, %
Addition and subtraction: +, -
Relational operators: <, >, <=, >=
Equality and inequality: ==, !=
Boolean and: &&
Boolean or: ||
Conditional operator: ?:
Assignment operators: =, +=, -=, *=, /=, %=
Operators on the same line have the same precedence. When operators of the same precedence
are strung together in the absence of parentheses, unary operators and assignment operators are
evaluated right-to-left, while the remaining operators are evaluated left-to-right. For example,
A*B/C means (A*B)/C, while A=B=C means A=(B=C). (Can you see how the expression A=B=C
might be useful, given that the value of B=C as an expression is the same as the value that is
assigned to B?)
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 56

2.6 Programming Environments

Although the Java language is highly standardized, the procedures for creating,
compiling, and editing Java programs vary widely from one programming environment to
another. There are two basic approaches: a command line environment, where the user
types commands and the computer responds, and an integrated development environment
(IDE), where the user uses the keyboard and mouse to interact with a graphical user interface.
While there is essentially just one command line environment for Java programming, there
are several common IDEs, including Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, and BlueJ. I cannot give complete
or definitive information on Java programming environments in this section, but I will try to
give enough information to let you compile and run the examples from this textbook using the
command line, Eclipse, or BlueJ. (Readers are strongly encouraged to read, compile, and run
the examples. Source code for sample programs and solutions to end-of-chapter exercises can
be downloaded from the book’s web page, https://math.hws.edu/javanotes.)
One thing to keep in mind is that you do not have to pay any money to do Java programming
(aside from buying a computer, of course). Everything that you need can be downloaded for
free on the Internet.
This textbook is meant for use with Java 17 or later, although the large majority of it it
is valid for versions as old as Java 8. In this section, I will try to give you enough information
to make it possible to install Java and use it with this textbook. Since Java 8, new versions
of Java are released much more frequently than in the past, about twice a year, but only some
of the releases are “long-term support” (LTS) releases that will continue to receive bug fixes
and security updates over an extended period of time. Java 8, Java 11, and Java 17 are long-
term support releases. I recommend that you use Java 17, or Java 11 if you already have
that installed, and avoid non-long-term-support releases unless you have specific need for some
feature that they offer.

2.6.1 Getting a JDK

The basic development system for Java programming is usually referred to as a JDK (Java
Development Kit). Note that Java comes in two versions: a Development Kit version (the JDK)
and a Runtime Environment version (the JRE). A Runtime Environment can be used to run
Java programs, but it does not allow you to compile your own Java programs. A Development
Kit includes the Runtime Environment but also lets you compile programs. (It has become
harder find a separate JRE download, but you will still see the term used — sometimes to
refer, in fact, to a JDK.) A JDK will include the command line environment that you need to
work with Java on the command line. If you decide to use an IDE, you might still need to
download a JDK first; note, however, that both the Eclipse IDE and BlueJ now include a JDK,
so you do not need to download a separate JDK to use them.
Java was developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc., which was acquired by the Oracle
corporation. It is possible to download a JDK directly from Oracle’s web site, but starting with
Java 11, the Oracle JDK is meant mostly for commercial use. For personal and educational
use, it is probably preferable to use OpenJDK, which has the same functionality as the version
available from Oracle and is distributed under a fully free, open-source license. Although
OpenJDK can be downloaded from https://jdk.java.net/, which is also owned by Oracle, I
recommend downloading from Adoptium at this address:
https://adoptium.net/
This site is run by the Eclipse Foundation, and it distributes a version of the OpenJDk under
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 57

the name “Eclipse Temurin.” You will want to download Temurin 17 or later. The JDK comes
in different versions, depending on the operating system and type of CPU for your computer,
but the Adoptium web page should detect your operating system and CPU, so that you just
need to click the “Latest release” download button to get the appropriate version. (If you need
to select the version yourself, note that the CPU type is referred to as “Architecture.” You are
most likely to be using the “x64” architecture, which works for Intel and AMD CPUs, but the
newer M1 Macs use “aarch64,” which refers to ARM CPUs.)
The Adoptium site provides installers for MacOS and Windows that make it easier to set up
Java on those platforms. (The installer for MacOS is a .pkg file, and the installer for Windows
is a .msi file.) If you use the Linux operating system, you can probably install an OpenJDK
using the usual software manager for your distribution; if not, you can download a version from
Adoptium, but it will just be a compressed archive rather than an installer.
If you download a JDK installer for Windows or MacOS from Adoptium, you can just
double-click the installer file to start the installation, if it does not start automatically. If you
use the default installation, the installer will set up your computer so that you can use the
javac and java commands on the command line.
The GUI programs in this book use a programming library known as JavaFX , which
must be downloaded separately from the OpenJDK. You will need to download JavaFX even
if you use Eclipse for all of your Java work. (BlueJ comes with JavaFX.) Information about
downloading and using JavaFX is given at the end of this section.
(An OpenJDK can also be downloaded as a compressed archive, which you can decompress
and place anywhere on your computer. However, to use the javac and java commands, you will
either need to put the bin directory from the OpenJDK directory on your PATH environment
variable, or use full path names for the javac and java commands. The Adoptium installers
for Windows and for MacOS will take care of this detail for you.)

2.6.2 Command Line Environment

Many modern computer users find the command line environment to be pretty alien and
unintuitive. It is certainly very different from the graphical user interfaces that most people
are used to. However, it takes only a little practice to learn the basics of the command line
environment and to become productive using it. It is useful to know how to use the command
line, and it is particularly important for computer science students, but you can skip this
subsection if you plan to do all of your work with Java in an IDE.
To use a command line programming environment, you will have to open a window where
you can type commands. In Windows, you can open such a command window by running a
program named cmd . In MacOS, you want to run the Terminal program, which can be found
in the Utilities folder inside the Applications folder. In Linux, there are several possibilities,
including a very old program called xterm; but try looking for “Terminal” in your Applications
menu.
No matter what type of computer you are using, when you open a command window, it
will display a prompt of some sort. Type in a command at the prompt and press return. The
computer will carry out the command, displaying any output in the command window, and
will then redisplay the prompt so that you can type another command. One of the central
concepts in the command line environment is the current directory or working directory ,
which contains files that can be used by the commands that you type. (The words “directory”
and “folder” mean the same thing.) Often, the name of the current directory is part of the
command prompt. You can get a list of the files in the current directory by typing in the
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 58

command dir (on Windows) or ls (on Linux and MacOS). When the window first opens, the
current directory is your home directory , where your personal files are stored. You can change
the current directory using the cd command with the name of the directory that you want to
use. For example, if the current directory is your home directory, then you can change into
your Desktop directory by typing the command cd Desktop (and then pressing return).
You might want to create a directory (that is, a folder) to hold your Java work. For example,
you might create a directory named javawork in your home directory. You can do this using
your computer’s GUI; another way is to use the command line: Open a command window. If
you want to put your work directory in a different folder from your home directory, cd into
the directory where you want to put it. Then enter the command mkdir javawork to make
the directory. When you want to work on programming, open a command window and use the
cd command to change into your Java work directory. Of course, you can have more than one
working directory for your Java work; you can organize your files any way you like.
∗ ∗ ∗
The most basic commands for using Java on the command line are javac and java. The
javac command is used to compile Java source code, and java is used to run Java programs.
These commands, and other commands for working with Java, can be found in a directory
named bin inside the directory that holds the JDK. If you set things up correctly on your
computer, it should recognize these commands when you type them on the command line. Try
typing the commands java -version and javac -version. The output from these commands
should tell you which version of Java is being used. If you get a message such as “Command
not found,” then Java is not correctly configured.
Java should already be configured correctly on Linux, if you have installed Java from the
Linux software repositories. The same is true on MacOS and Windows, if you have used an
installer from Adoptium.
∗ ∗ ∗
To test the javac command, place a copy of HelloWorld.java into your working directory.
(If you downloaded the Web site of this book, you can find it in the directory named chapter2
inside the directory named source; you can use your computer’s GUI to copy-and-paste this
file into your working directory, or you could cd into the chapter2 folder and work there.
Alternatively, you can navigate to HelloWorld.java on the book’s Web site and use the “Save As”
command in your Web browser to save a copy of the file into your working directory.) Type
the command (while working in the directory that contains the file HelloWorld.java):
javac HelloWorld.java
This will compile HelloWorld.java and will create a bytecode file named HelloWorld.class
in the same directory. Note that if the command succeeds, you will not get any response from
the computer; it will just redisplay the command prompt to tell you it’s ready for another
command. You will then be able to run the program using the java command:
java HelloWorld
The computer should respond by outputting the message “Hello World!”. Note that although
the compiled program is stored in a file named HelloWorld.class, the java command uses
the name of the class, HelloWorld, not the name of the file. To run the program, you only need
.class file, not the .java file.
Many of the sample programs for this book use TextIO to read input from the user (see
Subsection 2.4.3). Since TextIO is not a standard part of Java, you must make it available to any
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 59

program that uses it. This means that your working directory should contain a folder named
textio, and inside that folder should be the file TextIO.java. You can copy TextIO.java from
this book’s source directory, or your can download it from the web site, but you should be sure
to place it inside a folder named textio in the same directory as the program that uses TextIO.
Once you have TextIO.java you can run a sample program such as Interest2.java to test
user input. First, compile the program with the command
javac Interest2.java
If successful, this will create the compiled file named Interest2.class. But you will also notice
that it creates the file TextIO.class inside the textio folder, if that file does not already exist.
More generally, the javac command will compile not just the file that you specify but also any
additional Java files that are needed. Once you have Interest2.class, you can run it using
the command
java Interest2
You will be asked to enter some information, and you will respond by typing your answers into
the command window, pressing return at the end of each line. When the program ends, you
will see the command prompt, and you can enter another command. (Note, by the way, that
“java TextIO” would not make sense, since TextIO does not have a main() routine, and so it
is not possible to execute it as a program.)
You can follow a similar procedure to run all of the examples in this book that do not use
JavaFX. For running JavaFX programs, see Subsection 2.6.8 below.
∗ ∗ ∗
To create your own programs, you will need a text editor . A text editor is a computer
program that allows you to create and save documents that contain plain text. It is important
that the documents be saved as plain text, that is without any special encoding or formatting
information. Word processor documents are not appropriate, unless you can get your word
processor to save as plain text. A good text editor can make programming a lot more pleasant.
Linux comes with several text editors. On Windows, you can use notepad in a pinch, but you
will probably want something better. For MacOS, you might download the BBEdit application,
which can be used for free. One possibility that will work on any platform is to use jedit, a
programmer’s text editor that is itself written in Java and that can be downloaded for free from
www.jedit.org. Another popular cross-platform programming editor is Atom, available from
atom.io.
To work on your programs, you can open a command line window and cd into the working
directory where you will store your source code files. Start up your text editor program, such
as by double-clicking its icon or selecting it from a Start menu. Type your code into the editor
window, or open an existing source code file that you want to modify. Save the file into your
working directory. Remember that the name of a Java source code file must end in “.java”, and
the rest of the file name must match the name of the class that is defined in the file. Once the
file is saved in your working directory, go to the command window and use the javac command
to compile it, as discussed above. If there are syntax errors in the code, they will be listed in the
command window. Each error message contains the line number in the file where the computer
found the error. Go back to the editor and try to fix one or more errors, save your changes,
and then try the javac command again. (It’s usually a good idea to just work on the first few
errors; sometimes fixing those will make other errors go away.) Remember that when the javac
command finally succeeds, you will get no message at all, or possibly just some “warnings”;
warnings do not stop a program from running. Then you can use the java command to run
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 60

your program, as described above. Once you’ve compiled the program, you can run it as many
times as you like without recompiling it.
That’s really all there is to it: Keep both editor and command-line window open. Edit,
save, and compile until you have eliminated all the syntax errors. (Always remember to save
the file before compiling it—the compiler only sees the saved file, not the version in the editor
window.) When you run the program, you might find that it has semantic errors that cause it
to run incorrectly. In that case, you have to go back to the edit/save/compile loop to try to
find and fix the problem.

2.6.3 Eclipse IDE

In an Integrated Development Environment, everything you need to create, compile, and run
programs is integrated into a single package, with a graphical user interface that will be familiar
to most computer users. There are a number of different IDEs for Java program development,
ranging from fairly simple wrappers around the JDK to highly complex applications with a
multitude of features. For a beginning programmer, there is a danger in using an IDE, since
the difficulty of learning to use the IDE, on top of the difficulty of learning to program, can be
daunting. However, for my own programming, I generally use the Eclipse IDE, and I introduce
my students to it after they have had some experience with the command line. I will discuss
Eclipse in some detail and a much simpler alternative, BlueJ, more briefly. IDEs have features
that are very useful even for a beginning programmer, although a beginner will want to ignore
many of their advanced features.
Unless you happen to be using Oracle’s JDK for Java 8, 9, or 10, using Eclipse for JavaFX
programs will require some extra configuration. Subsection 2.6.8 discusses using JavaFX in
Eclipse. This subsection tells you how to use it for programs that use only standard Java
classes.
You can download an Eclipse IDE from eclipse.org. When I install Eclipse, I get the “Eclipse
IDE for Java Developers” package (not the “installer”) from this web page:
https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/packages/
For Windows and Linux, the package download is a compressed archive file. You can simply
extract the contents of the archive and place the resulting directory wherever you want it on
your computer. You will find the Eclipse application in that directory, and you can start Eclipse
by double-clicking the application icon. For MacOS, the download is a .dmg file that contains
the Eclipse application. You can open the .dmg file and drag the application to any location
that you prefer (probably the Applications folder). Note that the MacOS and Linux packages
are available in two versions, for x86 64 and AArch64. This refers to the type of CPU that the
computer uses. Newer “M1” Macs can use the AArch64 version; the x86 64 version is for older
Macs that use Intel CPUs. For Linux, you are most likely to need the x86 64 version, which
will work for Intel and AMD CPUs.
Eclipse is a free program. It is itself written in Java. Recent versions of Eclipse include an
OpenJDK (although Eclipse calls it a JRE), so you can use it without downloading a separate
JDK. The March 2022 version includes a Java 17 SDK.
The first time you start Eclipse, you will be asked to specify a workspace, which is the
directory where your work will be stored. You can accept the default name, or provide one
of your own. You can use multiple workspaces and select the one that you want to use at
startup. When a new workspace is first opened, the Eclipse window will be filled by a large
“Welcome” screen that includes links to extensive documentation and tutorials. You should
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 61

close this screen, by clicking the “X” next to the word “Welcome”; you can get back to it later
by choosing “Welcome” from the “Help” menu.
The Eclipse GUI consists of one large window that is divided into several sections. Each
section contains one or more views. For example, a view can be a text editor, it can be a place
where a program can do I/O, or it can contain a list of your projects. If there are several views
in one section of the window, then there will be tabs at the top of the section to select the view
that is displayed in that section. This will happen, for example, if you have several editor views
open at the same time.
Each view displays a different type of information. The whole set of views in the window
is called a perspective. Eclipse uses different perspectives, that is, different sets of views of
different types of information, for different tasks. For compiling and running programs, the
only perspective that you will need is the “Java Perspective,” which is the default. As you
become more experienced, you might want to use the “Debug Perspective,” which has features
designed to help you find semantic errors in programs. There are small buttons in the Eclipse
toolbar that can be used to switch between perspectives.
The Java Perspective includes a large area in the center of the window that contains text
editor views. This is where you will create and edit your programs. To the left of this is the
Package Explorer view, which will contain a list of your Java projects and source code files. To
the right are one or more other views that you might or might not find useful; I usually close
them by clicking the small “X” next to the name of each one. Several other views that will
certainly be useful appear under different tabs in a section of the window below the editing
area. If you accidently close one of the important views, such as the Package Explorer, you can
get it back by selecting it from the “Show View” submenu of the “Window” menu. You can
also reset the whole window to its default contents by selecting “Reset Perspective” from the
“Window” menu.
∗ ∗ ∗
To do any work in Eclipse, you need a project. To start a Java project, go to the “New”
submenu in the “File” menu, and select the “Java Project” command. In the window that pops
up, you will need to fill in a “Project Name,” which can be anything you like. There are two
other sections of the window that you might need to pay attention to:

If the project will use JavaFX, you must already have configured the workspace for JavaFX, as
described at the end of this section. You should make sure that the JRE configuration that you
have created for JavaFX is selected in the “JRE” section of the dialog box, as shown here. For
a project that does not require JavaFX, you can set the JRE to be an “execution environment,”
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 62

which should be set to JavaSE 17 or later. And for any program from this textbook, you need
to uncheck the option labeled “Create module-info.java file” in the “Module” section. This
textbook does not use modular programs! Note that the workspace will remember these two
settings for the next time that you create a new project and that it is harmless to use a JRE
with JavaFX support even for a project that does not use JavaFX.
After entering a project name, and changing the options if necessary, click the “Finish”
button. The project should appear in the “Package Explorer” view on the left side of the
Eclipse window. Click on the small triangle or plus sign next to the project name to see the
contents of the project. Assuming that you use the default settings, there should be a directory
named “src,” which is where your Java source code files will go. The project also contains the
“JRE System Library”. This is the collection of standard built-in classes that come with Java;
if you have configured the project for JavaFX, it will also include the JavaFX classes.
To run any of the sample Java programs from this textbook, you need to copy the source
code file into your Eclipse Java project. Assuming that you have downloaded the source code
file onto your computer, you can copy-and-paste it into the Eclipse window. (Right-click the
file icon (or control-click on MacOS); select “Copy” from the pop-up menu; then right-click the
project’s src folder in the Eclipse window, and select “Paste”. Be sure to paste it into the src
folder, not into the project itself; files outside the src folder are not treated as Java source
code files.) Alternatively, you can try dragging the file icon from a file browser window onto
the src folder in the Eclipse window.
To use the TextIO-based examples from this textbook, you must add the source code file
TextIO.java to your project. This file has to be in a “package” named textio. If you already
have TextIO.java in a folder named “textio,” as described above, then you can simply copy-
and-paste the textio folder into the “src” folder of your project. Alternatively, you can create
the textio package using the “New/Package” command from the “File” menu. This will make
a folder named “textio” in your project, inside the src folder, and you can then copy-and-paste
TextIO.java into that folder. In any case, package textio should appear under “src” in your
project, with TextIO.java inside it. (You can drag files from one location to another in the
Package Explorer view, if you accidently put a file in the wrong location.)
Once a Java program is in the project, you can open it in an editor by double-clicking the
file name in the “Package Explorer” view. To run the program, right-click in the editor window,
or on the file name in the Package Explorer view (or control-click in MacOS). In the menu that
pops up, go to the “Run As” submenu, and select “Java Application”. The program will be
executed. If the program writes to standard output, the output will appear in the “Console”
view, in the section of the Eclipse window below the editor section. If the program uses TextIO
or Scanner for input, you will have to type the required input into the “Console” view—click
the “Console” view before you start typing so that the characters that you type will be
sent to the correct part of the window. (For an easier way to run a program, find and click
the small “Run” button in Eclipse’s tool bar. This will run either the program in the editor
window, the program selected in the Package Explorer view, or the program that was run most
recently, depending on context.) Note that when you run a program in Eclipse, it is compiled
automatically. There is no separate compilation step.
You can have more than one program in the same Eclipse project, or you can create
additional projects to organize your work better. Remember to place a copy of TextIO.java,
inside a folder named textio, in any project that requires it.
∗ ∗ ∗
To create a new Java program in Eclipse, you must create a new Java class. To do that,
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 63

right-click the Java project name in the “Project Explorer” view. Go to the “New” submenu
of the popup menu, and select “Class”. (Alternatively, there is a small icon in the toolbar at
the top of the Eclipse window that you can click to create a new Java class.) In the window
that opens, type in the name of the class that you want to create. The class name must be
a legal Java identifier. Note that you want the name of the class, not the name of the source
code file, so don’t add “.java” at the end of the name. The window also includes an input box
labeled “Package” where you can specify the name of a package to contain the class. Most
examples in this book use the “default package,” but you can create your own programs in any
package. To use the default package, the “Package” input box should be empty. Finally, click
the “Finish” button to create the class. The class should appear inside the “src” folder, in a
folder corresponding to its package. The new file should automatically open in the editing area
so that you can start typing your program.
Eclipse has several features that aid you as you type your code. It will underline any syntax
error with a jagged red line, and in some cases will place an error marker in the left border
of the edit window. If you hover the mouse cursor over the error marker or over the error
itself, a description of the error will appear. Note that you do not have to get rid of every
error immediately as you type; many errors will go away as you type in more of the program!
If an error marker displays a small “light bulb,” Eclipse is offering to try to fix the error for
you. Click the light bulb—or simply hover your mouse over the actual error—to get a list of
possible fixes, then click the fix that you want to apply. For example, if you use an undeclared
variable in your program, Eclipse will offer to declare it for you. You can actually use this
error-correcting feature to get Eclipse to write certain types of code for you! Unfortunately,
you’ll find that you won’t understand a lot of the proposed fixes until you learn more about
the Java language, and it is not a good idea to apply a fix that you don’t understand—often
that will just make things worse in the end.
Eclipse will also look for spelling errors in comments and will underline them with jagged
red lines. Hover your mouse over the error to get a list of possible correct spellings.
Another essential Eclipse feature is content assist. Content assist can be invoked by typing
Control-Space. It will offer possible completions of whatever you are typing at the moment. For
example, if you type part of an identifier and hit Control-Space, you will get a list of identifiers
that start with the characters that you have typed; use the up and down arrow keys to select
one of the items in the list, and press Return or Enter. (You can also click an item with the
mouse to select it, or hit Escape to dismiss the list.) If there is only one possible completion
when you hit Control-Space, it will be inserted automatically. By default, Content Assist will
also pop up automatically, when you type a period or certain other characters. For example, if
you type “TextIO.”, you will get a list of all the subroutines in the TextIO class. Personally, I
find this auto-activation annoying. You can disable it in the Eclipse Preferences. (Look under
Java / Editor / Content Assist, and turn off the “Enable auto activation” option.) You can
still call up Code Assist manually with Control-Space.
Once you have an error-free program, you can run it as described above. If you find a
problem when you run it, it’s very easy to go back to the editor, make changes, and run it
again.
∗ ∗ ∗
(As a side note, it is possible to use the JDK that is included with Eclipse on the command
line. That JDK is a directory inside the Eclipse installation, with a long, complex name.
The best way to find the name might be to open The “Installed JREs” section of the Eclipse
preferences, as described above, select the built-in JRE in the list of “Installed JREs”, and click
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 64

“Edit.” The name of the JDK directory will be in the “JRE home” section of the dialog, and
you can copy-and-paste it from there. You need to add /bin— or \bin on Windows—to that
directory name to get the name of the directory that contains the JDK command line programs
such as javac. You can add the full name of that bin directory to your PATH environment
variable, or you can use full path names for the javac and java commands.)

2.6.4 BlueJ
As a simpler alternative to Eclipse, I will mention BlueJ, a small IDE that is designed specifically
for people who are learning to program. It is much less complex than Eclipse, but it does have
some features that make it useful for education. BlueJ can be downloaded from bluej.org.
There are installers available for Windows, for MacOS, and for Debian-based Linux (such as
Ubuntu Linux and Linux Mint). The installers include an OpenJDK as well as JavaFX (which is
required to run BlueJ), so you will not need to do any additional downloading or configuration.
As of March, 2022, BlueJ supports Java 11 but not later versions.
In BlueJ, you can begin a project with the “New Project” command in the “Project” menu.
A BlueJ project is simply a folder. When you create a project, you will have to select a folder
name that does not already exist. The folder will be created and a window will be opened to
show the contents of the folder. Files are shown as icons in the BlueJ window. You can drag
.java files from the file system onto that window to add files to the project; they will be copied
into the project folder as well as shown in the window. You can also copy files directly into the
project folder, but BlueJ won’t see them until the next time you open the project. When you
restart BlueJ, it should show the project that you were working on most recently, but you can
open any project with a command from the “Project” menu.
There is a button in the project window for creating a new class. An icon for the class is
added to the window, and a .java source code file is created in the project folder. The file is not
automatically opened for editing. To edit a file, double-click its icon in the project window. An
editor will be opened in a separate window. (A newly created class will contain some default
code that you probably don’t want; you can erase it and add a main() routine instead.) The
BlueJ editor does not show errors as you type. Errors will be reported when you compile the
program. Also, it does not offer automatic fixes for errors. It has a less capable version of
Eclipse’s Content Assist, which seems only to work for getting a list of available subroutines in
a class or object; call up the list by hitting Control-Space after typing the period following the
name of a class or object.
An editor window contains a button for compiling the program in the window. There is
also a compile button in the project window, which compiles all the classes in the project.
To run a program, it must already be compiled. Right-click the icon of a compiled program.
In the menu that pops up, you will see “void main(String[] args)” or, for a JavaFX program,
“Run JavaFX Application”). Select that option from the menu to run the program.
One of the neatest features of BlueJ is that you can actually use it to run any subroutine,
not just main(). If a class contains other subroutines, you will see them in the list that you get
by right-clicking its icon. A pop-up dialog allows you to enter any parameters required by the
routine, and if the routine is a function, you will get another dialog box after the routine has
been executed to tell you its return value. This allows easy testing of individual subroutines.
Furthermore, you can also use BlueJ to create new objects from a class. An icon for the object
will be added at the bottom of the project window, and you can right-click that icon to get
a list of subroutines in the object. This will, of course, not be useful to you until we get to
object-oriented programming in Chapter 5.
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 65

2.6.5 The Problem of Packages

Every class in Java is contained in something called a package. Classes that are not explicitly
put into a package are in the “default” package. All of Java’s standard classes are in named
packages. This includes even classes like String and System, which are in a package named
java.lang. Classes in java.lang are automatically imported into any Java file, but classes in
other packages must be imported using an import directive. My TextIO class is in a package
named textio, and it must be imported into a program that wants to use it. I will discuss
packages in greater detail in Section 4.6. For now, you just need to know some basic facts.
Although most of my examples are in the default package, the use of the default package is
in fact discouraged, according to official Java style guidelines. Nevertheless, I have chosen to
use it, since it seems easier for beginning programmers to avoid packages as much as possible,
at least at first. If Eclipse tries to put a class into a package, you can delete the package name
from the class-creation dialog to get it to use the default package instead. But if you do create
a class in a package, the source code starts with a line that specifies which package the class is
in. For example, if the class is in a package named test.pkg, then the first line of the source
code will be
package test.pkg;
For example, the source code for TextIO begins with “package textio;”. I put TextIO in a
package because a class that is in a non-default package cannot use a class from the default
package. That is, if TextIO were in the default package, then it could only be used by programs
that are also in the default package. (In fact, in earlier versions of this textbook, TextIO was
in the default package. I moved it to package textio as of Version 8 of the book.)
When packages are used in a command-line environment, some complications arise. For
example, if a program is in a package named test.pkg, then the source code file must be in a
subdirectory named “pkg” inside a directory named “test” that is in turn inside your main
Java working directory. Nevertheless, when you compile or execute the program, you should
be working in the main directory, not in the subdirectory. When you compile the source
code file, you have to include the name of the directory in the command: For example, for a
program in package test.pkg use “javac test/pkg/ClassName.java” on Linux or MacOS, or
“javac test\pkg\ClassName.java” on Windows. The command for executing the program is
then “java test.pkg.ClassName”, with a period separating the package name from the class
name.

2.6.6 About jshell

I will mention one more command-line tool for working with Java: jshell. The jshell command
is a standard part of the JDK (after Java 8). If you can use the javac and java commands on
the command line, then you can also use jshell. The purpose of jshell is to let you type in
and execute Java code without the bother of creating a .java file and writing a main program.
To start jshell, just enter the command on a line by itself. You will get a jshell prompt where
you can enter either a Java statement or a Java expression. If you enter a statement, it will
be executed. If you enter an expression, its value will be printed. You do not have to place a
semicolon at the end of a line. Here is a short example of a jshell session.
$ jshell
| Welcome to JShell -- Version 17.0.2
| For an introduction type: /help intro
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 66

jshell> System.out.println("Hello World")

Hello World
jshell> int x = 42
x ==> 42
jshell> x * x
$3 ==> 1764
jshell> /exit
| Goodbye

Using jshell can be a great way to learn Java and to experiment with its features. I won’t
give any more detailed information about it in this book, but you can learn more at
https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/17/jshell/introduction-jshell.html
or you can use the /help command inside jshell to learn more about it.

2.6.7 JavaFX on the Command Line

Version 7 of this textbook used Swing for GUI programming. When I began work on Version 8,
JavaFX had been added to the standard JDK, and it seemed to be the furture of Java GUIs. So,
in Version 8, I made the switch to JavaFX. Not long after that, however, JavaFX was removed
from the JDK, and it is now developed and distributed separately. This has made it somewhat
more difficult to use. So for Version 9, I decided to make the book available in two editions, one
covering Swing and one covering JavaFX. The only significant differences are in the chapters
that cover GUI programming, Chapter 6 and Chapter 13. This edition covers JavaFX. If you
also want to learn Swing, you can read those two chapters in the Swing edition.
To use JavaFX on the command line or in Eclipse, you have to download it onto your
computer. You can find download links on this page:
https://gluonhq.com/products/javafx/
You need to download a JavaFX “SDK”—not “jmods” or “Monocle SDK”—that is appropriate
for your operating system (Linux, MacOS, or Windows) and for the JDK that you are using.
You should get the version number that matches the version of the JDK; that probably means
JavaFX version 17.0.2. (Only the major version number, 17, has to match.) Furthermore, you
need to select the “Architecture,” which refers to the CPU type. The architecture should match
the architecture used by your JDK. If you are using an “x64” JDK from Adoptium or if you
are using an “x86 64” Eclipse package, then you need JavaFX for the x64 architecture. If you
are using an “aarch64” JDK from Adoptium or an “AArch64” package from Eclipse, then you
need the aarch64 architecture.
When you download the JavaFX SDK, it will be in the form of a compressed archive file.
You will need to extract the contents of the archive. Usually, simply double-clicking the icon of
the archive file will either extract the contents or open a program that you can use to extract
the contents. You will get a directory with a name something like javafx-sdk-17.0.2. You can
put the directory anywhere on your computer, but you will need to know where it is located.
JavaFX is a collection of Java classes that can be used for making GUI programs. In this
book, it is first used in Section 3.9 and is covered extensively in Chapter 6 and Chapter 13. It
is also used in example programs in several other chapters. This subsection explains how to
use JavaFX on the command line. It assumes that you have already downloaded the JavaFX
SDK, as described above. JavaFX is distributed as a set of “modules.” (See Subsection 4.6.4)
The modules are stored in .jar files in the lib subdirectory of the JavaFX SDK. When using
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 67

the javac and java commands on a program that uses JavaFX, you need to tell the command
where to find the JavaFX modules.
The modules are specified for the javac and java commands using two command options:
--module-path and --add-modules. The first option specifies the directory that contains
the JavaFX .jar files, and the second says which modules you actually want to use. For the
purposes of this textbook, you can set the value of --add-modules to ALL-MODULE-PATH, which
makes all of JavaFX available to your program. The value of --module-path is a path to
the lib directory that contains the JavaFX .jar files. For example, let’s say that the JavaFX
SDK directory is named openjfx-sdk-17.0.2 and that it is in my home directory, /home/eck.
Then the full path to the lib directory is /home/eck/openjfx-sdk-17.0.2/lib, and the javac
command for compiling JavaFX programs would be:
javac --module-path=/home/eck/openjfx-sdk-17.0.2/lib --add-modules=ALL-MODULE-PATH
This would be followed on the same line by the .java files that you want to compile. Exactly
the same options would be used with the java command to run JavaFX programs. The option
--module-path can also be abbreviated to -p, with no equals sign. So this can also be written
javac -p /home/eck/openjfx-sdk-17.0.2/lib --add-modules=ALL-MODULE-PATH
If you don’t know the full path to the JavaFX SDK, open a command window and use the
cd command to move to the SDK’s lib directory. On Mac or Linux, enter the command pwd
to print out the full path of the working directory. On windows, use the command cd, with
no directory specified, to print out the path. Use the output from that command as the value
for the --module-path. On windows, a typical java command for use with javafx might look
something like this:
java -p C:\Users\eck\openjfx-sdk-17.0.2\lib --add-modules=ALL-MODULE-PATH
If the path name includes a space, or certain other special characters, it must be enclosed in
quotation marks. For example,
java -p "C:\JavaFX Support\openjfx-sdk-17.0.2\lib" --add-modules=ALL-MODULE-PATH
Of course, this is very verbose, and it would be nice not to have to retype it all the time.
On MacOS or Linux, it is easy to define aliases, which are shortcuts for long commands. On
my computer, I use an alias to define a jfxc command for compiling JavaFX programs. The
alias is defined as follows:
alias jfxc=’javac -p /home/eck/javafx-sdk-17.0.2/lib --add-modules=ALL-MODULE-PATH’
Similarly, I defined an alias for running JavaFX programs:
alias jfx=’java -p /home/eck/javafx-sdk-17.0.2/lib --add-modules=ALL-MODULE-PATH’
This lets me compile and run JavaFX programs using commands such as
jfxc MyJavaFXProgram.java
jfx MyJavaFXProgram
To make the alias definitions permanent on my Linux computer, I added them to a file
named .bashrc. On MacOS, I would put them in a file named .zshrc (for MacOS 10.15 and
later) or in a file named .bash profile (for earlier versions of MacOS). That file must be placed
in your home directory. The file might or might not already exist; if it doesn’t exist, you can
create it. The file is executed whenever you open a Terminal window. (In particular, changes
do not become effective until you open a new Terminal.) Note that the file name begins with a
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 68

period, which makes it a “hidden file.” That means that it won’t show up in a usual directory
listing or file browser, but you should be able to set your file browser to show hidden files.
Unfortunately, Windows currently does not have an equivalent of a .bashrc or .zshrc for its
cmd command window. One option is to make a batch script file to run the command. For
compilation, you could create a file named jfxc.bat containing just one line similar to
javac -p C:\Users\eck\javafx-sdk-17.0.2\lib --add-modules=ALL-MODULE-PATH %*
but, of course, using the appropriate JavaFX location for your own computer. The “%*” at the
end represents the inputs to the javac command. The file can be in the current directory or
somewhere on the system path, such as the JDK bin directory. Then you can use jfxc as a
command for compiling JavaFX programs. You can handle the java command with a similar
.bat file.

2.6.8 Using JavaFX in Eclipse

To compile and run JavaFX programs in Eclipse, you need to configure your Eclipse workspace
to support it. My goal here is not to present the most “correct” or general way to configure
Eclipse for JavaFX; I just want to make it possible to easily work with basic JavaFX programs
like the ones that come with this textbook. I will discuss a one-time configuration of an Eclipse
workspace that seems to work reliably for all the versions of Eclipse in which I have tried it.
The first step is to download a JavaFX SDK from the JavaFX download site, as discussed
in the previous subsection.
To begin, open the Eclipse preferences, using the “Preferences” command (which is in the
“Windows” menu on Linux and Windows and in the “Eclipse” menu on MacOS). Expand the
Java section in the list on the left, by clicking the small triangle or plus sign next to the word
“Java.” Click on “Installed JREs.” You will see a list of the Java environments that Eclipse
knows about. The list should include at least the JRE that is included in Eclipse, and it might
also include other JREs that have been installed. You can click on a JRE to select it and click
the “Duplicate” button to make a copy. You can then add JavaFX support to the copy. (You
could also just “Edit” the original JRE, or “Add” a completely new configuration. I recommend
using “Duplicate”, but if you add a new configuration, you would have the freedom to use a
different JDK that you have downloaded, along with a matching JavaFX.)
When you “Duplicate” an existing JRE, you should see a dialog box similar to the following.
The “JRE home” and “JRE name” will already be filled in, and there will be just one entry
under “JRE system libraries”.
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 69

You should change the “JRE name” to something that indicates that it supports JavaFX. This
is just so that you will recognize the name when you create a new project in Eclipse. But the
main thing is to add the JavaFX configuration.
Remember that to use JavaFX, you need to make it available to your program both at
compile time and at run time. The first step in the configuration is to make it available at
compile time. To do that, you want to add the JavaFX .jar files to the JRE system libraries:
Click the “Add External JARs” button, and navigate to the lib directory in the JavaFX SDK
that you downloaded. You should see the JavaFX .jar files. Select them all, and click “OK”.
They should appear in the “JRE system libraries” list.
The second step is to configure the JavaFX source file. This step is optional, but it will allow
Eclipse to find the documentation for JavaFX, which can be very useful when you are writing
programs. For this step, make sure that all of the JavaFX jar files are selected in the list of .jar
files, as shown in the above illustration. Click the “Source Attachment” button. In the “Source
Attachment Configuration” dialog box, select “External Location”, and click “External File”.
Select the file src.zip from the JavaFX SDK directory, and click “OK”. That’s all there is to it.
Finally, you must make JavaFX available to your programs at run time. To do that, you need
to fill in the “Default VM arguments” input box by typing in the JavaFX command line options
for the java command. The input box contains options that will be added to the java command
every time you run a program in Eclipse using this JRE. The -p (or --module-path) and
--add-modules options that are needed were discussed in the previous subsection. Examples
appropriate for my own computer are shown in the above illustration. The value of the -p option
is the location of the JavaFX lib directory. It should be exactly the same as the beginning of
the paths for the JavaFX .jar files as shown in the “JRE system libraries” list. (But enclose
the value in quotation marks if it includes spaces or other special characters.) The value for
--add-modules can be ALL-MODULE-PATH, as shown in the illustration.
When everything is set up, click “Finish” and then click “Apply and Close” in the main
“Preferences” dialog box. When you create a new Java project in the workspace, make sure
CHAPTER 2. NAMES AND THINGS 70

that the JRE that you set up to use JavaFX is selected in the project creation dialog box. Look
in the “JRE” section of the dialog box, select “Use project-specific JRE,” and select the JRE
with JavaFX from the popup menu. You should then be able to use JavaFX in that project. If
not, check your JRE configuration. You can “Edit” it in the same Java preferences where you
set it up in the first place. If you can’t compile JavaFX programs, make sure that you are using
a JavaFX SDK with the same major version number as the built-in JDK in Eclipse (JavaFX 17
for the March 2022 version of Eclipse, for example). If you can compile JavaFX programs but
not run them, check the “Default VM arguments” and check that you have the JavaFX SDK
for the correct operating system and architecture.
Exercises 71

Exercises for Chapter 2

1. Write a program that will print your initials to standard output in letters that are nine (solution)
lines tall. Each big letter should be made up of a bunch of *’s. For example, if your initials
were “DJE”, then the output would look something like:
****** ************* **********
** ** ** **
** ** ** **
** ** ** **
** ** ** ********
** ** ** ** **
** ** ** ** **
** ** ** ** **
***** **** **********

2. Write a program that simulates rolling a pair of dice. You can simulate rolling one die by (solution)
choosing one of the integers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 at random. The number you pick represents
the number on the die after it is rolled. As pointed out in Section 2.5, the expression
(int)(Math.random()*6) + 1
does the computation to select a random integer between 1 and 6. You can assign this
value to a variable to represent one of the dice that are being rolled. Do this twice and
add the results together to get the total roll. Your program should report the number
showing on each die as well as the total roll. For example:
The first die comes up 3
The second die comes up 5
Your total roll is 8

3. Write a program that asks the user’s name, and then greets the user by name. Before (solution)
outputting the user’s name, convert it to upper case letters. For example, if the user’s
name is Fred, then the program should respond “Hello, FRED, nice to meet you!”.

4. Write a program that helps the user count his change. The program should ask how many (solution)
quarters the user has, then how many dimes, then how many nickels, then how many
pennies. Then the program should tell the user how much money he has, expressed in
dollars.

5. If you have N eggs, then you have N/12 dozen eggs, with N%12 eggs left over. (This is (solution)
essentially the definition of the / and % operators for integers.) Write a program that asks
the user how many eggs she has and then tells the user how many dozen eggs she has and
how many extra eggs are left over.
A gross of eggs is equal to 144 eggs. Extend your program so that it will tell the user
how many gross, how many dozen, and how many left over eggs she has. For example, if
the user says that she has 1342 eggs, then your program would respond with
Your number of eggs is 9 gross, 3 dozen, and 10
Exercises 72

since 1342 is equal to 9*144 + 3*12 + 10.

6. This exercise asks you to write a program that tests some of the built-in subroutines for (solution)
working with Strings. The program should ask the user to enter their first name and their
last name, separated by a space. Read the user’s response using TextIO.getln(). Break
the input string up into two strings, one containing the first name and one containing the
last name. You can do that by using the indexOf() subroutine to find the position of the
space, and then using substring() to extract each of the two names. Also output the
number of characters in each name, and output the user’s initials. (The initials are the
first letter of the first name together with the first letter of the last name.) A sample run
of the program should look something like this:
Please enter your first name and last name, separated by a space.
? Mary Smith
Your first name is Mary, which has 4 characters
Your last name is Smith, which has 5 characters
Your initials are MS

7. Suppose that a file named “testdata.txt” contains the following information: The first (solution)
line of the file is the name of a student. Each of the next three lines contains an integer.
The integers are the student’s scores on three exams. Write a program that will read
the information in the file and display (on standard output) a message that contains the
name of the student and the student’s average grade on the three exams. The average is
obtained by adding up the individual exam grades and then dividing by the number of
exams.
Quiz 73

Quiz on Chapter 2
(answers)

1. Briefly explain what is meant by the syntax and the semantics of a programming language.
Give an example to illustrate the difference between a syntax error and a semantics error.

2. What does the computer do when it executes a variable declaration statement. Give an
example.

3. What is a type, as this term relates to programming?

4. One of the primitive types in Java is boolean. What is the boolean type? Where are
boolean values used? What are its possible values?

5. Give the meaning of each of the following Java operators:

a) ++
b) &&
c) !=

6. Explain what is meant by an assignment statement, and give an example. What are
assignment statements used for?

7. What is meant by precedence of operators?

8. What is a literal ?

9. In Java, classes have two fundamentally different purposes. What are they?

10. What is the difference between the statement “x = TextIO.getDouble();” and the
statement “x = TextIO.getlnDouble();”

11. Explain why the value of the expression 2 + 3 + "test" is the string "5test" while the
value of the expression "test" + 2 + 3 is the string "test23". What is the value of
"test" + 2 * 3 ?

12. Integrated Development Environments such as Eclipse often use syntax coloring , which
assigns various colors to the characters in a program to reflect the syntax of the language.
A student notices that Eclipse colors the word String differently from int, double, and
boolean. The student asks why String should be a different color, since all these words
are names of types. What’s the answer to the student’s question?

13. What is the purpose of an import directive, such as import textio.TextIO or import
java.util.Scanner?

14. Write a complete program that asks the user to enter the number of “widgets” they want
to buy and the cost per widget. The program should then output the total cost for all
the widgets. Use System.out.printf to print the cost, with two digits after the decimal
point. You do not need to include any comments in the program.
Chapter 3

Programming in the Small II:

Control

The basic building blocks of programs—variables, expressions, assignment statements, and

subroutine call statements—were covered in the previous chapter. Starting with this chapter,
we look at how these building blocks can be put together to build complex programs with more
interesting behavior.
Since we are still working on the level of “programming in the small” in this chapter, we are
interested in the kind of complexity that can occur within a single subroutine. On this level,
complexity is provided by control structures. The two types of control structures, loops and
branches, can be used to repeat a sequence of statements over and over or to choose among two
or more possible courses of action. Java includes several control structures of each type, and
we will look at each of them in some detail.
Program complexity can be seen not just in control structures but also in data structures.
A data structure is an organized collection of data, chunked together so that it can be treated
as a unit. Section 3.8 in this chapter includes an introduction to one of the most common data
structures: arrays.
The chapter will also begin the study of program design. Given a problem, how can you
come up with a program to solve that problem? We’ll look at a partial answer to this question
in Section 3.2. Finally, Section 3.9 is a very brief first look at GUI programming.

3.1 Blocks, Loops, and Branches

The ability of a computer to perform complex tasks is built on just a few ways of
combining simple commands into control structures. In Java, there are just six such structures
that are used to determine the normal flow of control in a program—and, in fact, just three
of them would be enough to write programs to perform any task. The six control structures
are: the block , the while loop, the do..while loop, the for loop, the if statement, and the
switch statement. Each of these structures is considered to be a single “statement,” but it is
a structured statement that can contain one or more other statements inside itself.

3.1.1 Blocks
The block is the simplest type of structured statement. Its purpose is simply to group a
sequence of statements into a single statement. The format of a block is:

75
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 76

{
hstatements i
}
That is, it consists of a sequence of statements enclosed between a pair of braces, “{” and “}”.
In fact, it is possible for a block to contain no statements at all; such a block is called an empty
block , and can actually be useful at times. An empty block consists of nothing but an empty
pair of braces. Block statements usually occur inside other statements, where their purpose is
to group together several statements into a unit. However, a block can be legally used wherever
a statement can occur. There is one place where a block is required: As you might have already
noticed in the case of the main subroutine of a program, the definition of a subroutine is a
block, since it is a sequence of statements enclosed inside a pair of braces.
I should probably note again at this point that Java is what is called a free-format language.
There are no syntax rules about how the language has to be arranged on a page. So, for example,
you could write an entire block on one line if you want. But as a matter of good programming
style, you should lay out your program on the page in a way that will make its structure as
clear as possible. In general, this means putting one statement per line and using indentation
to indicate statements that are contained inside control structures. This is the format that I
will use in my examples.
Here are two examples of blocks:
{
System.out.print("The answer is ");
System.out.println(ans);
}

{ // This block exchanges the values of x and y

int temp; // A temporary variable for use in this block.
temp = x; // Save a copy of the value of x in temp.
x = y; // Copy the value of y into x.
y = temp; // Copy the value of temp into y.
}
In the second example, a variable, temp, is declared inside the block. This is perfectly legal,
and it is good style to declare a variable inside a block if that variable is used nowhere else
but inside the block. A variable declared inside a block is completely inaccessible and invisible
from outside that block. When the computer executes the variable declaration statement, it
allocates memory to hold the value of the variable (at least conceptually). When the block
ends, that memory is discarded (that is, made available for reuse). The variable is said to be
local to the block. There is a general concept called the “scope” of an identifier. The scope of
an identifier is the part of the program in which that identifier is valid. The scope of a variable
defined inside a block is limited to that block, and more specifically to the part of the block
that comes after the declaration of the variable.

3.1.2 The Basic While Loop

The block statement by itself really doesn’t affect the flow of control in a program. The five
remaining control structures do. They can be divided into two classes: loop statements and
branching statements. You really just need one control structure from each category in order to
have a completely general-purpose programming language. More than that is just convenience.
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 77

In this section, I’ll introduce the while loop and the if statement. I’ll give the full details of
these statements and of the other three control structures in later sections.
A while loop is used to repeat a given statement over and over. Of course, it’s not likely
that you would want to keep repeating it forever. That would be an infinite loop, which is
generally a bad thing. (There is an old story about computer pioneer Grace Murray Hopper,
who read instructions on a bottle of shampoo telling her to “lather, rinse, repeat.” As the
story goes, she claims that she tried to follow the directions, but she ran out of shampoo. (In
case you don’t get it, she was making a joke about the way that computers mindlessly follow
instructions.)) By the way, if you are working on the command line and need to stop a program
that has gotten into an infinite loop, you should be able to do so with Control-C, that is, hold
down the Control key and press the C key.
To be more specific, a while loop will repeat a statement over and over, but only so long
as a specified condition remains true. A while loop has the form:
while (hboolean-expression i)
hstatement i
Since the statement can be, and usually is, a block, most while loops have the form:
while (hboolean-expression i) {
hstatements i
}
Some programmers think that the braces should always be included as a matter of style, even
when there is only one statement between them, but I don’t always follow that advice myself.
The semantics of the while statement go like this: When the computer comes to a while
statement, it evaluates the hboolean-expressioni, which yields either true or false as its value.
If the value is false, the computer skips over the rest of the while loop and proceeds to the
next command in the program. If the value of the expression is true, the computer executes
the hstatementi or block of hstatementsi inside the loop. Then it returns to the beginning of
the while loop and repeats the process. That is, it re-evaluates the hboolean-expressioni, ends
the loop if the value is false, and continues it if the value is true. This will continue over and
over until the value of the expression is false when the computer evaluates it; if that never
happens, then there will be an infinite loop.
Here is an example of a while loop that simply prints out the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5:
int number; // The number to be printed.
number = 1; // Start with 1.
while ( number < 6 ) { // Keep going as long as number is < 6.
System.out.println(number);
number = number + 1; // Go on to the next number.
}
System.out.println("Done!");
The variable number is initialized with the value 1. So when the computer evaluates the
expression “number < 6” for the first time, it is asking whether 1 is less than 6, which is
true. The computer therefore proceeds to execute the two statements inside the loop. The
first statement prints out “1”. The second statement adds 1 to number and stores the result
back into the variable number; the value of number has been changed to 2. The computer has
reached the end of the loop, so it returns to the beginning and asks again whether number is
less than 6. Once again this is true, so the computer executes the loop again, this time printing
out 2 as the value of number and then changing the value of number to 3. It continues in this
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 78

way until eventually number becomes equal to 6. At that point, the expression “number < 6”
evaluates to false. So, the computer jumps past the end of the loop to the next statement
and prints out the message “Done!”. Note that when the loop ends, the value of number is 6,
but the last value that was printed was 5.
By the way, you should remember that you’ll never see a while loop standing by itself
in a real program. It will always be inside a subroutine which is itself defined inside some
class. As an example of a while loop used inside a complete program, here is a little program
that computes the interest on an investment over several years. This is an improvement over
examples from the previous chapter that just reported the results for one year:
import textio.TextIO;
/**
* This class implements a simple program that will compute the amount of
* interest that is earned on an investment over a period of 5 years. The
* initial amount of the investment and the interest rate are input by the
* user. The value of the investment at the end of each year is output.
*/
public class Interest3 {

public static void main(String[] args) {

double principal; // The value of the investment.
double rate; // The annual interest rate.
/* Get the initial investment and interest rate from the user. */
System.out.print("Enter the initial investment: ");
principal = TextIO.getlnDouble();
System.out.println();
System.out.println("Enter the annual interest rate.");
System.out.print("Enter a decimal, not a percentage: ");
rate = TextIO.getlnDouble();
System.out.println();
/* Simulate the investment for 5 years. */
int years; // Counts the number of years that have passed.
years = 0;
while (years < 5) {
double interest; // Interest for this year.
interest = principal * rate;
principal = principal + interest; // Add it to principal.
years = years + 1; // Count the current year.
System.out.print("The value of the investment after ");
System.out.print(years);
System.out.print(" years is $");
System.out.printf("%1.2f", principal);
System.out.println();
} // end of while loop
} // end of main()
} // end of class Interest3
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 79

You should study this program, and make sure that you understand what the computer does
step-by-step as it executes the while loop.

3.1.3 The Basic If Statement

An if statement tells the computer to take one of two alternative courses of action, depending
on whether the value of a given boolean-valued expression is true or false. It is an example of
a “branching” or “decision” statement. An if statement has the form:
if ( hboolean-expression i )
hstatement1 i
else
hstatement2 i
When the computer executes an if statement, it evaluates the boolean expression. If the value
is true, the computer executes the first statement and skips the statement that follows the
“else”. If the value of the expression is false, then the computer skips the first statement and
executes the second one. Note that in any case, one and only one of the two statements inside
the if statement is executed. The two statements represent alternative courses of action; the
computer decides between these courses of action based on the value of the boolean expression.
In many cases, you want the computer to choose between doing something and not doing
it. You can do this with an if statement that omits the else part:
if ( hboolean-expression i )
hstatement i
To execute this statement, the computer evaluates the expression. If the value is true, the
computer executes the hstatementi that is contained inside the if statement; if the value is
false, the computer skips over that hstatementi. In either case, the computer then continues
with whatever follows the if statement in the program.
Sometimes, novice programmers confuse while statements with simple if statements (with
no else part), although their meanings are quite different. The hstatementi in an if is executed
at most once, while the hstatementi in a while can be executed any number of times. It can
be helpful to look at diagrams of the flow of control for while and simple if statements:
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 80

While Loop Flow of Control If Statement Flow of Control

Is condition true? No Is condition true?

No

Yes Yes

Do statement Do statement

In these diagrams, the arrows represent the flow of time as the statement is executed. Control
enters the diagram at the top and leaves at the bottom. Similarly, a flow control diagram for an
if..else statement makes it clear that exactly one of the two nested statements is executed:

If..Else Flow of Control

Yes No
Is condition true?

Do statement

∗ ∗ ∗
Of course, either or both of the hstatementsi in an if statement can be a block, and again
many programmers prefer to add the braces even when they contain just a single statement.
So an if statement often looks like:
if ( hboolean-expression i ) {
hstatements i
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 81

}
else {
hstatements i
}
or:
if ( hboolean-expression i ) {
hstatements i
}
As an example, here is an if statement that exchanges the value of two variables, x and y,
but only if x is greater than y to begin with. After this if statement has been executed, we
can be sure that the value of x is definitely less than or equal to the value of y:
if ( x > y ) {
int temp; // A temporary variable for use in this block.
temp = x; // Save a copy of the value of x in temp.
x = y; // Copy the value of y into x.
y = temp; // Copy the value of temp into y.
}
Finally, here is an example of an if statement that includes an else part. See if you can
figure out what it does, and why it would be used:
if ( years > 1 ) { // handle case for 2 or more years
System.out.print("The value of the investment after ");
System.out.print(years);
System.out.print(" years is $");
}
else { // handle case for 1 year
System.out.print("The value of the investment after 1 year is $");
} // end of if statement
System.out.printf("%1.2f", principal); // this is done in any case
I’ll have more to say about control structures later in this chapter. But you already know
the essentials. If you never learned anything more about control structures, you would already
know enough to perform any possible computing task. Simple looping and branching are all
you really need!

3.1.4 Control Abstractiont

Control structures such as if statements and while loops allow you to control processes that
go on inside the CPU of a computer. But as to what actually goes on in the CPU, there is no
such thing as an if statements or a while loops. As discussed in Section 1.1, a CPU can only
execute simple machine language instructions. Loops and branches must be implemented in
machine language using jump instructions, which change the value stored in the program counter
register, and conditional jump instructions, which might or might not change the program
counter, depending on the result of a simple test.
Implementing Java control structures in machine language can get rather complicated.
Fortunately, you don’t need to know how to do it. You can use Java control structures without
knowing how they are implemented in machine language. In fact, you don’t need to know
anything about machine language or how CPUs work. This is an example of abstraction.
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 82

Abstraction is a central concept in computer science. Abstraction allows you to work with
something without understanding how it works in detail. It allows you to work on a “higher
level.” If statements and while loops are examples of control abstractions. They allow
you to work with a high-level programming language like Java, rather than with very low-level
machine language.
You will encounter other kinds of abstraction later in this book. In fact, you’ve already
encountered one: A variable is a basic example of data abstraction. A variable lets you use
a name to work with a data value of a certain type. The computer has to keep track of the
numerical address of that data in memory, how many bytes of memory the data occupies, and
how to interpret the bits that are stored in that memory to represent the value. The variable
is an abstraction that lets you avoid all that detail.

3.1.5 Definite Assignment

I will finish this introduction to control structures with a somewhat technical issue that you
might not fully understand the first time you encounter it. Consider the following two code
segments, which seem to be entirely equivalent:
int y; int y;
if (x < 0) { if (x < 0) {
y = 1; y = 1;
} }
else { if (x >= 0) {
y = 2; y = 2;
} }
System.out.println(y); System.out.println(y);
In the version on the left, y is assigned the value 1 if x < 0 and it is assigned the value 2
otherwise, that is, if x >= 0. Exactly the same is true of the version on the right. However, there
is a subtle difference. In fact, the Java compiler will report an error for the System.out.println
statement in the code on the right, while the code on the left is perfectly fine!
The problem is that in the code on the right, the computer can’t tell that the variable y has
definitely been assigned a value. When an if statement has no else part, the statement inside
the if might or might not be executed, depending on the value of the condition. The compiler
can’t tell whether it will be executed or not, since the condition will only be evaluated when
the program is running. For the code on the right above, as far as the compiler is concerned, it
is possible that neither statement, y = 1 or y = 2, will be evaluated, so it is possible that the
output statement is trying to print an undefined value. The compiler considers this to be an
error. The value of a variable can only be used if the compiler can verify that the variable will
have been assigned a value at that point when the program is running. This is called definite
assignment. (It doesn’t matter that you can tell that y will always be assigned a value in
this example. The question is whether the compiler can tell.)
Note that in the code on the left above, y is definitely assigned a value, since in an if..else
statement, one of the two alternatives will be executed no matter what the value of the condition
in the if. It is important that you understand that there is a difference between an if..else
statement and a pair of plain if statements. Here is another pair of code segments that might
seem to do the same thing, but don’t. What’s the value of x after each code segment is executed?
int x; int x;
x = -1; x = -1;
if (x < 0) if (x < 0)
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 83

x = 1; x = 1;
else if (x >= 0)
x = 2; x = 2;

After the code on the left is executed, x is 1; after the code on the right, x is 2. If you don’t
believe this, work though the code step-by-step, doing exactly what the computer does when it
executes each step. The key point is that for the code on the right, both assignment statements,
x = 1 and x = 2, are executed. Make sure that you understand why.

3.2 Algorithm Development

Programming is difficult (like many activities that are useful and worthwhile—and like
most of those activities, it can also be rewarding and a lot of fun). When you write a program,
you have to tell the computer every small detail of what to do. And you have to get everything
exactly right, since the computer will blindly follow your program exactly as written. How,
then, do people write any but the most simple programs? It’s not a big mystery, actually. It’s
a matter of learning to think in the right way.
A program is an expression of an idea. A programmer starts with a general idea of a task
for the computer to perform. Presumably, the programmer has some idea of how to perform
the task by hand, at least in general outline. The problem is to flesh out that outline into a
complete, unambiguous, step-by-step procedure for carrying out the task. Such a procedure is
called an “algorithm.” (Technically, an algorithm is an unambiguous, step-by-step procedure
that always terminates after a finite number of steps. We don’t want to count procedures that
might go on forever.) An algorithm is not the same as a program. A program is written in some
particular programming language. An algorithm is more like the idea behind the program, but
it’s the idea of the steps the program will take to perform its task, not just the idea of what the
task needs to accomplish in the end. When describing an algorithm, the steps don’t necessarily
have to be specified in complete detail, as long as the steps are unambiguous and it’s clear that
carrying out the steps will accomplish the assigned task. An algorithm can be expressed in
any language, including English. Of course, an algorithm can only be expressed as an actual
program if all the details have been filled in.
So, where do algorithms come from? Usually, they have to be developed, often with a lot of
thought and hard work. Skill at algorithm development is something that comes with practice,
but there are techniques and guidelines that can help. I’ll talk here about some techniques and
guidelines that are relevant to “programming in the small,” and I will return to the subject
several times in later chapters.

3.2.1 Pseudocode and Stepwise Refinement

When programming in the small, you have a few basics to work with: variables, assignment
statements, and input/output routines. You might also have some subroutines, objects, or
other building blocks that have already been written by you or someone else. (Input/output
routines fall into this class.) You can build sequences of these basic instructions, and you can
also combine them into more complex control structures such as while loops and if statements.
Suppose you have a task in mind that you want the computer to perform. One way to
proceed is to write a description of the task, and take that description as an outline of the
algorithm you want to develop. Then you can refine and elaborate that description, gradually
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 84

adding steps and detail, until you have a complete algorithm that can be translated directly
into programming language. This method is called stepwise refinement, and it is a type of
top-down design. As you proceed through the stages of stepwise refinement, you can write out
descriptions of your algorithm in pseudocode—informal instructions that imitate the structure
of programming languages without the complete detail and perfect syntax of actual program
code.
As an example, let’s see how one might develop the program from the previous section, which
computes the value of an investment over five years. The task that you want the program to
perform is: “Compute and display the value of an investment for each of the next five years,
where the initial investment and interest rate are to be specified by the user.” You might then
write—or more likely just think—that this can be expanded as:
Get the user’s input
Compute the value of the investment after 1 year
Display the value
Compute the value after 2 years
Display the value
Compute the value after 3 years
Display the value
Compute the value after 4 years
Display the value
Compute the value after 5 years
Display the value
This is correct, but rather repetitive. And seeing that repetition, you might notice an
opportunity to use a loop. A loop would take less typing. More important, it would be more
general: Essentially the same loop will work no matter how many years you want to process.
So, you might rewrite the above sequence of steps as:
Get the user’s input
while there are more years to process:
Compute the value after the next year
Display the value
Following this algorithm would certainly solve the problem, but for a computer we’ll have
to be more explicit about how to “Get the user’s input,” how to “Compute the value after the
next year,” and what it means to say “there are more years to process.” We can expand the
step, “Get the user’s input” into
Ask the user for the initial investment
Read the user’s response
Ask the user for the interest rate
Read the user’s response
To fill in the details of the step “Compute the value after the next year,” you have to
know how to do the computation yourself. (Maybe you need to ask your boss or professor for
clarification?) Let’s say you know that the value is computed by adding some interest to the
previous value. Then we can refine the while loop to:
while there are more years to process:
Compute the interest
Add the interest to the value
Display the value
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 85

As for testing whether there are more years to process, the only way that we can do that is
by counting the years ourselves. This displays a very common pattern, and you should expect
to use something similar in a lot of programs: We have to start with zero years, add one each
time we process a year, and stop when we reach the desired number of years. This is sometimes
called a counting loop. So the while loop becomes:
years = 0
while years < 5:
years = years + 1
Compute the interest
Add the interest to the value
Display the value
We still have to know how to compute the interest. Let’s say that the interest is to be
computed by multiplying the interest rate by the current value of the investment. Putting
this together with the part of the algorithm that gets the user’s inputs, we have the complete
algorithm:
Ask the user for the initial investment
Read the user’s response
Ask the user for the interest rate
Read the user’s response
years = 0
while years < 5:
years = years + 1
Compute interest = value * interest rate
Add the interest to the value
Display the value
Finally, we are at the point where we can translate pretty directly into proper programming-
language syntax. We still have to choose names for the variables, decide exactly what we want
to say to the user, and so forth. Having done this, we could express our algorithm in Java as:
double principal, rate, interest; // declare the variables
int years;
System.out.print("Type initial investment: ");
principal = TextIO.getlnDouble();
System.out.print("Type interest rate: ");
rate = TextIO.getlnDouble();
years = 0;
while (years < 5) {
years = years + 1;
interest = principal * rate;
principal = principal + interest;
System.out.println(principal);
}
This still needs to be wrapped inside a complete program, it still needs to be commented,
and it really needs to print out more information in a nicer format for the user. But it’s
essentially the same program as the one in the previous section. (Note that the pseudocode
algorithm used indentation to show which statements are inside the loop. In Java, indentation
is completely ignored by the computer, so you need a pair of braces to tell the computer which
statements are in the loop. If you leave out the braces, the only statement inside the loop would
be “years = years + 1;". The other statements would only be executed once, after the loop
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 86

ends. The nasty thing is that the computer won’t notice this error for you, like it would if you
left out the parentheses around “(years < 5)”. The parentheses are required by the syntax of
the while statement. The braces are only required semantically. The computer can recognize
syntax errors but not semantic errors.)
One thing you should have noticed here is that my original specification of the problem—
“Compute and display the value of an investment for each of the next five years”—was far from
being complete. Before you start writing a program, you should make sure you have a complete
specification of exactly what the program is supposed to do. In particular, you need to know
what information the program is going to input and output and what computation it is going
to perform. Here is what a reasonably complete specification of the problem might look like in
this example:
“Write a program that will compute and display the value of
an investment for each of the next five years. Each year, interest
is added to the value. The interest is computed by multiplying
the current value by a fixed interest rate. Assume that the initial
value and the rate of interest are to be input by the user when the
program is run.”

3.2.2 The 3N+1 Problem

Let’s do another example, working this time with a program that you haven’t already seen. The
assignment here is an abstract mathematical problem that is one of my favorite programming
exercises. This time, we’ll start with a more complete specification of the task to be performed:
“Given a positive integer, N, define the ’3N+1’ sequence
starting from N as follows: If N is an even number, then divide N
by two; but if N is odd, then multiply N by 3 and add 1. Continue
to generate numbers in this way until N becomes equal to 1. For
example, starting from N = 3, which is odd, we multiply by 3 and
add 1, giving N = 3*3+1 = 10. Then, since N is even, we divide
by 2, giving N = 10/2 = 5. We continue in this way, stopping
when we reach 1. The complete sequence is: 3, 10, 5, 16, 8, 4, 2,
1.
“Write a program that will read a positive integer from the
user and will print out the 3N+1 sequence starting from that
integer. The program should also count and print out the number
of terms in the sequence.”
A general outline of the algorithm for the program we want is:
Get a positive integer N from the user.
Compute, print, and count each number in the sequence.
Output the number of terms.
The bulk of the program is in the second step. We’ll need a loop, since we want to keep
computing numbers until we get 1. To put this in terms appropriate for a while loop, we need
to know when to continue the loop rather than when to stop it: We want to continue as long
as the number is not 1. So, we can expand our pseudocode algorithm to:
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 87

Get a positive integer N from the user;

while N is not 1:
Compute N = next term;
Output N;
Count this term;
Output the number of terms;
In order to compute the next term, the computer must take different actions depending on
whether N is even or odd. We need an if statement to decide between the two cases:
Get a positive integer N from the user;
while N is not 1:
if N is even:
Compute N = N/2;
else
Compute N = 3 * N + 1;
Output N;
Count this term;
Output the number of terms;
We are almost there. The one problem that remains is counting. Counting means that you
start with zero, and every time you have something to count, you add one. We need a variable
to do the counting. The variable must be set to zero once, before the loop starts, and it must
be incremented within the loop. (Again, this is a common pattern that you should expect to
see over and over.) With the counter added, we get:
Get a positive integer N from the user;
Let counter = 0;
while N is not 1:
if N is even:
Compute N = N/2;
else
Compute N = 3 * N + 1;
Output N;
Add 1 to counter;
Output the counter;
We still have to worry about the very first step. How can we get a positive integer from the
user? If we just read in a number, it’s possible that the user might type in a negative number
or zero. If you follow what happens when the value of N is negative or zero, you’ll see that the
program will go on forever, since the value of N will never become equal to 1. This is bad. In
this case, the problem is probably no big deal, but in general you should try to write programs
that are foolproof. One way to fix this is to keep reading in numbers until the user types in a
positive number:
Ask user to input a positive number;
Let N be the user’s response;
while N is not positive:
Print an error message;
Read another value for N;
Let counter = 0;
while N is not 1:
if N is even:
Compute N = N/2;
else
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 88

Compute N = 3 * N + 1;
Output N;
Add 1 to counter;
Output the counter;
The first while loop will end only when N is a positive number, as required. (A common
beginning programmer’s error is to use an if statement instead of a while statement here: “If
N is not positive, ask the user to input another value.” The problem arises if the second number
input by the user is also non-positive. The if statement is only executed once, so the second
input number is never tested, and the program proceeds into an infinite loop. With the while
loop, after the second number is input, the computer jumps back to the beginning of the loop
and tests whether the second number is positive. If not, it asks the user for a third number,
and it will continue asking for numbers until the user enters an acceptable input. After the
while loop ends, we can be absolutely sure that N is a positive number.)
Here is a Java program implementing this algorithm. It uses the operators <= to mean “is
less than or equal to” and != to mean “is not equal to.” To test whether N is even, it uses
“N % 2 == 0”. All the operators used here were discussed in Section 2.5.
import textio.TextIO;
/**
* This program prints out a 3N+1 sequence starting from a positive
* integer specified by the user. It also counts the number of
* terms in the sequence, and prints out that number.
*/
public class ThreeN1 {
public static void main(String[] args) {
int N; // for computing terms in the sequence
int counter; // for counting the terms
System.out.print("Starting point for sequence: ");
N = TextIO.getlnInt();
while (N <= 0) {
System.out.print(
"The starting point must be positive. Please try again: " );
N = TextIO.getlnInt();
}
// At this point, we know that N > 0
counter = 0;
while (N != 1) {
if (N % 2 == 0)
N = N / 2;
else
N = 3 * N + 1;
System.out.println(N);
counter = counter + 1;
}
System.out.println();
System.out.print("There were ");
System.out.print(counter);
System.out.println(" terms in the sequence.");
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 89

} // end of main()
} // end of class ThreeN1
Two final notes on this program: First, you might have noticed that the first term of the
sequence—the value of N input by the user—is not printed or counted by this program. Is
this an error? It’s hard to say. Was the specification of the program careful enough to decide?
This is the type of thing that might send you back to the boss/professor for clarification. The
problem (if it is one!) can be fixed easily enough. Just replace the line “counter = 0” before
the while loop with the two lines:
System.out.println(N); // print out initial term
counter = 1; // and count it
Second, there is the question of why this problem might be interesting. Well, it’s interesting
to mathematicians and computer scientists because of a simple question about the problem that
they haven’t been able to answer: Will the process of computing the 3N+1 sequence finish after
a finite number of steps for all possible starting values of N? Although individual sequences are
easy to compute, no one has been able to answer the general question. To put this another
way, no one knows whether the process of computing 3N+1 sequences can properly be called
an algorithm, since an algorithm is required to terminate after a finite number of steps! (Note:
This discussion really applies to integers, not to values of type int! That is, it assumes that the
value of N can take on arbitrarily large integer values, which is not true for a variable of type
int in a Java program. When the value of N in the program becomes too large to be represented
as a 32-bit int, the values output by the program are no longer mathematically correct. So
the Java program does not compute the correct 3N+1 sequence if N becomes too large. See
Exercise 8.2.)

3.2.3 Coding, Testing, Debugging

It would be nice if, having developed an algorithm for your program, you could relax, press a
button, and get a perfectly working program. Unfortunately, the process of turning an algorithm
into Java source code doesn’t always go smoothly. And when you do get to the stage of a working
program, it’s often only working in the sense that it does something. Unfortunately not what
you want it to do.
After program design comes coding: translating the design into a program written in Java
or some other language. Usually, no matter how careful you are, a few syntax errors will creep
in from somewhere, and the Java compiler will reject your program with some kind of error
message. Unfortunately, while a compiler will always detect syntax errors, it’s not very good
about telling you exactly what’s wrong. Sometimes, it’s not even good about telling you where
the real error is. A spelling error or missing “{” on line 45 might cause the compiler to choke
on line 105. You can avoid lots of errors by making sure that you really understand the syntax
rules of the language and by following some basic programming guidelines. For example, I
never type a “{” without typing the matching “}”. Then I go back and fill in the statements
between the braces. A missing or extra brace can be one of the hardest errors to find in a large
program. Always, always indent your program nicely. If you change the program, change the
indentation to match. It’s worth the trouble. Use a consistent naming scheme, so you don’t
have to struggle to remember whether you called that variable interestrate or interestRate.
In general, when the compiler gives multiple error messages, don’t try to fix the second error
message from the compiler until you’ve fixed the first one. Once the compiler hits an error in
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 90

your program, it can get confused, and the rest of the error messages might just be guesses.
Maybe the best advice is: Take the time to understand the error before you try to fix it.
Programming is not an experimental science.
When your program compiles without error, you are still not done. You have to test the
program to make sure it works correctly. Remember that the goal is not to get the right output
for the two sample inputs that the professor gave in class. The goal is a program that will
work correctly for all reasonable inputs. Ideally, when faced with an unreasonable input, it
should respond by gently chiding the user rather than by crashing. Test your program on a
wide variety of inputs. Try to find a set of inputs that will test the full range of functionality
that you’ve coded into your program. As you begin writing larger programs, write them in
stages and test each stage along the way. You might even have to write some extra code to
do the testing—for example to call a subroutine that you’ve just written. You don’t want to
be faced, if you can avoid it, with 500 newly written lines of code that have an error in there
somewhere.
The point of testing is to find bugs—semantic errors that show up as incorrect behavior
rather than as compilation errors. And the sad fact is that you will probably find them. Again,
you can minimize bugs by careful design and careful coding, but no one has found a way to
avoid them altogether. Once you’ve detected a bug, it’s time for debugging . You have to
track down the cause of the bug in the program’s source code and eliminate it. Debugging is a
skill that, like other aspects of programming, requires practice to master. So don’t be afraid of
bugs. Learn from them. One essential debugging skill is the ability to read source code—the
ability to put aside preconceptions about what you think it does and to follow it the way the
computer does—mechanically, step-by-step—to see what it really does. This is hard. I can still
remember the time I spent hours looking for a bug only to find that a line of code that I had
looked at ten times had a “1” where it should have had an “i”, or the time when I wrote a
subroutine named WindowClosing which would have done exactly what I wanted except that
the computer was looking for windowClosing (with a lower case “w”). Sometimes it can help
to have someone who doesn’t share your preconceptions look at your code.
Often, it’s a problem just to find the part of the program that contains the error. Most
programming environments come with a debugger , which is a program that can help you find
bugs. Typically, your program can be run under the control of the debugger. The debugger
allows you to set “breakpoints” in your program. A breakpoint is a point in the program where
the debugger will pause the program so you can look at the values of the program’s variables.
The idea is to track down exactly when things start to go wrong during the program’s execution.
The debugger will also let you execute your program one line at a time, so that you can watch
what happens in detail once you know the general area in the program where the bug is lurking.
I will confess that I only occasionally use debuggers myself. A more traditional approach to
debugging is to insert debugging statements into your program. These are output statements
that print out information about the state of the program. Typically, a debugging statement
would say something like
System.out.println("At start of while loop, N = " + N);
You need to be able to tell from the output where in your program the output is coming from,
and you want to know the value of important variables. Sometimes, you will find that the
computer isn’t even getting to a part of the program that you think it should be executing.
Remember that the goal is to find the first point in the program where the state is not what
you expect it to be. That’s where the bug is.
And finally, remember the golden rule of debugging: If you are absolutely sure that
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 91

everything in your program is right, and if it still doesn’t work, then one of the things that you
are absolutely sure of is wrong.

3.3 The while and do..while Statements

Statements in Java can be either simple statements or compound statements. Simple
statements, such as assignment statements and subroutine call statements, are the basic building
blocks of a program. Compound statements, such as while loops and if statements, are used to
organize simple statements into complex structures, which are called control structures because
they control the order in which the statements are executed. The next five sections explore
the details of control structures that are available in Java, starting with the while statement
and the do..while statement in this section. At the same time, we’ll look at examples of
programming with each control structure and apply the techniques for designing algorithms
that were introduced in the previous section.

3.3.1 The while Statement

The while statement was already introduced in Section 3.1. A while loop has the form
while ( hboolean-expression i )
hstatement i
The hstatementi can, of course, be a block statement consisting of several statements grouped
together between a pair of braces. This statement is called the body of the loop. The body
of the loop is repeated as long as the hboolean-expressioni is true. This boolean expression is
called the continuation condition, or more simply the test, of the loop. There are a few
points that might need some clarification. What happens if the condition is false in the first
place, before the body of the loop is executed even once? In that case, the body of the loop is
never executed at all. The body of a while loop can be executed any number of times, including
zero. What happens if the condition is true, but it becomes false somewhere in the middle of
the loop body? Does the loop end as soon as this happens? It doesn’t, because the computer
continues executing the body of the loop until it gets to the end. Only then does it jump back
to the beginning of the loop and test the condition, and only then can the loop end.
Let’s look at a typical problem that can be solved using a while loop: finding the average
of a set of positive integers entered by the user. The average is the sum of the integers, divided
by the number of integers. The program will ask the user to enter one integer at a time. It
will keep count of the number of integers entered, and it will keep a running total of all the
numbers it has read so far. Here is a pseudocode algorithm for the program:
Let sum = 0 // The sum of the integers entered by the user.
Let count = 0 // The number of integers entered by the user.
while there are more integers to process:
Read an integer
Add it to the sum
Count it
Divide sum by count to get the average
Print out the average
But how can we test whether there are more integers to process? A typical solution is to
tell the user to type in zero after all the data have been entered. This will work because we
are assuming that all the data are positive numbers, so zero is not a legal data value. The zero
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 92

is not itself part of the data to be averaged. It’s just there to mark the end of the real data.
A data value used in this way is sometimes called a sentinel value. So now the test in the
while loop becomes “while the input integer is not zero”. But there is another problem! The
first time the test is evaluated, before the body of the loop has ever been executed, no integer
has yet been read. There is no “input integer” yet, so testing whether the input integer is zero
doesn’t make sense. So, we have to do something before the while loop to make sure that the
test makes sense. Setting things up so that the test in a while loop makes sense the first time
it is executed is called priming the loop. In this case, we can simply read the first integer
before the beginning of the loop. Here is a revised algorithm:
Let sum = 0
Let count = 0
Read an integer
while the integer is not zero:
Add the integer to the sum
Count it
Read an integer
Divide sum by count to get the average
Print out the average
Notice that I’ve rearranged the body of the loop. Since an integer is read before the loop, the
loop has to begin by processing that integer. At the end of the loop, the computer reads a new
integer. The computer then jumps back to the beginning of the loop and tests the integer that
it has just read. Note that when the computer finally reads the sentinel value, the loop ends
before the sentinel value is processed. It is not added to the sum, and it is not counted. This
is the way it’s supposed to work. The sentinel is not part of the data. The original algorithm,
even if it could have been made to work without priming, was incorrect since it would have
summed and counted all the integers, including the sentinel. (Since the sentinel is zero, the sum
would still be correct, but the count would be off by one. Such so-called off-by-one errors
are very common. Counting turns out to be harder than it looks!)
We can easily turn the algorithm into a complete program. Note that the program cannot
use the statement “average = sum/count;” to compute the average. Since sum and count
are both variables of type int, the value of sum/count is an integer. The average should be
a real number. We’ve seen this problem before: we have to convert one of the int values to
a double to force the computer to compute the quotient as a real number. This can be done
by type-casting one of the variables to type double. The type cast “(double)sum” converts
the value of sum to a real number, so in the program the average is computed as “average =
((double)sum) / count;”. Another solution in this case would have been to declare sum to
be a variable of type double in the first place.
One other issue is addressed by the program: If the user enters zero as the first input value,
there are no data to process. We can test for this case by checking whether count is still equal
to zero after the while loop. This might seem like a minor point, but a careful programmer
should cover all the bases.
Here is the full source code for the program (with comments added, of course!):
import textio.TextIO;
/**
* This program reads a sequence of positive integers input
* by the user, and it will print out the average of those
* integers. The user is prompted to enter one integer at a
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 93

* time. The user must enter a 0 to mark the end of the

* data. (The zero is not counted as part of the data to
* be averaged.) The program does not check whether the
* user’s input is positive, so it will actually add up
* both positive and negative input values.
*/
public class ComputeAverage {
public static void main(String[] args) {
int inputNumber; // One of the integers input by the user.
int sum; // The sum of the positive integers.
int count; // The number of positive integers.
double average; // The average of the positive integers.
/* Initialize the summation and counting variables. */
sum = 0;
count = 0;
/* Read and process the user’s input. */
System.out.print("Enter your first positive integer: ");
inputNumber = TextIO.getlnInt();
while (inputNumber != 0) {
sum += inputNumber; // Add inputNumber to running sum.
count++; // Count the input by adding 1 to count.
System.out.print("Enter your next positive integer, or 0 to end: ");
inputNumber = TextIO.getlnInt();
}
/* Display the result. */
if (count == 0) {
System.out.println("You didn’t enter any data!");
}
else {
average = ((double)sum) / count;
System.out.println();
System.out.println("You entered " + count + " positive integers.");
System.out.printf("Their average is %1.3f.\n", average);
}
} // end main()
} // end class ComputeAverage

3.3.2 The do..while Statement

Sometimes it is more convenient to test the continuation condition at the end of a loop, instead
of at the beginning, as is done in the while loop. The do..while statement is very similar
to the while statement, except that the word “while,” along with the condition that it tests,
has been moved to the end. The word “do” is added to mark the beginning of the loop. A
do..while statement has the form
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 94

do
hstatement i
while ( hboolean-expression i );
or, since, as usual, the hstatementi can be a block,
do {
hstatements i
} while ( hboolean-expression i );
Note the semicolon, ’;’, at the very end. This semicolon is part of the statement, just as
the semicolon at the end of an assignment statement or declaration is part of the statement.
Omitting it is a syntax error. (More generally, every statement in Java ends either with a
semicolon or a right brace, ’}’.)
To execute a do loop, the computer first executes the body of the loop—that is, the statement
or statements inside the loop—and then it evaluates the boolean expression. If the value of
the expression is true, the computer returns to the beginning of the do loop and repeats the
process; if the value is false, it ends the loop and continues with the next part of the program.
Since the condition is not tested until the end of the loop, the body of a do loop is always
executed at least once.
For example, consider the following pseudocode for a game-playing program. The do loop
makes sense here instead of a while loop because with the do loop, you know there will be at
least one game. Also, the test that is used at the end of the loop wouldn’t even make sense at
the beginning:
do {
Play a Game
Ask user if he wants to play another game
Read the user’s response
} while ( the user’s response is yes );
Let’s convert this into proper Java code. Since I don’t want to talk about game playing at the
moment, let’s say that we have a class named Checkers, and that the Checkers class contains
a static member subroutine named playGame() that plays one game of checkers against the
user. Then, the pseudocode “Play a game” can be expressed as the subroutine call statement
“Checkers.playGame();”. We need a variable to store the user’s response. The TextIO class
makes it convenient to use a boolean variable to store the answer to a yes/no question. The
input function TextIO.getlnBoolean() allows the user to enter the value as “yes” or “no”
(among other acceptable responses). “Yes” is considered to be true, and “no” is considered to
be false. So, the algorithm can be coded as
boolean wantsToContinue; // True if user wants to play again.
do {
Checkers.playGame();
System.out.print("Do you want to play again? ");
wantsToContinue = TextIO.getlnBoolean();
} while (wantsToContinue == true);
When the value of the boolean variable is set to false, it is a signal that the loop should end.
When a boolean variable is used in this way—as a signal that is set in one part of the program
and tested in another part—it is sometimes called a flag or flag variable (in the sense of a
signal flag).
By the way, a more-than-usually-pedantic programmer would sneer at the test
“while (wantsToContinue == true)”. This test is exactly equivalent to “while
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 95

(wantsToContinue)”. Testing whether “wantsToContinue == true” is true amounts to the

same thing as testing whether “wantsToContinue” is true. A little less offensive is an expression
of the form “flag == false”, where flag is a boolean variable. The value of “flag == false”
is exactly the same as the value of “!flag”, where ! is the boolean negation operator. So
you can write “while (!flag)” instead of “while (flag == false)”, and you can write
“if (!flag)” instead of “if (flag == false)”.
Although a do..while statement is sometimes more convenient than a while statement,
having two kinds of loops does not make the language more powerful. Any problem that can be
solved using do..while loops can also be solved using only while statements, and vice versa.
In fact, if hdoSomethingi represents any block of program code, then
do {
hdoSomething i
} while ( hboolean-expression i );
has exactly the same effect as
hdoSomething i
while ( hboolean-expression i ) {
hdoSomething i
}
Similarly,
while ( hboolean-expression i ) {
hdoSomething i
}
can be replaced by
if ( hboolean-expression i ) {
do {
hdoSomething i
} while ( hboolean-expression i );
}
without changing the meaning of the program in any way.

3.3.3 break and continue

The syntax of the while and do..while loops allows you to test the continuation condition at
either the beginning of a loop or at the end. Sometimes, it is more natural to have the test
in the middle of the loop, or to have several tests at different places in the same loop. Java
provides a general method for breaking out of the middle of any loop. It’s called the break
statement, which takes the form
break;
When the computer executes a break statement in a loop, it will immediately jump out
of the loop. It then continues on to whatever follows the loop in the program. Consider for
example:
while (true) { // looks like it will run forever!
System.out.print("Enter a positive number: ");
N = TextIO.getlnInt();
if (N > 0) // the input value is OK, so jump out of loop
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 96

break;
System.out.println("Your answer must be > 0.");
}
// continue here after break
If the number entered by the user is greater than zero, the break statement will be executed
and the computer will jump out of the loop. Otherwise, the computer will print out “Your
answer must be > 0.” and will jump back to the start of the loop to read another input value.
The first line of this loop, “while (true)” might look a bit strange, but it’s perfectly
legitimate. The condition in a while loop can be any boolean-valued expression. The computer
evaluates this expression and checks whether the value is true or false. The boolean literal
“true” is just a boolean expression that always evaluates to true. So “while (true)” can be
used to write an infinite loop, or one that will be terminated by a break statement.
A break statement terminates the loop that immediately encloses the break statement. It
is possible to have nested loops, where one loop statement is contained inside another. If you
use a break statement inside a nested loop, it will only break out of that loop, not out of
the loop that contains the nested loop. There is something called a labeled break statement
that allows you to specify which loop you want to break. This is not very common, so I will
go over it quickly. Labels work like this: You can put a label in front of any loop. A label
consists of a simple identifier followed by a colon. For example, a while with a label might
look like “mainloop: while...”. Inside this loop you can use the labeled break statement
“break mainloop;” to break out of the labeled loop. For example, here is a code segment that
checks whether two strings, s1 and s2, have a character in common. If a common character is
found, the value of the flag variable nothingInCommon is set to false, and a labeled break is
used to end the processing at that point:
boolean nothingInCommon;
nothingInCommon = true; // Assume s1 and s2 have no chars in common.
int i,j; // Variables for iterating through the chars in s1 and s2.
i = 0;
bigloop: while (i < s1.length()) {
j = 0;
while (j < s2.length()) {
if (s1.charAt(i) == s2.charAt(j)) { // s1 and s2 have a common char...
nothingInCommon = false; // so nothingInCommon is actually false.
break bigloop; // break out of BOTH loops
}
j++; // Go on to the next char in s2.
}
i++; //Go on to the next char in s1.
}

∗ ∗ ∗
The continue statement is related to break, but less commonly used. A continue
statement tells the computer to skip the rest of the current iteration of the loop. However,
instead of jumping out of the loop altogether, it jumps back to the beginning of the loop and
continues with the next iteration (including evaluating the loop’s continuation condition to see
whether any further iterations are required). As with break, when a continue is in a nested
loop, it will continue the loop that directly contains it; a “labeled continue” can be used to
continue the containing loop instead.
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 97

break and continue can be used in while loops and do..while loops. They can also be
used in for loops, which are covered in the next section. In Section 3.6, we’ll see that break can
also be used to break out of a switch statement. A break can occur inside an if statement,
but only if the if statement is nested inside a loop or inside a switch statement. In that case,
it does not mean to break out of the if. Instead, it breaks out of the loop or switch statement
that contains the if statement. The same consideration applies to continue statements inside
ifs.

3.4 The for Statement

We turn in this section to another type of loop, the for statement. Any for loop is
equivalent to some while loop, so the language doesn’t get any additional power by having for
statements. But for a certain type of problem, a for loop can be easier to construct and easier
to read than the corresponding while loop. It’s quite possible that in real programs, for loops
actually outnumber while loops (and I know of at least one person who only uses for loops).

3.4.1 For Loops

The for statement makes a common type of while loop easier to write. Many while loops have
the general form:
hinitialization i
while ( hcontinuation-condition i ) {
hstatements i
hupdate i
}
For example, consider this example, copied from an example in Section 3.2:
years = 0; // initialize the variable years
while ( years < 5 ) { // condition for continuing loop
interest = principal * rate; //
principal += interest; // do three statements
System.out.println(principal); //
years++; // update the value of the variable, years
}
This loop can be written as the following equivalent for statement:
for ( years = 0; years < 5; years++ ) {
interest = principal * rate;
principal += interest;
System.out.println(principal);
}
The initialization, continuation condition, and updating have all been combined in the first line
of the for loop. This keeps everything involved in the “control” of the loop in one place, which
helps make the loop easier to read and understand. The for loop is executed in exactly the
same way as the original code: The initialization part is executed once, before the loop begins.
The continuation condition is executed before each execution of the loop (including the first
execution), and the loop ends when this condition is false. The update part is executed at
the end of each execution of the loop, just before jumping back to check the condition.
The formal syntax of the for statement is as follows:
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 98

for ( hinitialization i; hcontinuation-condition i; hupdate i )

hstatement i
or, using a block statement:
for ( hinitialization i; hcontinuation-condition i; hupdate i ) {
hstatements i
}
The hcontinuation-conditioni must be a boolean-valued expression. The hinitializationi is
usually a declaration or an assignment statement, but it can be any expression that would
be allowed as a statement in a program. The hupdatei can be any simple statement, but is
usually an increment, a decrement, or an assignment statement. Any of the three parts can
be empty, but the two semicolons are required in any case. If the continuation condition is
empty, it is treated as if it were “true,” so the loop will be repeated forever or until it ends for
some other reason, such as a break statement. (Some people like to begin an infinite loop with
“for (;;)” instead of “while (true)”.) Here’s a flow control diagram for a for statement:

For Loop Flow of Control

Is condition true?
No

Yes

Do statement

Usually, the initialization part of a for statement assigns a value to some variable, and the
update changes the value of that variable with an assignment statement or with an increment
or decrement operation. The value of the variable is tested in the continuation condition, and
the loop ends when this condition evaluates to false. A variable used in this way is called a
loop control variable. In the example given above, the loop control variable was years.
Certainly, the most common type of for loop is the counting loop, where a loop control
variable takes on all integer values between some minimum and some maximum value. A
counting loop has the form
for ( hvariable i = hmin i; hvariable i <= hmax i; hvariable i++ ) {
hstatements i
}
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 99

where hmini and hmax i are integer-valued expressions (usually constants). The hvariablei takes
on the values hmini, hmini+1, hmini+2, . . . , hmax i. The value of the loop control variable is
often used in the body of the loop. The for loop at the beginning of this section is a counting
loop in which the loop control variable, years, takes on the values 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Here is an even
simpler example, in which the numbers 1, 2, . . . , 10 are displayed on standard output:
for ( N = 1 ; N <= 10 ; N++ )
System.out.println( N );
For various reasons, Java programmers like to start counting at 0 instead of 1, and they tend
to use a “<” in the condition, rather than a “<=”. The following variation of the above loop
prints out the ten numbers 0, 1, 2, . . . , 9:
for ( N = 0 ; N < 10 ; N++ )
System.out.println( N );
Using < instead of <= in the test, or vice versa, is a common source of off-by-one errors in
programs. You should always stop and think, Do I want the final value to be processed or not?
It’s easy to count down from 10 to 1 instead of counting up. Just start with 10, decrement
the loop control variable instead of incrementing it, and continue as long as the variable is
greater than or equal to one.
for ( N = 10 ; N >= 1 ; N-- )
System.out.println( N );
Now, in fact, the official syntax of a for statement actually allows both the initialization
part and the update part to consist of several expressions, separated by commas. So we can
even count up from 1 to 10 and count down from 10 to 1 at the same time!
for ( i=1, j=10; i <= 10; i++, j-- ) {
System.out.printf("%5d", i); // Output i in a 5-character wide column.
System.out.printf("%5d", j); // Output j in a 5-character column.
System.out.println(); // and end the line.
}
As a final introductory example, let’s say that we want to use a for loop that prints out
just the even numbers between 2 and 20, that is: 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20. There are
several ways to do this. Just to show how even a very simple problem can be solved in many
ways, here are four different solutions (three of which would get full credit):
(1) // There are 10 numbers to print.
// Use a for loop to count 1, 2,
// ..., 10. The numbers we want
// to print are 2*1, 2*2, ... 2*10.
for (N = 1; N <= 10; N++) {
System.out.println( 2*N );
}

(2) // Use a for loop that counts

// 2, 4, ..., 20 directly by
// adding 2 to N each time through
// the loop.
for (N = 2; N <= 20; N = N + 2) {
System.out.println( N );
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 100

(3) // Count off all the numbers

// 2, 3, 4, ..., 19, 20, but
// only print out the numbers
// that are even.
for (N = 2; N <= 20; N++) {
if ( N % 2 == 0 ) // is N even?
System.out.println( N );
}

(4) // Irritate the professor with

// a solution that follows the
// letter of this silly assignment
// while making fun of it.
for (N = 1; N <= 1; N++) {
System.out.println("2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20");
}

Perhaps it is worth stressing one more time that a for statement, like any statement except
for a variable declaration, never occurs on its own in a real program. A statement must be
inside the main routine of a program or inside some other subroutine. And that subroutine
must be defined inside a class. I should also remind you that every variable must be declared
before it can be used, and that includes the loop control variable in a for statement. In all
the examples that you have seen so far in this section, the loop control variables should be
declared to be of type int. It is not required that a loop control variable be an integer. Here,
for example, is a for loop in which the variable, ch, is of type char, using the fact that the ++
operator can be applied to characters as well as to numbers:
// Print out the alphabet on one line of output.
char ch; // The loop control variable;
// one of the letters to be printed.
for ( ch = ’A’; ch <= ’Z’; ch++ )
System.out.print(ch);
System.out.println();

3.4.2 Example: Counting Divisors

Let’s look at a less trivial problem that can be solved with a for loop. If N and D are positive
integers, we say that D is a divisor of N if the remainder when D is divided into N is zero.
(Equivalently, we could say that N is an even multiple of D.) In terms of Java programming, D
is a divisor of N if N % D is zero.
Let’s write a program that inputs a positive integer, N, from the user and computes how
many different divisors N has. The numbers that could possibly be divisors of N are 1, 2, . . . , N.
To compute the number of divisors of N, we can just test each possible divisor of N and count
the ones that actually do divide N evenly. (This is a correct solution, but there are much more
efficient ways to perform this task.) In pseudocode, the algorithm takes the form
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 101

Get a positive integer, N, from the user

Let divisorCount = 0
for each number, testDivisor, in the range from 1 to N:
if testDivisor is a divisor of N:
Count it by adding 1 to divisorCount
Output the count
This algorithm displays a common programming pattern that is used when some, but not all,
of a sequence of items are to be processed. The general pattern is
for each item in the sequence:
if the item passes the test:
process it
The for loop in our divisor-counting algorithm can be translated into Java code as
for (testDivisor = 1; testDivisor <= N; testDivisor++) {
if ( N % testDivisor == 0 )
divisorCount++;
}
On a modern computer, this loop can be executed very quickly. It is not impossible to run
it even for the largest legal int value, 2147483647. (If you wanted to run it for even larger
values, you could use variables of type long rather than int.) However, it does take a significant
amount of time for very large numbers. So when I implemented this algorithm, I decided to
output a dot every time the computer has tested ten million possible divisors. In the improved
version of the program, there are two types of counting going on. We have to count the number
of divisors and we also have to count the number of possible divisors that have been tested.
So the program needs two counters. When the second counter reaches 10000000, the program
outputs a ’.’ and resets the counter to zero so that we can start counting the next group of ten
million. Reverting to pseudocode, the algorithm now looks like
Get a positive integer, N, from the user
Let divisorCount = 0 // Number of divisors found.
Let numberTested = 0 // Number of possible divisors tested
// since the last period was output.
for each number, testDivisor, in the range from 1 to N:
if testDivisor is a divisor of N:
Count it by adding 1 to divisorCount
Add 1 to numberTested
if numberTested is 10000000:
print out a ’.’
Reset numberTested to 0
Output the count
Finally, we can translate the algorithm into a complete Java program:
import textio.TextIO;
/**
* This program reads a positive integer from the user.
* It counts how many divisors that number has, and
* then it prints the result.
*/
public class CountDivisors {
public static void main(String[] args) {
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 102

int N; // A positive integer entered by the user.

// Divisors of this number will be counted.
int testDivisor; // A number between 1 and N that is a
// possible divisor of N.
int divisorCount; // Number of divisors of N that have been found.
int numberTested; // Used to count how many possible divisors
// of N have been tested. When the number
// reaches 10000000, a period is output and
// the value of numberTested is reset to zero.
/* Get a positive integer from the user. */
while (true) {
System.out.print("Enter a positive integer: ");
N = TextIO.getlnInt();
if (N > 0)
break;
System.out.println("That number is not positive. Please try again.");
}
/* Count the divisors, printing a "." after every 10000000 tests. */
divisorCount = 0;
numberTested = 0;
for (testDivisor = 1; testDivisor <= N; testDivisor++) {
if ( N % testDivisor == 0 )
divisorCount++;
numberTested++;
if (numberTested == 10000000) {
System.out.print(’.’);
numberTested = 0;
}
}
/* Display the result. */
System.out.println();
System.out.println("The number of divisors of " + N
+ " is " + divisorCount);
} // end main()
} // end class CountDivisors

3.4.3 Nested for Loops

Control structures in Java are statements that contain other, simpler statements. In particular,
control structures can contain control structures. You’ve already seen several examples of
if statements inside loops, and one example of a while loop inside another while, but any
combination of one control structure inside another is possible. We say that one structure is
nested inside another. You can even have multiple levels of nesting, such as a while loop
inside an if statement inside another while loop. The syntax of Java does not set a limit on
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 103

the number of levels of nesting. As a practical matter, though, it’s difficult to understand a
program that has more than a few levels of nesting, and it is a style rule that excessive nesting
should be avoided.
Nested for loops arise naturally in many algorithms, and it is important to understand how
they work. Let’s look at a couple of examples. First, consider the problem of printing out a
multiplication table like this one:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24
3 6 9 12 15 18 21 24 27 30 33 36
4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 44 48
5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60
6 12 18 24 30 36 42 48 54 60 66 72
7 14 21 28 35 42 49 56 63 70 77 84
8 16 24 32 40 48 56 64 72 80 88 96
9 18 27 36 45 54 63 72 81 90 99 108
10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 110 120
11 22 33 44 55 66 77 88 99 110 121 132
12 24 36 48 60 72 84 96 108 120 132 144
The data in the table are arranged into 12 rows and 12 columns. The process of printing them
out can be expressed in a pseudocode algorithm as
for each rowNumber = 1, 2, 3, ..., 12:
Print the first twelve multiples of rowNumber on one line
Output a carriage return
The first step in the for loop can itself be expressed as a for loop. We can expand “Print the
first twelve multiples of rowNumber on one line” as:
for N = 1, 2, 3, ..., 12:
Print N * rowNumber
so a refined algorithm for printing the table has one for loop nested inside another:
for each rowNumber = 1, 2, 3, ..., 12:
for N = 1, 2, 3, ..., 12:
Print N * rowNumber
Output a carriage return
We want to print the output in neat columns, with each output number taking up four spaces.
This can be done using formatted output with format specifier %4d. Assuming that rowNumber
and N have been declared to be variables of type int, the algorithm can be expressed in Java as
for ( rowNumber = 1; rowNumber <= 12; rowNumber++ ) {
for ( N = 1; N <= 12; N++ ) {
// print in 4-character columns
System.out.printf( "%4d", N * rowNumber ); // No carriage return !
}
System.out.println(); // Add a carriage return at end of the line.
}
This section has been weighed down with lots of examples of numerical processing. For our
next example, let’s do some text processing. Consider the problem of finding which of the 26
letters of the alphabet occur in a given string. For example, the letters that occur in “Hello
World” are D, E, H, L, O, R, and W. More specifically, we will write a program that will list all
the letters contained in a string and will also count the number of different letters. The string
will be input by the user. Let’s start with a pseudocode algorithm for the program.
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 104

Ask the user to input a string

Read the response into a variable, str
Let count = 0 (for counting the number of different letters)
for each letter of the alphabet:
if the letter occurs in str:
Print the letter
Add 1 to count
Output the count
Since we want to process the entire line of text that is entered by the user, we’ll use
TextIO.getln() to read it. The line of the algorithm that reads “for each letter of the
alphabet” can be expressed as “for (letter=’A’; letter<=’Z’; letter++)”. But the if
statement inside the for loop needs still more thought before we can write the program. How
do we check whether the given letter, letter, occurs in str? One idea is to look at each
character in the string in turn, and check whether that character is equal to letter. We can
get the i-th character of str with the function call str.charAt(i), where i ranges from 0 to
str.length() - 1.
One more difficulty: A letter such as ’A’ can occur in str in either upper or lower case, ’A’
or ’a’. We have to check for both of these. But we can avoid this difficulty by converting str
to upper case before processing it. Then, we only have to check for the upper case letter. We
can now flesh out the algorithm fully:
Ask the user to input a string
Read the response into a variable, str
Convert str to upper case
Let count = 0
for letter = ’A’, ’B’, ..., ’Z’:
for i = 0, 1, ..., str.length()-1:
if letter == str.charAt(i):
Print letter
Add 1 to count
break // jump out of the loop, to avoid counting letter twice
Output the count
Note the use of break in the nested for loop. It is required to avoid printing or counting a given
letter more than once (in the case where it occurs more than once in the string). The break
statement breaks out of the inner for loop, but not the outer for loop. Upon executing the
break, the computer continues the outer loop with the next value of letter. You should try
to figure out exactly what count would be at the end of this program, if the break statement
were omitted. Here is the complete program:
import textio.TextIO;
/**
* This program reads a line of text entered by the user.
* It prints a list of the letters that occur in the text,
* and it reports how many different letters were found.
*/
public class ListLetters {
public static void main(String[] args) {
String str; // Line of text entered by the user.
int count; // Number of different letters found in str.
char letter; // A letter of the alphabet.
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 105

System.out.println("Please type in a line of text.");

str = TextIO.getln();
str = str.toUpperCase();
count = 0;
System.out.println("Your input contains the following letters:");
System.out.println();
System.out.print(" ");
for ( letter = ’A’; letter <= ’Z’; letter++ ) {
int i; // Position of a character in str.
for ( i = 0; i < str.length(); i++ ) {
if ( letter == str.charAt(i) ) {
System.out.print(letter);
System.out.print(’ ’);
count++;
break;
}
}
}
System.out.println();
System.out.println();
System.out.println("There were " + count + " different letters.");
} // end main()
} // end class ListLetters

In fact, there is actually an easier way to determine whether a given letter occurs in a string,
str. The built-in function str.indexOf(letter) will return -1 if letter does not occur in
the string. It returns a number greater than or equal to zero if it does occur. So, we could
check whether letter occurs in str simply by checking “if (str.indexOf(letter) >= 0)”.
If we used this technique in the above program, we wouldn’t need a nested for loop. This gives
you a preview of how subroutines can be used to deal with complexity.

3.5 The if Statement

The first of the two branching statements in Java is the if statement, which you
have already seen in Section 3.1. It takes the form
if (hboolean-expression i)
hstatement-1 i
else
hstatement-2 i
As usual, the statements inside an if statement can be blocks. The if statement represents
a two-way branch. The else part of an if statement—consisting of the word “else” and the
statement that follows it—can be omitted.
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 106

3.5.1 The Dangling else Problem

Now, an if statement is, in particular, a statement. This means that either hstatement-1 i
or hstatement-2 i in the above if statement can itself be an if statement. A problem arises,
however, if hstatement-1 i is an if statement that has no else part. This special case is
effectively forbidden by the syntax of Java. Suppose, for example, that you type
if ( x > 0 )
if (y > 0)
System.out.println("First case");
else
System.out.println("Second case");
Now, remember that the way you’ve indented this doesn’t mean anything at all to the computer.
You might think that the else part is the second half of your “if (x > 0)” statement, but
the rule that the computer follows attaches the else to “if (y > 0)”, which is closer. That
is, the computer reads your statement as if it were formatted:
if ( x > 0 )
if (y > 0)
System.out.println("First case");
else
System.out.println("Second case");
You can force the computer to use the other interpretation by enclosing the nested if in a
block:
if ( x > 0 ) {
if (y > 0)
System.out.println("First case");
}
else
System.out.println("Second case");
These two if statements have different meanings: In the case when x <= 0, the first statement
doesn’t print anything, but the second statement prints “Second case”.

3.5.2 Multiway Branching

Much more interesting than this technicality is the case where hstatement-2 i, the else part
of the if statement, is itself an if statement. The statement would look like this (perhaps
without the final else part):
if (hboolean-expression-1 i)
hstatement-1 i
else
if (hboolean-expression-2 i)
hstatement-2 i
else
hstatement-3 i
However, since the computer doesn’t care how a program is laid out on the page, this is almost
always written in the format:
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 107

if (hboolean-expression-1 i)
hstatement-1 i
else if (hboolean-expression-2 i)
hstatement-2 i
else
hstatement-3 i
You should think of this as a single statement representing a three-way branch. When the
computer executes this, one and only one of the three statements—hstatement-1 i, hstatement-
2 i, or hstatement-3 i—will be executed. The computer starts by evaluating hboolean-expression-
1 i. If it is true, the computer executes hstatement-1 i and then jumps all the way to the end of
the outer if statement, skipping the other two hstatementsi. If hboolean-expression-1 i is false,
the computer skips hstatement-1 i and executes the second, nested if statement. To do this,
it tests the value of hboolean-expression-2 i and uses it to decide between hstatement-2 i and
hstatement-3 i.
Here is an example that will print out one of three different messages, depending on the
value of a variable named temperature:
if (temperature < 50)
System.out.println("It’s cold.");
else if (temperature < 80)
System.out.println("It’s nice.");
else
System.out.println("It’s hot.");
If temperature is, say, 42, the first test is true. The computer prints out the message “It’s
cold”, and skips the rest—without even evaluating the second condition. For a temperature of
75, the first test is false, so the computer goes on to the second test. This test is true, so
the computer prints “It’s nice” and skips the rest. If the temperature is 173, both of the tests
evaluate to false, so the computer says “It’s hot” (unless its circuits have been fried by the
heat, that is).
You can go on stringing together “else-if’s” to make multiway branches with any number
of cases:
if (htest-1 i)
hstatement-1 i
else if (htest-2 i)
hstatement-2 i
else if (htest-3 i)
hstatement-3 i
.
. // (more cases)
.
else if (htest-N i)
hstatement-N i
else
hstatement-(N+1) i
The computer evaluates the tests, which are boolean expressions, one after the other until it
comes to one that is true. It executes the associated statement and skips the rest. If none
of the boolean expressions evaluate to true, then the statement in the else part is executed.
This statement is called a multiway branch because one and only one of the statements will be
executed. The final else part can be omitted. In that case, if all the boolean expressions are
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 108

false, none of the statements are executed. Of course, each of the statements can be a block,
consisting of a number of statements enclosed between { and }. Admittedly, there is lot of
syntax here; as you study and practice, you’ll become comfortable with it. It might be useful
to look at a flow control diagram for the general “if..else if” statement shown above:

Yes No

Yes No
Do statement-1

Yes No
Do statement-2

Yes No

Do statement-N Do statement-(N+1)

3.5.3 If Statement Examples

As an example of using if statements, let’s suppose that x, y, and z are variables of type int,
and that each variable has already been assigned a value. Consider the problem of printing out
the values of the three variables in increasing order. For example, if the values are 42, 17, and
20, then the output should be in the order 17, 20, 42.
One way to approach this is to ask, where does x belong in the list? It comes first if it’s
less than both y and z. It comes last if it’s greater than both y and z. Otherwise, it comes in
the middle. We can express this with a 3-way if statement, but we still have to worry about
the order in which y and z should be printed. In pseudocode,
if (x < y && x < z) {
output x, followed by y and z in their correct order
}
else if (x > y && x > z) {
output y and z in their correct order, followed by x
}
else {
output x in between y and z in their correct order
}
Determining the relative order of y and z requires another if statement, so this becomes
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 109

if (x < y && x < z) { // x comes first

if (y < z)
System.out.println( x + " " + y + " " + z );
else
System.out.println( x + " " + z + " " + y );
}
else if (x > y && x > z) { // x comes last
if (y < z)
System.out.println( y + " " + z + " " + x );
else
System.out.println( z + " " + y + " " + x );
}
else { // x in the middle
if (y < z)
System.out.println( y + " " + x + " " + z);
else
System.out.println( z + " " + x + " " + y);
}
You might check that this code will work correctly even if some of the values are the same. If
the values of two variables are the same, it doesn’t matter which order you print them in.
Note, by the way, that even though you can say in English “if x is less than y and z,” you
can’t say in Java “if (x < y && z)”. The && operator can only be used between boolean
values, so you have to make separate tests, x<y and x<z, and then combine the two tests with
&&.
There is an alternative approach to this problem that begins by asking, “which order should
x and y be printed in?” Once that’s known, you only have to decide where to stick in z. This
line of thought leads to different Java code:
if ( x < y ) { // x comes before y
if ( z < x ) // z comes first
System.out.println( z + " " + x + " " + y);
else if ( z > y ) // z comes last
System.out.println( x + " " + y + " " + z);
else // z is in the middle
System.out.println( x + " " + z + " " + y);
}
else { // y comes before x
if ( z < y ) // z comes first
System.out.println( z + " " + y + " " + x);
else if ( z > x ) // z comes last
System.out.println( y + " " + x + " " + z);
else // z is in the middle
System.out.println( y + " " + z + " " + x);
}
Once again, we see how the same problem can be solved in many different ways. The two
approaches to this problem have not exhausted all the possibilities. For example, you might
start by testing whether x is greater than y. If so, you could swap their values. Once you’ve
done that, you know that x should be printed before y.
∗ ∗ ∗
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 110

Finally, let’s write a complete program that uses an if statement in an interesting way. I
want a program that will convert measurements of length from one unit of measurement to
another, such as miles to yards or inches to feet. So far, the problem is extremely under-
specified. Let’s say that the program will only deal with measurements in inches, feet, yards,
and miles. It would be easy to extend it later to deal with other units. The user will type in
a measurement in one of these units, such as “17 feet” or “2.73 miles”. The output will show
the length in terms of each of the four units of measure. (This is easier than asking the user
which units to use in the output.) An outline of the process is
Read the user’s input measurement and units of measure
Express the measurement in inches, feet, yards, and miles
Display the four results
The program can read both parts of the user’s input from the same line by using
TextIO.getDouble() to read the numerical measurement and TextIO.getlnWord() to read
the unit of measure. The conversion into different units of measure can be simplified by first
converting the user’s input into inches. From there, the number of inches can easily be converted
into feet, yards, and miles. Before converting into inches, we have to test the input to determine
which unit of measure the user has specified:
Let measurement = TextIO.getDouble()
Let units = TextIO.getlnWord()
if the units are inches
Let inches = measurement
else if the units are feet
Let inches = measurement * 12 // 12 inches per foot
else if the units are yards
Let inches = measurement * 36 // 36 inches per yard
else if the units are miles
Let inches = measurement * 12 * 5280 // 5280 feet per mile
else
The units are illegal!
Print an error message and stop processing
Let feet = inches / 12.0
Let yards = inches / 36.0
Let miles = inches / (12.0 * 5280.0)
Display the results
Since units is a String, we can use units.equals("inches") to check whether the
specified unit of measure is “inches”. However, it would be nice to allow the units to be
specified as “inch” or abbreviated to “in”. To allow these three possibilities, we can check if
(units.equals("inches") || units.equals("inch") || units.equals("in")). It would
also be nice to allow upper case letters, as in “Inches” or “IN”. We can do this by converting
units to lower case before testing it or by substituting the function units.equalsIgnoreCase
for units.equals.
In my final program, I decided to make things more interesting by allowing the user to
repeat the process of entering a measurement and seeing the results of the conversion for each
measurement. The program will end only when the user inputs 0. To program that, I just had
to wrap the above algorithm inside a while loop, and make sure that the loop ends when the
user inputs a 0. Here’s the complete program:
import textio.TextIO;
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 111

/**
* This program will convert measurements expressed in inches,
* feet, yards, or miles into each of the possible units of
* measure. The measurement is input by the user, followed by
* the unit of measure. For example: "17 feet", "1 inch", or
* "2.73 mi". Abbreviations in, ft, yd, and mi are accepted.
* The program will continue to read and convert measurements
* until the user enters an input of 0.
*/
public class LengthConverter {
public static void main(String[] args) {
double measurement; // Numerical measurement, input by user.
String units; // The unit of measure for the input, also
// specified by the user.
double inches, feet, yards, miles; // Measurement expressed in
// each possible unit of
// measure.
System.out.println("""
Enter measurements in inches, feet, yards, or miles.
For example: 1 inch 17 feet 2.73 miles
You can use abbreviations: in ft yd mi
I will convert your input into the other units
of measure.
""");
while (true) {
/* Get the user’s input, and convert units to lower case. */
System.out.print("Enter your measurement, or 0 to end: ");
measurement = TextIO.getDouble();
if (measurement == 0)
break; // Terminate the while loop.
units = TextIO.getlnWord();
units = units.toLowerCase(); // convert units to lower case
/* Convert the input measurement to inches. */
if (units.equals("inch") || units.equals("inches")
|| units.equals("in")) {
inches = measurement;
}
else if (units.equals("foot") || units.equals("feet")
|| units.equals("ft")) {
inches = measurement * 12;
}
else if (units.equals("yard") || units.equals("yards")
|| units.equals("yd")) {
inches = measurement * 36;
}
else if (units.equals("mile") || units.equals("miles")
|| units.equals("mi")) {
inches = measurement * 12 * 5280;
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 112

}
else {
System.out.println("Sorry, but I don’t understand \""
+ units + "\".");
continue; // back to start of while loop
}
/* Convert measurement in inches to feet, yards, and miles. */
feet = inches / 12;
yards = inches / 36;
miles = inches / (12*5280);
/* Output measurement in terms of each unit of measure. */
System.out.printf("""
That’s equivalent to:
%14.5g inches
%14.5g feet
%14.5g yards
%14.5g miles
""", inches, feet, yards, miles);
System.out.println();
} // end while
System.out.println();
System.out.println("OK! Bye for now.");
} // end main()
} // end class LengthConverter

(Note that this program uses text blocks for multiline outputs (see Subsection 2.3.4; text
blocks require Java 17). It also uses formatted output with the “g” format specifier. In this
program, we have no control over how large or how small the numbers might be. It could easily
make sense for the user to enter very large or very small measurements. The “g” format will
print a real number in exponential form if it is very large or very small, and in the usual decimal
form otherwise. Remember that in the format specification %14.5g, the 5 is the total number
of significant digits that are to be printed, so we will always get the same number of significant
digits in the output, no matter what the size of the number. If we had used an “f” format
specifier such as %14.5f, the output would be in decimal form with 5 digits after the decimal
point. This would print the number 0.000000000745482 as 0.00000, with no significant digits
at all! With the “g” format specifier, the output would be 7.4549e-10.)

3.5.4 The Empty Statement

As a final note in this section, I will mention one more type of statement in Java: the empty
statement. This is a statement that consists simply of a semicolon and which tells the computer
to do nothing. The existence of the empty statement makes the following legal, even though
you would not ordinarily see a semicolon after a } :
if (x < 0) {
x = -x;
};
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 113

The semicolon is legal after the }, but the computer considers it to be an empty statement,
not part of the if statement. Occasionally, you might find yourself using the empty statement
when what you mean is, in fact, “do nothing.” For example, the rather contrived if statement
if ( done )
; // Empty statement
else
System.out.println( "Not done yet.");
does nothing when the boolean variable done is true, and prints out “Not done yet” when
it is false. You can’t just leave out the semicolon in this example, since Java syntax requires
an actual statement between the if and the else. I prefer, though, to use an empty block,
consisting of { and } with nothing between, for such cases.
Occasionally, stray empty statements can cause annoying, hard-to-find errors in a program.
For example, the following program segment prints out “Hello” just once, not ten times:
for (i = 0; i < 10; i++);
System.out.println("Hello");
Why? Because the “;” at the end of the first line is a statement, and it is this empty statement
that is executed ten times. The System.out.println statement is not really inside the for
statement at all, so it is executed just once, after the for loop has completed. The for loop
just does nothing, ten times!

3.6 The switch Statement

The second branching statement in Java is the switch statement, which is introduced
in this section. The switch statement is used much less often than the if statement, but it is
sometimes useful for expressing a certain type of multiway branch.

3.6.1 The Basic switch Statement

A switch statement allows you to test the value of an expression and, depending on that value,
to jump directly to some location within the switch statement. Only expressions of certain
types can be used. The value of the expression can be one of the primitive integer types int,
short, or byte. It can be the primitive char type. It can be String. Or it can be an enum type
(see Subsection 2.3.5 for an introduction to enum types). In particular, note that the expression
cannot be a double or float value.
Java has two different syntaxes for switch statements. The original switch syntax, which
like other Java control structures was modeled on the C programming language, is error-prone
and kind-of ugly. The new syntax, which requires Java 17, is an improvement. You still need
to know the traditional syntax, since it is used in a lot of existing code, but my advice would
be to use the new syntax when you write new code. We look at the new syntax first, and will
cover the traditional syntax at the end of this section.
The positions within a switch statement to which it can jump are marked with case labels
that take the form: “case hconstantListi”. The hconstantListi here consists of one or more
literals of the same type as the expression in the switch, separated by commas. For example:
case 2, 4, 8
or
case "Paper"
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 114

The case label is followed by ->, that is by a symbol made up of a hyphen and a greater-than
character, and then by a single statement. The statement can be a subroutine call statement,
a throw statement, or a block statement, containing several nested statements. A switch
statement can also, optionally, have one jump point labeled with default instead of with a
case label. The syntax for the statement can be specified as follows, noting that there can be
at most one default case and that all the constants in the case labels must be different:
switch ( hexpression i ) {
hcase-label-or-default i -> hstatement i
hcase-label-or-default i -> hstatement i
.
.
.
hcase-label-or-default i -> hstatement i
}
When the computer executes this switch statement, it evaluates the hexpressioni. If the value
is one of the constants in a case label, the computer executes the statement that follows that
case label, and then jumps out of the switch statement. If the value of the expression does
not match any of the case constants, then the computer looks for a default case, and if one is
present, executes the statement that follows it.
It is probably easiest to look at an example. This is not a useful example, but it should be
easy to follow:
switch ( N ) { // (Assume N is an integer variable.)
case 1 -> System.out.println("The number is 1.");
case 2, 4, 8 -> {
System.out.println("The number is 2, 4, or 8.");
System.out.println("(That’s a power of 2!)");
}
case 3, 6, 9 -> {
System.out.println("The number is 3, 6, or 9.");
System.out.println("(That’s a multiple of 3!)");
}
case 5 -> System.out.println("The number is 5.");
default ->
System.out.println("The number is 7 or is outside the range 1 to 9.");
}
The braces, { and }, in this example are required to group multiple statements into a single
block statement. Braces could also be added to the other cases, but are not required there.
This switch statement has exactly the same effect as the following multiway if statement:
if ( N == 1 ) {
System.out.println("The number is 1.");
}
else if ( N == 2 || N == 4 || N == 8 ) {
System.out.println("The number is 2, 4, or 8.");
System.out.println("(That’s a power of 2!)");
}
else if ( N == 3 || N == 6 || N == 9 ) {
System.out.println("The number is 3, 6, or 9.");
System.out.println("(That’s a multiple of 3!)");
}
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 115

else if ( N == 5 ) {
System.out.println("The number is 5.");
}
else {
System.out.println("The number is 7 or is outside the range 1 to 9.");
}
More generally, any switch statement could be replaced by a multiway if statement. The
switch statement can be easier to read. And it might be more efficient since the computer
can jump directly to the correct case instead of working through a series of tests to get to the
correct case.

3.6.2 Menus and switch Statements

One application of switch statements is in processing menus. A menu is a list of options.
The user selects one of the options. The computer has to respond to each possible choice in a
different way. If the options are numbered 1, 2, . . . , then the number of the chosen option can
be used in a switch statement to select the proper response.
In a command-line program, the menu can be presented as a numbered list of options, and
the user can choose an option by typing in its number. It can be convenient to use a text block
(see Subsection 2.3.4) to present the menu. Here is an example that could be used in a variation
of the LengthConverter example from the previous section:
int optionNumber; // Option number from menu, selected by user.
double measurement; // A numerical measurement, input by the user.
// The unit of measurement depends on which
// option the user has selected.
double inches; // The same measurement, converted into inches.
/* Display menu of options, and get user’s selected option number. */
System.out.println("""
What unit of measurement does your input use?
1. inches
2. feet
3. yards
4. miles
Enter the number of your choice:
""");
optionNumber = TextIO.getlnInt();
/* Read user’s measurement and convert to inches. */
switch ( optionNumber ) {
case 1 -> {
System.out.println("Enter the number of inches: ");
measurement = TextIO.getlnDouble();
inches = measurement;
}
case 2 -> {
System.out.println("Enter the number of feet: ");
measurement = TextIO.getlnDouble();
inches = measurement * 12;
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 116

}
case 3 -> {
System.out.println("Enter the number of yards: ");
measurement = TextIO.getlnDouble();
inches = measurement * 36;
}
case 4 -> {
System.out.println("Enter the number of miles: ");
measurement = TextIO.getlnDouble();
inches = measurement * 12 * 5280;
}
default -> {
System.out.println("Error! Illegal option number! I quit!");
System.exit(1);
}
} // end switch
/* Now go on to convert inches to feet, yards, and miles... */
Alternatively, this example could be designed to ask the use to enter the unit of measure as a
string, instead of as an option number, and then use that string directly in a switch statement:
String units; // Unit of measurement, entered by user.
double measurement; // A numerical measurement, input by the user.
double inches; // The same measurement, converted into inches.
/* Read the user’s unit of measurement. */
System.out.println("What unit of measurement does your input use?");
units = TextIO.getln().toLowerCase();
/* Read user’s measurement and convert to inches. */
System.out.print("Enter the number of " + units + ": ");
measurement = TextIO.getlnDouble();
switch ( units ) {
case "inch", "inches", "in" -> inches = measurement;
case "foot", "feet", "ft" -> inches = measurement * 12;
case "yard", "yards", "yd" -> inches = measurement * 36;
case "mile", "miles", "mi" -> inches = measurement * 12 * 5280;
default -> {
System.out.println("Wait a minute! Illegal unit of measure! I quit!");
System.exit(1);
}
} // end switch

3.6.3 Enums in switch Statements

The type of the expression in a switch can be an enum type. In that case, the constants in
the case labels must be values from the enum type. For example, suppose that the type of the
expression is the enumerated type Season defined by
enum Season { SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER }
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 117

and that the expression in a switch statement is an expression of type Season. The constants
in the case label must be chosen from among the values Season.SPRING, Season.SUMMER,
Season.FALL, or Season.WINTER. However, there is a quirk in the syntax: when an enum
constant is used in a case label, only the simple name, such as “SPRING” is used, not the full
name, such as “Season.SPRING”. Of course, the computer already knows that the value in the
case label must belong to the enumerated type, since it can tell that from the type of expression
used, so there is really no need to specify the type name in the constant. For example, assuming
that currentSeason is a variable of type Season, then we could have the switch statement:
System.out.print("The months in " + currentSeason + " are: ");
switch ( currentSeason ) {
case WINTER -> // ( NOT Season.WINTER ! )
System.out.println("December, January, February");
case SPRING ->
System.out.println("March, April, May");
case SUMMER ->
System.out.println("June, July, August");
case FALL ->
System.out.println("September, October, November");
}

3.6.4 Definite Assignment and switch Statements

As a somewhat more realistic example, the following switch statement makes a ran-
dom choice among three possible alternatives. Recall that the value of the expression
(int)(3*Math.random()) is one of the integers 0, 1, or 2, selected at random with equal
probability, so the switch statement below will assign one of the values "Rock", "Paper",
"Scissors" to computerMove, with probability 1/3 for each case:
switch ( (int)(3*Math.random()) ) {
case 0 -> computerMove = "Rock";
case 1 -> computerMove = "Paper";
case 2 -> computerMove = "Scissors";
}
This switch statement is perfectly OK, but suppose that we use it in the following code segment:
String computerMove;
switch ( (int)(3*Math.random()) ) {
case 0 -> computerMove = "Rock";
case 1 -> computerMove = "Paper";
case 2 -> computerMove = "Scissors";
}
System.out.println("The computer’s move is " + computerMove); // ERROR!
Now there is a subtle error on the last line! The problem here is due to definite assignment,
the idea that the Java compiler must be able to determine that a variable has definitely been
assigned a value before its value is used. Definite assignment was introduced in Subsection 3.1.5.
In this example, it’s true that the three cases in the switch cover all the possibilities, but the
compiler is not smart enough to figure that out; it just sees that there is an integer-valued
expression in the switch but not all possible integer values are covered by the given cases.
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 118

A simple solution is to replace the final case in the switch statement with default. With
a default case, all possible values of the expression in the switch are certainly covered, and
the compiler knows that computerMove is definitely assigned a value:
String computerMove;
switch ( (int)(3*Math.random()) ) {
case 0 -> computerMove = "Rock";
case 1 -> computerMove = "Paper";
default -> computerMove = "Scissors";
}
System.out.println("The computer’s move is " + computerMove); // OK!

3.6.5 Switch Expressions

Often, the whole purpose of a switch statement is to assign a value to a variable, where the
value that is to be assigned depends on the value of the expression in the switch statement.
For example, this is true for the switch statement in the previous subsection.
This type of thing can be handled more elegantly by using a switch expression instead of
a switch statement. Like any expression, a switch expression computes and returns a single
value. The syntax is similar to a switch statement, but instead of a statement in each case,
there is an expression (or a throw statement). For example,
String computerMove = switch ( (int)(3*Math.random()) ) {
case 1 -> "Rock";
case 2 -> "Paper";
default -> "Scissors";
};
This is a single assignment statement, where the value to be assigned to computerMove is
computed by the switch expression. The semicolon on the last line is the semicolon that is
required at the end of the assignment statement; it is not part of the switch expression.
A switch expression must always compute a value (or throw an exception) and therefore will
usually have a default case. The expression in a case can be replaced by a block containing
several statements; the value for that case should then be specified by a yield statement,
which takes a form such as “yield 42;”. The value after the word yield is then returned as
the value of the switch expression.
Of course, switch expressions are not limited to assignment statements. You can use a
switch expression any place where any other kind of expression could be used, such as in an
output statement or as part of a larger expression.

3.6.6 The Traditional switch Statement

The older traditional syntax for switch statements is more complicated, but you should be
aware of it since it has been widely used in Java and in other programming languages. As it is
most often used, the traditional switch has the form:
switch (hexpression i) {
case hconstant-1 i:
hstatements-1 i
break;
case hconstant-2 i:
hstatements-2 i
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 119

break;
.
. // (more cases)
.
case hconstant-N i:
hstatements-N i
break;
default: // optional default case
hstatements-(N+1) i
} // end of switch statement
Note that in the traditional syntax, only one constant is allowed in a case label (but Java 17
allows a comma-separated list of constants here). A case label can be followed by any number
of statements. This traditional syntax uses a colon after each case label, rather than ->. The
default case is optional.
To execute this switch statement, the computer will evaluate the hexpressioni and jump to
the case label that contains that constant, if there is one, or to the default case if not. The break
statements in this switch are not actually required by the syntax of the switch statement. The
effect of a break is to make the computer jump past the end of the switch statement, skipping
over all the remaining cases. If you leave out the break statement, the computer will just forge
ahead after completing one case and will execute the statements associated with the next case
label. This is called “fall through”; it is rarely what you want, and it is a common source of
bugs. However, it is legal and is even occasionally useful.
Note that you can leave out one of the groups of statements entirely (including the break).
You then have two case labels in a row, containing two different constants. This just means
that the computer will jump to the same place and perform the same action for each of the two
constants.
Here is how our first example switch statement would be written using the traditional
syntax:
switch ( N ) { // (Assume N is an integer variable.)
case 1:
System.out.println("The number is 1.");
break;
case 2:
case 4:
case 8:
System.out.println("The number is 2, 4, or 8.");
System.out.println("(That’s a power of 2!)");
break;
case 3:
case 6:
case 9:
System.out.println("The number is 3, 6, or 9.");
System.out.println("(That’s a multiple of 3!)");
break;
case 5:
System.out.println("The number is 5.");
break;
default:
System.out.println("The number is 7 or is outside the range 1 to 9.");
}
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 120

3.7 Introduction to Exceptions and try..catch

In addition to the control structures that determine the normal flow of control in a
program, Java has a way to deal with “exceptional” cases that throw the flow of control off its
normal track. When an error occurs during the execution of a program, the default behavior
is to terminate the program and to print an error message. However, Java makes it possible to
“catch” such errors and program a response different from simply letting the program crash.
This is done with the try..catch statement. In this section, we will take a preliminary and
incomplete look the try..catch statement, leaving out a lot of the rather complex syntax of
this statement. Error handling is a complex topic, which we will return to in Section 8.3, and
we will cover the full syntax of try..catch at that time.

3.7.1 Exceptions
The term exception is used to refer to the type of event that one might want to handle with
a try..catch. An exception is an exception to the normal flow of control in the program.
The term is used in preference to “error” because in some cases, an exception might not be
considered to be an error at all. You can sometimes think of an exception as just another way
to organize a program.
Exceptions in Java are represented as objects of type Exception. Actual exceptions are
usually defined by subclasses of Exception. Different subclasses represent different types of
exceptions. We will look at only two types of exception in this section: NumberFormatException
and IllegalArgumentException.
A NumberFormatException can occur when an attempt is made to convert a string
into a number. Such conversions are done by the functions Integer.parseInt
and Double.parseDouble. (See Subsection 2.5.7.) Consider the function call
Integer.parseInt(str) where str is a variable of type String. If the value of str is the
string "42", then the function call will correctly convert the string into the int 42. However,
if the value of str is, say, "fred", the function call will fail because "fred" is not a legal
string representation of an int value. In this case, an exception of type NumberFormatException
occurs. If nothing is done to handle the exception, the program will crash.
An IllegalArgumentException can occur when an illegal value is passed as a parameter to a
subroutine. For example, if a subroutine requires that a parameter be greater than or equal to
zero, an IllegalArgumentException might occur when a negative value is passed to the subroutine.
How to respond to the illegal value is up to the person who wrote the subroutine, so we
can’t simply say that every illegal parameter value will result in an IllegalArgumentException.
However, it is a common response.

3.7.2 try..catch
When an exception occurs, we say that the exception is “thrown.” For example, we say that
Integer.parseInt(str) throws an exception of type NumberFormatException when the value
of str is illegal. When an exception is thrown, it is possible to “catch” the exception and
prevent it from crashing the program. This is done with a try..catch statement. In simplified
form, the syntax for a try..catch statement can be:
try {
hstatements-1 i
}
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 121

catch ( hexception-class-name i hvariable-name i ) {

hstatements-2 i
}
The hexception-class-namei could be NumberFormatException, IllegalArgumentException, or
some other exception class. When the computer executes this try..catch statement, it
executes hstatements-1 i, the statements inside the try part. If no exception occurs during
the execution of hstatements-1 i, then the computer just skips over the catch part and proceeds
with the rest of the program. However, if an exception of type hexception-class-namei occurs
during the execution of hstatements-1 i, the computer immediately jumps from the point where
the exception occurs to the catch part and executes hstatements-2 i, skipping any remaining
statements in hstatements-1 i. Note that only one type of exception is caught; if some other
type of exception occurs during the execution of hstatements-1 i, it will crash the program as
usual.
An exception is represented by an object. During the execution of hstatements-2 i, the
hvariable-namei represents that exception object, so that you can, for example, print it out.
The exception object contains information about the cause of the exception. This includes an
error message, which will be displayed if you print out the exception object.
After the end of the catch part, the computer proceeds with the rest of the program; the
exception has been caught and handled and does not crash the program.
By the way, note that the braces, { and }, are part of the syntax of the try..catch
statement. They are required even if there is only one statement between the braces. This is
different from the other statements we have seen, where the braces around a single statement
are optional.
As an example, suppose that str is a variable of type String whose value might or might
not represent a legal real number. Then we could say:
double x;
try {
x = Double.parseDouble(str);
System.out.println( "The number is " + x );
}
catch ( NumberFormatException e ) {
System.out.println( "Not a legal number." );
x = Double.NaN;
}
If an error is thrown by the call to Double.parseDouble(str), then the output statement in
the try part is skipped, and the statement in the catch part is executed. (In this example,
I set x to be the value Double.NaN when an exception occurs. Double.NaN is the special
“not-a-number” value for type double.)
It’s not always a good idea to catch exceptions and continue with the program. Often that
can just lead to an even bigger mess later on, and it might be better just to let the exception
crash the program at the point where it occurs. However, sometimes it’s possible to recover
from an error.
Suppose, for example, we want a program that will find the average of a sequence of real
numbers entered by the user, and we want the user to signal the end of the sequence by entering
a blank line. (This is similar to the sample program ComputeAverage.java from Section 3.3, but
in that program the user entered a zero to signal end-of-input.) If we use TextIO.getlnInt()
to read the user’s input, we will have no way of detecting the blank line, since that function
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 122

simply skips over blank lines. A solution is to use TextIO.getln() to read the user’s input.
This allows us to detect a blank input line, and we can convert non-blank inputs to numbers
using Double.parseDouble. And we can use try..catch to avoid crashing the program when
the user’s input is not a legal number. In this example, it makes sense to simply print an error
message, ignore the bad input, and let the program continue. Here’s the program:
import textio.TextIO;
public class ComputeAverage2 {
public static void main(String[] args) {
String str; // The user’s input.
double number; // The input converted into a number.
double total; // The total of all numbers entered.
double avg; // The average of the numbers.
int count; // The number of numbers entered.
total = 0;
count = 0;
System.out.println("Enter your numbers, press return to end.");
while (true) {
System.out.print("? ");
str = TextIO.getln();
if (str.equals("")) {
break; // Exit the loop, since the input line was blank.
}
try {
number = Double.parseDouble(str);
// If an error occurs, the next 2 lines are skipped!
total = total + number;
count = count + 1;
}
catch (NumberFormatException e) {
System.out.println("Not a legal number! Try again.");
}
}
avg = total/count;
System.out.printf("The average of %d numbers is %1.6g%n", count, avg);
}
}

3.7.3 Exceptions in TextIO

When TextIO reads a numeric value from the user, it makes sure that the user’s response is
legal, using a technique similar to the while loop and try..catch in the previous example.
However, TextIO can read data from other sources besides the user. (See Subsection 2.4.4.)
When it is reading from a file, there is no reasonable way for TextIO to recover from an illegal
value in the input, so it responds by throwing an exception. To keep things simple, TextIO only
throws exceptions of type IllegalArgumentException, no matter what type of error it encounters.
For example, an exception will occur if an attempt is made to read from a file after all the data
in the file has already been read. In TextIO, the exception is of type IllegalArgumentException. If
you have a better response to file errors than to let the program crash, you can use a try..catch
to catch exceptions of type IllegalArgumentException.
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 123

As an example, we will look at yet another number-averaging program. In this case, we will
read the numbers from a file. Assume that the file contains nothing but real numbers, and we
want a program that will read the numbers and find their sum and their average. Since it is
unknown how many numbers are in the file, there is the question of when to stop reading. One
approach is simply to try to keep reading indefinitely. When the end of the file is reached, an
exception occurs. This exception is not really an error—it’s just a way of detecting the end of
the data. So, we can catch the exception and finish up the program when it occurs. We can
read the data in a while (true) loop and break out of the loop when an exception occurs.
This is an example of the somewhat unusual technique of using an exception as part of the
expected flow of control in a program.
To read from the file, we need to know the file’s name. To make the program more
general, we can let the user enter the file name, instead of hard-coding a fixed file name in
the program. However, it is possible that the user will enter the name of a file that does
not exist. When we use TextIO.readfile to open a file that does not exist, an exception of
type IllegalArgumentException occurs. We can catch this exception and ask the user to enter a
different file name. Here is a complete program that uses all these ideas:
import textio.TextIO;
/**
* This program reads numbers from a file. It computes the sum and
* the average of the numbers that it reads. The file should contain
* nothing but numbers of type double; if this is not the case, the
* output will be the sum and average of however many numbers were
* successfully read from the file. The name of the file will be
* input by the user. (The user can choose to end the program by
* typing Control-C.)
*/
public class AverageNumbersFromFile {
public static void main(String[] args) {
while (true) {
String fileName; // The name of the file, to be input by the user.
System.out.print("Enter the name of the file: ");
fileName = TextIO.getln();
try {
TextIO.readFile( fileName ); // Try to open the file for input.
break; // If that succeeds, break out of the loop.
}
catch ( IllegalArgumentException e ) {
System.out.println("Can’t read from the file \"" + fileName + "\".");
System.out.println("Please try again.\n");
}
}
/* At this point, TextIO is reading from the file. */
double number; // A number read from the data file.
double sum; // The sum of all the numbers read so far.
int count; // The number of numbers that were read.
sum = 0;
count = 0;
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 124

try {
while (true) { // Loop ends when an exception occurs.
number = TextIO.getDouble();
count++; // This is skipped when the exception occurs
sum += number;
}
}
catch ( IllegalArgumentException e ) {
// We expect this to occur when the end-of-file is encountered.
// We don’t consider this to be an error, so there is nothing to do
// in this catch clause. Just proceed with the rest of the program.
}
// At this point, we’ve read the entire file.
System.out.println();
System.out.println("Number of data values read: " + count);
System.out.println("The sum of the data values: " + sum);
if ( count == 0 )
System.out.println("Can’t compute an average of 0 values.");
else
System.out.println("The average of the values: " + (sum/count));
}
}

3.8 Introduction to Arrays

In previous sections of this chapter, we have already covered all of Java’s control
structures. But before moving on to the next chapter, we will take preliminary looks at two
additional topics that are at least somewhat related to control structures.
This section is an introduction to arrays. Arrays are a basic and very commonly used
data structure, and array processing is often an exercise in using control structures. The next
section will introduce computer graphics and will allow you to apply what you know about
control structures in another context.

3.8.1 Creating and Using Arrays

A data structure consists of a number of data items chunked together so that they can be
treated as a unit. An array is a data structure in which the items are arranged as a numbered
sequence, so that each individual item can be referred to by its position number. In Java—but
not in some other programming languages—all the items must be of the same type, and the
numbering always starts at zero. You will need to learn several new terms to talk about arrays:
The number of items in an array is called the length of the array. The type of the individual
items in an array is called the base type of the array. And the position number of an item in
an array is called the index of that item.
Suppose that you want to write a program that will process the names of, say, one thousand
people. You will need a way to deal with all that data. Before you knew about arrays, you might
have thought that the program would need a thousand variables to hold the thousand names,
and if you wanted to print out all the names, you would need a thousand print statements.
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 125

Clearly, that would be ridiculous! In reality, you can put all the names into an array. The array
is represented by a single variable, but it holds the entire list of names. The length of the array
would be 1000, since there are 1000 individual names. The base type of the array would be
String since the items in the array are strings. The first name would be at index 0 in the array,
the second name at index 1, and so on, up to the thousandth name at index 999.
The base type of an array can be any Java type, but for now, we will stick to arrays whose
base type is String or one of the eight primitive types. If the base type of an array is int, it
is referred to as an “array of ints.” An array with base type String is referred to as an “array
of Strings.” However, an array is not, properly speaking, a list of integers or strings or other
values. It is better thought of as a list of variables of type int, or a list of variables of type
String, or of some other type. As always, there is some potential for confusion between the two
uses of a variable: as a name for a memory location and as a name for the value stored in that
memory location. Each position in an array acts as a variable. Each position can hold a value
of a specified type (the base type of the array), just as a variable can hold a value. The value
can be changed at any time, just as the value of a variable can be changed. The items in an
array—really, the individual variables that make up the array—are more often referred to as
the elements of the array.
As I mentioned above, when you use an array in a program, you can use a variable to refer
to the array as a whole. But you often need to refer to the individual elements of the array. The
name for an element of an array is based on the name for the array and the index number of
the element. The syntax for referring to an element looks, for example, like this: namelist[7].
Here, namelist is the variable that names the array as a whole, and namelist[7] refers to
the element at index 7 in that array. That is, to refer to an element of an array, you use the
array name, followed by element index enclosed in square brackets. An element name of this
form can be used like any other variable: You can assign a value to it, print it out, use it in an
expression, and so on.
An array also contains a kind of variable representing its length. For example, you can refer
to the length of the array namelist as namelist.length. However, you cannot assign a value
to namelist.length, since the length of an array cannot be changed.
Before you can use a variable to refer to an array, that variable must be declared, and it
must have a type. For an array of Strings, for example, the type for the array variable would
be String[ ], and for an array of ints, it would be int[ ]. In general, an array type consists of the
base type of the array followed by a pair of empty square brackets. Array types can be used to
declare variables; for example,
String[] namelist;
int[] A;
double[] prices;

and variables declared in this way can refer to arrays. However, declaring a variable does not
make the actual array. Like all variables, an array variable has to be assigned a value before
it can be used. In this case, the value is an array. Arrays have to be created using a special
syntax. (The syntax is related to the fact that arrays in Java are actually objects, but that
doesn’t need to concern us here.) Arrays are created with an operator named new . Here are
some examples:
namelist = new String[1000];
A = new int[5];
prices = new double[100];
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 126

The general syntax is

harray-variable i = new hbase-type i[harray-length i];
The length of the array can be given as either an integer or an integer-valued expression. For
example, after the assignment statement “A = new int[5];”, A is an array containing the five
integer elements A[0], A[1], A[2], A[3], and A[4]. Also, A.length would have the value 5.
It’s useful to have a picture in mind:

The statement The array contains ve

A = new int[5];
A: elements, which are
creates an array A.length: (
 referred to as
that holds ve A[0]: 0 A[0], A[1], A[2], A[3], A[4].
elements of type A[1]: 0 Each element is a variable
int. A is a name A[2]: 0 of type int. The array also
for the whole array. A[3]: 0 contains A.length, whose
A[4]: 0 value cannot be changed.

When you create an array of int, each element of the array is automatically initialized to
zero. Any array of numbers is filled with zeros when it is created. An array of boolean is filled
with the value false. And an array of char is filled with the character that has Unicode code
number zero. (For an array of String, the initial value is null, a special value used for objects
that we won’t encounter officially until Section 5.1.)

3.8.2 Arrays and For Loops

A lot of the real power of arrays comes from the fact that the index of an element can be given
by an integer variable or even an integer-valued expression. For example, if list is an array
and i is a variable of type int, then you can use list[i] and even list[2*i+1] as variable
names. The meaning of list[i] depends on the value of i. This becomes especially useful
when we want to process all the elements of an array, since that can be done with a for loop.
For example, to print out all the items in an array, list, we can just write
int i; // the array index
for (i = 0; i < list.length; i++) {
System.out.println( list[i] );
}
The first time through the loop, i is 0, and list[i] refers to list[0]. So, it is the value
stored in the variable list[0] that is printed. The second time through the loop, i is 1,
and the value stored in list[1] is printed. If the length of the list is 5, then the loop ends
after printing the value of list[4], when i becomes equal to 5 and the continuation condition
“i < list.length” is no longer true. This is a typical example of using a loop to process an
array.
Let’s look at a few more examples. Suppose that A is an array of double, and we want to
find the average of all the elements of the array. We can use a for loop to add up the numbers,
and then divide by the length of the array to get the average:
double total; // The sum of the numbers in the array.
double average; // The average of the numbers.
int i; // The array index.
total = 0;
for ( i = 0; i < A.length; i++ ) {
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 127

total = total + A[i]; // Add element number i to the total.

}
average = total / A.length; // A.length is the number of items
Another typical problem is to find the largest number in the array A. The strategy is to
go through the array, keeping track of the largest number found so far. We’ll store the largest
number found so far in a variable called max. As we look through the array, whenever we find
a number larger than the current value of max, we change the value of max to that larger value.
After the whole array has been processed, max is the largest item in the array overall. The only
question is, what should the original value of max be? One possibility is to start with max equal
to A[0], and then to look through the rest of the array, starting from A[1], for larger items:
double max; // The largest number seen so far.
max = A[0]; // At first, the largest number seen is A[0].
int i;
for ( i = 1; i < A.length; i++ ) {
if (A[i] > max) {
max = A[i];
}
}
// at this point, max is the largest item in A
Sometimes, you only want to process some elements of the array. In that case, you can use
an if statement inside the for loop to decide whether or not to process a given element. Let’s
look at the problem of averaging the elements of an array, but this time, suppose that we only
want to average the non-zero elements. In this case, the number of items that we add up can
be less than the length of the array, so we will need to keep a count of the number of items
added to the sum:
double total; // The sum of the non-zero numbers in the array.
int count; // The number of non-zero numbers.
double average; // The average of the non-zero numbers.
int i;
total = 0;
count = 0;
for ( i = 0; i < A.length; i++ ) {
if ( A[i] != 0 ) { // Only process non-zero elements!
total = total + A[i]; // Add element to the total
count = count + 1; // and count it.
}
}
if (count == 0) {
System.out.println("There were no non-zero elements.");
}
else {
average = total / count; // Divide by number of items
System.out.printf("Average of %d elements is %1.5g%n",
count, average);
}
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 128

3.8.3 Random Access

So far, my examples of array processing have used sequential access. That is, the elements of
the array were processed one after the other in the sequence in which they occur in the array.
But one of the big advantages of arrays is that they allow random access. That is, every
element of the array is equally accessible at any given time.
As an example, let’s look at a well-known problem called the birthday problem: Suppose
that there are N people in a room. What’s the chance that there are two people in the room
who have the same birthday? (That is, they were born on the same day in the same month,
but not necessarily in the same year.) Most people severely underestimate the probability. We
will actually look at a different version of the question: Suppose you choose people at random
and check their birthdays. How many people will you check before you find one who has the
same birthday as someone you’ve already checked? Of course, the answer in a particular case
depends on random factors, but we can simulate the experiment with a computer program and
run the program several times to get an idea of how many people need to be checked on average.
To simulate the experiment, we need to keep track of each birthday that we find. There are
365 different possible birthdays. (We’ll ignore leap years.) For each possible birthday, we need
to keep track of whether or not we have already found a person who has that birthday. The
answer to this question is a boolean value, true or false. To hold the data for all 365 possible
birthdays, we can use an array of 365 boolean values:
boolean[] used;
used = new boolean[365];
For this problem, the days of the year are numbered from 0 to 364. The value of used[i] is
true if someone has been selected whose birthday is day number i. Initially, all the values in the
array are false. (Remember that this is done automatically when the array is created.) When
we select someone whose birthday is day number i, we first check whether used[i] is true.
If it is true, then this is the second person with that birthday. We are done. On the other
hand, if used[i] is false, we set used[i] to be true to record the fact that we’ve encountered
someone with that birthday, and we go on to the next person. Here is a program that carries
out the simulated experiment (of course, in the program, there are no simulated people, only
simulated birthdays):
/**
* Simulate choosing people at random and checking the day of the year they
* were born on. If the birthday is the same as one that was seen previously,
* stop, and output the number of people who were checked.
*/
public class BirthdayProblem {
public static void main(String[] args) {
boolean[] used; // For recording the possible birthdays
// that have been seen so far. A value
// of true in used[i] means that a person
// whose birthday is the i-th day of the
// year has been found.
int count; // The number of people who have been checked.
used = new boolean[365]; // Initially, all entries are false.
count = 0;
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while (true) {
// Select a birthday at random, from 0 to 364.
// If the birthday has already been used, quit.
// Otherwise, record the birthday as used.
int birthday; // The selected birthday.
birthday = (int)(Math.random()*365);
count++;
System.out.printf("Person %d has birthday number %d%n", count, birthday);
if ( used[birthday] ) {
// This day was found before; it’s a duplicate. We are done.
break;
}
used[birthday] = true;
} // end while
System.out.println();
System.out.println("A duplicate birthday was found after "
+ count + " tries.");
}
} // end class BirthdayProblem
You should study the program to understand how it works and how it uses the array. Also, try
it out! You will probably find that a duplicate birthday tends to occur sooner than you expect.

3.8.4 Partially Full Arrays

Consider an application where the number of items that we want to store in an array changes
as the program runs. Since the size of the array can’t be changed, a separate counter variable
must be used to keep track of how many spaces in the array are in use. (Of course, every space
in the array has to contain something; the question is, how many spaces contain useful or valid
items?)
Consider, for example, a program that reads positive integers entered by the user and stores
them for later processing. The program stops reading when the user inputs a number that is
less than or equal to zero. The input numbers can be kept in an array, numbers, of type int[ ].
Let’s say that no more than 100 numbers will be input. Then the size of the array can be fixed
at 100. But the program must keep track of how many numbers have actually been read and
stored in the array. For this, it can use an integer variable. Each time a number is stored in
the array, we have to count it; that is, the value of the counter variable must be incremented
by one. One question is, when we add a new item to the array, where do we put it? Well, if
the number of items is count, then they would be stored in the array in positions number 0, 1,
. . . , (count-1). The next open spot would be position number count, so that’s where we should
put the new item.
As a rather silly example, let’s write a program that will read the numbers input by the
user and then print them in the reverse of the order in which they were entered. Assume that
an input value equal to zero marks the end of the data. (This is, at least, a processing task
that requires that the numbers be saved in an array. Note that many types of processing, such
as finding the sum or average or maximum of the numbers, can be done without saving the
individual numbers.)
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 130

import textio.TextIO;
public class ReverseInputNumbers {
public static void main(String[] args) {
int[] numbers; // An array for storing the input values.
int count; // The number of numbers saved in the array.
int num; // One of the numbers input by the user.
int i; // for-loop variable.
numbers = new int[100]; // Space for 100 ints.
count = 0; // No numbers have been saved yet.
System.out.println("Enter up to 100 positive integers; enter 0 to end.");
while (true) { // Get the numbers and put them in the array.
System.out.print("? ");
num = TextIO.getlnInt();
if (num <= 0) {
// Zero marks the end of input; we have all the numbers.
break;
}
numbers[count] = num; // Put num in position count.
count++; // Count the number
}
System.out.println("\nYour numbers in reverse order are:\n");
for ( i = count - 1; i >= 0; i-- ) {
System.out.println( numbers[i] );
}
} // end main();
} // end class ReverseInputNumbers
It is especially important to note how the variable count plays a dual role. It is the number
of items that have been entered into the array. But it is also the index of the next available
spot in the array.
When the time comes to print out the numbers in the array, the last occupied spot in the
array is location count - 1, so the for loop prints out values starting from location count - 1
and going down to 0. This is also a nice example of processing the elements of an array in reverse
order.
∗ ∗ ∗
You might wonder what would happen in this program if the user tries to input more than
100 numbers. The result would be an error that would crash the program. When the user enters
the 101-st number, the program tries to store that number in an array element number[100].
However, there is no such array element. There are only 100 items in the array, and the
index of the last item is 99. The attempt to use number[100] generates an exception of type
ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException. Exceptions of this type are a common source of run-time
errors in programs that use arrays.
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 131

3.8.5 Two-dimensional Arrays

The arrays that we have considered so far are “one-dimensional.” This means that the array
consists of a sequence of elements that can be thought of as being laid out along a line. It
is also possible to have two-dimensional arrays, where the elements can be laid out in a
rectangular grid. We consider them only briefly here, but will return to the topic in Section 7.6.
In a two-dimensional, or “2D,” array, the elements can be arranged in rows and columns.
Here, for example, is a 2D array of int that has five rows and seven columns:

0 1 2 3 4 5 6
0 13 7 33 54 -5 -1 92
1 -3 0 8 42 18 0 67
2 44 78 90 79 -5 72 22
3 43 -6 17 100 1 -12 12
4 2 0 58 58 36 21 87

This 5-by-7 grid contains a total of 35 elements. The rows in a 2D array are numbered 0, 1, 2,
. . . , up to the number of rows minus one. Similarly, the columns are numbered from zero up
to the number of columns minus one. Each individual element in the array can be picked out
by specifying its row number and its column number. (The illustration shown here is not what
the array actually looks like in the computer’s memory, but it does show the logical structure
of the array.)
In Java, the syntax for two-dimensional arrays is similar to the syntax for one-dimensional
arrays, except that an extra index is involved, since picking out an element requires both a row
number and a column number. For example, if A is a 2D array of int, then A[3][2] would be
the element in row 3, column 2. That would pick out the number 17 in the array shown above.
The type for A would be given as int[ ][ ], with two pairs of empty brackets. To declare the array
variable and create the array, you could say,
int[][] A;
A = new int[5][7];
The second line creates a 2D array with 5 rows and 7 columns. Two-dimensional arrays are
often processed using nested for loops. For example, the following code segment will print out
the elements of A in neat columns:
int row, col; // loop-control-variables for accessing rows and columns in A
for ( row = 0; row < 5; row++ ) {
for ( col = 0; col < 7; col++ ) {
System.out.printf( "%7d", A[row][col] );
}
System.out.println();
}
The base type of a 2D array can be anything, so you can have arrays of type double[ ][ ],
String[ ][ ], and so on.
There are some natural uses for 2D arrays. For example, a 2D array can be used to store the
contents of the board in a game such as chess or checkers. And an example in Subsection 4.7.3
uses a 2D array to hold the colors of a grid of colored squares. But sometimes two-dimensional
arrays are used in problems in which the grid is not so visually obvious. Consider a company
that owns 25 stores. Suppose that the company has data about the profit earned at each store
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 132

for each month in the year 2022. If the stores are numbered from 0 to 24, and if the twelve
months from January 2022 through December 2022 are numbered from 0 to 11, then the profit
data could be stored in an array, profit, created as follows:
double[][] profit;
profit = new double[25][12];
profit[3][2] would be the amount of profit earned at store number 3 in March, and more
generally, profit[storeNum][monthNum] would be the amount of profit earned in store number
storeNum in month number monthNum (where the numbering, remember, starts from zero).
Let’s assume that the profit array has already been filled with data. This data can be
processed in a lot of interesting ways. For example, the total profit for the company—for the
whole year from all its stores—can be calculated by adding up all the entries in the array:
double totalProfit; // Company’s total profit in 2022.
int store, month; // variables for looping through the stores and the months
totalProfit = 0;
for ( store = 0; store < 25; store++ ) {
for ( month = 0; month < 12; month++ )
totalProfit += profit[store][month];
}
Sometimes it is necessary to process a single row or a single column of an array, not the
entire array. For example, to compute the total profit earned by the company in December,
that is, in month number 11, you could use the loop:
double decemberProfit;
int storeNum;
decemberProfit = 0.0;
for ( storeNum = 0; storeNum < 25; storeNum++ ) {
decemberProfit += profit[storeNum][11];
}
Two-dimensional arrays are sometimes useful, but they are much less common than one-
dimensional arrays. Java actually allows arrays of even higher dimension, but they are only
rarely encountered in practice.

3.9 Introduction to GUI Programming

For the past two chapters, you’ve been learning the sort of programming that is done
inside a single subroutine, “programming in the small.” In the rest of this book, we’ll be more
concerned with the larger scale structure of programs, but the material that you’ve already
learned will be an important foundation for everything to come. In this section, we see how
techniques that you have learned so far can be applied in the context of graphical user interface
programming. GUI programs here, and in the rest of this book, are written using JavaFX,
a collection of classes that form a “toolkit” for writing GUI programs. All of the classes
mentioned in this section are part of JavaFX, and they must be imported into any program
that uses them. See Subsection 2.6.7 and Subsection 2.6.8 for information about compiling and
running programs that use JavaFX.
When you run a GUI program, it opens one or more windows on your computer screen. As
a programmer, you can have complete control over what appears in the window and how the
user can interact with it. For our first encounter, we look at one simple example: the ability
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 133

of a program to display simple shapes like rectangles and lines in the window, with no user
interaction. For now, the main point is to take a look at how programming-in-the-small can be
used in other contexts besides text-based, command-line-style programs. You will see that a
knowledge of programming-in-the-small applies to writing the guts of any subroutine, not just
main().

3.9.1 Drawing Shapes

To understand computer graphics, you need to know a little about pixels and coordinate
systems. The computer screen is made up of small squares called pixels, arranged in rows
and columns, usually about 100 pixels per inch. (Many screens now have many more physical
pixels per inch. On these “high-resolution” screens, a “pixel” might refer to a physical pixel,
but it might also refer to a “logical pixel,” which is a unit of measure somewhere close to 1/100
inch.)
The computer controls the color of the pixels, and drawing is done by changing the colors
of individual pixels. Each pixel has a pair of integer coordinates, often called x and y, that
specify the pixel’s horizontal and vertical position. When drawing to a rectangular area on
the screen, the coordinates of the pixel in the upper left corner of the rectangle are (0,0). The
x coordinate increases from left to right, and the y coordinate increases from top to bottom.
Shapes are specified using pixels. For example, a rectangle is specified by the x and y coordinates
of its upper left corner and by its width and height measured in pixels. Here’s a picture of a
rectangular drawing area, showing the ranges of x and y coordinates. The “width” and “height”
in this picture give the size of the drawing area, in pixels:
0 width
x
0

Hello World
height

Assuming that the drawing area is 800-by-500 pixels, the rectangle in the upper left of the
picture would have, approximately, width 200, height 150, and upper left corner at coordinates
(50,50).
∗ ∗ ∗
Drawing in Java is done using a graphics context. A graphics context is an object. As an
object, it can include subroutines and data. Among the subroutines in a graphics context are
routines for drawing basic shapes such as lines, rectangles, ovals, and text. (When text appears
on the screen, the characters have to be drawn there by the computer, just like the computer
draws any other shapes.) Among the data in a graphics context are the color and font that
are currently selected for drawing. (A font determines the style and size of characters.) One
other piece of data in a graphics context is the “drawing surface” on which the drawing is done.
Different graphics context objects can draw to different drawing surfaces. For us, the drawing
surface will be the content area of a window, not including its border or title bar.
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 134

There are two ways to draw a shape in JavaFX: You can fill the shape, meaning you can
set the color of each of the pixels inside the shape. Or you can stroke the shape, meaning
that you set the color of the pixels that lie along the border of the shape. Some shapes, such
as a line, can only be stroked. A JavaFX graphics context actually keeps track of two separate
colors, one used for filling shapes and one used for stroking shapes. Stroking a shape is like
dragging a pen along the border of the shape. The properties of that pen (such as its size and
whether it produces a solid line or a dashed line) are properties of the graphics context.
A graphics context is represented by a variable. The type for the variable is GraphicsContext
(just like the type for a string variable is String ). The variable is often named g, but the name
of the variable is of course up to the programmer. Here are a few of the subroutines that are
available in a graphics context g. Note that all numerical parameter values can be of type
double.
• g.setFill(c) is called to set the color to be used for filling shapes. The parameter, c
is an object belonging to a class named Color. There are many constants representing
standard colors that can be used as the parameter in this subroutine. The standard
colors range from common colors such as Color.BLACK, Color.WHITE, Color.RED,
Color.GREEN, Color.BLUE, and Color.YELLOW, to more exotic color names such as
Color.CORNFLOWERBLUE. (Later, we will see that it is also possible to create new colors.)
For example, if you want to fill shapes with red, you would say “g.setFill(Color.RED);”.
The specified color is used for all subsequent fill operations up until the next time
g.setFill() is called. Note that previously drawn shapes are not affected!
• g.setStroke(c) is called to set the color to be used for stroking shapes. It works similarly
to g.setFill.
• g.setLineWidth(w) sets the size of the pen that will be used for subsequent stroke
operations, where w is measured in pixels.
• g.strokeLine(x1,y1,x2,y2) draws a line from the point with coordinates (x1,y1) to
the point with coordinates (x2,y2). The width of the line is 1, unless a different line
width has been set by calling g.setLineWidth(), and the color is black unless a different
color has been set by calling g.setStroke().
• g.strokeRect(x,y,w,h) draws the outline of a rectangle with vertical and horizontal
sides. This subroutine draws the outline of the rectangle whose top-left corner is x pixels
from the left edge of the drawing area and y pixels down from the top. The horizontal
width of the rectangle is w pixels, and the vertical height is h pixels. Color and line width
are set by calling g.setStroke() and g.setLineWidth().
• g.fillRect(x,y,w,h) is similar to g.strokeRect() except that it fills in the inside of
the rectangle instead of drawing an outline, and it uses the color set by g.setFill().
• g.strokeOval(x,y,w,h) draws the outline of an oval. The oval just fits inside the
rectangle that would be drawn by g.strokeRect(x,y,w,h). To get a circle, use the
same values for w and for h.
• g.fillOval(x,y,w,h) is similar to g.strokeOval() except that it fills in the inside of
the oval instead of drawing an outline.
This is enough information to draw some pictures using Java graphics. To start with
something simple, let’s say that we want to draw a set of ten parallel lines, something like this:
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 135

Let’s say that the lines are 200 pixels long and that the distance from each line to the next
is 10 pixels, and let’s put the start of the first line at the pixel with coordinates (100,50). To
draw one line, we just have to call g.strokeLine(x1,y1,x2,y2) with appropriate values for
the parameters. Now, all the lines start at x -coordinate 100, so we can use the constant 100 as
the value for x1. Since the lines are 200 pixels long, we can use the constant 300 as the value
for x2. The y-coordinates of the lines are different, but we can see that both endpoints of a
line have the same y-coordinates, so we can use a single variable as the value for y1 and for
y2. Using y as the name of that variable, the command for drawing one of the lines becomes
g.strokeLine(100,y,300,y). The value of y is 50 for the top line and increases by 10 each
time we move down from one line to the next. We just need to make sure that y takes on the
correct sequence of values. We can use a for loop that counts from 1 to 10:
int y; // y-coordinate for the line
int i; // loop control variable
y = 50; // y starts at 50 for the first line
for ( i = 1; i <= 10; i++ ) {
g.strokeLine( 100, y, 300, y );
y = y + 10; // increase y by 10 before drawing the next line.
}
Alternatively, we could use y itself as the loop control variable, noting that the value of y for
the last line is 140:
int y;
for ( y = 50; y <= 140; y = y + 10 )
g.strokeLine( 100, y, 300, y );
If we wanted the lines to be blue, we could do that by calling g.setStroke(Color.BLUE)
before drawing them. If we just draw the lines without setting the color, they will be black.
If we wanted the lines to be 3 pixels wide, we could call g.setLineWidth(3) before drawing
the lines.
For something a little more complicated, let’s draw a large number of randomly colored,
randomly positioned, filled circles. Since we only know a few colors, I will randomly select the
color to be red, green, blue, or yellow. That can be done with a simple switch statement, similar
to the ones in Section 3.6:
switch ( (int)(4*Math.random()) ) {
case 0 -> g.setFill( Color.RED );
case 1 -> g.setFill( Color.GREEN );
case 2 -> g.setFill( Color.BLUE );
case 3 -> g.setFill( Color.YELLOW );
}
I will choose the center points of the circles at random. Let’s say that the width of the
drawing area is given by a variable, width. Then we want a random value in the range 0 to
width-1 for the horizontal position of the center. Similarly, the vertical position of the center
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 136

will be a random value in the range 0 to height-1. That leaves the size of the circle to be
determined; I will make the radius of each circle equal to 50 pixels. We can draw the circle with
a statement of the form g.fillOval(x,y,w,h). However, in this command, x and y are not
the coordinates of the center of the circle; they are the upper left corner of a rectangle drawn
around the circle. To get values for x and y, we have to move back from the center of the circle
by 50 pixels, an amount equal to the radius of the circle. The parameters w and h give the
width and height of the rectangle, which have to be twice the radius, or 100 pixels in this case.
Taking all this into account, here is a code segment for drawing a random circle:
centerX = (int)(width*Math.random());
centerY = (int)(height*Math.random());
g.fillOval( centerX - 50, centerY - 50, 100, 100 );
This code comes after the color-setting code given above. In the end, I found that the picture
looks better if I also draw a black outline around each filled circle, so I added this code at the
end:
g.setStroke( Color.BLACK );
g.strokeOval( centerX - 50, centerY - 50, 100, 100 );
Finally, to get a large number of circles, I put all of the above code into a for loop that runs
for 500 executions. Here’s a typical drawing from the program, shown at reduced size:

3.9.2 Drawing in a Program

Now, as you know, you can’t just have a bunch of Java code standing by itself. The code
has to be inside a subroutine definition that is itself inside a class definition. In fact, for my
circle-drawing program, the complete subroutine for drawing the picture looks like this:
public void drawPicture(GraphicsContext g, int width, int height) {
g.setFill(Color.WHITE);
g.fillRect(0, 0, width, height); // First, fill with a background color.
// As an example, draw a large number of colored disks.
// To get a different picture, erase this code, and substitute your own.
int centerX; // The x-coord of the center of a disk.
int centerY; // The y-coord of the center of a disk.
int colorChoice; // Used to select a random color.
int count; // Loop control variable for counting disks
for (count = 0; count < 500; count++) {
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 137

centerX = (int)(width*Math.random());
centerY = (int)(height*Math.random());
colorChoice = (int)(4*Math.random());
switch (colorChoice) {
case 0 -> g.setFill( Color.RED );
case 1 -> g.setFill( Color.GREEN );
case 2 -> g.setFill( Color.BLUE );
case 3 -> g.setFill( Color.YELLOW );
}
g.fillOval( centerX - 50, centerY - 50, 100, 100 );
g.setStroke(Color.BLACK);
g.strokeOval( centerX - 50, centerY - 50, 100, 100 );
}
} // end drawPicture()

This is the first subroutine definition that you have seen, other than main(), but you will
learn all about defining subroutines in the next chapter. The first line of the definition makes
available certain values that are used in the subroutine: the graphics context g and the width
and height of the drawing area. These values come from outside the subroutine, but the
subroutine can use them. The point here is that to draw something, you just have to fill in the
inside of the subroutine, just as you write a program by filling in the inside of main().
The subroutine definition still has to go inside a class that defines the program. In this case,
the class is named SimpleGraphicsStarter, and the complete program is available in the sample
source code file SimpleGraphicsStarter.java. You can run that program to see the drawing. You
can use this sample program as a starting point for drawing your own pictures.
There’s a lot in the program that you won’t understand. To make your own drawing, all you
have to do is erase the inside of the drawPicture() routine in the source code and substitute
your own drawing code. You don’t need to understand the rest.
(By the way, you might notice that the main() subroutine uses the word static in its
definition, but drawPicture() does not. This has to do with the fact that drawPicture is a
subroutine in an object rather than in a class. The difference between static and non-static
subroutines is important but not something that we need to worry about for the time being. It
will become important for us in Chapter 5.)

3.9.3 Animation
We can extend the idea of drawing pictures to making animations. A computer animation is
simply a sequence of individual pictures, displayed quickly one after the other. If the change
from each picture to the next is small, the user will perceive the sequence of images as a
continuous animation. Each picture in the animation is called a frame. The sample program
SimpleAnimationStarter.java can be used as a starting point for writing animations. It contains
a subroutine named drawFrame() that draws one frame in an animation. You can create an
animation by filling in the definition of this subroutine. In addition to the graphics context
and the width and height of the drawing area, you can use the value of two other variables in
your code: frameNumber and elapsedSeconds. The drawFrame subroutine will automatically
be called about 60 times per second. The variable frameNumber takes on the values 0, 1, 2,
3, . . . in successive calls to the subroutine, and the value of elapsedSeconds is the number of
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 138

seconds that the animation has been running. By using either of these variables in your code,
you can draw a different picture each time drawFrame() is called, and the user will see the
series of pictures as an animation.
As an example of animation, we look at drawing a set of nested rectangles. The rectangles
will shrink towards the center of the drawing, giving an illusion of infinite motion. One frame
from the animation looks like this:

Consider how to draw a picture like this one. The rectangles can be drawn with a while
loop, which draws the rectangles starting from the one on the outside and moving in. Think
about what variables will be needed and how they change from one iteration of the while loop to
the next. Each time through the loop, the rectangle that is drawn is smaller than the previous
one and is moved down and over a bit. The difference between two rectangles is in their sizes
and in the coordinates of their upper left corners. We need variables to represent the width
and height of the rectangle, which I call rectWidth and rectHeight. The x and y-coordinates
of the upper left corner are the same, and they can be represented by the same variable. I call
that variable inset, since it is the amount by which the edges of the rectangle are inset from
the edges of the drawing area. The width and height decrease from one rectangle to the next,
while the inset increases. The while loop ends when either the width or the height becomes
less than or equal to zero. In general outline, the algorithm for drawing the rectangles in one
frame is
Set the amount of inset for the first rectangle
Set the width and height for the first rectangle
Set the stroke color to black
while the width and height are both greater than zero:
draw a rectangle (using the g.strokeRect subroutine)
increase the inset (to move the next rectangle over and down)
decrease the width and height (to make the next rectangle smaller)
In my program, each rectangle is 15 pixels away from the rectangle that surrounds it, so the
inset is increased by 15 each time through the while loop. The rectangle shrinks by 15 pixels
on the left and by 15 pixels on the right, so the width of the rectangle shrinks by 30 before
drawing the next rectangle. The height also shrinks by 30 pixels each time through the loop.
The pseudocode is then easy to translate into Java, except that we need to know what
initial values to use for the inset, width, and height of the first rectangle. To figure that out,
we have to think about the fact that the picture is animated, so that what we draw will depend
in some way on the frame number. From one frame to the next frame of the animation, the
CHAPTER 3. CONTROL 139

top-left corner of the outer rectangle moves over and down; that is, the inset for the outer
rectangle increases from one frame to the next. We can make this happen by setting the inset
for frame number 0 to 0, the inset for frame number 1 to 1, and so on. But that can’t go on
forever, or eventually all the rectangles would disappear. In fact, when the animation gets to
frame 15, a new rectangle should appear at the outside of the drawing area—but it’s not really
a “new rectangle,” it’s just that the inset for the outer rectangle goes back to zero. So, as the
animation proceeds, the inset should go through the sequence of values 0, 1, 2, . . . , 14 over and
over. We can accomplish that very easily by setting
inset = frameNumber % 15;
Finally, note that the first rectangle that is drawn in a frame fills the drawing area except for
a border of size inset around the outside of the rectangle. This means that the width of the
first rectangle is the width of the drawing area minus two times the inset, and similarly for the
height. Here, then is the drawFrame() subroutine for the moving rectangle example:
public void drawFrame(GraphicsContext g, int frameNumber,
double elapsedSeconds, int width, int height) {
g.setFill(Color.WHITE);
g.fillRect(0,0,width,height); // Fill drawing area with white.
double inset; // Gap between edges of drawing area and outer rectangle.
double rectWidth, rectHeight; // The size of one of the rectangles.
g.setStroke(Color.BLACK); // Draw the rectangle outlines in black.
inset = frameNumber % 15 + 0.5; // (The 0.5 is a technicality that gives
// a sharper picture.)
rectWidth = width - 2*inset;
rectHeight = height - 2*inset;
while (rectWidth >= 0 && rectHeight >= 0) {
g.strokeRect(inset, inset, rectWidth, rectHeight);
inset += 15; // rectangles are 15 pixels apart
rectWidth -= 30;
rectHeight -= 30;
}
}
You can find the full source code for the program is in the sample program MovingRects.java.
Take a look! It’s a neat effect. For another example of animation, see the sample program
RandomCircles.java. That program adds one random colored disk to the picture in each frame;
it illustrates the fact that the image from one frame is not automatically erased before the next
frame is drawn.
Exercises 140

Exercises for Chapter 3

1. How many times do you have to roll a pair of dice before they come up snake eyes? You (solution)
could do the experiment by rolling the dice by hand. Write a computer program that
simulates the experiment. The program should report the number of rolls that it makes
before the dice come up snake eyes. (Note: “Snake eyes” means that both dice show a
value of 1.) Exercise 2.2 explained how to simulate rolling a pair of dice.

2. Which integer between 1 and 10000 has the largest number of divisors, and how many (solution)
divisors does it have? Write a program to find the answers and print out the results. It is
possible that several integers in this range have the same, maximum number of divisors.
Your program only has to print out one of them. An example in Subsection 3.4.2 discussed
divisors. The source code for that example is CountDivisors.java.
You might need some hints about how to find a maximum value. The basic idea is
to go through all the integers, keeping track of the largest number of divisors that you’ve
seen so far. Also, keep track of the integer that had that number of divisors.

3. Write a program that will evaluate simple expressions such as 17 + 3 and 3.14159 * 4.7. (solution)
The expressions are to be typed in by the user. The input always consists of a number,
followed by an operator, followed by another number. The operators that are allowed are
+, -, *, and /. You can read the numbers with TextIO.getDouble() and the operator
with TextIO.getChar(). Your program should read an expression, print its value, read
another expression, print its value, and so on. The program should end when the user
enters 0 as the first number on the line.

4. Write a program that reads one line of input text and breaks it up into words. The (solution)
words should be output one per line. A word is defined to be a sequence of letters. Any
characters in the input that are not letters should be discarded. For example, if the user
inputs the line
He said, "That’s not a good idea."
then the output of the program should be
He
said
That
s
not
a
good
idea
An improved version of the program would list “that’s” as a single word. An apostrophe
can be considered to be part of a word if there is a letter on each side of the apostrophe.
To test whether a character is a letter, you might use (ch >= ’a’ && ch <= ’z’) ||
(ch >= ’A’ && ch <= ’Z’). However, this only works in English and similar languages.
A better choice is to call the standard function Character.isLetter(ch), which returns
a boolean value of true if ch is a letter and false if it is not. This works for any Unicode
character.
Exercises 141

5. Suppose that a file contains information about sales figures for a company in various cities. (solution)
Each line of the file contains a city name, followed by a colon (:) followed by the data for
that city. The data is a number of type double. However, for some cities, no data was
available. In these lines, the data is replaced by a comment explaining why the data is
missing. For example, several lines from the file might look like:
San Francisco: 19887.32
Chicago: no report received
New York: 298734.12
Write a program that will compute and print the total sales from all the cities together.
The program should also report the number of cities for which data was not available.
The name of the file is “sales.dat”.
To complete this program, you’ll need one fact about file input with TextIO that was
not covered in Subsection 2.4.4. Since you don’t know in advance how many lines there
are in the file, you need a way to tell when you have gotten to the end of the file. When
TextIO is reading from a file, the function TextIO.eof() can be used to test for end of
file. This boolean-valued function returns true if the file has been entirely read and
returns false if there is more data to read in the file. This means that you can read the
lines of the file in a loop while (TextIO.eof() == false).... The loop will end when
all the lines of the file have been read.
Suggestion: For each line, read and ignore characters up to the colon. Then read the
rest of the line into a variable of type String. Try to convert the string into a number, and
use try..catch to test whether the conversion succeeds.

6. Exercise 3.2 asked you to find the number in the range 1 to 10000 that has the largest (solution)
number of divisors. You only had to print out one such number. Revise the program so
that it will print out all numbers that have the maximum number of divisors. Use an array
as follows: As you count the divisors for each number, store each count in an array. Then
at the end of the program, you can go through the array and print out all the numbers
that have the maximum count. The output from the program should look something like
this:
Among integers between 1 and 10000,
The maximum number of divisors was 64
Numbers with that many divisors include:
7560
9240

7. An example in Subsection 3.8.3 tried to answer the question, How many random people do (solution)
you have to select before you find a duplicate birthday? The source code for that program
can be found in the file BirthdayProblem.java. Here are some related questions:
• How many random people do you have to select before you find three people who
share the same birthday? (That is, all three people were born on the same day in
the same month, but not necessarily in the same year.)
• Suppose you choose 365 people at random. How many different birthdays will they
have? (The number could theoretically be anywhere from 1 to 365).
• How many different people do you have to check before you’ve found at least one
person with a birthday on each of the 365 days of the year?
Exercises 142

Write three programs to answer these questions. Each of your programs should
simulate choosing people at random and checking their birthdays. (In each case, ignore
the possibility of leap years.)

8. Write a GUI program that draws a checkerboard. Base your solution on the sample pro- (solution)
gram SimpleGraphicsStarter.java You will draw the checkerboard in the drawPicture()
subroutine, after erasing the code that it already contains.
The checkerboard should be 400-by-400 pixels. You can change the size of the drawing
area in SimpleGraphicsStarter.java by modifying the first two lines of the start()
subroutine to set width and height to 400 instead of 800 and 600. A checkerboard
contains 8 rows and 8 columns of squares. If the size of the drawing area is 400, that
means that each square should be 50-by-50 pixels. The squares are red and black (or
whatever other colors you choose). Here is a tricky way to determine whether a given
square should be red or black: The rows and columns can be thought of as numbered from
0 to 7. If the row number of the square and the column number of the square are either
both even or both odd, then the square is red. Otherwise, it is black. Note that a square
is just a rectangle in which the height is equal to the width, so you can use the subroutine
g.fillRect() to draw the squares. Here is a reduced-size image of the checkerboard that
you want to draw:

9. Often, some element of an animation repeats over and over, every so many frames. (solution)
Sometimes, the repetition is “cyclic,” meaning that at the end it jumps back to the start.
Sometimes the repetition is “oscillating,” like a back-and-forth motion where the second
half is the same as the first half played in reverse.
Write an animation that demonstrates both cyclic and oscillating motions at various
speeds. For cyclic motion, you can use a square that moves across the drawing area, then
jumps back to the start, and then repeats the same motion over and over. For oscillating
motion, you can do something similar, but the square should move back and forth between
the two edges of the drawing area; that is, it moves left-to-right during the first half of
the animation and then backwards from right-to-left during the second half. To write the
program, you can start with a copy of the sample program SimpleAnimationStarter.java.
A cyclic motion has to repeat every N frames for some value of N. What you draw in
some frame of the animation depends on the frameNumber. The frameNumber just keeps
increasing forever. To implement cyclic motion, what you really want is a “cyclic frame
Exercises 143

number” that takes on the values 0, 1, 2, . . . , (N-1), 0, 1, 2, . . . , (N-1), 0, 1, 2, . . . . You

can derive the value that you need from frameNumber simply by saying
cyclicFrameNumber = frameNumber % N;
Then, you just have to base what you draw on cyclicFrameNumber instead of on
frameNumber. Similarly, for an oscillating animation, you need an “oscillation frame
number” that takes on the values 0, 1, 2, . . . (N-1), N, (N-1), (N-2), . . . 2, 1, 0, 1, 2, and
so on, repeating the back and forth motion forever. You can compute the value that you
need with
oscilationFrameNumber = frameNumber % (2*N);
if (oscillationFrameNumber > N)
oscillationFrameNumber = (2*N) - oscillationFrameNumber;
Here is a screen shot from my version of the program. I use six squares. The top three
do cyclic motion at various speeds, while the bottom three do oscillating motion. I drew
black lines across the drawing area to separate the squares and to give them “channels”
to move in.
Quiz 144

Quiz on Chapter 3
(answers)

1. What is an algorithm?

2. Explain briefly what is meant by “pseudocode” and how is it useful in the development
of algorithms.

3. What is a block statement? How are block statements used in Java programs?

4. What is the main difference between a while loop and a do..while loop?

5. What does it mean to prime a loop?

6. Explain what is meant by an animation and how a computer displays an animation.

7. Write a for loop that will print out all the multiples of 3 from 3 to 36, that is: 3 6 9 12
15 18 21 24 27 30 33 36.

8. Fill in the following main() routine so that it will ask the user to enter an integer, read
the user’s response, and tell the user whether the number entered is even or odd. (You can
use TextIO.getInt() to read the integer. Recall that an integer n is even if n % 2 == 0.)
public static void main(String[] args) {
// Fill in the body of this subroutine!
}

9. Write a code segment that will print out two different random integers selected from the
range 1 to 10. All possible outputs should have the same probability. Hint: You can easily
select two random numbers, but you have to account for the fact that the two numbers
that you pick might be the same.

10. Suppose that s1 and s2 are variables of type String, whose values are expected to be
string representations of values of type int. Write a code segment that will compute and
print the integer sum of those values, or will print an error message if the values cannot
successfully be converted into integers. (Use a try..catch statement.)

11. Show the exact output that would be produced by the following main() routine:
public static void main(String[] args) {
int N;
N = 1;
while (N <= 32) {
N = 2 * N;
System.out.println(N);
}
}

12. Show the exact output produced by the following main() routine:
Quiz 145

public static void main(String[] args) {

int x,y;
x = 5;
y = 1;
while (x > 0) {
x = x - 1;
y = y * x;
System.out.println(y);
}
}

13. What output is produced by the following program segment? Why? (Recall that
name.charAt(i) is the i-th character in the string, name.)
String name;
int i;
boolean startWord;
name = "Richard M. Nixon";
startWord = true;
for (i = 0; i < name.length(); i++) {
if (startWord)
System.out.println(name.charAt(i));
if (name.charAt(i) == ’ ’)
startWord = true;
else
startWord = false;
}

14. Suppose that numbers is an array of type int[ ]. Write a code segment that will count and
output the number of times that the number 42 occurs in the array.

15. Define the range of an array of numbers to be the maximum value in the array minus
the minimum value. Suppose that raceTimes is an array of type double[ ]. Write a code
segment that will find and print the range of raceTimes.
Chapter 4

Programming in the Large I:

Subroutines

One way to break up a complex program into manageable pieces is to use subroutines.
A subroutine consists of the instructions for carrying out a certain task, grouped together and
given a name. Elsewhere in the program, that name can be used as a stand-in for the whole set
of instructions. As a computer executes a program, whenever it encounters a subroutine name,
it executes all the instructions necessary to carry out the task associated with that subroutine.
Subroutines can be used over and over, at different places in the program. A subroutine
can even be used inside another subroutine. This allows you to write simple subroutines and
then use them to help write more complex subroutines, which can then be used in turn in other
subroutines. In this way, very complex programs can be built up step-by-step, where each step
in the construction is reasonably simple.
Subroutines in Java can be either static or non-static. This chapter covers static subroutines.
Non-static subroutines, which are used in true object-oriented programming, will be covered in
the next chapter.

4.1 Black Boxes and Procedural Abstraction

A subroutine consists of instructions for performing some task, chunked together and
given a name. “Chunking” allows you to deal with a potentially very complicated task as
a single concept. Instead of worrying about the many, many steps that the computer might
have to go though to perform that task, you just need to remember the name of the subroutine.
Whenever you want your program to perform the task, you just call the subroutine. Subroutines
are a major tool for dealing with complexity.
A subroutine is sometimes said to be a “black box” because you can’t see what’s “inside”
it (or, to be more precise, you usually don’t want to see inside it, because then you would
have to deal with all the complexity that the subroutine is meant to hide). Of course, a black
box that has no way of interacting with the rest of the world would be pretty useless. A black
box needs some kind of interface with the rest of the world, which allows some interaction
between what’s inside the box and what’s outside. A physical black box might have buttons
on the outside that you can push, dials that you can set, and slots that can be used for passing
information back and forth. Since we are trying to hide complexity, not create it, we have the
first rule of black boxes:

147
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 148

The interface of a black box should be fairly straight-

forward, well-defined, and easy to understand.
Are there any examples of black boxes in the real world? Yes; in fact, you are surrounded
by them. Your television, your car, your mobile phone, your refrigerator. . . . You can turn
your television on and off, change channels, and set the volume by using elements of the
television’s interface—on/off switch, remote control, don’t forget to plug in the power—without
understanding anything about how the thing actually works. The same goes for a mobile phone,
although the interface in that case is a lot more complicated.
Now, a black box does have an inside—the code in a subroutine that actually performs the
task, or all the electronics inside your television set. The inside of a black box is called its
implementation. The second rule of black boxes is that:
To use a black box, you shouldn’t need to know
anything about its implementation; all you need to know
is its interface.
In fact, it should be possible to change the implementation, as long as the behavior of the
box, as seen from the outside, remains unchanged. For example, when the insides of TV sets
went from using vacuum tubes to using transistors, the users of the sets didn’t need to know
about it—or even know what it means. Similarly, it should be possible to rewrite the inside of
a subroutine, to use more efficient code for example, without affecting the programs that use
that subroutine.
Of course, to have a black box, someone must have designed and built the implementation
in the first place. The black box idea works to the advantage of the implementor as well as
the user of the black box. After all, the black box might be used in an unlimited number of
different situations. The implementor of the black box doesn’t need to know about any of that.
The implementor just needs to make sure that the box performs its assigned task and interfaces
correctly with the rest of the world. This is the third rule of black boxes:
The implementor of a black box should not need to
know anything about the larger systems in which the box
will be used.
In a way, a black box divides the world into two parts: the inside (implementation) and the
outside. The interface is at the boundary, connecting those two parts.
∗ ∗ ∗
By the way, you should not think of an interface as just the physical connection between
the box and the rest of the world. The interface also includes a specification of what the
box does and how it can be controlled by using the elements of the physical interface. It’s not
enough to say that a TV set has a power switch; you need to specify that the power switch is
used to turn the TV on and off!
To put this in computer science terms, the interface of a subroutine has a semantic as well
as a syntactic component. The syntactic part of the interface tells you just what you have
to type in order to call the subroutine. The semantic component specifies exactly what task
the subroutine will accomplish. To write a legal program, you need to know the syntactic
specification of the subroutine. To understand the purpose of the subroutine and to use it
effectively, you need to know the subroutine’s semantic specification. I will refer to both parts
of the interface—syntactic and semantic—collectively as the contract of the subroutine.
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 149

The contract of a subroutine says, essentially, “Here is what you have to do to use me,
and here is what I will do for you, guaranteed.” When you write a subroutine, the comments
that you write for the subroutine should make the contract very clear. (I should admit that
in practice, subroutines’ contracts are often inadequately specified, much to the regret and
annoyance of the programmers who have to use them.)
For the rest of this chapter, I turn from general ideas about black boxes and subroutines
in general to the specifics of writing and using subroutines in Java. But keep the general ideas
and principles in mind. They are the reasons that subroutines exist in the first place, and they
are your guidelines for using them. This should be especially clear in Section 4.7, where I will
discuss subroutines as a tool in program development.
You should keep in mind that subroutines are not the only example of black boxes in
programming. For example, a class is also a black box. We’ll see that a class can have a
“public” part, representing its interface, and a “private” part that is entirely inside its hidden
implementation. All the principles of black boxes apply to classes as well as to subroutines.
∗ ∗ ∗
Subsection 3.1.4 introduced the idea of “control abstraction” to express the fact that a Java
control structure lets the user work on a higher level than machine language, hiding the details
of the process in the CPU that implements the control structure.
In a similar way, we say that a subroutine is a procedural abstraction. The interface of
a subroutine is an abstraction that you can use to carry out some procedure without worrying
about the details of how the procedure is actually implemented. This is just another, fancier
way of saying that the subroutine can be used as a black box, but it brings us back to abstraction
as a central concept in computer science.
An important aspect of abstraction in general is information hiding . An abstraction hides
information about what is behind the abstraction, in its implementation. Information hiding by
control abstractions is what makes it possible to use the same Java control structures on different
types of CPU, with different underlying machine language implementations. Information hiding
by procedural abstractions is what makes it possible for the inside of a subroutine to be changed
without affecting the programs in which the subroutine is used. Again, this is just another term
for the black box principle.

4.2 Static Subroutines and Static Variables

Every subroutine in Java must be defined inside some class. This makes Java rather
unusual among programming languages, since most languages allow free-floating, independent
subroutines. One purpose of a class is to group together related subroutines and variables.
Perhaps the designers of Java felt that everything must be related to something. As a less
philosophical motivation, Java’s designers wanted to place firm controls on the ways things are
named, since a Java program potentially has access to a huge number of subroutines created by
many different programmers. The fact that those subroutines are grouped into named classes
(and classes are grouped into named “packages,” as we will see later) helps control the confusion
that might result from so many different names.
There is a basic distinction in Java between static and non-static subroutines. A class
definition can contain the source code for both types of subroutine, but what’s done with them
when the program runs is very different. Static subroutines are easier to understand: In a
running program, a static subroutine is a member of the class itself. Non-static subroutine
definitions, on the other hand, are only there to be used when objects are created, and the
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 150

subroutines themselves become members of the objects. Non-static subroutines only become
relevant when you are working with objects. The distinction between static and non-static also
applies to variables and to other things that can occur in class definitions. This chapter will
deal with static subroutines and static variables almost exclusively. We’ll turn to non-static
stuff and to object-oriented programming in the next chapter.
A subroutine that is in a class or object is often called a method , and “method” is the
term that most people prefer for subroutines in Java. I will start using the term “method”
occasionally, but I will continue to prefer the more general term “subroutine” in this chapter,
at least for static subroutines. However, you should start thinking of the terms “method”
and “subroutine” as being essentially synonymous as far as Java is concerned. Other terms
that you might see used to refer to subroutines are “procedures” and “functions.” (I generally
use the term “function” only for subroutines that compute and return a value, but in some
programming languages, it is used to refer to subroutines in general.)

4.2.1 Subroutine Definitions

A subroutine must be defined somewhere. The definition has to include the name of the
subroutine, enough information to make it possible to call the subroutine, and the code that
will be executed each time the subroutine is called. A subroutine definition in Java takes the
form:
hmodifiers i hreturn-type i hsubroutine-name i ( hparameter-list i ) {
hstatements i
}
It will take us a while—most of the chapter—to get through what all this means in detail. Of
course, you’ve already seen examples of subroutines in previous chapters, such as the main()
routine of a program and the drawFrame() routine of the animation programs in Section 3.9.
So you are familiar with the general format.
The hstatementsi between the braces, { and }, in a subroutine definition make up the body
of the subroutine. These statements are the inside, or implementation part, of the “black box,”
as discussed in the previous section. They are the instructions that the computer executes when
the method is called. Subroutines can contain any of the statements discussed in Chapter 2
and Chapter 3.
The hmodifiersi that can occur at the beginning of a subroutine definition are words that
set certain characteristics of the subroutine, such as whether it is static or not. The modifiers
that you’ve seen so far are “static” and “public”. There are only about a half-dozen possible
modifiers altogether.
If the subroutine is a function, whose job is to compute some value, then the hreturn-typei
is used to specify the type of value that is returned by the function. It can be a type name such
as String or int or even an array type such as double[ ]. We’ll be looking at functions and return
types in some detail in Section 4.4. If the subroutine is not a function, then the hreturn-typei is
replaced by the special value void, which indicates that no value is returned. The term “void”
is meant to indicate that the return value is empty or non-existent.
Finally, we come to the hparameter-listi of the method. Parameters are part of the interface
of a subroutine. They represent information that is passed into the subroutine from outside,
to be used by the subroutine’s internal computations. For a concrete example, imagine a class
named Television that includes a method named changeChannel(). The immediate question
is: What channel should it change to? A parameter can be used to answer this question. If a
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 151

channel number is an integer, the type of the parameter would be int, and the declaration of
the changeChannel() method might look like
public void changeChannel(int channelNum) { ... }
This declaration specifies that changeChannel() has a parameter named channelNum of type
int. However, channelNum does not yet have any particular value. A value for channelNum is
provided when the subroutine is called; for example: changeChannel(17);
The parameter list in a subroutine can be empty, or it can consist of one or more parameter
declarations of the form htypei hparameter-namei. If there are several declarations, they are
separated by commas. Note that each declaration can name only one parameter. For example,
if you want two parameters of type double, you have to say “double x, double y”, rather
than “double x, y”.
Parameters are covered in more detail in the next section.
Here are a few examples of subroutine definitions, leaving out the statements that define
what the subroutines do:
public static void playGame() {
// "public" and "static" are modifiers; "void" is the
// return-type; "playGame" is the subroutine-name;
// the parameter-list is empty.
. . . // Statements that define what playGame does go here.
}
int getNextN(int N) {
// There are no modifiers; "int" is the return-type;
// "getNextN" is the subroutine-name; the parameter-list
// includes one parameter whose name is "N" and whose
// type is "int".
. . . // Statements that define what getNextN does go here.
}
static boolean lessThan(double x, double y) {
// "static" is a modifier; "boolean" is the
// return-type; "lessThan" is the subroutine-name;
// the parameter-list includes two parameters whose names are
// "x" and "y", and the type of each of these parameters
// is "double".
. . . // Statements that define what lessThan does go here.
}
In the second example given here, getNextN is a non-static method, since its definition does
not include the modifier “static”—and so it’s not an example that we should be looking at in
this chapter! The other modifier shown in the examples is “public”. This modifier indicates
that the method can be called from anywhere in a program, even from outside the class where
the method is defined. There is another modifier, “private”, which indicates that the method
can be called only from inside the same class. The modifiers public and private are called
access specifiers. If no access specifier is given for a method, then by default, that method
can be called from anywhere in the package that contains the class, but not from outside that
package. (You will learn more about packages later in this chapter, in Section 4.6.) There
is one other access modifier, protected, which will only become relevant when we turn to
object-oriented programming in Chapter 5.
Note, by the way, that the main() routine of a program follows the usual syntax rules for
a subroutine. In
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 152

public static void main(String[] args) { ... }

the modifiers are public and static, the return type is void, the subroutine name is main,
and the parameter list is “String[] args”. In this case, the type for the parameter is the
array type String[ ].
You’ve already had some experience with filling in the implementation of a subroutine. In
this chapter, you’ll learn all about writing your own complete subroutine definitions, including
the interface part.

4.2.2 Calling Subroutines

When you define a subroutine, all you are doing is telling the computer that the subroutine
exists and what it does. The subroutine doesn’t actually get executed until it is called. (This
is true even for the main() routine in a class—even though you don’t call it, it is called by the
system when the system runs your program.) For example, the playGame() method given as
an example above could be called using the following subroutine call statement:
playGame();
This statement could occur anywhere in the same class that includes the definition of
playGame(), whether in a main() method or in some other subroutine. Since playGame()
is a public method, it can also be called from other classes, but in that case, you have to tell
the computer which class it comes from. Since playGame() is a static method, its full name
includes the name of the class in which it is defined. Let’s say, for example, that playGame() is
defined in a class named Poker. Then to call playGame() from outside the Poker class, you
would have to say
Poker.playGame();
The use of the class name here tells the computer which class to look in to find the method. It
also lets you distinguish between Poker.playGame() and other potential playGame() methods
defined in other classes, such as Roulette.playGame() or Blackjack.playGame().
More generally, a subroutine call statement for a static subroutine takes the form
hsubroutine-name i(hparameters i);
if the subroutine that is being called is in the same class, or
hclass-name i.hsubroutine-name i(hparameters i);
if the subroutine is defined elsewhere, in a different class. (Non-static methods belong to objects
rather than classes, and they are called using objects instead of class names. More on that later.)
Note that the parameter list can be empty, as in the playGame() example, but the parentheses
must be there even if there is nothing between them. The number of parameters that you
provide when you call a subroutine must match the number specified in the parameter list in
the subroutine definition, and the types of the parameters in the call statement must match
the types in the subroutine definition.

4.2.3 Subroutines in Programs

It’s time to give an example of what a complete program looks like, when it includes other
subroutines in addition to the main() routine. Let’s write a program that plays a guessing
game with the user. The computer will choose a random number between 1 and 100, and the
user will try to guess it. The computer tells the user whether the guess is high or low or correct.
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 153

If the user gets the number after six guesses or fewer, the user wins the game. After each game,
the user has the option of continuing with another game.
Since playing one game can be thought of as a single, coherent task, it makes sense to write
a subroutine that will play one guessing game with the user. The main() routine will use a
loop to call the playGame() subroutine over and over, as many times as the user wants to play.
We approach the problem of designing the playGame() subroutine the same way we write a
main() routine: Start with an outline of the algorithm and apply stepwise refinement. Here is
a short pseudocode algorithm for a guessing game routine:
Pick a random number
while the game is not over:
Get the user’s guess
Tell the user whether the guess is high, low, or correct.
The test for whether the game is over is complicated, since the game ends if either the user
makes a correct guess or the number of guesses is six. As in many cases, the easiest thing to
do is to use a “while (true)” loop and use break to end the loop whenever we find a reason
to do so. Also, if we are going to end the game after six guesses, we’ll have to keep track of the
number of guesses that the user has made. Filling out the algorithm gives:
Let computersNumber be a random number between 1 and 100
Let guessCount = 0
while (true):
Get the user’s guess
Count the guess by adding 1 to guess count
if the user’s guess equals computersNumber:
Tell the user he won
break out of the loop
if the number of guesses is 6:
Tell the user he lost
break out of the loop
if the user’s guess is less than computersNumber:
Tell the user the guess was low
else if the user’s guess is higher than computersNumber:
Tell the user the guess was high
With variable declarations added and translated into Java, this becomes the definition of the
playGame() routine. A random integer between 1 and 100 can be computed as (int)(100 *
Math.random()) + 1. I’ve cleaned up the interaction with the user to make it flow better.
static void playGame() {
int computersNumber; // A random number picked by the computer.
int usersGuess; // A number entered by user as a guess.
int guessCount; // Number of guesses the user has made.
computersNumber = (int)(100 * Math.random()) + 1;
// The value assigned to computersNumber is a randomly
// chosen integer between 1 and 100, inclusive.
guessCount = 0;
System.out.println();
System.out.print("What is your first guess? ");
while (true) {
usersGuess = TextIO.getInt(); // Get the user’s guess.
guessCount++;
if (usersGuess == computersNumber) {
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 154

System.out.println("You got it in " + guessCount

+ " guesses! My number was " + computersNumber);
break; // The game is over; the user has won.
}
if (guessCount == 6) {
System.out.println("You didn’t get the number in 6 guesses.");
System.out.println("You lose. My number was " + computersNumber);
break; // The game is over; the user has lost.
}
// If we get to this point, the game continues.
// Tell the user if the guess was too high or too low.
if (usersGuess < computersNumber)
System.out.print("That’s too low. Try again: ");
else if (usersGuess > computersNumber)
System.out.print("That’s too high. Try again: ");
}
System.out.println();
} // end of playGame()
Now, where exactly should you put this? It should be part of the same class as the main()
routine, but not inside the main routine. It is not legal to have one subroutine physically nested
inside another. The main() routine will call playGame(); it will not contain the definition of
playGame. You can put the definition of playGame() either before or after the main() routine.
Java is not very picky about having the subroutine definitions in a class in any particular order.
It’s pretty easy to write the main routine. You’ve done things like this before. Here’s what
the complete program looks like (except that a serious program needs more comments than I’ve
included here).
import textio.TextIO;
public class GuessingGame {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("Let’s play a game. I’ll pick a number between");
System.out.println("1 and 100, and you try to guess it.");
boolean playAgain;
do {
playGame(); // call subroutine to play one game
System.out.print("Would you like to play again? ");
playAgain = TextIO.getlnBoolean();
} while (playAgain);
System.out.println("Thanks for playing. Goodbye.");
} // end of main()
static void playGame() {
int computersNumber; // A random number picked by the computer.
int usersGuess; // A number entered by user as a guess.
int guessCount; // Number of guesses the user has made.
computersNumber = (int)(100 * Math.random()) + 1;
// The value assigned to computersNumber is a randomly
// chosen integer between 1 and 100, inclusive.
guessCount = 0;
System.out.println();
System.out.print("What is your first guess? ");
while (true) {
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 155

usersGuess = TextIO.getInt(); // Get the user’s guess.

guessCount++;
if (usersGuess == computersNumber) {
System.out.println("You got it in " + guessCount
+ " guesses! My number was " + computersNumber);
break; // The game is over; the user has won.
}
if (guessCount == 6) {
System.out.println("You didn’t get the number in 6 guesses.");
System.out.println("You lose. My number was " + computersNumber);
break; // The game is over; the user has lost.
}
// If we get to this point, the game continues.
// Tell the user if the guess was too high or too low.
if (usersGuess < computersNumber)
System.out.print("That’s too low. Try again: ");
else if (usersGuess > computersNumber)
System.out.print("That’s too high. Try again: ");
}
System.out.println();
} // end of playGame()
} // end of class GuessingGame
Take some time to read the program carefully and figure out how it works. And try to
convince yourself that even in this relatively simple case, breaking up the program into two
methods makes the program easier to understand and probably made it easier to write each
piece.

4.2.4 Member Variables

A class can include other things besides subroutines. In particular, it can also include variable
declarations. Of course, you can declare variables inside subroutines. Those are called local
variables. However, you can also have variables that are not part of any subroutine. To
distinguish such variables from local variables, we call them member variables, since they
are members of a class. Another term for them is global variable.
Just as with subroutines, member variables can be either static or non-static. In this chapter,
we’ll stick to static variables. A static member variable belongs to the class as a whole, and it
exists as long as the class exists. Memory is allocated for the variable when the class is first
loaded by the Java interpreter. Any assignment statement that assigns a value to the variable
changes the content of that memory, no matter where that assignment statement is located in
the program. Any time the variable is used in an expression, the value is fetched from that
same memory, no matter where the expression is located in the program. This means that the
value of a static member variable can be set in one subroutine and used in another subroutine.
Static member variables are “shared” by all the static subroutines in the class. A local variable
in a subroutine, on the other hand, exists only while that subroutine is being executed, and is
completely inaccessible from outside that one subroutine.
The declaration of a member variable looks just like the declaration of a local variable
except for two things: The member variable is declared outside any subroutine (although it
still has to be inside a class), and the declaration can be marked with modifiers such as static,
public, and private. Since we are only working with static member variables for now, every
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 156

declaration of a member variable in this chapter will include the modifier static. They might
also be marked as public or private. For example:
static String usersName;
public static int numberOfPlayers;
private static double velocity, time;
A static member variable that is not declared to be private can be accessed from outside
the class where it is defined, as well as inside. When it is used in some other class, it must be
referred to with a compound identifier of the form hclass-namei.hvariable-namei. For example,
the System class contains the public static member variable named out, and you use this variable
in your own classes by referring to System.out. Similarly, Math.PI is a public static member
variable in the Math class. If numberOfPlayers is a public static member variable in a class
named Poker, then code in the Poker class would refer to it simply as numberOfPlayers, while
code in another class would refer to it as Poker.numberOfPlayers.
As an example, let’s add a couple of static member variables to the GuessingGame class that
we wrote earlier in this section. We add a variable named gamesPlayed to keep track of how
many games the user has played and another variable named gamesWon to keep track of the
number of games that the user has won. The variables are declared as static member variables:
static int gamesPlayed;
static int gamesWon;
In the playGame() routine, we always add 1 to gamesPlayed, and we add 1 to gamesWon if the
user wins the game. At the end of the main() routine, we print out the values of both variables.
It would be impossible to do the same thing with local variables, since both subroutines need
to access the variables, and local variables exist in only one subroutine. Furthermore, global
variables keep their values between one subroutine call and the next. Local variables do not; a
local variable gets a new value each time that the subroutine that contains it is called.
When you declare a local variable in a subroutine, you have to assign a value to that variable
before you can do anything with it. Member variables, on the other hand are automatically
initialized with a default value. The default values are the same as those that are used when
initializing the elements of an array: For numeric variables, the default value is zero; for boolean
variables, the default is false; for char variables, it’s the character that has Unicode code
number zero; and for objects, such as Strings, the default initial value is the special value null.
Since they are of type int, the static member variables gamesPlayed and gamesWon
automatically get zero as their initial value. This happens to be the correct initial value for a
variable that is being used as a counter. You can, of course, assign a value to a variable at the
beginning of the main() routine if you are not satisfied with the default initial value, or if you
want to make the initial value more explicit.
Here’s the revised version of GuessingGame.java. The changes from the above version are
shown in italic:
import textio.TextIO;
public class GuessingGame2 {
static int gamesPlayed; // The number of games played.
static int gamesWon; // The number of games won.
public static void main(String[] args) {
gamesPlayed = 0;
gamesWon = 0; // This is actually redundant, since 0 is
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 157

// the default initial value.

System.out.println("Let’s play a game. I’ll pick a number between");
System.out.println("1 and 100, and you try to guess it.");
boolean playAgain;
do {
playGame(); // call subroutine to play one game
System.out.print("Would you like to play again? ");
playAgain = TextIO.getlnBoolean();
} while (playAgain);
System.out.println();
System.out.println("You played " + gamesPlayed + " games,");
System.out.println("and you won " + gamesWon + " of those games.");
System.out.println("Thanks for playing. Goodbye.");
} // end of main()
static void playGame() {
int computersNumber; // A random number picked by the computer.
int usersGuess; // A number entered by user as a guess.
int guessCount; // Number of guesses the user has made.
gamesPlayed++; // Count this game.
computersNumber = (int)(100 * Math.random()) + 1;
// The value assigned to computersNumber is a randomly
// chosen integer between 1 and 100, inclusive.
guessCount = 0;
System.out.println();
System.out.print("What is your first guess? ");
while (true) {
usersGuess = TextIO.getInt(); // Get the user’s guess.
guessCount++;
if (usersGuess == computersNumber) {
System.out.println("You got it in " + guessCount
+ " guesses! My number was " + computersNumber);
gamesWon++; // Count this win.
break; // The game is over; the user has won.
}
if (guessCount == 6) {
System.out.println("You didn’t get the number in 6 guesses.");
System.out.println("You lose. My number was " + computersNumber);
break; // The game is over; the user has lost.
}
// If we get to this point, the game continues.
// Tell the user if the guess was too high or too low.
if (usersGuess < computersNumber)
System.out.print("That’s too low. Try again: ");
else if (usersGuess > computersNumber)
System.out.print("That’s too high. Try again: ");
}
System.out.println();
} // end of playGame()
} // end of class GuessingGame2

∗ ∗ ∗
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 158

(By the way, notice that in my example programs, I didn’t mark the static subroutines or
variables as being public or private. You might wonder what it means to leave out both
modifiers. Recall that global variables and subroutines with no access modifier can be used
anywhere in the same package as the class where they are defined, but not in other packages.
Classes that don’t declare a package are in the default package. So, any class in the default
package would have access to gamesPlayed, gamesWon, and playGame()—and that includes
most of the classes in this book. In fact, it is considered to be good practice to make member
variables and subroutines private, unless there is a reason for doing otherwise. (But then
again, it’s also considered good practice to avoid using the default package.))

4.3 Parameters
If a subroutine is a black box, then a parameter is something that provides a mechanism
for passing information from the outside world into the box. Parameters are part of the interface
of a subroutine. They allow you to customize the behavior of a subroutine to adapt it to a
particular situation.
As an analogy, consider a thermostat—a black box whose task it is to keep your house
at a certain temperature. The thermostat has a parameter, namely the dial that is used to
set the desired temperature. The thermostat always performs the same task: maintaining a
constant temperature. However, the exact task that it performs—that is, which temperature
it maintains—is customized by the setting on its dial.

4.3.1 Using Parameters

As an example, let’s go back to the “3N+1” problem that was discussed in Subsection 3.2.2.
(Recall that a 3N+1 sequence is computed according to the rule, “if N is odd, multiply it by 3
and add 1; if N is even, divide it by 2; continue until N is equal to 1.” For example, starting from
N=3 we get the sequence: 3, 10, 5, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1.) Suppose that we want to write a subroutine
to print out such sequences. The subroutine will always perform the same task: Print out a
3N+1 sequence. But the exact sequence it prints out depends on the starting value of N. So,
the starting value of N would be a parameter to the subroutine. The subroutine can be written
like this:
/**
* This subroutine prints a 3N+1 sequence to standard output, using
* startingValue as the initial value of N. It also prints the number
* of terms in the sequence. The value of the parameter, startingValue,
* must be a positive integer.
*/
static void print3NSequence(int startingValue) {
int N; // One of the terms in the sequence.
int count; // The number of terms.
N = startingValue; // The first term is whatever value
// is passed to the subroutine as
// a parameter.
count = 1; // We have one term, the starting value, so far.
System.out.println("The 3N+1 sequence starting from " + N);
System.out.println();
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 159

System.out.println(N); // print initial term of sequence

while (N > 1) {
if (N % 2 == 1) // is N odd?
N = 3 * N + 1;
else
N = N / 2;
count++; // count this term
System.out.println(N); // print this term
}
System.out.println();
System.out.println("There were " + count + " terms in the sequence.");
} // end print3NSequence
The parameter list of this subroutine, “(int startingValue)”, specifies that the subroutine
has one parameter, of type int. Within the body of the subroutine, the parameter name can
be used in the same way as a variable name. But notice that there is nothing in the subroutine
definition that gives a value to the parameter! The parameter gets its initial value from outside
the subroutine. When the subroutine is called, a value must be provided for the parameter in
the subroutine call statement. This value will be assigned to startingValue before the body
of the subroutine is executed. For example, the subroutine could be called using the subroutine
call statement “print3NSequence(17);”. When the computer executes this statement, the
computer first assigns the value 17 to startingValue and then executes the statements in the
subroutine. This prints the 3N+1 sequence starting from 17. If K is a variable of type int,
then the subroutine can be called by saying “print3NSequence(K);”. When the computer
executes this subroutine call statement, it takes the value of the variable K, assigns that value
to startingValue, and then executes the body of the subroutine.
The class that contains print3NSequence can contain a main() routine (or other subrou-
tines) that call print3NSequence. For example, here is a main() program that prints out 3N+1
sequences for various starting values specified by the user:
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("This program will print out 3N+1 sequences");
System.out.println("for starting values that you specify.");
System.out.println();
int K; // Input from user; loop ends when K < 0.
do {
System.out.println("Enter a starting value.");
System.out.print("To end the program, enter 0: ");
K = TextIO.getInt(); // Get starting value from user.
if (K > 0) // Print sequence, but only if K is > 0.
print3NSequence(K);
} while (K > 0); // Continue only if K > 0.
} // end main
Remember that before you can use this program, the definitions of main and of
print3NSequence must both be wrapped inside a class definition.

4.3.2 Formal and Actual Parameters

Note that the term “parameter” is used to refer to two different, but related, concepts. There
are parameters that are used in the definitions of subroutines, such as startingValue in the
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 160

above example. And there are parameters that are used in subroutine call statements, such
as the K in the statement “print3NSequence(K);”. Parameters in a subroutine definition are
called formal parameters or dummy parameters. The parameters that are passed to a
subroutine when it is called are called actual parameters or arguments. When a subroutine
is called, the actual parameters in the subroutine call statement are evaluated and the values
are assigned to the formal parameters in the subroutine’s definition. Then the body of the
subroutine is executed.
A formal parameter must be a name, that is, a simple identifier. A formal parameter is very
much like a variable, and—like a variable—it has a specified type such as int, boolean, String, or
double[ ]. An actual parameter is a value, and so it can be specified by any expression, provided
that the expression computes a value of the correct type. The type of the actual parameter must
be one that could legally be assigned to the formal parameter with an assignment statement.
For example, if the formal parameter is of type double, then it would be legal to pass an int as
the actual parameter since ints can legally be assigned to doubles. When you call a subroutine,
you must provide one actual parameter for each formal parameter in the subroutine’s definition.
Consider, for example, a subroutine
static void doTask(int N, double x, boolean test) {
// statements to perform the task go here
}
This subroutine might be called with the statement
doTask(17, Math.sqrt(z+1), z >= 10);
When the computer executes this statement, it has essentially the same effect as the block of
statements:
{
int N; // Allocate memory locations for the formal parameters.
double x;
boolean test;
N = 17; // Assign 17 to the first formal parameter, N.
x = Math.sqrt(z+1); // Compute Math.sqrt(z+1), and assign it to
// the second formal parameter, x.
test = (z >= 10); // Evaluate "z >= 10" and assign the resulting
// true/false value to the third formal
// parameter, test.
// statements to perform the task go here
}
(There are a few technical differences between this and “doTask(17,Math.sqrt(z+1),z>=10);”
—besides the amount of typing—because of questions about scope of variables and what
happens when several variables or parameters have the same name.)
Beginning programming students often find parameters to be surprisingly confusing. Calling
a subroutine that already exists is not a problem—the idea of providing information to the
subroutine in a parameter is clear enough. Writing the subroutine definition is another
matter. A common beginner’s mistake is to assign values to the formal parameters at the
beginning of the subroutine, or to ask the user to input their values. This represents a
fundamental misunderstanding. By the time the computer starts executing the statements
in the subroutine, the formal parameters have already been assigned initial values! The
computer automatically assigns values to the formal parameters before it starts executing the
code inside the subroutine. The values come from the actual parameters in the subroutine call
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 161

statement. Remember that a subroutine is not independent. It is called by some other routine,
and it is the subroutine call statement’s responsibility to provide appropriate values for the
parameters.

4.3.3 Overloading
In order to call a subroutine legally, you need to know its name, you need to know how many
formal parameters it has, and you need to know the type of each parameter. This information is
called the subroutine’s signature. The signature of the subroutine doTask, used as an example
above, can be expressed as: doTask(int,double,boolean). Note that the signature does not
include the names of the parameters; in fact, if you just want to use the subroutine, you don’t
even need to know what the formal parameter names are, so the names are not part of the
interface.
Java is somewhat unusual in that it allows two different subroutines in the same class to
have the same name, provided that their signatures are different. When this happens, we say
that the name of the subroutine is overloaded because it has several different meanings. The
computer doesn’t get the subroutines mixed up. It can tell which one you want to call by the
number and types of the actual parameters that you provide in the subroutine call statement.
You have already seen overloading used with System.out. This object includes many different
methods named println, for example. These methods all have different signatures, such as:
println(int) println(double)
println(char) println(boolean)
println()
The computer knows which of these subroutines you want to use based on the type of
the actual parameter that you provide. System.out.println(17) calls the subroutine with
signature println(int), while System.out.println(’A’) calls the subroutine with signature
println(char). Of course all these different subroutines are semantically related, which is
why it is acceptable programming style to use the same name for them all. But as far as the
computer is concerned, printing out an int is very different from printing out a char, which is
different from printing out a boolean, and so forth—so that each of these operations requires
a different subroutine.
Note, by the way, that the signature does not include the subroutine’s return type. It is
illegal to have two subroutines in the same class that have the same signature but that have
different return types. For example, it would be a syntax error for a class to contain two
subroutines defined as:
int getln() { ... }
double getln() { ... }
This is why in the TextIO class, the subroutines for reading different types are not all named
getln(). In a given class, there can only be one routine that has the name getln with no
parameters. So, the input routines in TextIO are distinguished by having different names, such
as getlnInt() and getlnDouble().

4.3.4 Subroutine Examples

Let’s do a few examples of writing small subroutines to perform assigned tasks. Of course,
this is only one side of programming with subroutines. The task performed by a subroutine is
always a subtask in a larger program. The art of designing those programs—of deciding how to
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 162

break them up into subtasks—is the other side of programming with subroutines. We’ll return
to the question of program design in Section 4.7.
As a first example, let’s write a subroutine to compute and print out all the divisors of a
given positive integer. The integer will be a parameter to the subroutine. Remember that the
syntax of any subroutine is:
hmodifiers i hreturn-type i hsubroutine-name i ( hparameter-list i ) {
hstatements i
}
Writing a subroutine always means filling out this format. In this case, the statement of the
problem implies that there is one parameter, of type int, that represents the “given integer”
whose divisors are to be printed. And it tells us what the statements in the body of the
subroutine should do. Since we are only working with static subroutines for now, we’ll need
to use static as a modifier. We could add an access modifier (public or private), but in
the absence of any instructions, I’ll leave it out. Since we are not told to return a value, the
return type is void. Since no names are specified, we’ll have to make up names for the formal
parameter and for the subroutine itself. I’ll use N for the parameter and printDivisors for
the subroutine name. The subroutine will look like
static void printDivisors( int N ) {
hstatements i
}
and all we have left to do is to write the statements that make up the body of the routine. This
is not difficult. Just remember that you have to write the body assuming that N already has
a value! The algorithm is: “For each possible divisor D in the range from 1 to N, if D evenly
divides N, then print D.” Written in Java, this becomes:
/**
* Print all the divisors of N.
* We assume that N is a positive integer.
*/
static void printDivisors( int N ) {
int D; // One of the possible divisors of N.
System.out.println("The divisors of " + N + " are:");
for ( D = 1; D <= N; D++ ) {
if ( N % D == 0 ) // Does D evenly divide N?
System.out.println(D);
}
}
I’ve added a comment before the subroutine definition indicating the contract of the
subroutine—that is, what it does and what assumptions it makes. The contract includes the
assumption that N is a positive integer. It is up to the caller of the subroutine to make sure
that this assumption is satisfied.
As a second short example, consider the problem: Write a private subroutine named
printRow. It should have a parameter ch of type char and a parameter N of type int. The
subroutine should print out a line of text containing N copies of the character ch.
Here, we are told the name of the subroutine and the names of the two parameters, and we
are told that the subroutine is private, so we don’t have much choice about the first line of
the subroutine definition. The task in this case is pretty simple, so the body of the subroutine
is easy to write. The complete subroutine is given by
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 163

/**
* Write one line of output containing N copies of the
* character ch. If N <= 0, an empty line is output.
*/
private static void printRow( char ch, int N ) {
int i; // Loop-control variable for counting off the copies.
for ( i = 1; i <= N; i++ ) {
System.out.print( ch );
}
System.out.println();
}
Note that in this case, the contract makes no assumption about N, but it makes it clear what
will happen in all cases, including the unexpected case that N <= 0.
Finally, let’s do an example that shows how one subroutine can build on another. Let’s write
a subroutine that takes a String as a parameter. For each character in the string, it should
print a line of output containing 25 copies of that character. It should use the printRow()
subroutine defined above to produce the output.
Again, we get to choose a name for the subroutine and a name for the parameter. I’ll call
the subroutine printRowsFromString and the parameter str. The algorithm is pretty clear:
For each position i in the string str, call printRow(str.charAt(i),25) to print one line of
the output that contains 25 copies of character number i from the string. So, we get:
/**
* For each character in str, write a line of output
* containing 25 copies of that character.
*/
private static void printRowsFromString( String str ) {
int i; // Loop-control variable for counting off the chars.
for ( i = 0; i < str.length(); i++ ) {
printRow( str.charAt(i), 25 );
}
}
We could then use printRowsFromString in a main() routine such as
public static void main(String[] args) {
String inputLine; // Line of text input by user.
System.out.print("Enter a line of text: ");
inputLine = TextIO.getln();
System.out.println();
printRowsFromString( inputLine );
}
Of course, the three routines, main(), printRowsFromString(), and printRow(), would
have to be collected together inside the same class. The program is rather useless, but it does
demonstrate the use of subroutines. You’ll find the program in the file RowsOfChars.java, if
you want to take a look.

4.3.5 Array Parameters

It’s possible for the type of a parameter to be an array type. This means that an entire array
of values can be passed to the subroutine as a single parameter. For example, we might want
a subroutine to print all the values in an integer array in a neat format, separated by commas
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 164

and enclosed in a pair of square brackets. To tell it which array to print, the subroutine would
have a parameter of type int[ ]:
static void printValuesInList( int[] list ) {
System.out.print(’[’);
int i;
for ( i = 0; i < list.length; i++ ) {
if ( i > 0 )
System.out.print(’,’); // No comma in front of list[0]
System.out.print(list[i]);
}
System.out.println(’]’);
}
To use this subroutine, you need an actual array. Here is a legal, though not very realistic, code
segment that creates an array just to pass it as an argument to the subroutine:
int[] numbers;
numbers = new int[3];
numbers[0] = 42;
numbers[1] = 17;
numbers[2] = 256;
printValuesInList( numbers );
The output produced by the last statement would be [42,17,256].

4.3.6 Command-line Arguments

The main routine of a program has a parameter of type String[ ]. When the main routine is
called, some actual array of String must be passed to main() as the value of the parameter. The
system provides the actual parameter when it calls main(), so the values come from outside the
program. Where do the strings in the array come from, and what do they mean? The strings
in the array are command-line arguments from the command that was used to run the
program. When using a command-line interface, the user types a command to tell the system
to execute a program. The user can include extra input in this command, beyond the name of
the program. This extra input becomes the command-line arguments. The system takes the
command-line arguments, puts them into an array of strings, and passes that array to main().
For example, if the name of the program is myProg, then the user can type “java myProg”
to execute the program. In this case, there are no command-line arguments. But if the user
types the command
java myProg one two three
then the command-line arguments are the strings “one”, “two”, and “three”. The system puts
these strings into an array of Strings and passes that array as a parameter to the main() routine.
Here, for example, is a short program that simply prints out any command line arguments
entered by the user:
public class CLDemo {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("You entered " + args.length
+ " command-line arguments");
if (args.length > 0) {
System.out.println("They were:");
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 165

int i;
for ( i = 0; i < args.length; i++ )
System.out.println(" " + args[i]);
}
} // end main()
} // end class CLDemo
Note that the parameter, args, can be an array of length zero. This just means that the user
did not include any command-line arguments when running the program.
In practice, command-line arguments are often used to pass the names of files to a program.
For example, consider the following program for making a copy of a text file. It does this
by copying one line at a time from the original file to the copy, using TextIO. The function
TextIO.eof() is a boolean-valued function that is true if the end of the input file has been
reached.
input textio.TextIO;
/**
* Requires two command line arguments, which must be file names. The
* first must be the name of an existing file. The second is the name
* of a file to be created by the program. The contents of the first file
* are copied into the second. WARNING: If the second file already
* exists when the program is run, its previous contents will be lost!
* This program only works for plain text files.
*/
public class CopyTextFile {
public static void main( String[] args ) {
if (args.length < 2 ) {
System.out.println("Two command-line arguments are required!");
System.exit(1);
}
TextIO.readFile( args[0] ); // Open the original file for reading.
TextIO.writeFile( args[1] ); // Open the copy file for writing.
int lineCount; // Number of lines copied
lineCount = 0;
while ( TextIO.eof() == false ) {
// Read one line from the original file and write it to the copy.
String line;
line = TextIO.getln();
TextIO.putln(line);
lineCount++;
}
System.out.printf( "%d lines copied from %s to %s%n",
lineCount, args[0], args[1] );
}
}
Since most programs are run in a GUI environment these days, command-line arguments
aren’t as important as they used to be. But at least they provide a nice example of how array
parameters can be used.
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 166

4.3.7 Throwing Exceptions

I have been talking about the “contract” of a subroutine. The contract says what the subroutine
will do, provided that the caller of the subroutine provides acceptable values for the subroutine’s
parameters. The question arises, though, what should the subroutine do when the caller violates
the contract by providing bad parameter values?
We’ve already seen that some subroutines respond to bad parameter values by throwing
exceptions. (See Section 3.7.) For example, the contract of the built-in subroutine
Double.parseDouble says that the parameter should be a string representation of a number
of type double; if this is true, then the subroutine will convert the string into the equivalent
numeric value. If the caller violates the contract by passing an invalid string as the actual
parameter, the subroutine responds by throwing an exception of type NumberFormatException.
Many subroutines throw IllegalArgumentExceptions in response to bad parameter values.
You might want to do the same in your own subroutines. This can be done with a throw
statement. An exception is an object, and in order to throw an exception, you must create
an exception object. You won’t officially learn how to do this until Chapter 5, but for now, you
can use the following syntax for a throw statement that throws an IllegalArgumentException:
throw new IllegalArgumentException( herror-message i );
where herror-messagei is a string that describes the error that has been detected. (The word
“new” in this statement is what creates the object.) To use this statement in a subroutine,
you would check whether the values of the parameters are legal. If not, you would throw the
exception. For example, consider the print3NSequence subroutine from the beginning of this
section. The parameter of print3NSequence is supposed to be a positive integer. We can
modify the subroutine definition to make it throw an exception when this condition is violated:
static void print3NSequence(int startingValue) {
if (startingValue <= 0) // The contract is violated!
throw new IllegalArgumentException( "Starting value must be positive." );
.
. // (The rest of the subroutine is the same as before.)
.
If the start value is bad, the computer executes the throw statement. This will
immediately terminate the subroutine, without executing the rest of the body of the subroutine.
Furthermore, the program as a whole will crash unless the exception is “caught” and handled
elsewhere in the program by a try..catch statement, as discussed in Section 3.7. For this to
work, the subroutine call would have to be in the “try” part of the statement.

4.3.8 Global and Local Variables

I’ll finish this section on parameters by noting that we now have three different sorts of
variables that can be used inside a subroutine: local variables declared in the subroutine,
formal parameter names, and static member variables that are declared outside the subroutine.
Local variables have no connection to the outside world; they are purely part of the internal
working of the subroutine.
Parameters are used to “drop” values into the subroutine when it is called, but once the
subroutine starts executing, parameters act much like local variables. Changes made inside
a subroutine to a formal parameter have no effect on the rest of the program (at least if the
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 167

type of the parameter is one of the primitive types—things are more complicated in the case of
arrays and objects, as we’ll see later).
Things are different when a subroutine uses a variable that is defined outside the subroutine.
That variable exists independently of the subroutine, and it is accessible to other parts of the
program as well. Such a variable is said to be global to the subroutine, as opposed to the
local variables defined inside the subroutine. A global variable can be used in the entire class
in which it is defined and, if it is not private, in other classes as well. Changes made to a
global variable can have effects that extend outside the subroutine where the changes are made.
You’ve seen how this works in the last example in the previous section, where the values of the
global variables, gamesPlayed and gamesWon, are computed inside a subroutine and are used
in the main() routine.
It’s not always bad to use global variables in subroutines, but you should realize that the
global variable then has to be considered part of the subroutine’s interface. The subroutine
uses the global variable to communicate with the rest of the program. This is a kind of sneaky,
back-door communication that is less visible than communication done through parameters,
and it risks violating the rule that the interface of a black box should be straightforward and
easy to understand. So before you use a global variable in a subroutine, you should consider
whether it’s really necessary.
I don’t advise you to take an absolute stand against using global variables inside subroutines.
There is at least one good reason to do it: If you think of the class as a whole as being a kind
of black box, it can be very reasonable to let the subroutines inside that box be a little sneaky
about communicating with each other, if that will make the class as a whole look simpler from
the outside.

4.4 Return Values

A subroutine that returns a value is called a function. A given function can only
return a value of a specified type, called the return type of the function. A function call
generally occurs in a position where the computer is expecting to find a value, such as the right
side of an assignment statement, as an actual parameter in a subroutine call, or in the middle
of some larger expression. A boolean-valued function can even be used as the test condition in
an if, while, for or do..while statement.
(It is also legal to use a function call as a stand-alone statement, just as if it were a
regular subroutine. In this case, the computer ignores the value computed by the subroutine.
Sometimes this makes sense. For example, the function TextIO.getln(), with a return type
of String, reads and returns a line of input typed in by the user. Usually, the line that
is returned is assigned to a variable to be used later in the program, as in the statement
“name = TextIO.getln();”. However, this function is also useful as a subroutine call
statement “TextIO.getln();”, which still reads all input up to and including the next carriage
return. Since the return value is not assigned to a variable or used in an expression, it is simply
discarded. So, the effect of the subroutine call is to read and discard some input. Sometimes,
discarding unwanted input is exactly what you need to do.)

4.4.1 The return statement

You’ve already seen how functions such as Math.sqrt() and TextIO.getInt() can be used.
What you haven’t seen is how to write functions of your own. A function takes the same form
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 168

as a regular subroutine, except that you have to specify the value that is to be returned by the
subroutine. This is done with a return statement, which has the following syntax:
return hexpression i ;
Such a return statement can only occur inside the definition of a function, and the type of
the hexpressioni must match the return type that was specified for the function. (More exactly,
it must be an expression that could legally be assigned to a variable whose type is specified
by the return type of the function.) When the computer executes this return statement,
it evaluates the expression, terminates execution of the function, and uses the value of the
expression as the returned value of the function.
For example, consider the function definition
static double pythagoras(double x, double y) {
// Computes the length of the hypotenuse of a right
// triangle, where the sides of the triangle are x and y.
return Math.sqrt( x*x + y*y );
}
Suppose the computer executes the statement “totalLength = 17 + pythagoras(12,5);”.
When it gets to the term pythagoras(12,5), it assigns the actual parameters 12 and 5 to
the formal parameters x and y in the function. In the body of the function, it evaluates
Math.sqrt(12.0*12.0 + 5.0*5.0), which works out to 13.0. This value is “returned” by the
function, so the 13.0 essentially replaces the function call in the assignment statement, which
then has the same effect as the statement “totalLength = 17+13.0 ”. The return value is
added to 17, and the result, 30.0, is stored in the variable, totalLength.
Note that a return statement does not have to be the last statement in the function
definition. At any point in the function where you know the value that you want to return, you
can return it. Returning a value will end the function immediately, skipping any subsequent
statements in the function. However, a function must definitely return some value (or throw
an exception), no matter what path the execution of the function takes through the code.
You can use a return statement inside an ordinary subroutine, one with declared return
type “void”. Since a void subroutine does not return a value, the return statement does not
include an expression; it simply takes the form “return;”. The effect of this statement is to
terminate execution of the subroutine and return control back to the point in the program from
which the subroutine was called. This can be convenient if you want to terminate execution
somewhere in the middle of the subroutine, but return statements are optional in non-function
subroutines. In a function, on the other hand, a return statement, with expression, is always
required.
Note that a return inside a loop will end the loop as well as the subroutine that contains
it. Similarly, a return in a switch statement breaks out of the switch statement as well as
the subroutine. So, you will sometimes use return in contexts where you are used to seeing a
break.

4.4.2 Function Examples

Here is a very simple function that could be used in a program to compute 3N+1 sequences.
(The 3N+1 sequence problem is one we’ve looked at several times already, including in the
previous section.) Given one term in a 3N+1 sequence, this function computes the next term
of the sequence:
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 169

static int nextN(int currentN) {

if (currentN % 2 == 1) // test if current N is odd
return 3*currentN + 1; // if so, return this value
else
return currentN / 2; // if not, return this instead
}
This function has two return statements. Exactly one of the two return statements is executed
to give the value of the function. Some people prefer to use a single return statement at the
very end of the function when possible. This allows the reader to find the return statement
easily. You might choose to write nextN() like this, for example:
static int nextN(int currentN) {
int answer; // answer will be the value returned
if (currentN % 2 == 1) // test if current N is odd
answer = 3*currentN+1; // if so, this is the answer
else
answer = currentN / 2; // if not, this is the answer
return answer; // (Don’t forget to return the answer!)
}
Here is a subroutine that uses this nextN function. In this case, the improvement from the
version of the subroutine in Section 4.3 is not great, but if nextN() were a long function that
performed a complex computation, then it would make a lot of sense to hide that complexity
inside a function:
static void print3NSequence(int startingValue) {
int N; // One of the terms in the sequence.
int count; // The number of terms found.
N = startingValue; // Start the sequence with startingValue.
count = 1;
System.out.println("The 3N+1 sequence starting from " + N);
System.out.println();
System.out.println(N); // print initial term of sequence
while (N > 1) {
N = nextN( N ); // Compute next term, using the function nextN.
count++; // Count this term.
System.out.println(N); // Print this term.
}
System.out.println();
System.out.println("There were " + count + " terms in the sequence.");
}

∗ ∗ ∗
Here are a few more examples of functions. The first one computes a letter grade
corresponding to a given numerical grade, on a typical grading scale:
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 170

/**
* Returns the letter grade corresponding to the numerical
* grade that is passed to this function as a parameter.
*/
static char letterGrade(int numGrade) {
if (numGrade >= 90)
return ’A’; // 90 or above gets an A
else if (numGrade >= 80)
return ’B’; // 80 to 89 gets a B
else if (numGrade >= 65)
return ’C’; // 65 to 79 gets a C
else if (numGrade >= 50)
return ’D’; // 50 to 64 gets a D
else
return ’F’; // anything else gets an F
} // end of function letterGrade
The type of the return value of letterGrade() is char. Functions can return values of any
type at all. Here’s a function whose return value is of type boolean. It demonstrates some
interesting programming points, so you should read the comments:
/**
* This function returns true if N is a prime number. A prime number
* is an integer greater than 1 that is not divisible by any positive
* integer, except itself and 1. If N has any divisor, D, in the range
* 1 < D < N, then it has a divisor in the range 2 to Math.sqrt(N), namely
* either D itself or N/D. So we only test possible divisors from 2 to
* Math.sqrt(N).
*/
static boolean isPrime(int N) {
int divisor; // A number we will test to see whether it evenly divides N.
if (N <= 1)
return false; // No number <= 1 is a prime.
int maxToTry; // The largest divisor that we need to test.
maxToTry = (int)(Math.sqrt(N) + 0.001);
// We will try to divide N by numbers between 2 and maxToTry.
// If N is not evenly divisible by any of these numbers, then
// N is prime. (Note that since Math.sqrt(N) is defined to
// return a value of type double, the value must be typecast
// to type int before it can be assigned to maxToTry. I added
// the 0.001 because computations with double values are not
// exact, and I worry that, for example, Math.sqrt(49) might
// be computed as 6.999... instead of as 7.0.)
for (divisor = 2; divisor <= maxToTry; divisor++) {
if ( N % divisor == 0 ) // Test if divisor evenly divides N.
return false; // If so, we know N is not prime.
// No need to continue testing!
}
// If we get to this point, N must be prime. Otherwise,
// the function would already have been terminated by
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 171

// a return statement in the previous loop.

return true; // Yes, N is prime.
} // end of function isPrime
Finally, here is a function with return type String. This function has a String as parameter.
The returned value is a reversed copy of the parameter. For example, the reverse of “Hello
World” is “dlroW olleH”. The algorithm for computing the reverse of a string, str, is to
start with an empty string and then to append each character from str, starting from the last
character of str and working backwards to the first:
static String reverse(String str) {
String copy; // The reversed copy.
int i; // One of the positions in str,
// from str.length() - 1 down to 0.
copy = ""; // Start with an empty string.
for ( i = str.length() - 1; i >= 0; i-- ) {
// Append i-th char of str to copy.
copy = copy + str.charAt(i);
}
return copy;
}
A palindrome is a string that reads the same backwards and forwards, such as “radar”. The
reverse() function could be used to check whether a string, word, is a palindrome by testing
“if (word.equals(reverse(word)))”.
By the way, a typical beginner’s error in writing functions is to print out the answer, instead
of returning it. This represents a fundamental misunderstanding. The task of a function
is to compute a value and return it to the point in the program where the function was called.
That’s where the value is used. Maybe it will be printed out. Maybe it will be assigned to a
variable. Maybe it will be used in an expression. But it’s not for the function to decide.

4.4.3 3N+1 Revisited

I’ll finish this section with a complete new version of the 3N+1 program. This will give me a
chance to show the function nextN(), which was defined above, used in a complete program.
I’ll also take the opportunity to improve the program by getting it to print the terms of the
sequence in columns, with five terms on each line. This will make the output more presentable.
The idea is this: Keep track of how many terms have been printed on the current line; when
that number gets up to 5, start a new line of output. To make the terms line up into neat
columns, I use formatted output.
import textio.TextIO;
/**
* A program that computes and displays several 3N+1 sequences. Starting
* values for the sequences are input by the user. Terms in the sequence
* are printed in columns, with five terms on each line of output.
* After a sequence has been displayed, the number of terms in that
* sequence is reported to the user.
*/
public class ThreeN2 {
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 172

public static void main(String[] args) {

System.out.println("This program will print out 3N+1 sequences");
System.out.println("for starting values that you specify.");
System.out.println();
int K; // Starting point for sequence, specified by the user.
do {
System.out.println("Enter a starting value;");
System.out.print("To end the program, enter 0: ");
K = TextIO.getlnInt(); // get starting value from user
if (K > 0) // print sequence, but only if K is > 0
print3NSequence(K);
} while (K > 0); // continue only if K > 0
} // end main

/**
* print3NSequence prints a 3N+1 sequence to standard output, using
* startingValue as the initial value of N. It also prints the number
* of terms in the sequence. The value of the parameter, startingValue,
* must be a positive integer.
*/
static void print3NSequence(int startingValue) {
int N; // One of the terms in the sequence.
int count; // The number of terms found.
int onLine; // The number of terms that have been output
// so far on the current line.
N = startingValue; // Start the sequence with startingValue;
count = 1; // We have one term so far.
System.out.println("The 3N+1 sequence starting from " + N);
System.out.println();
System.out.printf("%8d", N); // Print initial term, using 8 characters.
onLine = 1; // There’s now 1 term on current output line.
while (N > 1) {
N = nextN(N); // compute next term
count++; // count this term
if (onLine == 5) { // If current output line is full
System.out.println(); // ...then output a carriage return
onLine = 0; // ...and note that there are no terms
// on the new line.
}
System.out.printf("%8d", N); // Print this term in an 8-char column.
onLine++; // Add 1 to the number of terms on this line.
}
System.out.println(); // end current line of output
System.out.println(); // and then add a blank line
System.out.println("There were " + count + " terms in the sequence.");
} // end of print3NSequence

/**
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 173

* nextN computes and returns the next term in a 3N+1 sequence,

* given that the current term is currentN.
*/
static int nextN(int currentN) {
if (currentN % 2 == 1)
return 3 * currentN + 1;
else
return currentN / 2;
} // end of nextN()

} // end of class ThreeN2

You should read this program carefully and try to understand how it works.

4.5 Lambda Expressions

In a running program, a subroutine is just a bunch of binary numbers (representing
instructions) stored somewhere in the computer’s memory. Considered as a long string of zeros
and ones, a subroutine doesn’t seem all that different from a data value such as, for example,
as an integer, a string, or an array, which is also represented as a string of zeros and ones in
memory. We are used to thinking of subroutines and data as very different things, but inside
the computer, a subroutine is just another kind of data. Some programming languages make
it possible to work with a subroutine as a kind of data value. In Java 8, that ability was added
to Java in the form of something called lambda expressions.
Lambda expressions are becoming more and more common in Java programs. They are
especially useful for working with the stream API that will be covered in Section 10.6 and with
the JavaFX GUI toolkit. It will definitely be useful to know about them before we cover GUI
programming in Chapter 6. However, we won’t encounter them again until near the end of
Chapter 5, so you can skip this section for now if you want.

4.5.1 First-class Functions

Lambda is a letter in the Greek alphabet that was used by the mathematician Alonzo Church in
his study of computable functions. His lambda notation makes it possible to define a function
without giving it a name. For example, you might think that the notation x 2 is a perfectly
good way of representing a function that squares a number, but in fact, it’s an expression that
represents the result of squaring x, which leaves open the question of what x represents. We
can define a function with x as a dummy parameter:
static double square( double x ) {
return x*x;
}
but to do that, we had to name the function square, and that name becomes a permanent
part of the program—which is overkill if we just want to use the function once. Alonzo Church
introduced the notation lambda(x ).x 2 to represent “the function of x that is given by x 2 ” (except
using the Greek letter instead of the word “lambda”). This notation is a kind of function literal
that represents a value of type “function” in the same way that 42 is an integer literal that
represents a value of type int.
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 174

Having function literals is the starting point for thinking of a function as just another kind
of data value. Once we do that, we should be able to do the same things with functions that we
can do with other values, such as assign a function to a variable, pass a function as a parameter
to a subroutine, return a function as the value of subroutine, or even make an array of functions.
A programming language that allows you to do all those things with functions is said to have
“first-class functions” or “functions as first-class objects.”
In fact, you can do all of those things with Java lambda expressions. Java’s notation is
different from the one used by Alonzo Church, and in spite of the name “lambda expression”
it does not even use the word lambda. In Java, the lambda expression for a squaring function
like the one above can be written
x -> x*x
The operator -> is what makes this a lambda expression. The dummy parameter for the function
is on the left of the operator, and the expression that computes the value of the function is on
the right. You might see an expression like this one being passed as an actual parameter to a
subroutine, assigned to a variable, or returned by a function.
So are functions now first-class in Java? I’m not quite sure. There are some cool things that
can be done in other languages but can’t be done in Java. For example, in Java we can assign
the above expression to a variable named, say, sqr, but we can’t then use sqr as if it actually is
a function. For example, we can’t say sqr (42). The problem, really, is that Java is a strongly
typed language; to have a variable named sqr, we must declare that variable and give it a type.
But what sort of type would be appropriate for a value that is a function? The answer in Java
is something called a functional interface, which we turn to next.
But first one more note: Lambda expressions in Java can actually represent arbitrary
subroutines, not just functions. Nevertheless, it is the term “function” that is usually associated
with them, rather than “subroutine” or “method.”

4.5.2 Functional Interfaces

To know how a subroutine can be legally used, you need to know its name, how many parameters
it requires, their types, and the return type of the subroutine. A functional interface specifies
this information about one subroutine. A functional interface is similar to a class, and it can
be defined in a .java file, just like a class. However, its content is just a specification for a single
subroutine. Here is an example:
public interface FunctionR2R {
double valueAt( double x );
}
This code would be in a file named FunctionR2R.java. It specifies a function named valueAt
with one parameter of type double and a return type of double. (The name of the parameter,
x, is not really part of the specification, and it’s a little annoying that it has to be there.) Here
is another example:
public interface ArrayProcessor {
void process( String[] array, int count );
}
Java comes with many standard functional interfaces. One of the most important is a very
simple one named Runnable, which is already defined in Java as
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 175

public interface Runnable {

public void run();
}
I will use these three functional interfaces for examples in this section.
”Interfaces” in Java can be much more complicated than functional interfaces. You will
learn more about them in Section 5.7. But it is only functional interfaces that are relevant
to lambda expressions: a functional interface provides a template for a subroutine that might
be represented by a lambda expression. The name of a functional interface is a type, just as
String and double are types. That is, it can be used to declare variables and parameters and
to specify the return type of a function. When a type is a functional interface, a value for that
type can be given as a lambda expression.

4.5.3 Lambda Expressions

A lambda expression represents an anonymous subroutine, that is, one without a name. But it
does have a formal parameter list and a definition. The full syntax is:
( hparameter-list i ) -> { hstatements i }
As with a regular subroutine, the hparameter-listi can be empty, or it can be a list of parameter
declarations, separated by commas, where each declaration consists of a type followed by a
parameter name. However, the syntax can often be simplified. First of all, the parameter types
can be omitted, as long as they can be deduced from the context. For example, if the lambda
expression is known to be of type FunctionR2R, then the parameter type must be double, so it
is unnecessary to specify the parameter type in the lambda expression. Next, if there is exactly
one parameter and if its type is not specified, then the parentheses around the parameter list
can be omitted. On the right-hand side of the ->, if the only thing between the braces, { and },
is a single subroutine call statement, then the braces can be omitted. And if the right-hand side
has the form { return hexpressioni; }, then you can omit everything except the hexpressioni.
For example, suppose that we want a lambda expression to represent a function that
computes the square of a double value. The type of such a function can be the FunctionR2R
interface given above. If sqr is a variable of type FunctionR2R, then the value of the function
can be a lambda expression, which can be written in any of the following forms:
sqr = (double x) -> { return x*x; }; // The full lambda expression syntax!
sqr = (x) -> { return x*x; };
sqr = x -> { return x*x; };
sqr = x -> x*x;
sqr = (double fred) -> fred*fred;
sqr = (z) -> z*z;
The last two statements are there to emphasize that the parameters in a lambda expression are
dummy parameters; their names are irrelevant. The six lambda expressions in these statements
all define exactly the same function. Note that the parameter type double can be omitted
because the compiler knows that sqr is of type FunctionR2R, and a FunctionR2R requires a
parameter of type double. A lambda expression can only be used in a context where the
compiler can deduce its type, and the parameter type has to be included only in a case where
leaving it out would make the type of the lambda expression ambiguous.
Now, in Java, the variable sqr as defined here is not quite a function. It is a value of
type FunctionR2R, which means that it contains a function named valueAt, as specified in
the definition of interface FunctionR2R. The full name of that function is sqr.valueAt, and we
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 176

must use that name to call the function. For example: sqr.valueAt(42) or sqr.valueAt(x) +
sqr.valueAt(y).
When a lambda expression has two parameters, the parentheses are not optional. Here is
an example of using the ArrayProcessor interface, which also demonstrates a lambda expression
with a multiline definition:
ArrayProcessor concat;
concat = (A,n) -> { // parentheses around (A,n) are required!
String str;
str = "";
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++)
str += A[i];
System.out.println(str);
}; // The semicolon marks the end of the assignment statement;
// it is not part of the lambda expression.
String[] nums;
nums = new String[4];
nums[0] = "One";
nums[1] = "Two";
nums[2] = "Three";
nums[3] = "Four";
for (int i = 1; i < nums.length; i++) {
concat.process( nums, i );
}
This will print out
One
OneTwo
OneTwoThree
OneTwoThreeFour
Things get more interesting when a lambda expression is used as an actual parameter, which
is the most common use in practice. For example, suppose that the following function is defined:
/**
* For a function f, compute f(start) + f(start+1) + ... + f(end).
* The value of end should be >= the value of start.
*/
static double sum( FunctionR2R f, int start, int end ) {
double total = 0;
for (int n = start; n <= end; n++) {
total = total + f.valueAt( n );
}
return total;
}
Note that since f is a value of type FunctionR2R, the value of f at n is actually written as
f.valueAt(n). When the function sum is called, the first parameter can be given as a lambda
expression that matches the type FunctionR2R. For example:
System.out.print("The sum of n squared for n from 1 to 100 is ");
System.out.println( sum( x -> x*x, 1, 100 ) );
System.out.print("The sum of 2 raised to the power n, for n from 1 to 10 is ");
System.out.println( sum( num -> Math.pow(2,num), 1, 10 ) );
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 177

As another example, suppose that we have a subroutine that performs a given task several
times. The task can be specified as a value of type Runnable:
static void doSeveralTimes( Runnable task, int repCount ) {
for (int i = 0; i < repCount; i++) {
task.run(); // Perform the task!
}
}
We could then say “Hello World” ten times by calling
doSeveralTimes( () -> System.out.println("Hello World"), 10 );
Note that for a lambda expression of type Runnable, the parameter list is given as an empty
pair of parentheses. Here is an example in which the syntax is getting rather complicated:
doSeveralTimes( () -> {
// count from 1 up to some random number between 5 and 25
int count = 5 + (int)(21*Math.random());
for (int i = 1; i <= count; i++) {
System.out.print(i + " ");
}
System.out.println();
}, 100);
This is a single subroutine call statement in which the first parameter is a lambda expression
that extends over multiple lines. The second parameter is 100, and the semicolon on the last
line ends the subroutine call statement.
We have seen examples of assigning a lambda expression to a variable and of using one as
an actual parameter. Here is an example in which a lambda expression is the return value of a
function:
static FunctionR2R makePowerFunction( int n ) {
return x -> Math.pow(x,n);
}
Then makePowerFunction(2) returns a FunctionR2R that computes the square of its parameter,
while makePowerFunction(10) returns a FunctionR2R that computes the 10-th power of its
parameter. This example also illustrates the fact that a lambda expression can use other
variables in addition to its parameter, such as n in this case (although there are some restrictions
on when that can be done).

4.5.4 Method References

Suppose that we want a lambda expression to represent the square root function as a value of
type FunctionR2R. We could write it as x -> Math.sqrt(x). However, this lambda expression
is a simple wrapper for a Math.sqrt function that already exists. Instead of writing out the
lambda expression, that function can be written as a method reference, which takes the form
Math::sqrt. (Recall that in Java, “method” is another word for “subroutine.”) This method
reference is just a shorthand for the lambda expression, and it can be used wherever that lambda
expression could be used, such as in the sum function defined above:
System.out.print("The sum of the square root of n for n from 1 to 100 is ");
System.out.println( sum( Math::sqrt, 1, 100 ) );
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 178

It would be nice if we could simply use the name Math.sqrt here instead of introducing a new
notation with ::, but the notation Math.sqrt was already defined to mean a variable named
sqrt in the Math class.
More generally, a lambda expression that simply calls an existing static method can be
written as a method reference of the form
hclassname i :: hmethod-name i
Furthermore, this notation extends to methods that are in objects rather than classes. For
example, if str is a String, then str contains the method str.length(). The method reference
str::length could be used as a lambda expression of type SupplyInt, where SupplyInt is the
functional interface
public interface SupplyInt {
int get( );
}

4.6 APIs, Packages, Modules, and Javadoc

As computers and their user interfaces have become easier to use, they have also
become more complex for programmers to deal with. You can write programs for a simple
console-style user interface using just a few subroutines that write output to the console and
read the user’s typed replies. A modern graphical user interface, with windows, buttons, scroll
bars, menus, text-input boxes, and so on, might make things easier for the user, but it forces
the programmer to cope with a hugely expanded array of possibilities. The programmer sees
this increased complexity in the form of great numbers of subroutines that are provided for
managing the user interface, as well as for other purposes.

4.6.1 Toolboxes
Someone who wanted to program for the original Macintosh computers—and to produce
programs that look and behave the way users expected them to—had to deal with the
“Macintosh Toolbox,” a collection of well over a thousand different subroutines. There were
routines for opening and closing windows, for drawing geometric figures and text to windows,
for adding buttons to windows, and for responding to mouse clicks on the window. There
were other routines for creating menus and for reacting to user selections from menus. Aside
from the user interface, there were routines for opening files and reading data from them, for
communicating over a network, for sending output to a printer, for handling communication
between programs, and in general for doing all the standard things that a computer has to do.
Microsoft Windows provides its own set of subroutines for programmers to use, and they are
quite a bit different from the subroutines used on the Mac. Linux has several different GUI
toolboxes for the programmer to choose from.
The analogy of a “toolbox” is a good one to keep in mind. Every programming project
involves a mixture of innovation and reuse of existing tools. A programmer is given a set of
tools to work with, starting with the set of basic tools that are built into the language: things
like variables, assignment statements, if statements, and loops. To these, the programmer can
add existing toolboxes full of routines that have already been written for performing certain
tasks. These tools, if they are well-designed, can be used as true black boxes: They can be called
to perform their assigned tasks without worrying about the particular steps they go through to
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 179

accomplish those tasks. The innovative part of programming is to take all these tools and apply
them to some particular project or problem (word-processing, keeping track of bank accounts,
processing image data from a space probe, Web browsing, computer games, . . . ). This is called
applications programming .
A software toolbox is a kind of black box, and it presents a certain interface to the
programmer. This interface is a specification of what routines are in the toolbox, what
parameters they use, and what tasks they perform. This information constitutes the API ,
or Application Programming Interface, associated with the toolbox. The API is the
abstraction through which you access the functionality of the software in the toolbox. The
Macintosh API is a specification of all the routines available in the Macintosh Toolbox. A
company that makes some hardware device—say a card for connecting a computer to a
network—might publish an API for that device consisting of a list of routines that programmers
can call in order to communicate with and control the device. Scientists who write a set of
routines for doing some kind of complex computation—such as solving “differential equations,”
say—would provide an API to allow others to use those routines without understanding the
details of the computations they perform.
∗ ∗ ∗
The Java programming language is supplemented by a large, standard API. You’ve seen
part of this API already, in the form of mathematical subroutines such as Math.sqrt(), the
String data type and its associated routines, and the System.out.print() routines. The
standard Java API includes routines for working with graphical user interfaces, for network
communication, for reading and writing files, and more. It’s tempting to think of these routines
as being part of the Java language, but they are technically subroutines that have been written
and made available for use in Java programs.
Java is platform-independent. That is, the same program can run on platforms as diverse
as MacOS, Windows, Linux, and others. The same Java API must work on all these platforms.
But notice that it is the interface that is platform-independent; the implementation of some
parts of the API varies from one platform to another. A Java system on a particular computer
includes implementations of all the standard API routines. A Java program includes only calls
to those routines. When the Java interpreter executes a program and encounters a call to one
of the standard routines, it will pull up and execute the implementation of that routine which
is appropriate for the particular platform on which it is running. This is a very powerful idea.
It is the power of abstraction. It means that you only need to learn one API to program for a
wide variety of platforms.

4.6.2 Java’s Standard Packages

Like all subroutines in Java, the routines in the standard API are grouped into classes. To
provide larger-scale organization, classes in Java can be grouped into packages, which were
introduced briefly in Subsection 2.6.5. You can have even higher levels of grouping, since
packages can also contain other packages. In fact, the entire standard Java API is implemented
in several packages. One of these, which is named “java”, contains several non-GUI packages as
well as the original AWT graphical user interface classes. Another package, “javax”, contains
the classes used by the Swing graphical user interface, as well as many other classes. And
“javafx,” which is not a standard part of Java, contains the JavaFX API that is used for GUI
programming in this textbook.
A package can contain both classes and other packages. A package that is contained in
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 180

another package is sometimes called a “subpackage.” The java and javafx packages both
contain subpackages. One of the subpackages of java, for example, is named “util”. Since
util is contained within java, its full name is actually java.util. This package contains
a variety of utility classes, including the Scanner class that was discussed in Subsection 2.4.6.
The java package includes several other subpackages, such as java.io, which provides facilities
for input/output, and java.net, which deals with network communication. The most basic
package is called java.lang. This package contains fundamental classes such as String, Math,
Integer, and Double.
It might be helpful to look at a graphical representation of the levels of nesting in the java
package, its subpackages, the classes in those subpackages, and the subroutines in those classes.
This is not a complete picture, since it shows only a very few of the many items in each element:

j"#"
l ! u i
M S HJKL
s
  nn
NOPQLR
r  @BCEFG@ 

S T

I D

$%&'outines nested in c)*++,+ nested -. /12 )*3,'+ 24 p*c5*a,+6

78, 4%)) .*9, 24 +:'/;< -+ =*>*6)*.a6?*/86+:'/;<6

Similarly, the package javafx contains a package javafx.scene, which in turn contains
javafx.scene.control. This package contains classes that represent GUI components such as
buttons and input boxes. Another subpackage, javafx.scene.paint, contains class Color and
other classes that define ways to fill and stroke a shape.
The standard Java API includes thousands of classes in hundreds of packages. Many of
the classes are rather obscure or very specialized, but you might want to browse through the
documentation to see what is available. As I write this, the documentation for the complete
basic API for Java 8 can be found at
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/
and for JavaFX 8 at
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/javafx/api/toc.htm
See the subsection about “modules,” below, for a discussion of changes that were made the
language after Java 8 and for links to the documentation for Java 17. However, for the purposes
of this textbook, you will probably find that the Java 8 documentation is easier to use, and the
information that it provides is still relevant.
Even an expert programmer won’t be familiar with the entire Java API, or even a majority
of it. In this book, you’ll only encounter several dozen classes, and those will be sufficient for
writing a wide variety of programs.
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 181

4.6.3 Using Classes from Packages

Let’s say that you want to use the class javafx.scene.paint.Color in a program that you are
writing. This is the full name of class Color in package javafx.scene.paint. Like any class,
javafx.scene.paint.Color is a type, which means that you can use it to declare variables
and parameters and to specify the return type of a function. One way to do this is to use the
full name of the class as the name of the type. For example, suppose that you want to declare
a variable named rectColor of type Color. You could say:
javafx.scene.paint.Color rectColor;
This is just an ordinary variable declaration of the form “htype-namei hvariable-namei;”. Of
course, using the full name of every class can get tiresome, and you will hardly ever see full
names like this used in a program. Java makes it possible to avoid using the full name of a
class by importing the class. If you put
import javafx.scene.paint.Color;
at the beginning of a Java source code file, then, in the rest of the file, you can abbreviate the
full name javafx.scene.paint.Color to just the simple name of the class, which is Color.
Note that the import line comes at the start of a file (after the package statement, if there
is one) and is not inside any class. Although it is sometimes referred to as a statement, it is
more properly called an import directive since it is not a statement in the usual sense. The
import directive “import javafx.scene.paint.Color” would allow you to say
Color rectColor;
to declare the variable. Note that the only effect of the import directive is to allow you to use
simple class names instead of full “package.class” names. You aren’t really importing anything
substantial; if you leave out the import directive, you can still access the class—you just have
to use its full name. There is a shortcut for importing all the classes from a given package. For
example, you can import all the classes from java.util by saying
import java.util.*;
The “*” is a wildcard that matches every class in the package. (However, it does not match
subpackages; for example, you cannot import the entire contents of all the subpackages of the
java package by saying import java.*.)
Some programmers think that using a wildcard in an import statement is bad style, since
it can make a large number of class names available that you are not going to use and might
not even know about. They think it is better to explicitly import each individual class that
you want to use. In my own programming, I often use wildcards to import all the classes from
the most relevant packages, and use individual imports when I am using just one or two classes
from a given package.
A program that works with networking might include the line “import java.net.*;”, while
one that reads or writes files might use “import java.io.*;”. But when you start importing
lots of packages in this way, you have to be careful about one thing: It’s possible for two classes
that are in different packages to have the same name. For example, both the java.awt package
and the java.util package contain a class named List. If you import both java.awt.* and
java.util.*, the simple name List will be ambiguous. If you try to declare a variable of
type List, you will get a compiler error message about an ambiguous class name. You can
still use both classes in your program: Use the full name of the class, either java.awt.List or
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 182

java.util.List. Another solution, of course, is to use import to import the individual classes
you need, instead of importing entire packages.
Because the package java.lang is so fundamental, all the classes in java.lang are
automatically imported into every program. It’s as if every program began with the statement
“import java.lang.*;”. This is why we have been able to use the class name String instead
of java.lang.String, and Math.sqrt() instead of java.lang.Math.sqrt(). It would still,
however, be perfectly legal to use the longer forms of the names.
Programmers can create new packages. Suppose that you want some classes that you are
writing to be in a package named utilities. Then the source code files that defines those
classes must begin with the line
package utilities;
This would come even before any import directive in that file. Furthermore, the source code
file would be placed in a folder with the same name as the package, “utilities” in this example.
And a class that is in a subpackage must be in a subfolder. For example, a class in a package
named utilities.net would be in folder named “net” inside a folder named “utilities”. A
class that is in a package automatically has access to other classes in the same package; that
is, a class doesn’t have to import classes from the package in which it is defined.
In projects that define large numbers of classes, it makes sense to organize those classes
into packages. It also makes sense for programmers to create new packages as toolboxes that
provide functionality and APIs for dealing with areas not covered in the standard Java API.
(And in fact such “toolmaking” programmers often have more prestige than the applications
programmers who use their tools.)
However, with just a couple of exceptions such as class TextIO in package textio, the classes
written for this book are not in packages. For the purposes of this book, you need to know
about packages mainly so that you will be able to import TextIO and classes from the standard
packages. The standard packages are always available to the programs that you write. You
might wonder where the standard classes are actually located. Again, that can depend to some
extent on the version of Java that you are using, but they will be part of the installed JDK.
Although we won’t be creating packages explicitly, every class is actually part of a package.
If a class is not specifically placed in a package, then it is put in something called the default
package, which has no name. Almost all the examples that you see in this book are in the
default package.

4.6.4 About Modules

Starting with Java 9, a major change was made to the large-scale structure of Java with the
introduction of modules. A module is a collection of packages, so it represents yet another
level of containment: Modules contain packages which contain classes which contain variables
and methods. A package does not have to be in a module to be used, but all of the standard
classes in Java and in JavaFX have been divided into a set of modules.
Modules were introduced for several reasons. A major reason is to provide better access
control. Before modules, a class that is declared public can be used anywhere, from any class in
any package, as can its public variables and methods. For a class that is defined in a module, on
the other hand, “public” only automatically means public within the module where it is defined.
However, a module can explicitly export a package. Exporting a package from a module makes
the public classes in the package accessible from anywhere, including from other modules and
from classes that are not part of any module. (It is even possible to export a package just to
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 183

certain specified modules, providing an even finer level of access control.) The upshot is that
it is now possible to have entire packages that are essentially private: They provide services to
other packages in the same module, but are invisible from outside that module. So a module
is another kind of black box, and a non-exported package is part of its hidden implementation.
Of course, modularity on this scale is really only important for very large-scale applications.
Another motivation for modules is the sheer size of the standard JRE (Java Runtime
Environment), which includes all of the standard classes. A given application will use only
a small part of the standard runtime. Modularization makes it possible to construct smaller,
custom JREs that contain only the modules that are required by an application. The JDK
includes a jlink command for making custom runtimes, which can include modules that define
an application as well as the standard modules that are required to run that application.
That runtime can then be distributed as a standalone application that can be executed even
by people who have not installed a JDK on their computer. But just as for the JDK itself,
different versions of the custom runtime will be needed for Windows, for MacOS, and for Linux.
Furthermore, when security updates are made to the JDK, they are not automatically applied
to custom runtimes, so the application developer takes on the responsibility of updating custom
runtimes. Once again, this is really only useful for fairly large applications.
In a JDK for Java 9 or later, compiled class files from the standard modules are stored
together in a file named modules inside a directory named lib in the main JDK directory. This
is a so-called “jimage file,” and there is a command-line tool named jimage for working with
such files. If you use the jlink tool to create a custom runtime, part of what it does is to
create a custom modules file containing just the modules that are needed by the runtime. In
the JDK 17 on my Linux computer, modules is a 127 megabyte file containing 26401 classes
in 835 packages in 70 modules. The JDK directory also has a subdirectory named jmods that
contains the modules in another form. However, it is not required for compiling and running
programs and, as far as I can tell, is meant mostly for use by jlink.
Modules in the JDK include, for example, java.base (which contains the basic modules such
as java.lang and java.util) and java.desktop (which include packages for the Swing GUI
toolkit). JavaFX packages include javafx.base, javafx.control, javafx.graphics, and a few that
are less generally useful. The API documentation for modular versions of Java is divided into
modules, then into packages, and finally into classes. This makes the documentation harder
to browse than in older versions of Java. However, the documentation web site does have an
effective search feature. As I write this, the documentation for Java 17 and for JavaFX 17 is
available at:
https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/17/docs/api/index.html
https://openjfx.io/javadoc/17/
A class can be defined outside of any module, and it is possible for that class to use packages
from modules, provided that those packages are exported by the modules where they are defined.
In particular, a programmer can use classes from the JDK without ever thinking about modules
or knowing that they exist. This applies to all the command-line programs in this book.
However, when using Java 9 or later, things are different for GUI programs that use JavaFX,
which has been removed from the JDK and is distributed as a separate set of modules. As we
saw in Section 2.6, when you compile or run a JavaFX program, you need to specify a module
path that includes the JavaFX modules, and you need to provide an --add-modules option.
(In Section 2.6, the value for --add-modules was given as ALL-MODULE-PATH, which lets the
program access any modules that are found on the module path. An alternative is to specify a
list of names of just those modules that are actually used by the program.)
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 184

Aside from using modules with JavaFX and the basic background information in this section,
this textbook does not cover modules.

4.6.5 Javadoc
To use an API effectively, you need good documentation for it. The documentation for most
Java APIs is prepared using a system called Javadoc. For example, this system is used to
prepare the documentation for Java’s standard packages. And almost everyone who creates a
toolbox in Java publishes Javadoc documentation for it.
Javadoc documentation is prepared from special comments that are placed in the Java
source code file. Recall that one type of Java comment begins with /* and ends with */. A
Javadoc comment takes the same form, but it begins with /** rather than simply /*. You have
already seen comments of this form in many of the examples in this book.
Note that a Javadoc comment must be placed just before the subroutine that it is
commenting on. This rule is always followed. You can have Javadoc comments for subroutines,
for member variables, and for classes. The Javadoc comment always immediately precedes
the thing it is commenting on.
Like any comment, a Javadoc comment is ignored by the computer when the file is compiled.
But there is a tool called javadoc that reads Java source code files, extracts any Javadoc
comments that it finds, and creates a set of Web pages containing the comments in a nicely
formatted, interlinked form. By default, javadoc will only collect information about public
classes, subroutines, and member variables, but it allows the option of creating documentation
for non-public things as well. If javadoc doesn’t find any Javadoc comment for something, it
will construct one, but the comment will contain only basic information such as the name and
type of a member variable or the name, return type, and parameter list of a subroutine. This
is syntactic information. To add information about semantics and pragmatics, you have to
write a Javadoc comment.
As an example, you can look at the documentation Web page for TextIO. The documentation
page was created by applying the javadoc tool to the source code file, TextIO.java. If you
have downloaded the on-line version of this book, the documentation can be found in the
TextIO Javadoc directory, or you can find a link to it in the on-line version of this section.
In a Javadoc comment, the *’s at the start of each line are optional. The javadoc tool
will remove them. In addition to normal text, the comment can contain certain special codes.
For one thing, the comment can contain HTML mark-up commands. HTML is the language
that is used to create web pages, and Javadoc comments are meant to be shown on web pages.
The javadoc tool will copy any HTML commands in the comments to the web pages that it
creates. The book will not teach you HTML, but as an example, you can add <p> to indicate
the start of a new paragraph. (Generally, in the absence of HTML commands, blank lines and
extra spaces in the comment are ignored. Furthermore, the characters & and < have special
meaning in HTML and should not be used in Javadoc comments except with those meanings;
they can be written as &amp; and &lt;.)
In addition to HTML commands, Javadoc comments can include doc tags, which are
processed as commands by the javadoc tool. A doc tag has a name that begins with the
character @. I will only discuss four tags: @author, @param, @return, and @throws. The
@author tag can be used only for a class, and should be followed by the name of the author.
The other three tags are used in Javadoc comments for a subroutine to provide information
about its parameters, its return value, and the exceptions that it might throw. These tags
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 185

must be placed at the end of the comment, after any description of the subroutine itself. The
syntax for using them is:
@param hparameter-name i hdescription-of-parameter i
@return hdescription-of-return-value i
@throws hexception-class-name i hdescription-of-exception i
The hdescriptionsi can extend over several lines. The description ends at the next doc tag or at
the end of the comment. You can include a @param tag for every parameter of the subroutine
and a @throws for as many types of exception as you want to document. You should have
a @return tag only for a non-void subroutine. These tags do not have to be given in any
particular order.
Here is an example that doesn’t do anything exciting but that does use all three types of
doc tag:
/**
* This subroutine computes the area of a rectangle, given its width
* and its height. The length and the width should be positive numbers.
* @param width the length of one side of the rectangle
* @param height the length the second side of the rectangle
* @return the area of the rectangle
* @throws IllegalArgumentException if either the width or the height
* is a negative number.
*/
public static double areaOfRectangle( double length, double width ) {
if ( width < 0 || height < 0 )
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Sides must have positive length.");
double area;
area = width * height;
return area;
}
I use Javadoc comments for many of my examples. I encourage you to use them in your
own code, even if you don’t plan to generate Web page documentation of your work, since it’s
a standard format that other Java programmers will be familiar with.
If you do want to create Web-page documentation, you need to run the javadoc tool. This
tool is available as a command in the Java Development Kit that was discussed in Section 2.6.
You can use the javadoc tool in a command line interface similarly to the way that the javac
and java commands are used. Javadoc can also be applied in the integrated development
environments that were also discussed in Section 2.6. I won’t go into any of the details here;
consult the documentation for your programming environment.

4.6.6 Static Import

Before ending this section, I will mention an extension of the import directive. We have seen
that import makes it possible to refer to a class such as java.util.Scanner using its simple
name, Scanner. But you still have to use compound names to refer to static member variables
such as System.out and to static methods such as Math.sqrt.
There is another form of the import directive that can be used to import static members
of a class in the same way that the ordinary import directive imports classes from a package.
That form of the directive is called a static import, and it has syntax
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 186

import static hpackage-name i.hclass-name i.hstatic-member-name i;

to import one static member name from a class, or
import static hpackage-name i.hclass-name i.*;
to import all the public static members from a class. For example, if you preface a class
definition with
import static java.lang.System.out;
then you can use the simple name out instead of the compound name System.out. This means
you can say out.println instead of System.out.println. If you are going to work extensively
with the Math class, you might preface your class definition with
import static java.lang.Math.*;
This would allow you to say sqrt instead of Math.sqrt, log instead of Math.log, PI instead
of Math.PI, and so on. And you could import the getlnInt function from TextIO using
import static textio.TextIO.getlnInt;
Note that the static import directive requires a hpackage-namei, even for classes in the
standard package java.lang. One consequence of this is that you can’t do a static import from
a class in the default package.

4.7 More on Program Design

Understanding how programs work is one thing. Designing a program to perform some
particular task is another thing altogether. In Section 3.2, I discussed how pseudocode and
stepwise refinement can be used to methodically develop an algorithm. We can now see how
subroutines can fit into the process.
Stepwise refinement is inherently a top-down process, but the process does have a “bottom,”
that is, a point at which you stop refining the pseudocode algorithm and translate what you
have directly into proper program code. In the absence of subroutines, the process would
not bottom out until you get down to the level of assignment statements and very primitive
input/output operations. But if you have subroutines lying around to perform certain useful
tasks, you can stop refining as soon as you’ve managed to express your algorithm in terms of
those tasks.
This allows you to add a bottom-up element to the top-down approach of stepwise
refinement. Given a problem, you might start by writing some subroutines that perform tasks
relevant to the problem domain. The subroutines become a toolbox of ready-made tools that
you can integrate into your algorithm as you develop it. (Alternatively, you might be able to
buy or find a software toolbox written by someone else, containing subroutines that you can
use in your project as black boxes.)
Subroutines can also be helpful even in a strict top-down approach. As you refine your
algorithm, you are free at any point to take any sub-task in the algorithm and make it into a
subroutine. Developing that subroutine then becomes a separate problem, which you can work
on separately. Your main algorithm will merely call the subroutine. This, of course, is just
a way of breaking your problem down into separate, smaller problems. It is still a top-down
approach because the top-down analysis of the problem tells you what subroutines to write.
In the bottom-up approach, you start by writing or obtaining subroutines that are relevant to
the problem domain, and you build your solution to the problem on top of that foundation of
subroutines.
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 187

4.7.1 Preconditions and Postconditions

When working with subroutines as building blocks, it is important to be clear about how a
subroutine interacts with the rest of the program. This interaction is specified by the contract
of the subroutine, as discussed in Section 4.1. A convenient way to express the contract of a
subroutine is in terms of preconditions and postconditions.
A precondition of a subroutine is something that must be true when the subroutine is called,
if the subroutine is to work correctly. For example, for the built-in function Math.sqrt(x), a
precondition is that the parameter, x, is greater than or equal to zero, since it is not possible
to take the square root of a negative number. In terms of a contract, a precondition represents
an obligation of the caller of the subroutine. If you call a subroutine without meeting its
precondition, then there is no reason to expect it to work properly. The program might crash
or give incorrect results, but you can only blame yourself, not the subroutine, because you
haven’t lived up to your side of the deal.
A postcondition of a subroutine represents the other side of the contract. It represents an
obligation of the subroutine. It is something that will be true after the subroutine has run
(assuming that its preconditions were met—and that there are no bugs in the subroutine).
The postcondition of the function Math.sqrt() is that the square of the value that is returned
by this function is equal to the parameter that is provided when the subroutine is called. Of
course, this will only be true if the precondition—that the parameter is greater than or equal
to zero—is met. A postcondition of the built-in subroutine System.out.print(x) is that the
value of the parameter has been displayed on the screen.
Preconditions most often give restrictions on the acceptable values of parameters, as in the
example of Math.sqrt(x). However, they can also refer to global variables that are used in the
subroutine. Or, if it only makes sense to call the subroutine at certain times, the precondition
might refer to the state that the program must be in when the subroutine is called.
The postcondition of a subroutine, on the other hand, specifies the task that it performs.
For a function, the postcondition should specify the value that the function returns.
Subroutines are sometimes described by comments that explicitly specify their preconditions
and postconditions. When you are given a pre-written subroutine, a statement of its
preconditions and postconditions tells you how to use it and what it does. When you
are assigned to write a subroutine, the preconditions and postconditions give you an exact
specification of what the subroutine is expected to do. I will use this approach in the example
that constitutes the rest of this section. The comments are given in the form of Javadoc
comments, but I will explicitly label the preconditions and postconditions. (Many computer
scientists think that new doc tags @precondition and @postcondition should be added to
the Javadoc system for explicit labeling of preconditions and postconditions, but that has not
yet been done.)

4.7.2 A Design Example

Let’s work through an example of program design using subroutines. In this example, we will
use pre-written subroutines as building blocks and we will also design new subroutines that
we need to complete the project. The API that I will use here is defined in two classes that I
have written: Mosaic.java, which in turn depends on MosaicCanvas.java. To compile and run
a program that uses the API, the classes Mosaic and MosaicCanvas must be available. That is,
the files Mosaic.java and MosaicCanvas.java, or the corresponding compiled class files, must
be in the same folder as the class that defines the program. (You can download them from this
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 188

textbooks’s web site.)

So, suppose that I have access to an already-written class called Mosaic. This class allows
a program to work with a window that displays little colored rectangles arranged in rows and
columns. The window can be opened, closed, and otherwise manipulated with static member
subroutines defined in the Mosaic class. In fact, the class defines a toolbox or API that can be
used for working with such windows. Here are some of the available routines in the API, with
Javadoc-style comments. (Remember that a Javadoc comment comes before the thing that it
is commenting on.)
/**
* Opens a "mosaic" window on the screen. This subroutine should be called
* before any of the other Mosaic subroutines are used. The program will end
* when the user closes the window.
*
* Precondition: The parameters rows, cols, h, and w are positive integers.
* Postcondition: A window is open on the screen that can display rows and
* columns of colored rectangles. Each rectangle is w pixels
* wide and h pixels high. The number of rows is given by
* the first parameter and the number of columns by the
* second. Initially, all rectangles are black.
*
* Note: The rows are numbered from 0 to rows - 1, and the columns are
* numbered from 0 to cols - 1.
*/
public static void open(int rows, int cols, int w, int h)

/**
* Sets the color of one of the rectangles in the window.
*
* Precondition: row and col are in the valid range of row and column numbers,
* and r, g, and b are in the range 0 to 255, inclusive.
* Postcondition: The color of the rectangle in row number row and column
* number col has been set to the color specified by r, g,
* and b. r gives the amount of red in the color with 0
* representing no red and 255 representing the maximum
* possible amount of red. The larger the value of r, the
* more red in the color. g and b work similarly for the
* green and blue color components.
*/
public static void setColor(int row, int col, int r, int g, int b)

/**
* Gets the red component of the color of one of the rectangles.
*
* Precondition: row and col are in the valid range of row and column numbers.
* Postcondition: The red component of the color of the specified rectangle is
* returned as an integer in the range 0 to 255 inclusive.
*/
public static int getRed(int row, int col)

/**
* Like getRed, but returns the green component of the color.
*/
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 189

public static int getGreen(int row, int col)

/**
* Like getRed, but returns the blue component of the color.
*/
public static int getBlue(int row, int col)

/**
* Inserts a delay in the program (to regulate the speed at which the colors
* are changed, for example).
*
* Precondition: milliseconds is a positive integer.
* Postcondition: The program has paused for at least the specified number
* of milliseconds, where one second is equal to 1000
* milliseconds.
*/
public static void delay(int milliseconds)
Remember that these subroutines are static members of the Mosaic class, so when they are
called from outside Mosaic, the name of the class must be included as part of the name of the
routine. For example, we’ll have to use the name Mosaic.open rather than simply open.
You’ll notice that the comments on the subroutine don’t specify what happens when the
preconditions are not met. Although a subroutine is not really obligated by its contract to
do anything particular in that case, it would be good to know what happens. For example,
if the precondition, “row and col are in the valid range of row and column numbers,” on
the setColor() or getRed() routine is violated, an IllegalArgumentException will be thrown.
Knowing that fact would allow you to write programs that catch and handle the exception,
and it would be good to document it with a @throws doc tag in the Javadoc comment. Other
questions remain about the behavior of the subroutines. For example, what happens if you
call Mosaic.open() and there is already a mosaic window open on the screen? (In fact, the
second call will simply be ignored.) It’s difficult to fully document the behavior of a piece of
software—sometimes, you just have to experiment or look at the full source code.
∗ ∗ ∗
My idea for a program is to use the Mosaic class as the basis for a neat animation. I want
to fill the window with randomly colored squares, and then randomly change the colors in a
loop that continues as long as the window is open. “Randomly change the colors” could mean
a lot of different things, but after thinking for a while, I decide it would be interesting to have
a “disturbance” that wanders randomly around the window, changing the color of each square
that it encounters. Here’s a picture showing what the contents of the window might look like
at one point in time:
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 190

With basic routines for manipulating the window as a foundation, I can turn to the specific
problem at hand. A basic outline for my program is
Open a Mosaic window
Fill window with random colors
Move around, changing squares at random
Filling the window with random colors seems like a nice coherent task that I can work on
separately, so let’s decide to write a separate subroutine to do it. The third step can be
expanded a bit more, into the steps: Start in the middle of the window, then keep moving
to new squares and changing the color of those squares. This should continue as long as the
mosaic window is still open. Thus we can refine the algorithm to:
Open a Mosaic window
Fill window with random colors
Set the current position to the middle square in the window
As long as the mosaic window is open:
Randomly change color of the square at the current position
Move current position up, down, left, or right, at random
I need to represent the current position in some way. That can be done with two int variables
named currentRow and currentColumn that hold the row number and the column number of
the square where the disturbance is currently located. I’ll use 16 rows and 20 columns of squares
in my mosaic, so setting the current position to be in the center means setting currentRow to 8
and currentColumn to 10. I already have a subroutine, Mosaic.open(), to open the window.
To keep the main routine simple, I decide that I will write two more subroutines of my own to
carry out the two tasks in the while loop. The algorithm can then be written in Java as:
Mosaic.open(16,20,25,25)
fillWithRandomColors();
currentRow = 8; // Middle row, halfway down the window.
currentColumn = 10; // Middle column.
while ( true ) { // Program ends when user closes the window.
changeToRandomColor(currentRow, currentColumn);
randomMove();
}
With the proper wrapper, this is essentially the main() routine of my program. It turns out I
decided to make one small modification after running the completed program: To prevent the
animation from running too fast, I added the line “Mosaic.delay(10);” to the while loop.
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 191

The main() routine is taken care of, but to complete the program, I still have to write the
subroutines fillWithRandomColors(), changeToRandomColor(int,int), and randomMove().
Writing each of these subroutines is a separate, small task. The fillWithRandomColors()
routine is defined by the postcondition that “each of the rectangles in the mosaic has been
changed to a random color.” Pseudocode for an algorithm to accomplish this task can be given
as:
For each row:
For each column:
set the square in that row and column to a random color
“For each row” and “for each column” can be implemented as for loops. We’ve already
planned to write a subroutine changeToRandomColor that can be used to set the color. (The
possibility of reusing subroutines in several places is one of the big payoffs of using them!) So,
fillWithRandomColors() can be written in proper Java as:
static void fillWithRandomColors() {
int row, column;
for ( row = 0; row < 16; row++ )
for ( column = 0; column < 20; column++ )
changeToRandomColor(row,column);
}
Turning to the changeToRandomColor subroutine, we already have a method in the
Mosaic class, Mosaic.setColor(), that can be used to change the color of a square. If we
want a random color, we just have to choose random values for r, g, and b. According
to the precondition of the Mosaic.setColor() subroutine, these random values must be
integers in the range from 0 to 255. A formula for randomly selecting such an integer is
“(int)(256*Math.random())”. So the random color subroutine becomes:
static void changeToRandomColor(int rowNum, int colNum) {
int red = (int)(256*Math.random());
int green = (int)(256*Math.random());
int blue = (int)(256*Math.random());
Mosaic.setColor(rowNum,colNum,red,green,blue);
}
Finally, consider the randomMove subroutine, which is supposed to randomly move the
disturbance up, down, left, or right. To make a random choice among four directions, we
can choose a random integer in the range 0 to 3. If the integer is 0, move in one direction;
if it is 1, move in another direction; and so on. The position of the disturbance is given
by the variables currentRow and currentColumn. To “move up” means to subtract 1 from
currentRow. This leaves open the question of what to do if currentRow becomes -1, which
would put the disturbance above the window (which would violate a precondition of several
of the Mosaic subroutines). Rather than let this happen, I decide to move the disturbance to
the opposite edge of the grid by setting currentRow to 15. (Remember that the 16 rows are
numbered from 0 to 15.) An alternative to jumping to the opposite edge would be to simply
do nothing in this case. Moving the disturbance down, left, or right is handled similarly. If we
use a switch statement to decide which direction to move, the code for randomMove becomes:
int directionNum;
directionNum = (int)(4*Math.random());
switch (directionNum) {
case 0 -> { // move up
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 192

currentRow--;
if (currentRow < 0) // CurrentRow is outside the mosaic;
currentRow = 15; // move it to the opposite edge.
}
case 1 -> { // move right
currentColumn++;
if (currentColumn >= 20)
currentColumn = 0;
}
case 2 -> { // move down
currentRow++;
if (currentRow >= 16)
currentRow = 0;
}
case 3 -> { // move left
currentColumn--;
if (currentColumn < 0)
currentColumn = 19;
}
}

4.7.3 The Program

Putting this all together, we get the following complete program. Note that I’ve added Javadoc-
style comments for the class itself and for each of the subroutines. The variables currentRow
and currentColumn are defined as static members of the class, rather than local variables,
because each of them is used in several different subroutines. You can find a copy of the source
code in RandomMosaicWalk.java. Remember that this program actually depends on two other
files, Mosaic.java and MosaicCanvas.java.
/**
* This program opens a window full of randomly colored squares. A "disturbance"
* moves randomly around in the window, randomly changing the color of each
* square that it visits. The program runs until the user closes the window.
*/
public class RandomMosaicWalk {
static int currentRow; // Row currently containing the disturbance.
static int currentColumn; // Column currently containing disturbance.
/**
* The main program creates the window, fills it with random colors,
* and then moves the disturbance in a random walk around the window
* as long as the window is open.
*/
public static void main(String[] args) {
Mosaic.open(16,20,25,25);
fillWithRandomColors();
currentRow = 8; // start at center of window
currentColumn = 10;
while ( true ) {
changeToRandomColor(currentRow, currentColumn);
randomMove();
Mosaic.delay(10); // Remove this line to speed things up!
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 193

}
} // end main
/**
* Fills the window with randomly colored squares.
* Precondition: The mosaic window is open.
* Postcondition: Each square has been set to a random color.
*/
static void fillWithRandomColors() {
int row, column;
for ( row=0; row < 16; row++ ) {
for ( column=0; column < 20; column++ ) {
changeToRandomColor(row, column);
}
}
} // end fillWithRandomColors
/**
* Changes one square to a new randomly selected color.
* Precondition: The specified rowNum and colNum are in the valid range
* of row and column numbers.
* Postcondition: The square in the specified row and column has
* been set to a random color.
* @param rowNum the row number of the square, counting rows down
* from 0 at the top
* @param colNum the column number of the square, counting columns over
* from 0 at the left
*/
static void changeToRandomColor(int rowNum, int colNum) {
int red = (int)(256*Math.random()); // Choose random levels in range
int green = (int)(256*Math.random()); // 0 to 255 for red, green,
int blue = (int)(256*Math.random()); // and blue color components.
Mosaic.setColor(rowNum,colNum,red,green,blue);
} // end changeToRandomColor
/**
* Move the disturbance.
* Precondition: The global variables currentRow and currentColumn
* are within the legal range of row and column numbers.
* Postcondition: currentRow or currentColumn is changed to one of the
* neighboring positions in the grid -- up, down, left, or
* right from the current position. If this moves the
* position outside of the grid, then it is moved to the
* opposite edge of the grid.
*/
static void randomMove() {
int directionNum; // Randomly set to 0, 1, 2, or 3 to choose direction.
directionNum = (int)(4*Math.random());
switch (directionNum) {
case 0 -> { // move up
currentRow--;
if (currentRow < 0) // CurrentRow is outside the mosaic;
currentRow = 15; // move it to the opposite edge.
}
case 1 -> { // move right
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 194

currentColumn++;
if (currentColumn >= 20)
currentColumn = 0;
}
case 2 -> { // move down
currentRow++;
if (currentRow >= 16)
currentRow = 0;
}
case 3 -> { // move left
currentColumn--;
if (currentColumn < 0)
currentColumn = 19;
}
}
} // end randomMove
} // end class RandomMosaicWalk

4.8 The Truth About Declarations

Names are fundamental to programming, as I said a few chapters ago. There are a lot
of details involved in declaring and using names. I have been avoiding some of those details. In
this section, I’ll reveal most of the truth (although still not the full truth) about declaring and
using variables in Java. The material in the subsections “Initialization in Declarations” and
“Named Constants” is particularly important, since I will be using it regularly from now on.

4.8.1 Initialization in Declarations

When a variable declaration is executed, memory is allocated for the variable. This memory
must be initialized to contain some definite value before the variable can be used in an
expression. In the case of a local variable, the declaration is often followed closely by an
assignment statement that does the initialization. For example,
int count; // Declare a variable named count.
count = 0; // Give count its initial value.
However, the truth about declaration statements is that it is legal to include the initialization
of the variable in the declaration statement. The two statements above can therefore be
abbreviated as
int count = 0; // Declare count and give it an initial value.
The computer still executes this statement in two steps: Declare the variable count, then assign
the value 0 to the newly created variable. The initial value does not have to be a constant. It
can be any expression. It is legal to initialize several variables in one declaration statement.
For example,
char firstInitial = ’D’, secondInitial = ’E’;
int x, y = 1; // OK, but only y has been initialized!
int N = 3, M = N+2; // OK, N is initialized
// before its value is used.
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 195

This feature is especially common in for loops, since it makes it possible to declare a loop control
variable at the same point in the loop where it is initialized. Since the loop control variable
generally has nothing to do with the rest of the program outside the loop, it’s reasonable to
have its declaration in the part of the program where it’s actually used. For example:
for ( int i = 0; i < 10; i++ ) {
System.out.println(i);
}
You should remember that this is simply an abbreviation for the following, where I’ve added
an extra pair of braces to show that i is considered to be local to the for statement and no
longer exists after the for loop ends:
{
int i;
for ( i = 0; i < 10; i++ ) {
System.out.println(i);
}
}
A member variable can also be initialized at the point where it is declared, just as for a
local variable. For example:
public class Bank {
private static double interestRate = 0.05;
private static int maxWithdrawal = 200;
.
. // More variables and subroutines.
.
}
A static member variable is created as soon as the class is loaded by the Java interpreter, and
the initialization is also done at that time. In the case of member variables, this is not simply
an abbreviation for a declaration followed by an assignment statement. Declaration statements
are the only type of statement that can occur outside of a subroutine. Assignment statements
cannot, so the following is illegal:
public class Bank {
private static double interestRate;
interestRate = 0.05; // ILLEGAL:
. // Can’t be outside a subroutine!:
.
.
Because of this, declarations of member variables often include initial values. In fact, as
mentioned in Subsection 4.2.4, if no initial value is provided for a member variable, then a
default initial value is used. For example, when declaring an integer member variable, count,
“static int count;” is equivalent to “static int count = 0;”.
Even array variables can be initialized. An array contains several elements, not just a single
value. To initialize an array variable, you can provide a list of values, separated by commas,
and enclosed between a pair of braces. For example:
int[] smallPrimes = { 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29 };
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 196

In this statement, an array of int of length 10 is created and filled with the values in the list.
The length of the array is determined by the number of items in the list.
Note that this syntax for initializing arrays cannot be used in assignment statements. It
can only be used in a declaration statement at the time when the array variable is declared.
It is also possible to initialize an array variable with an array created using the new operator
(which can also be used in assignment statements). For example:
String[] nameList = new String[100];
but in that case, of course, all the array elements will have their default value.

4.8.2 Declaring Variables with var

In Java 11 and later, there is a new way of declaring variables, using the word “var” instead of
specifying an explicit type for the variable. The new syntax for declarations can only be used for
local variables, that is for variables that are declared inside subroutines (see Subsection 4.2.4).
Furthermore a variable that is declared using var must be given an initial value. A variable
that is declared with var has a defined type, just like any other variable. The Java compiler
uses the type of the initial value to define the type for the variable. For example, the declaration
statement
var interestRate = 0.05;
can be used to define a local variable named interestRate with initial value 0.05. The variable
is of type double, since 0.05 is a value of type double. And a local variable named nameList
of type String[ ] can be declared as
var nameList = new String[100];
In particular, var can be used to declare the loop control variable in a for loop. For example,
for ( var i = 0; i < 10; i++ ) {
System.out.println(i);
}
All this might not seem particularly useful, but it becomes more useful for the more
complicated “parameterized types” that will be covered in Section 7.3 and Chapter 10.

4.8.3 Named Constants

Sometimes, the value of a variable is not supposed to change after it is initialized. For example,
in the above example where interestRate is initialized to the value 0.05, it’s quite possible
that 0.05 is meant to be the value throughout the entire program. In that case, the programmer
is probably defining the variable, interestRate, to give a meaningful name to the otherwise
meaningless number, 0.05. It’s easier to understand what’s going on when a program says
“principal += principal*interestRate;” rather than “principal += principal*0.05;”.
In Java, the modifier “final” can be applied to a variable declaration to ensure that the
value stored in the variable cannot be changed after the variable has been initialized. For
example, if the member variable interestRate is declared with
public final static double interestRate = 0.05;
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 197

then it would be impossible for the value of interestRate to change anywhere else in the
program. Any assignment statement that tries to assign a value to interestRate will be
rejected by the computer as a syntax error when the program is compiled. (A “final” modifier
on a public interest rate makes a lot of sense—a bank might want to publish its interest rate,
but it certainly wouldn’t want to let random people make changes to it!)
It is legal to apply the final modifier to local variables and to formal parameters (and even
to classes and subroutines), but it is probably most useful for member variables. I will often
refer to a static member variable that is declared to be final as a named constant, since
its value remains constant for the whole time that the program is running. The readability
of a program can be greatly enhanced by using named constants to give meaningful names to
important quantities in the program. A recommended style rule for named constants is to give
them names that consist entirely of upper case letters, with underscore characters to separate
words if necessary. For example, the preferred style for the interest rate constant would be
public final static double INTEREST RATE = 0.05;
This is the style that is generally used in Java’s standard classes, which define many named
constants. For example, we have already seen that the Math class contains a variable Math.PI.
This variable is declared in the Math class as a “public final static” variable of type double.
Similarly, the Color class contains named constants such as Color.RED and Color.YELLOW
which are public final static variables of type Color.
Enumerated type constants (see Subsection 2.3.3) are also examples of named constants.
The enumerated type definition
enum Alignment { LEFT, RIGHT, CENTER }
defines the constants Alignment.LEFT, Alignment.RIGHT, and Alignment.CENTER. Technically,
Alignment is a class, and the three constants are public final static members of that class.
Defining the enumerated type is similar to defining three constants of type, say, int:
public static final int ALIGNMENT LEFT = 0;
public static final int ALIGNMENT RIGHT = 1;
public static final int ALIGNMENT CENTER = 2;
In fact, this is how things had to be done before the introduction of enumerated types, and it
is what is still done in many cases. Using the integer constants, you could define a variable of
type int and assign it the values ALIGNMENT LEFT, ALIGNMENT RIGHT, or ALIGNMENT CENTER to
represent different types of alignment. The only problem with this is that the computer has no
way of knowing that you intend the value of the variable to represent an alignment, and it will
not raise any objection if the value that is assigned to the variable is not one of the three valid
alignment values. With the enumerated type, on the other hand, the only values that can be
assigned to a variable of type Alignment are the constant values that are listed in the definition
of the enumerated type. Any attempt to assign an invalid value to the variable is a syntax error
which the computer will detect when the program is compiled. This extra safety is one of the
major advantages of enumerated types.
∗ ∗ ∗
Curiously enough, one of the main reasons to use named constants is that it’s easy to
change the value of a named constant. Of course, the value can’t change while the program
is running. But between runs of the program, it’s easy to change the value in the source code
and recompile the program. Consider the interest rate example. It’s quite possible that the
value of the interest rate is used many times throughout the program. Suppose that the bank
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 198

changes the interest rate and the program has to be modified. If the literal number 0.05 were
used throughout the program, the programmer would have to track down each place where
the interest rate is used in the program and change the rate to the new value. (This is made
even harder by the fact that the number 0.05 might occur in the program with other meanings
besides the interest rate, as well as by the fact that someone might have, say, used 0.025 to
represent half the interest rate.) On the other hand, if the named constant INTEREST RATE is
declared and used consistently throughout the program, then only the single line where the
constant is initialized needs to be changed.
As an extended example, I will give a new version of the RandomMosaicWalk program from
the previous section. This version uses named constants to represent the number of rows in
the mosaic, the number of columns, and the size of each little square. The three constants are
declared as final static member variables with the lines:
final static int ROWS = 20; // Number of rows in mosaic.
final static int COLUMNS = 30; // Number of columns in mosaic.
final static int SQUARE SIZE = 15; // Size of each square in mosaic.
The rest of the program is carefully modified to use the named constants. For example, in
the new version of the program, the Mosaic window is opened with the statement
Mosaic.open(ROWS, COLUMNS, SQUARE SIZE, SQUARE SIZE);
Sometimes, it’s not easy to find all the places where a named constant needs to be used. If
you don’t use the named constant consistently, you’ve more or less defeated the purpose. It’s
always a good idea to run a program using several different values for any named constant, to
test that it works properly in all cases.
Here is the complete new program, RandomMosaicWalk2, with all modifications from the
previous version shown in italic. Note in particular how the constants ROWS and COLUMNS are
used in randomMove() when moving the disturbance from one edge of the mosaic to the opposite
edge. I’ve left out most of the comments to save space.
public class RandomMosaicWalk2 {
final static int ROWS = 20; // Number of rows in mosaic.
final static int COLUMNS = 30; // Number of columns in mosaic.
final static int SQUARE SIZE = 15; // Size of each square in mosaic.
static int currentRow; // Row currently containing the disturbance.
static int currentColumn; // Column currently containing the disturbance.
public static void main(String[] args) {
Mosaic.open( ROWS, COLUMNS, SQUARE SIZE, SQUARE SIZE );
fillWithRandomColors();
currentRow = ROWS / 2; // start at center of window
currentColumn = COLUMNS / 2;
while ( true ) {
changeToRandomColor(currentRow, currentColumn);
randomMove();
Mosaic.delay(5);
}
} // end main
static void fillWithRandomColors() {
for (int row=0; row < ROWS; row++) {
for (int column=0; column < COLUMNS; column++) {
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 199

changeToRandomColor(row, column);
}
}
} // end fillWithRandomColors
static void changeToRandomColor(int rowNum, int colNum) {
int red = (int)(256*Math.random()); // Choose random levels in range
int green = (int)(256*Math.random()); // 0 to 255 for red, green,
int blue = (int)(256*Math.random()); // and blue color components.
Mosaic.setColor(rowNum,colNum,red,green,blue);
} // end changeToRandomColor
static void randomMove() {
int directionNum; // Randomly set to 0, 1, 2, or 3 to choose direction.
directionNum = (int)(4*Math.random());
switch (directionNum) {
case 0 -> { // move up
currentRow--;
if (currentRow < 0)
currentRow = ROWS - 1;
}
case 1 -> { // move right
currentColumn++;
if (currentColumn >= COLUMNS)
currentColumn = 0;
}
case 2 -> { // move down
currentRow++;
if (currentRow >= ROWS)
currentRow = 0;
}
case 3 -> { // move left
currentColumn--;
if (currentColumn < 0)
currentColumn = COLUMNS - 1;
}
}
} // end randomMove
} // end class RandomMosaicWalk2

4.8.4 Naming and Scope Rules

When a variable declaration is executed, memory is allocated for that variable. The variable
name can be used in at least some part of the program source code to refer to that memory
or to the data that is stored in the memory. The portion of the program source code where
the variable is valid is called the scope of the variable. Similarly, we can refer to the scope of
subroutine names and formal parameter names.
For static member subroutines, scope is straightforward. The scope of a static subroutine
is the entire source code of the class in which it is defined. That is, it is possible to call the
subroutine from any point in the class, including at a point in the source code before the point
where the definition of the subroutine appears. It is even possible to call a subroutine from
within itself. This is an example of something called “recursion,” a fairly advanced topic that
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 200

we will return to in Section 9.1. If the subroutine is not private, it can also be accessed from
outside the class where it is defined, using its full name.
For a variable that is declared as a static member variable in a class, the situation is similar,
but with one complication. It is legal to have a local variable or a formal parameter that has
the same name as a member variable. In that case, within the scope of the local variable or
parameter, the member variable is hidden. Consider, for example, a class named Game that
has the form:
public class Game {
static int count; // member variable
static void playGame() {
int count; // local variable
.
. // Some statements to define playGame()
.
}
.
. // More variables and subroutines.
.
} // end Game
In the statements that make up the body of the playGame() subroutine, the name “count”
refers to the local variable. In the rest of the Game class, “count” refers to the member
variable (unless hidden by other local variables or parameters named count). However, the
member variable named count can also be referred to by the full name Game.count. Usually,
the full name is only used outside the class where count is defined. However, there is no
rule against using it inside the class. The full name, Game.count, can be used inside the
playGame() subroutine to refer to the member variable instead of the local variable. So, the
full scope rule is that the scope of a static member variable includes the entire class in which
it is defined, but where the simple name of the member variable is hidden by a local variable
or formal parameter name, the member variable must be referred to by its full name of the
form hclassNamei.hvariableNamei. (Scope rules for non-static members are similar to those
for static members, except that, as we shall see, non-static members cannot be used in static
subroutines.)
The scope of a formal parameter of a subroutine is the block that makes up the body of the
subroutine. The scope of a local variable extends from the declaration statement that defines
the variable to the end of the block in which the declaration occurs. As noted above, it is
possible to declare a loop control variable of a for loop in the for statement, as in “for (int
i=0; i < 10; i++)”. The scope of such a declaration is considered as a special case: It is
valid only within the for statement and does not extend to the remainder of the block that
contains the for statement.
It is not legal to redefine the name of a formal parameter or local variable within its scope,
even in a nested block. For example, this is not allowed:
void badSub(int y) {
int x;
while (y > 0) {
int x; // ERROR: x is already defined.
.
CHAPTER 4. SUBROUTINES 201

.
.
}
}
In many languages, this would be legal; the declaration of x in the while loop would hide
the original declaration. It is not legal in Java; however, once the block in which a variable is
declared ends, its name does become available for reuse in Java. For example:
void goodSub(int y) {
while (y > 10) {
int x;
.
.
.
// The scope of x ends here.
}
while (y > 0) {
int x; // OK: Previous declaration of x has expired.
.
.
.
}
}
You might wonder whether local variable names can hide subroutine names. This can’t
happen, for a reason that might be surprising. There is no rule that variables and subroutines
have to have different names. The computer can always tell whether a name refers to a variable
or to a subroutine, because a subroutine name is always followed by a left parenthesis. It’s
perfectly legal to have a variable called count and a subroutine called count in the same class.
(This is one reason why I often write subroutine names with parentheses, as when I talk about
the main() routine. It’s a good idea to think of the parentheses as part of the name.) Even
more is true: It’s legal to reuse class names to name variables and subroutines. The syntax
rules of Java guarantee that the computer can always tell when a name is being used as a class
name. A class name is a type, and so it can be used to declare variables and formal parameters
and to specify the return type of a function. This means that you could legally have a class
called Insanity in which you declare a function
static Insanity Insanity( Insanity Insanity ) { ... }
The first Insanity is the return type of the function. The second is the function name, the
third is the type of the formal parameter, and the fourth is the name of the formal parameter.
However, please remember that not everything that is possible is a good idea!
Exercises 202

Exercises for Chapter 4

1. To “capitalize” a string means to change the first letter of each word in the string to upper (solution)
case (if it is not already upper case). For example, a capitalized version of “Now is the time
to act!” is “Now Is The Time To Act!”. Write a subroutine named printCapitalized
that will print a capitalized version of a string to standard output. The string to be printed
should be a parameter to the subroutine. Test your subroutine with a main() routine that
gets a line of input from the user and applies the subroutine to it.
Note that a letter is the first letter of a word if it is not immediately preceded in the
string by another letter. Recall from Exercise 3.4 that there is a standard boolean-valued
function Character.isLetter(char) that can be used to test whether its parameter is a
letter. There is another standard char-valued function, Character.toUpperCase(char),
that returns a capitalized version of the single character passed to it as a parameter. That
is, if the parameter is a letter, it returns the upper-case version. If the parameter is not a
letter, it just returns a copy of the parameter.

2. The hexadecimal digits are the ordinary, base-10 digits ’0’ through ’9’ plus the letters ’A’ (solution)
through ’F’. In the hexadecimal system, these digits represent the values 0 through 15,
respectively. Write a function named hexValue that uses a switch statement to find the
hexadecimal value of a given character. The character is a parameter to the function, and
its hexadecimal value is the return value of the function. You should count lower case
letters ’a’ through ’f’ as having the same value as the corresponding upper case letters.
If the parameter is not one of the legal hexadecimal digits, return -1 as the value of the
function.
A hexadecimal integer is a sequence of hexadecimal digits, such as 34A7, ff8, 174204, or
FADE. If str is a string containing a hexadecimal integer, then the corresponding base-10
integer can be computed as follows:
value = 0;
for ( i = 0; i < str.length(); i++ )
value = value*16 + hexValue( str.charAt(i) );
Of course, this is not valid if str contains any characters that are not hexadecimal digits.
Write a program that reads a string from the user. If all the characters in the string are
hexadecimal digits, print out the corresponding base-10 value. If not, print out an error
message.

3. Write a function that simulates rolling a pair of dice until the total on the dice comes up (solution)
to be a given number. The number that you are rolling for is a parameter to the function.
The number of times you have to roll the dice is the return value of the function. The
parameter should be one of the possible totals: 2, 3, . . . , 12. The function should throw
an IllegalArgumentException if this is not the case. Use your function in a program that
computes and prints the number of rolls it takes to get snake eyes. (Snake eyes means
that the total showing on the dice is 2.)

4. This exercise builds on Exercise 4.3. Every time you roll the dice repeatedly, trying to (solution)
get a given total, the number of rolls it takes can be different. The question naturally
arises, what’s the average number of rolls to get a given total? Write a function that
performs the experiment of rolling to get a given total 10000 times. The desired total is
Exercises 203

a parameter to the subroutine. The average number of rolls is the return value. Each
individual experiment should be done by calling the function you wrote for Exercise 4.3.
Now, write a main program that will call your function once for each of the possible totals
(2, 3, ..., 12). It should make a table of the results, something like:
Total On Dice Average Number of Rolls
------------- -----------------------
2 35.8382
3 18.0607
. .
. .

5. This exercise asks you to write a few lambda expressions and a function that returns a (solution)
lambda expression as its value. Suppose that a function interface ArrayProcessor is defined
as
public interface ArrayProcessor {
double apply( double[] array );
}
Write a class that defines four public static final variables of type ArrayProcessor
that process an array in the following ways: find the maximum value in the array, find the
minimum value in an array, find the sum of the values in the array, and find the average
of the values in the array. In each case, the value of the variable should be given by a
lambda expression. The class should also define a function
public static ArrayProcessor counter( double value ) { ...
This function should return an ArrayProcessor that counts the number of times that value
occurs in an array. The return value should be given as a lambda expression.
The class should have a main() routine that tests your work. The program that you
write for this exercise will need access to the file ArrayProcessor.java, which defines the
functional interface.

6. The sample program RandomMosaicWalk.java from Section 4.7 shows a “disturbance” (solution)
that wanders around a grid of colored squares. When the disturbance visits a square,
the color of that square is changed. Here’s an idea for a variation on that program. In
the new version, all the squares start out with the default color, black. Every time the
disturbance visits a square, a small amount is added to the green component of the color
of that square. The result will be a visually interesting effect, as the path followed by the
disturbance gradually turns a brighter and brighter green.
Write a subroutine that will add 25 to the green component of one of the squares in the
mosaic. (But don’t let the green component go over 255, since that’s the largest legal value
for a color component.) The row and column numbers of the square should be given as
parameters to the subroutine. Recall that you can discover the current green component
of the square in row r and column c with the function call Mosaic.getGreen(r,c). Use
your subroutine as a substitute for the changeToRandomColor() subroutine in the program
RandomMosaicWalk2.java. (This is the improved version of the program from Section 4.8
that uses named constants for the number of rows, number of columns, and square size.)
Set the number of rows and the number of columns to 80. Set the square size to 5.
By default, the rectangles in the mosaic have a “3D” appearance and a gray border
that makes them look nicer in the random walk program. But for this program, you
Exercises 204

want to turn off that effect. To do so, call Mosaic.setUse3DEffect(false) in the main
program.
Don’t forget that you will need Mosaic.java and MosaicCanvas.java to compile and run
your program, since they define non-standard classes that are required by the program.

7. For this exercise, you will do something even more interesting with the Mosaic class that (solution)
was discussed in Section 4.7. (Again, don’t forget that you will need Mosaic.java and
MosaicCanvas.java to compile and run your program.)
The program that you write for this exercise should start by filling a mosaic with
random colors. Then repeat the following until the user closes the mosaic window: Select
one of the rectangles in the mosaic at random. Then select one of the neighboring
rectangles—above it, below it, to the left of it, or to the right of it. Copy the color
of the originally selected rectangle to the selected neighbor, so that the two rectangles
now have the same color.
As this process is repeated over and over, it becomes more and more likely that
neighboring squares will have the same color. The result is to build up larger color
patches. On the other hand, once the last square of a given color disappears, there is
no way for that color to ever reappear. (Extinction is forever!) If you let the program run
long enough, eventually the entire mosaic will be one uniform color.

8. Write a program that administers a basic addition quiz to the user. There should be (solution)
ten questions. Each question is a simple addition problem such as 17 + 42, where the
numbers in the problem are chosen at random (and are not too big). The program should
ask the user all ten questions and get the user’s answers. After asking all the questions, the
user should print each question again, with the user’s answer. If the user got the answer
right, the program should say so; if not, the program should give the correct answer. At
the end, tell the user their score on the quiz, where each correct answer counts for ten
points.
The program should use three subroutines, one to create the quiz, one to administer
the quiz, and one to grade the quiz. It can use three arrays, with three global variables
of type int[ ], to refer to the arrays. The first array holds the first number from every
question, the second holds the second number from every questions, and the third holds
the user’s answers.
Quiz 205

Quiz on Chapter 4
(answers)

1. A “black box” has an interface and an implementation. Explain what is meant by the
terms interface and implementation.

2. A subroutine is said to have a contract. What is meant by the contract of a subroutine?

When you want to use a subroutine, why is it important to understand its contract? The
contract has both “syntactic” and “semantic” aspects. What is the syntactic aspect?
What is the semantic aspect?

3. Briefly explain how subroutines can be useful in the top-down design of programs.

4. Discuss the concept of parameters. What are parameters for? What is the difference
between formal parameters and actual parameters?

5. Give two different reasons for using named constants (declared with the final modifier).

6. What is an API? Give an example.

7. What might the following expression mean in a program?

(a,b) -> a*a + b*b + 1

8. Suppose that SupplyInt is a functional interface that defines the method public int get().
Write a lambda expression of type SupplyInt that gets a random integer in the range 1 to
6 inclusive. Write another lambda expression of type SupplyInt that gets an int by asking
the user to enter an integer and then returning the user’s response.

9. Write a subroutine named “stars” that will output a line of stars to standard output. (A
star is the character “*”.) The number of stars should be given as a parameter to the
subroutine. Use a for loop. For example, the command “stars(20)” would output
********************

10. Write a main() routine that uses the subroutine that you wrote for Question 7 to output
10 lines of stars with 1 star in the first line, 2 stars in the second line, and so on, as shown
below.
*
**
***
****
*****
******
*******
********
*********
**********
Quiz 206

11. Write a function named countChars that has a String and a char as parameters. The
function should count the number of times the character occurs in the string, and it should
return the result as the value of the function.

12. Write a subroutine with three parameters of type int. The subroutine should determine
which of its parameters is smallest. The value of the smallest parameter should be returned
as the value of the subroutine.

13. Write a function that finds the average of the first N elements of an array of type double.
The array and N are parameters to the subroutine.

14. Explain the purpose of the following function, and explain how it works:
static int[] stripZeros( int[] list ) {
int count = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < list.length; i++) {
if ( list[i] != 0 )
count++;
}
int[] newList;
newList = new int[count];
int j = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < list.length; i++) {
if ( list[i] != 0 ) {
newList[j] = list[i];
j++;
}
}
return newList;
}
Chapter 5

Programming in the Large II:

Objects and Classes

Whereas a subroutine represents a single task, an object can encapsulate both data (in
the form of instance variables) and a number of different tasks or “behaviors” related to that
data (in the form of instance methods). Therefore objects provide another, more sophisticated
type of structure that can be used to help manage the complexity of large programs.
The first four sections of this chapter introduce the basic things you need to know to work
with objects and to define simple classes. The remaining sections cover more advanced topics;
you might not understand them fully the first time through. In particular, Section 5.5 covers the
most central ideas of object-oriented programming: inheritance and polymorphism. However,
in this textbook, we will generally use these ideas in a limited form, by creating independent
classes and building on existing classes rather than by designing entire hierarchies of classes
from scratch.

5.1 Objects, Instance Methods, and Instance Variables

Object-oriented programming (OOP) represents an attempt to make programs more
closely model the way people think about and deal with the world. In the older styles of
programming, a programmer who is faced with some problem must identify a computing task
that needs to be performed in order to solve the problem. Programming then consists of
finding a sequence of instructions that will accomplish that task. But at the heart of object-
oriented programming, instead of tasks we find objects—entities that have behaviors, that hold
information, and that can interact with one another. Programming consists of designing a set
of objects that somehow model the problem at hand. Software objects in the program can
represent real or abstract entities in the problem domain. This is supposed to make the design
of the program more natural and hence easier to get right and easier to understand.
To some extent, OOP is just a change in point of view. We can think of an object in standard
programming terms as nothing more than a set of variables together with some subroutines for
manipulating those variables. In fact, it is possible to use object-oriented techniques in any
programming language. However, there is a big difference between a language that makes OOP
possible and one that actively supports it. An object-oriented programming language such as
Java includes a number of features that make it very different from a standard language. In
order to make effective use of those features, you have to “orient” your thinking correctly.
As I have mentioned before, in the context of object-oriented programming, subroutines are

207
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 208

often referred to as methods. Now that we are starting to use objects, I will be using the term
“method” more often than “subroutine.”

5.1.1 Objects, Classes, and Instances

Objects are closely related to classes. We have already been working with classes for several
chapters, and we have seen that a class can contain variables and methods (that is, subroutines).
If an object is also a collection of variables and methods, how do they differ from classes? And
why does it require a different type of thinking to understand and use them effectively? In the
one section where we worked with objects rather than classes, Section 3.9, it didn’t seem to
make much difference: We just left the word “static” out of the subroutine definitions!
I have said that classes “describe” objects, or more exactly that the non-static portions of
classes describe objects. But it’s probably not very clear what this means. The more usual
terminology is to say that objects belong to classes, but this might not be much clearer. (There
is a real shortage of English words to properly distinguish all the concepts involved. An object
certainly doesn’t “belong” to a class in the same way that a member variable “belongs” to a
class.) From the point of view of programming, it is more exact to say that classes are used
to create objects. A class is a kind of factory—or blueprint—for constructing objects. The
non-static parts of the class specify, or describe, what variables and methods the objects will
contain. This is part of the explanation of how objects differ from classes: Objects are created
and destroyed as the program runs, and there can be many objects with the same structure, if
they are created using the same class.
Consider a simple class whose job is to group together a few static member variables. For
example, the following class could be used to store information about the person who is using
the program:
class UserData {
static String name;
static int age;
}
In a program that uses this class, there is only one copy of each of the variables UserData.name
and UserData.age. When the class is loaded into the computer, there is a section of memory
devoted to the class, and that section of memory includes space for the values of the variables
name and age. We can picture the class in memory as looking like this:

class UVWXYata

name:

age:

An important point is that the static member variables are part of the representation of
the class in memory. Their full names, UserData.name and UserData.age, use the name of
the class, since they are part of the class. When we use class UserData to represent the user
of the program, there can only be one user, since we only have memory space to store data
about one user. Note that the class, UserData, and the variables it contains exist as long as
the program runs. (That is essentially what it means to be “static.”) Now, consider a similar
class that includes some non-static variables:
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 209

class PlayerData {
static int playerCount;
String name;
int age;
}
I’ve also included a static variable in the PlayerData class. Here, the static variable
playerCount is stored as part of the representation of the class in memory. Its full name
is PlayerData.playerCount, and there is only one of it, which exists as long as the program
runs. However, the other two variables in the class definition are non-static. There is no such
variable as PlayerData.name or PlayerData.age, since non-static variables do not become
part of the class itself. But the PlayerData class can be used to create objects. There can be
many objects created using the class, and each one will have its own variables called name and
age. This is what it means for the non-static parts of the class to be a template for objects:
Every object gets its own copy of the non-static part of the class. We can visualize the situation
in the computer’s memory after several objects have been created like this:

class PlayerData

playerCount: 3

(constructor)

instanceof PlayerData

instanceof PlayerData name:

name: age:

age:
instanceof PlayerData

name:

age:

Note that the static variable playerCount is part of the class, and there is only one copy.
On the other hand, every object contains a name and an age. An object that is created from
a class is called an instance of that class, and as the picture shows, every object “knows”
which class was used to create it. I’ve shown class PlayerData as containing something called a
“constructor;” the constructor is a subroutine that creates objects.
Now there can be many “players,” because we can make new objects to represent new
players on demand. A program might use the PlayerData class to store information about
multiple players in a game. Each player has a name and an age. When a player joins the game,
a new PlayerData object can be created to represent that player. If a player leaves the game,
the PlayerData object that represents that player can be destroyed. A system of objects in
the program is being used to dynamically model what is happening in the game. You can’t
do this with static variables! “Dynamic” is the opposite of “static.”
∗ ∗ ∗
An object that is created using a class is said to be an instance of that class. We will
sometimes say that the object belongs to the class. The variables that the object contains are
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 210

called instance variables. The methods (that is, subroutines) that the object contains are
called instance methods. For example, if the PlayerData class, as defined above, is used to
create an object, then that object is an instance of the PlayerData class, and name and age
are instance variables in the object.
My examples here don’t include any methods, but methods work similarly to variables.
Static methods are part of the class; non-static, or instance, methods become part of objects
created from the class. It’s not literally true that each object contains its own copy of the actual
compiled code for an instance method. But logically an instance method is part of the object,
and I will continue to say that the object “contains” the instance method.
Note that you should distinguish between the source code for the class, and the class itself
(in memory). The source code determines both the class and the objects that are created from
that class. The “static” definitions in the source code specify the things that are part of the
class itself (in the computer’s memory), whereas the non-static definitions in the source code
specify things that will become part of every instance object that is created from the class.
By the way, static member variables and static member subroutines in a class are sometimes
called class variables and class methods, since they belong to the class itself, rather than
to instances of that class.
As you can see, the static and the non-static portions of a class are very different things and
serve very different purposes. Many classes contain only static members, or only non-static,
and we will see only a few examples of classes that contain a mixture of the two.

5.1.2 Fundamentals of Objects

So far, I’ve been talking mostly in generalities, and I haven’t given you much of an idea about
what you have to put in a program if you want to work with objects. Let’s look at a specific
example to see how it works. Consider this extremely simplified version of a Student class,
which could be used to store information about students taking a course:
public class Student {
public String name; // Student’s name.
public double test1, test2, test3; // Grades on three tests.
public double getAverage() { // compute average test grade
return (test1 + test2 + test3) / 3;
}
} // end of class Student
None of the members of this class are declared to be static, so the class exists only for
creating objects. This class definition says that any object that is an instance of the Student
class will include instance variables named name, test1, test2, and test3, and it will include
an instance method named getAverage(). The names and test grades in different objects will
generally have different values. When called for a particular student, the method getAverage()
will compute an average using that student’s test grades. Different students can have different
averages. (Again, this is what it means to say that an instance method belongs to an individual
object, not to the class.)
In Java, a class is a type, similar to the built-in types such as int and boolean. So, a class
name can be used to specify the type of a variable in a declaration statement, or the type of
a formal parameter, or the return type of a function. For example, a program could define a
variable named std of type Student with the statement
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 211

Student std;
However, declaring a variable does not create an object! This is an important point, which is
related to this Very Important Fact:

In Java, no variable can ever hold an object.

A variable can only hold a reference to an object.

You should think of objects as floating around independently in the computer’s memory. In
fact, there is a special portion of memory called the heap where objects live. Instead of holding
an object itself, a variable holds the information necessary to find the object in memory. This
information is called a reference or pointer to the object. In effect, a reference to an object
is the address of the memory location where the object is stored. When you use a variable of
object type, the computer uses the reference in the variable to find the actual object.
In a program, objects are created using an operator called new, which creates an object and
returns a reference to that object. (In fact, the new operator calls a special subroutine called
a “constructor” in the class.) For example, assuming that std is a variable of type Student,
declared as above, the assignment statement
std = new Student();
would create a new object which is an instance of the class Student, and it would store a
reference to that object in the variable std. The value of the variable is a reference, or pointer,
to the object. The object itself is somewhere in the heap. It is not quite true, then, to say that
the object is the “value of the variable std” (though sometimes it is hard to avoid using this
terminology). It is certainly not at all true to say that the object is “stored in the variable
std.” The proper terminology is that “the variable std refers to or points to the object,”
and I will try to stick to that terminology as much as possible. If I ever say something like “std
is an object,” you should read it as meaning “std is a variable that refers to an object.”
So, suppose that the variable std refers to an object that is an instance of class Student.
That object contains instance variables name, test1, test2, and test3. These instance
variables can be referred to as std.name, std.test1, std.test2, and std.test3. This follows
the usual naming convention that when B is part of A, then the full name of B is A.B. For
example, a program might include the lines
System.out.println("Hello, " + std.name + ". Your test grades are:");
System.out.println(std.test1);
System.out.println(std.test2);
System.out.println(std.test3);
This would output the name and test grades from the object to which std refers. Similarly,
std can be used to call the getAverage() instance method in the object by saying
std.getAverage(). To print out the student’s average, you could say:
System.out.println( "Your average is " + std.getAverage() );
More generally, you could use std.name any place where a variable of type String is legal.
You can use it in expressions. You can assign a value to it. You can even use it to call subroutines
from the String class. For example, std.name.length() is the number of characters in the
student’s name.
It is possible for a variable like std, whose type is given by a class, to refer to no object at
all. We say in this case that std holds a null pointer or null reference. The null pointer is
written in Java as: null. You can store a null reference in the variable std by saying
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 212

std = null;
null is an actual value that is stored in the variable, not a pointer to something else. It is not
correct to say that the variable “points to null”; in fact, the variable is null. For example, you
can test whether the value of std is null by testing
if (std == null) . . .
If the value of a variable is null, then it is, of course, illegal to refer to instance variables
or instance methods through that variable—since there is no object, and hence no instance
variables to refer to! For example, if the value of the variable std is null, then it would be
illegal to refer to std.test1. If your program attempts to use a null pointer illegally in this
way, the result is an error called a null pointer exception. When this happens while the
program is running, an exception of type NullPointerException is thrown.
Let’s look at a sequence of statements that work with objects:
Student std, std1, // Declare four variables of
std2, std3; // type Student.
std = new Student(); // Create a new object belonging
// to the class Student, and
// store a reference to that
// object in the variable std.
std1 = new Student(); // Create a second Student object
// and store a reference to
// it in the variable std1.
std2 = std1; // Copy the reference value in std1
// into the variable std2.
std3 = null; // Store a null reference in the
// variable std3.
std.name = "John Smith"; // Set values of some instance variables.
std1.name = "Mary Jones";
// (Other instance variables have default
// initial values of zero.)
After the computer executes these statements, the situation in the computer’s memory looks
like this:
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 213

std:

std1:

std2:

std3: null

instanceof Z[\]^_t instanceof Student

name: name:
[^`[bd 0 test1: 0
[^`[ed 0 test2: 0
[^`[fd 0 test3: 0

g^[hverage() getAverage()

instanceof String instanceof String

"Mary Jones" "John Smith"

In this picture, when a variable contains a reference to an object, the value of that variable is
shown as an arrow pointing to the object. Note, by the way, that the Strings are objects! The
variable std3, with a value of null, doesn’t point anywhere. The arrows from std1 and std2
both point to the same object. This illustrates a Very Important Point:

When one object variable is assigned

to another, only a reference is copied.
The object referred to is not copied.

When the assignment “std2 = std1;” was executed, no new object was created. Instead, std2
was set to refer to the very same object that std1 refers to. This is to be expected, since the
assignment statement just copies the value that is stored in std1 into std2, and that value
is a pointer, not an object. But this has some consequences that might be surprising. For
example, std1.name and std2.name are two different names for the same variable, namely
the instance variable in the object that both std1 and std2 refer to. After the string "Mary
Jones" is assigned to the variable std1.name, it is also true that the value of std2.name is
"Mary Jones". There is a potential for a lot of confusion here, but you can help protect yourself
from it if you keep telling yourself, “The object is not in the variable. The variable just holds
a pointer to the object.”
You can test objects for equality and inequality using the operators == and !=, but
here again, the semantics are different from what you are used to. When you make a
test “if (std1 == std2)”, you are testing whether the values stored in std1 and std2
are the same. But the values that you are comparing are references to objects; they are
not objects. So, you are testing whether std1 and std2 refer to the same object. This
is fine, if it’s what you want to do. But sometimes, what you want to check is whether
the instance variables in the objects have the same values. To do that, you would need to
ask whether “std1.test1 == std2.test1 && std1.test2 == std2.test2 && std1.test3
== std2.test3 && std1.name.equals(std2.name)”.
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 214

I’ve remarked previously that Strings are objects, and I’ve shown the strings "Mary Jones"
and "John Smith" as objects in the above illustration. (Strings are special objects, treated
by Java in a special way, and I haven’t attempted to show the actual internal structure of the
String objects.) Since strings are objects, a variable of type String can only hold a reference
to a string, not the string itself. This explains why using the == operator to test strings for
equality is not a good idea. Suppose that greeting is a variable of type String, and that
it refers to the string "Hello". Then would the test greeting == "Hello" be true? Well,
maybe, maybe not. The variable greeting and the String literal "Hello" each refer to a string
that contains the characters H-e-l-l-o. But the strings could still be different objects, that just
happen to contain the same characters; in that case, greeting == "Hello" would be false.
The function greeting.equals("Hello") tests whether greeting and "Hello" contain the
same characters, which is almost certainly the question you want to ask. The expression
greeting == "Hello" tests whether greeting and "Hello" contain the same characters
stored in the same memory location. (Of course, a String variable such as greeting
can also contain the special value null, and it would make sense to use the == operator to test
whether “greeting == null”.)
∗ ∗ ∗
The fact that variables hold references to objects, not objects themselves, has a couple of
other consequences that you should be aware of. They follow logically, if you just keep in mind
the basic fact that the object is not stored in the variable. The object is somewhere else; the
variable points to it.
Suppose that a variable that refers to an object is declared to be final. This means that
the value stored in the variable can never be changed, once the variable has been initialized.
The value stored in the variable is a reference to the object. So the variable will continue to
refer to the same object as long as the variable exists. However, this does not prevent the data
in the object from changing. The variable is final, not the object. It’s perfectly legal to say
final Student stu = new Student();
stu.name = "John Doe"; // Change data in the object;
// The value stored in stu is not changed!
// It still refers to the same object.
Next, suppose that obj is a variable that refers to an object. Let’s consider what happens
when obj is passed as an actual parameter to a subroutine. The value of obj is assigned to
a formal parameter in the subroutine, and the subroutine is executed. The subroutine has no
power to change the value stored in the variable, obj. It only has a copy of that value. However,
the value is a reference to an object. Since the subroutine has a reference to the object, it can
change the data stored in the object. After the subroutine ends, obj still points to the same
object, but the data stored in the object might have changed. Suppose x is a variable of type
int and stu is a variable of type Student. Compare:
void dontChange(int z) { void change(Student s) {
z = 42; s.name = "Fred";
} }
The lines: The lines:
x = 17; stu.name = "Jane";
dontChange(x); change(stu);
System.out.println(x); System.out.println(stu.name);
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 215

output the value 17. output the value "Fred".

The value of x is not The value of stu is not
changed by the subroutine, changed, but stu.name is changed.
which is equivalent to This is equivalent to
z = x; s = stu;
z = 42; s.name = "Fred";

5.1.3 Getters and Setters

When writing new classes, it’s a good idea to pay attention to the issue of access control. Recall
that making a member of a class public makes it accessible from anywhere, including from
other classes. On the other hand, a private member can only be used in the class where it is
defined.
In the opinion of many programmers, almost all member variables should be declared
private. This gives you complete control over what can be done with the variable. Even
if the variable itself is private, you can allow other classes to find out what its value is by
providing a public accessor method that returns the value of the variable. For example,
if your class contains a private member variable, title, of type String, you can provide a
method
public String getTitle() {
return title;
}
that returns the value of title. By convention, the name of an accessor method for a variable
is obtained by capitalizing the name of variable and adding “get” in front of the name. So, for
the variable title, we get an accessor method named “get” + “Title”, or getTitle(). Because
of this naming convention, accessor methods are more often referred to as getter methods. A
getter method provides “read access” to a variable. (Sometimes for boolean variables, “is” is
used in place of “get”. For example, a getter for a boolean member variable named done might
be called isDone().)
You might also want to allow “write access” to a private variable. That is, you might
want to make it possible for other classes to specify a new value for the variable. This is done
with a setter method . (If you don’t like simple, Anglo-Saxon words, you can use the fancier
term mutator method .) The name of a setter method should consist of “set” followed by a
capitalized copy of the variable’s name, and it should have a parameter with the same type as
the variable. A setter method for the variable title could be written
public void setTitle( String newTitle ) {
title = newTitle;
}
It is actually very common to provide both a getter and a setter method for a private
member variable. Since this allows other classes both to see and to change the value of the
variable, you might wonder why not just make the variable public? The reason is that getters
and setters are not restricted to simply reading and writing the variable’s value. In fact, they
can take any action at all. For example, a getter method might keep track of the number of
times that the variable has been accessed:
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 216

public String getTitle() {

titleAccessCount++; // Increment member variable titleAccessCount.
return title;
}
and a setter method might check that the value that is being assigned to the variable is legal:
public void setTitle( String newTitle ) {
if ( newTitle == null ) // Don’t allow null strings as titles!
title = "(Untitled)"; // Use an appropriate default value instead.
else
title = newTitle;
}
Even if you can’t think of any extra chores to do in a getter or setter method, you might change
your mind in the future when you redesign and improve your class. If you’ve used a getter and
setter from the beginning, you can make the modification to your class without affecting any of
the classes that use your class. The private member variable is not part of the public interface
of your class; only the public getter and setter methods are, and you are free to change their
implementations without changing the public interface of your class. If you haven’t used get
and set from the beginning, you’ll have to contact everyone who uses your class and tell them,
“Sorry people, you’ll have to track down every use that you’ve made of this variable and change
your code to use my new get and set methods instead.”
A couple of final notes: Some advanced aspects of Java rely on the naming convention
for getter and setter methods, so it’s a good idea to follow the convention rigorously. And
though I’ve been talking about using getter and setter methods for a variable, you can define
get and set methods even if there is no variable. A getter and/or setter method defines a
property of the class, that might or might not correspond to a variable. For example, if a class
includes a public void instance method with signature setValue(double), then the class has
a “property” named value of type double, and it has this property whether or not the class
has a member variable named value.

5.1.4 Arrays and Objects

As I noted in Subsection 3.8.1, arrays are objects. Like Strings they are special objects, with
their own unique syntax. An array type such as int[ ] or String[ ] is actually a class, and arrays
are created using a special version of the new operator. As in the case for other object variables,
an array variable can never hold an actual array—only a reference to an array object. The array
object itself exists in the heap. It is possible for an array variable to hold the value null, which
means there is no actual array.
For example, suppose that list is a variable of type int[ ]. If the value of list is null,
then any attempt to access list.length or an array element list[i] would be an error and
would cause an exception of type NullPointerException. If newlist is another variable of type
int[ ], then the assignment statement
newlist = list;
only copies the reference value in list into newlist. If list is null, the result is that newlist
will also be null. If list points to an array, the assignment statement does not make a copy
of the array. It just sets newlist to refer to the same array as list. For example, the output
of the following code segment
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 217

list = new int[3];

list[1] = 17;
newlist = list; // newlist points to the same array as list!
newlist[1] = 42;
System.out.println( list[1] );
would be 42, not 17, since list[1] and newlist[1] are just different names for the same
element in the array. All this is very natural, once you understand that arrays are objects and
array variables hold pointers to arrays.
This fact also comes into play when an array is passed as a parameter to a subroutine. The
value that is copied into the subroutine is a pointer to the array. The array is not copied. Since
the subroutine has a reference to the original array, any changes that it makes to elements of
the array are being made to the original and will persist after the subroutine returns.
∗ ∗ ∗
Arrays are objects. They can also hold objects. The base type of an array can be a class.
We have already seen this when we used arrays of type String[ ], but any class can be used as
the base type. For example, suppose Student is the class defined earlier in this section. Then
we can have arrays of type Student[ ]. For an array of type Student[ ], each element of the array
is a variable of type Student. To store information about 30 students, we could use an array:
Student[] classlist; // Declare a variable of type Student[].
classlist = new Student[30]; // The variable now points to an array.
The array has 30 elements, classlist[0], classlist[1], . . . classlist[29]. When the array
is created, it is filled with the default initial value, which for an object type is null. So, although
we have 30 array elements of type Student, we don’t yet have any actual Student objects! All
we have is 30 nulls. If we want student objects, we have to create them:
Student[] classlist;
classlist = new Student[30];
for ( int i = 0; i < 30; i++ ) {
classlist[i] = new Student();
}
Once we have done this, each classlist[i] points to an object of type Student. If we want
to talk about the name of student number 3, we can use classlist[3].name. The average
for student number i can be computed by calling classlist[i].getAverage(). You can do
anything with classlist[i] that you could do with any other variable of type Student.

5.2 Constructors and Object Initialization

Object types in Java are very different from the primitive types. Simply declaring a variable
whose type is given as a class does not automatically create an object of that class. Objects
must be explicitly constructed . For the computer, the process of constructing an object means,
first, finding some unused memory in the heap that can be used to hold the object and, second,
filling in the object’s instance variables. As a programmer, you don’t care where in memory
the object is stored, but you will usually want to exercise some control over what initial values
are stored in a new object’s instance variables. In many cases, you will also want to do more
complicated initialization or bookkeeping every time an object is created.
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 218

5.2.1 Initializing Instance Variables

An instance variable can be assigned an initial value in its declaration, just like any other
variable. For example, consider a class named PairOfDice. An object of this class will represent
a pair of dice. It will contain two instance variables to represent the numbers showing on the
dice and an instance method for rolling the dice:
public class PairOfDice {
public int die1 = 3; // Number showing on the first die.
public int die2 = 4; // Number showing on the second die.
public void roll() {
// Roll the dice by setting each of the dice to be
// a random number between 1 and 6.
die1 = (int)(Math.random()*6) + 1;
die2 = (int)(Math.random()*6) + 1;
}
} // end class PairOfDice
The instance variables die1 and die2 are initialized to the values 3 and 4 respectively. These
initializations are executed whenever a PairOfDice object is constructed. It’s important to
understand when and how this happens. There can be many PairOfDice objects. Each time one
is created, it gets its own instance variables, and the assignments “die1 = 3” and “die2 = 4”
are executed to fill in the values of those variables. To make this clearer, consider a variation
of the PairOfDice class:
public class PairOfDice {
public int die1 = (int)(Math.random()*6) + 1;
public int die2 = (int)(Math.random()*6) + 1;
public void roll() {
die1 = (int)(Math.random()*6) + 1;
die2 = (int)(Math.random()*6) + 1;
}
} // end class PairOfDice
Here, every time a new PairOfDice is created, the dice are initialized to random values, as if a
new pair of dice were being thrown onto the gaming table. Since the initialization is executed
for each new object, a set of random initial values will be computed for each new pair of dice.
Different pairs of dice can have different initial values. For initialization of static member
variables, of course, the situation is quite different. There is only one copy of a static variable,
and initialization of that variable is executed just once, when the class is first loaded.
If you don’t provide any initial value for an instance variable, a default initial value
is provided automatically. Instance variables of numerical type (int, double, etc.) are
automatically initialized to zero if you provide no other values; boolean variables are initialized
to false; and char variables, to the Unicode character with code number zero. An instance
variable can also be a variable of object type. For such variables, the default initial value is
null. (In particular, since Strings are objects, the default initial value for String variables is
null.)
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 219

5.2.2 Constructors
Objects are created with the operator, new. For example, a program that wants to use a
PairOfDice object could say:
PairOfDice dice; // Declare a variable of type PairOfDice.
dice = new PairOfDice(); // Construct a new object and store a
// reference to it in the variable.
In this example, “new PairOfDice()” is an expression that allocates memory for the object,
initializes the object’s instance variables, and then returns a reference to the object. This
reference is the value of the expression, and that value is stored by the assignment statement
in the variable, dice. So, after the assignment statement is executed, dice refers to the newly
created object. Part of this expression, “PairOfDice()”, looks like a subroutine call, and that
is no accident. It is, in fact, a call to a special type of subroutine called a constructor . This
might puzzle you, since there is no such subroutine in the class definition. However, every class
has at least one constructor. If the programmer doesn’t write a constructor definition in a class,
then the system will provide a default constructor for that class. This default constructor
does nothing beyond the basics: allocate memory and initialize instance variables. If you want
more than that to happen when an object is created, you can include one or more constructors
in the class definition.
The definition of a constructor looks much like the definition of any other subroutine, with
three exceptions. A constructor does not have any return type (not even void). The name
of the constructor must be the same as the name of the class in which it is defined. And the
only modifiers that can be used on a constructor definition are the access modifiers public,
private, and protected. (In particular, a constructor can’t be declared static.)
However, a constructor does have a subroutine body of the usual form, a block of statements.
There are no restrictions on what statements can be used. And a constructor can have a list
of formal parameters. In fact, the ability to include parameters is one of the main reasons for
using constructors. The parameters can provide data to be used in the construction of the
object. For example, a constructor for the PairOfDice class could provide the values that are
initially showing on the dice. Here is what the class would look like in that case:
public class PairOfDice {
public int die1; // Number showing on the first die.
public int die2; // Number showing on the second die.
public PairOfDice(int val1, int val2) {
// Constructor. Creates a pair of dice that
// are initially showing the values val1 and val2.
die1 = val1; // Assign specified values
die2 = val2; // to the instance variables.
}
public void roll() {
// Roll the dice by setting each of the dice to be
// a random number between 1 and 6.
die1 = (int)(Math.random()*6) + 1;
die2 = (int)(Math.random()*6) + 1;
}
} // end class PairOfDice
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 220

The constructor is declared as “public PairOfDice(int val1, int val2) ...”, with
no return type and with the same name as the name of the class. This is how the Java
compiler recognizes a constructor. The constructor has two parameters, and values for these
parameters must be provided when the constructor is called. For example, the expression
“new PairOfDice(3,4)” would create a PairOfDice object in which the values of the instance
variables die1 and die2 are initially 3 and 4. Of course, in a program, the value returned by
the constructor should be used in some way, as in
PairOfDice dice; // Declare a variable of type PairOfDice.
dice = new PairOfDice(1,1); // Let dice refer to a new PairOfDice
// object that initially shows 1, 1.
Now that we’ve added a constructor to the PairOfDice class, we can no longer create an
object by saying “new PairOfDice()”! The system provides a default constructor for a class
only if the class definition does not already include a constructor. In this version of PairOfDice,
there is only one constructor in the class, and it requires two actual parameters. However,
this is not a big problem, since we can add a second constructor to the class, one that has
no parameters. In fact, you can have as many different constructors as you want, as long as
their signatures are different, that is, as long as they have different numbers or types of formal
parameters. In the PairOfDice class, we might have a constructor with no parameters which
produces a pair of dice showing random numbers:
public class PairOfDice {
public int die1; // Number showing on the first die.
public int die2; // Number showing on the second die.
public PairOfDice() {
// Constructor. Rolls the dice, so that they initially
// show some random values.
roll(); // Call the roll() method to roll the dice.
}
public PairOfDice(int val1, int val2) {
// Constructor. Creates a pair of dice that
// are initially showing the values val1 and val2.
die1 = val1; // Assign specified values
die2 = val2; // to the instance variables.
}
public void roll() {
// Roll the dice by setting each of the dice to be
// a random number between 1 and 6.
die1 = (int)(Math.random()*6) + 1;
die2 = (int)(Math.random()*6) + 1;
}
} // end class PairOfDice
Now we have the option of constructing a PairOfDice object either with “new PairOfDice()”
or with “new PairOfDice(x,y)”, where x and y are int-valued expressions.
This class, once it is written, can be used in any program that needs to work with
one or more pairs of dice. None of those programs will ever have to use the obscure
incantation “(int)(Math.random()*6)+1”, because it’s done inside the PairOfDice class. And
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 221

the programmer, having once gotten the dice-rolling thing straight will never have to worry
about it again. Here, for example, is a main program that uses the PairOfDice class to count
how many times two pairs of dice are rolled before the two pairs come up showing the same
value. This illustrates once again that you can create several instances of the same class:
public class RollTwoPairs {
public static void main(String[] args) {
PairOfDice firstDice; // Refers to the first pair of dice.
firstDice = new PairOfDice();
PairOfDice secondDice; // Refers to the second pair of dice.
secondDice = new PairOfDice();
int countRolls; // Counts how many times the two pairs of
// dice have been rolled.
int total1; // Total showing on first pair of dice.
int total2; // Total showing on second pair of dice.
countRolls = 0;
do { // Roll the two pairs of dice until totals are the same.
firstDice.roll(); // Roll the first pair of dice.
total1 = firstDice.die1 + firstDice.die2; // Get total.
System.out.println("First pair comes up " + total1);
secondDice.roll(); // Roll the second pair of dice.
total2 = secondDice.die1 + secondDice.die2; // Get total.
System.out.println("Second pair comes up " + total2);
countRolls++; // Count this roll.
System.out.println(); // Blank line.
} while (total1 != total2);
System.out.println("It took " + countRolls
+ " rolls until the totals were the same.");
} // end main()
} // end class RollTwoPairs

∗ ∗ ∗
Constructors are subroutines, but they are subroutines of a special type. They are certainly
not instance methods, since they don’t belong to objects. Since they are responsible for creating
objects, they exist before any objects have been created. They are more like static member
subroutines, but they are not and cannot be declared to be static. In fact, according to the
Java language specification, they are technically not members of the class at all! In particular,
constructors are not referred to as “methods.”
Unlike other subroutines, a constructor can only be called using the new operator, in an
expression that has the form
new hclass-name i ( hparameter-list i )
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 222

where the hparameter-listi is possibly empty. I call this an expression because it computes and
returns a value, namely a reference to the object that is constructed. Most often, you will store
the returned reference in a variable, but it is also legal to use a constructor call in other ways,
for example as a parameter in a subroutine call or as part of a more complex expression. Of
course, if you don’t save the reference in a variable, you won’t have any way of referring to the
object that was just created.
A constructor call is more complicated than an ordinary subroutine or function call. It is
helpful to understand the exact steps that the computer goes through to execute a constructor
call:
1. First, the computer gets a block of unused memory in the heap, large enough to hold an
object of the specified type.
2. It initializes the instance variables of the object. If the declaration of an instance variable
specifies an initial value, then that value is computed and stored in the instance variable.
Otherwise, the default initial value is used.
3. The actual parameters in the constructor, if any, are evaluated, and the values are assigned
to the formal parameters of the constructor.
4. The statements in the body of the constructor, if any, are executed.
5. A reference to the object is returned as the value of the constructor call.
The end result of this is that you have a reference to a newly constructed object.
∗ ∗ ∗
For another example, let’s rewrite the Student class that was used in Section 1. I’ll add a
constructor, and I’ll also take the opportunity to make the instance variable, name, private.
public class Student {
private String name; // Student’s name.
public double test1, test2, test3; // Grades on three tests.
public Student(String theName) {
// Constructor for Student objects;
// provides a name for the Student.
// The name can’t be null.
if ( theName == null )
throw new IllegalArgumentException("name can’t be null");
name = theName;
}
public String getName() {
// Getter method for reading the value of the private
// instance variable, name.
return name;
}
public double getAverage() {
// Compute average test grade.
return (test1 + test2 + test3) / 3;
}
} // end of class Student
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 223

An object of type Student contains information about some particular student. The
constructor in this class has a parameter of type String, which specifies the name of that
student. Objects of type Student can be created with statements such as:
std = new Student("John Smith");
std1 = new Student("Mary Jones");
In the original version of this class, the value of name had to be assigned by a program after it
created the object of type Student. There was no guarantee that the programmer would always
remember to set the name properly. In the new version of the class, there is no way to create
a Student object except by calling the constructor, and that constructor automatically sets the
name. Furthermore, the constructor makes it impossible to have a student object whose name is
null. The programmer’s life is made easier, and whole hordes of frustrating bugs are squashed
before they even have a chance to be born.
Another type of guarantee is provided by the private modifier. Since the instance variable,
name, is private, there is no way for any part of the program outside the Student class to get at
the name directly. The program sets the value of name, indirectly, when it calls the constructor.
I’ve provided a getter function, getName(), that can be used from outside the class to find out
the name of the student. But I haven’t provided any setter method or other way to change the
name. Once a student object is created, it keeps the same name as long as it exists.
Note that it would be legal, and good style, to declare the variable name to be “final”
in this class. An instance variable can be final provided it is either assigned a value in its
declaration or is assigned a value in every constructor in the class. It is illegal to assign a value
to a final instance variable, except inside a constructor.
∗ ∗ ∗
Let’s take this example a little farther to illustrate one more aspect of classes: What happens
when you mix static and non-static in the same class? In that case, it’s legal for an instance
method in the class to use static member variables or call static member subroutines. An object
knows what class it belongs to, and it can refer to static members of that class. But there is
only one copy of the static member, in the class itself. Effectively, all the objects share one
copy of the static member.
As an example, consider a version of the Student class to which I’ve added an ID for each
student and a static member called nextUniqueID. Although there is an ID variable in each
student object, there is only one nextUniqueID variable.
public class Student {
private String name; // Student’s name.
public double test1, test2, test3; // Grades on three tests.
private int ID; // Unique ID number for this student.
private static int nextUniqueID = 0;
// keep track of next available unique ID number
Student(String theName) {
// Constructor for Student objects; provides a name for the Student,
// and assigns the student a unique ID number.
name = theName;
nextUniqueID++;
ID = nextUniqueID;
}
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 224

public String getName() {

// Getter method for reading the value of the private
// instance variable, name.
return name;
}
public int getID() {
// Getter method for reading the value of ID.
return ID;
}
public double getAverage() {
// Compute average test grade.
return (test1 + test2 + test3) / 3;
}
} // end of class Student
Since nextUniqueID is a static variable, the initialization “nextUniqueID = 0” is done
only once, when the class is first loaded. Whenever a Student object is constructed and the
constructor says “nextUniqueID++;”, it’s always the same static member variable that is being
incremented. When the very first Student object is created, nextUniqueID becomes 1. When
the second object is created, nextUniqueID becomes 2. After the third object, it becomes 3.
And so on. The constructor stores the new value of nextUniqueID in the ID variable of the
object that is being created. Of course, ID is an instance variable, so every object has its own
individual ID variable. The class is constructed so that each student will automatically get a
different value for its ID variable. Furthermore, the ID variable is private, so there is no way
for this variable to be tampered with after the object has been created. You are guaranteed,
just by the way the class is designed, that every student object will have its own permanent,
unique identification number. Which is kind of cool if you think about it.
(Unfortunately, if you think about it a bit more, it turns out that the guarantee isn’t quite
absolute. The guarantee is valid in programs that use a single thread. But, as a preview of the
difficulties of parallel programming, I’ll note that in multi-threaded programs, where several
things can be going on at the same time, things can get a bit strange. In a multi-threaded
program, it is possible that two threads are creating Student objects at exactly the same time,
and it becomes possible for both objects to get the same ID number. We’ll come back to this
in Subsection 12.1.3, where you will learn how to fix the problem.)

5.2.3 Garbage Collection

So far, this section has been about creating objects. What about destroying them? In Java,
the destruction of objects takes place automatically.
An object exists in the heap, and it can be accessed only through variables that hold
references to the object. What should be done with an object if there are no variables that
refer to it? Such things can happen. Consider the following two statements (though in reality,
you’d never do anything like this in consecutive statements!):
Student std = new Student("John Smith");
std = null;
In the first line, a reference to a newly created Student object is stored in the variable std. But
in the next line, the value of std is changed, and the reference to the Student object is gone. In
fact, there are now no references whatsoever to that object, in any variable. So there is no way
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 225

for the program ever to use the object again! It might as well not exist. In fact, the memory
occupied by the object should be reclaimed to be used for another purpose.
Java uses a procedure called garbage collection to reclaim memory occupied by objects
that are no longer accessible to a program. It is the responsibility of the system, not the
programmer, to keep track of which objects are “garbage.” In the above example, it was very
easy to see that the Student object had become garbage. Usually, it’s much harder. If an object
has been used for a while, there might be several references to the object stored in several
variables. The object doesn’t become garbage until all those references have been dropped.
In some other programming languages, it’s the programmer’s responsibility to delete the
garbage. Unfortunately, keeping track of memory usage is very error-prone, and many serious
program bugs are caused by such errors. A programmer might accidently delete an object even
though there are still references to that object. This is called a dangling pointer error , and
it leads to problems when the program tries to access an object that is no longer there. Another
type of error is a memory leak , where a programmer neglects to delete objects that are no
longer in use. This can lead to filling memory with objects that are completely inaccessible,
and the program might run out of memory even though, in fact, large amounts of memory are
being wasted.
Because Java uses garbage collection, such errors are simply impossible. Garbage collection
is an old idea and has been used in some programming languages since the 1960s. You might
wonder why all languages don’t use garbage collection. In the past, it was considered too slow
and wasteful. However, research into garbage collection techniques combined with the incredible
speed of modern computers have combined to make garbage collection feasible. Programmers
should rejoice.

5.3 Programming with Objects

There are several ways in which object-oriented concepts can be applied to the process
of designing and writing programs. The broadest of these is object-oriented analysis
and design which applies an object-oriented methodology to the earliest stages of program
development, during which the overall design of a program is created. Here, the idea is
to identify things in the problem domain that can be modeled as objects. On another
level, object-oriented programming encourages programmers to produce generalized software
components that can be used in a wide variety of programming projects.
Of course, for the most part, you will experience “generalized software components” by
using the standard classes that come along with Java. We begin this section by looking at some
built-in classes that are used for creating objects. At the end of the section, we will get back
to generalities.

5.3.1 Some Built-in Classes

Although the focus of object-oriented programming is generally on the design and implementa-
tion of new classes, it’s important not to forget that the designers of Java have already provided
a large number of reusable classes. Some of these classes are meant to be extended to produce
new classes, while others can be used directly to create useful objects. A true mastery of Java
requires familiarity with a large number of built-in classes—something that takes a lot of time
and experience to develop. Let’s take a moment to look at a few built-in classes that you might
find useful.
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 226

A string can be built up from smaller pieces using the + operator, but this is not always
efficient. If str is a String and ch is a character, then executing the command “str =
str + ch;” involves creating a whole new string that is a copy of str, with the value of
ch appended onto the end. Copying the string takes some time. Building up a long string
letter by letter would require a surprising amount of processing. The class StringBuilder makes
it possible to be efficient about building up a long string from a number of smaller pieces. To
do this, you must make an object belonging to the StringBuilder class. For example:
StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
(This statement both declares the variable builder and initializes it to refer to a newly created
StringBuilder object. Combining declaration with initialization was covered in Subsection 4.8.1
and works for objects just as it does for primitive types.)
Like a String, a StringBuilder contains a sequence of characters. However, it is possible
to add new characters onto the end of a StringBuilder without continually making copies
of the data that it already contains. If x is a value of any type and builder is the variable
defined above, then the command builder.append(x) will add x, converted into a string
representation, onto the end of the data that was already in the builder. This can be done more
efficiently than copying the data every time something is appended. A long string can be built
up in a StringBuilder using a sequence of append() commands. When the string is complete,
the function builder.toString() will return a copy of the string in the builder as an ordinary
value of type String. The StringBuilder class is in the standard package java.lang, so you can
use its simple name without importing it.
A number of useful classes are collected in the package java.util. For example, this
package contains classes for working with collections of objects. We will study such collection
classes extensively in Chapter 10. And we have already encountered java.util.Scanner in
Subsection 2.4.6. Another class in this package, java.util.Date, is used to represent times.
When a Date object is constructed without parameters, the result represents the current date
and time, so an easy way to display this information is:
System.out.println( new Date() );
Of course, since it is in the package java.util, in order to use the Date class in
your program, you must make it available by importing it with one of the statements
“import java.util.Date;” or “import java.util.*;” at the beginning of your program.
(See Subsection 4.6.3 for a discussion of packages and import.)
I will also mention the class java.util.Random. An object belonging to this class is a
source of random numbers (or, more precisely pseudorandom numbers). The standard function
Math.random() uses one of these objects behind the scenes to generate its random numbers.
An object of type Random can generate random integers, as well as random real numbers. If
randGen is created with the command:
Random randGen = new Random();
and if N is a positive integer, then randGen.nextInt(N) generates a random integer in the range
from 0 to N-1. For example, this makes it a little easier to roll a pair of dice. Instead of saying
“die1 = (int)(6*Math.random())+1;”, one can say “die1 = randGen.nextInt(6)+1;”.
(Since you also have to import the class java.util.Random and create the Random object,
you might not agree that it is actually easier.) An object of type Random can also be used to
generate so-called Gaussian distributed random real numbers.
Some of Java’s standard classes are used in GUI programming. You will encounter
many of them in Chapter 6. Here, I will mention only the class Color, from the package
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 227

javafx.scene.paint, so that I can use it in the next example. A Color object represents
a color that can be used for drawing. In Section 3.9, you encountered color constants such
as Color.RED. These constants are final static member variables in the Color class, and their
values are objects of type Color. It is also possible to create new color objects. Class Color has
a constructor new Color(r,g,b,a), which takes four double parameters to specify the red,
green, and blue components of the color, plus an “alpha” component that says how transparent
the color is. The parameters must be in the range 0.0 to 1.0. For example, a value of 0.0
for r means that the color contains no red, while a value of 1.0 means that the color contains
the maximum possible amount of red. When you draw with a partially transparent color, the
background shows through the color to some extent. A larger value of the fourth parameter
gives a color that is less transparent and more opaque.
A Color object has only a few instance methods that you are likely to use. Mainly, there
are functions like getRed() to get the individual color components of the color. There are no
“setter” methods to change the color components. In fact, a Color is an immutable object,
meaning that all of its instance variables are final and cannot be changed after the object is
created. Strings are another example of immutable objects, and we will make some of our own
later in this chapter.
The main point of all this, again, is that many problems have already been solved, and the
solutions are available in Java’s standard classes. If you are faced with a task that looks like
it should be fairly common, it might be worth looking through a Java reference to see whether
someone has already written a class that you can use.

5.3.2 The class “Object”

We have already seen that one of the major features of object-oriented programming is the
ability to create subclasses of a class. The subclass inherits all the properties or behaviors of
the class, but can modify and add to what it inherits. In Section 5.5, you’ll learn how to create
subclasses. What you don’t know yet is that every class in Java (with just one exception) is
a subclass of some other class. If you create a class and don’t explicitly make it a subclass of
some other class, then it automatically becomes a subclass of the special class named Object,
in package java.lang. (Object is the one class that is not a subclass of any other class.)
Class Object defines several instance methods that are inherited by every other class. These
methods can be used with any object whatsoever. I will mention two of them here. You will
encounter more of them later in the book.
The method equals(obj) is defined in class Object. It takes one parameter, which can
be any object. It is meant for testing whether two objects are “equal” but its definition gives
obj1.equals(obj2) the same meaning as obj1 == obj2. That is, it tests whether obj1 and
obj2 refer to the same object. The String class overrides this method to say that two Strings
are equal if they contain the same sequence of characters, and it is common to similarly override
equals() in a class to say that two objects belonging to that class are equal if they have the
same contents. We see again that what it means for objects to be “equal” is not always clear.
We will have more use for this method later.
The instance method toString() in class Object returns a value of type String that is
supposed to be a string representation of the object. You’ve already used this method implicitly,
any time you’ve printed out an object or concatenated an object onto a string. When you use
an object in a context that requires a string, the object is automatically converted to type
String by calling its toString() method.
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 228

The version of toString that is defined in Object just returns the name of the class that
the object belongs to, concatenated with a code number called the hash code of the object;
this is not very useful. When you create a class, you can write a new toString() method for
it, which will replace the inherited version. For example, we might add the following method
to any of the PairOfDice classes from the previous section:
/**
* Return a String representation of a pair of dice, where die1
* and die2 are instance variables containing the numbers that are
* showing on the two dice.
*/
public String toString() {
if (die1 == die2)
return "double " + die1;
else
return die1 + " and " + die2;
}
If dice refers to a PairOfDice object, then dice.toString() will return strings such as
“3 and 6”, “5 and 1”, and “double 2”, depending on the numbers showing on the dice. This
method would be used automatically to convert dice to type String in a statement such as
System.out.println( "The dice came up " + dice );
so this statement might output, “The dice came up 5 and 1” or “The dice came up double 2”.
You’ll see another example of a toString() method in the next section.

5.3.3 Writing and Using a Class

As an example of designing and using a new class, we will write an animation program, based
on the same animation framework that was used in Subsection 3.9.3. The animation shows
a number of semi-transparent disks that grow in size as the animation plays. The disks have
random colors and locations. When a disk gets too big, or sometimes just at random, the
disk disappears and is replaced with a new disk at a random location. Here is a reduced-size
screenshot from the program:

A disk in this program can be represented as an object. A disk has properties—color, location,
and size—that can be instance variables in the object. As for instance methods, we need to think
about what we might want to do with a disk. An obvious candidate is that we need to be able to
draw it, so we can include an instance method draw(g), where g is a graphics context that will
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 229

be used to do the drawing. The class can also include one or more constructors. A constructor
initializes the object. It’s not always clear what data should be provided as parameters to the
constructor. In this case, as an example, the constructor’s parameters specify the location and
size for the circle, but the constructor makes up a color using random values for the red, green,
and blue components. Here’s the complete class:
import javafx.scene.paint.Color;
import javafx.scene.canvas.GraphicsContext;
/**
* A simple class that holds the size, color, and location of a colored disk,
* with a method for drawing the circle in a graphics context. The circle
* is drawn as a filled oval, with a black outline.
*/
public class CircleInfo {
public int radius; // The radius of the circle.
public int x,y; // The location of the center of the circle.
public Color color; // The color of the circle.
/**
* Create a CircleInfo with a given location and radius and with a
* randomly selected, semi-transparent color.
* @param centerX The x coordinate of the center.
* @param centerY The y coordinate of the center.
* @param rad The radius of the circle.
*/
public CircleInfo( int centerX, int centerY, int rad ) {
x = centerX;
y = centerY;
radius = rad;
double red = Math.random();
double green = Math.random();
double blue = Math.random();
color = new Color( red,green,blue, 0.4 );
}
/**
* Draw the disk in graphics context g, with a black outline.
*/
public void draw( GraphicsContext g ) {
g.setFill( color );
g.fillOval( x - radius, y - radius, 2*radius, 2*radius );
g.setStroke( Color.BLACK );
g.strokeOval( x - radius, y - radius, 2*radius, 2*radius );
}
}
It would probably be better style to write getters and setters for the instance variables, but to
keep things simple, I made the variables public.
The main program for my animation is a class GrowingCircleAnimation. The program uses
100 disks, each one represented by an object of type CircleInfo. To make that manageable, the
program uses an array of objects. The array variable is an instance variable in the class:
private CircleInfo[] circleData; // holds the data for all 100 circles
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 230

Note that it is not static. GUI programming generally uses objects rather than static variables
and methods. Basically, this is because we can imagine having several GrowingCircleAnimations
going on at the same time, each with its own array of disks. Each animation would be
represented by an object, and each object will need to have its own circleData instance
variable. If circleData were static, there would only be one array and all the animations
would show exactly the same thing.
The array must be created and filled with data. The array is created using
new CircleInfo[100], and then 100 objects of type CircleInfo are created to fill the array.
The new objects are created with random locations and sizes. In the program, this is done
before drawing the first frame of the animation. Here is the code, where width and height are
the size of the drawing area:
circleData = new CircleInfo[100]; // create the array
for (int i = 0; i < circleData.length; i++) { // create the objects
circleData[i] = new CircleInfo(
(int)(width*Math.random()),
(int)(height*Math.random()),
(int)(100*Math.random()) );
}
In each frame, the radius of the disk is increased and the disk is drawn using the code
circleData[i].radius++;
circleData[i].draw(g);
These statements look complicated, so let’s unpack them. Now, circleData[i] is an element
of the array circleData. That means that it is a variable of type CircleInfo. This variable
refers to an object of type CircleInfo, which contains a public instance variable named radius.
This means that circleData[i].radius is the full name for that variable. Since it is a
variable of type int, we can use the ++ operator to increment its value. So the effect of
circleData[i].radius++ is to increase the radius of the circle by one. The second line of
code is similar, but in that statement, circleData[i].draw is an instance method in the
CircleInfo object. The statement circleData[i].draw(g) calls that instance method with a
parameter g that represents the graphics context that is being used for drawing.
The source code example GrowingCircleAnimation.java contains the full source code for the
program, if you are interested. Since the program uses class CircleInfo, you will also need a copy
of CircleInfo.java in order to compile and run the program.

5.3.4 Object-oriented Analysis and Design

Every programmer builds up a stock of techniques and expertise expressed as snippets of code
that can be reused in new programs using the tried-and-true method of cut-and-paste: The old
code is physically copied into the new program and then edited to customize it as necessary.
The problem is that the editing is error-prone and time-consuming, and the whole enterprise is
dependent on the programmer’s ability to pull out that particular piece of code from last year’s
project that looks like it might be made to fit. (On the level of a corporation that wants to
save money by not reinventing the wheel for each new project, just keeping track of all the old
wheels becomes a major task.)
Well-designed classes are software components that can be reused without editing. A well-
designed class is not carefully crafted to do a particular job in a particular program. Instead,
it is crafted to model some particular type of object or a single coherent concept. Since objects
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 231

and concepts can recur in many problems, a well-designed class is likely to be reusable without
modification in a variety of projects.
Furthermore, in an object-oriented programming language, it is possible to make subclasses
of an existing class. This makes classes even more reusable. If a class needs to be customized,
a subclass can be created, and additions or modifications can be made in the subclass without
making any changes to the original class. This can be done even if the programmer doesn’t
have access to the source code of the class and doesn’t know any details of its internal, hidden
implementation.
∗ ∗ ∗
The PairOfDice class in the previous section is already an example of a generalized software
component, although one that could certainly be improved. The class represents a single,
coherent concept, “a pair of dice.” The instance variables hold the data relevant to the state
of the dice, that is, the number showing on each of the dice. The instance method represents
the behavior of a pair of dice, that is, the ability to be rolled. This class would be reusable in
many different programming projects.
On the other hand, the Student class from the previous section is not very reusable. It
seems to be crafted to represent students in a particular course where the grade will be based
on three tests. If there are more tests or quizzes or papers, it’s useless. If there are two people
in the class who have the same name, we are in trouble (one reason why numerical student ID’s
are often used). Admittedly, it’s much more difficult to develop a general-purpose student class
than a general-purpose pair-of-dice class. But this particular Student class is good only as an
example in a programming textbook.
∗ ∗ ∗
A large programming project goes through a number of stages, starting with specification
of the problem to be solved, followed by analysis of the problem and design of a program
to solve it. Then comes coding , in which the program’s design is expressed in some actual
programming language. This is followed by testing and debugging of the program. After that
comes a long period of maintenance, which means fixing any new problems that are found
in the program and modifying it to adapt it to changing requirements. Together, these stages
form what is called the software life cycle. (In the real world, the ideal of consecutive stages
is seldom if ever achieved. During the analysis stage, it might turn out that the specifications
are incomplete or inconsistent. A problem found during testing requires at least a brief return
to the coding stage. If the problem is serious enough, it might even require a new design.
Maintenance usually involves redoing some of the work from previous stages. . . .)
Large, complex programming projects are only likely to succeed if a careful, systematic
approach is adopted during all stages of the software life cycle. The systematic approach to
programming, using accepted principles of good design, is called software engineering . The
software engineer tries to efficiently construct programs that verifiably meet their specifications
and that are easy to modify if necessary. There is a wide range of “methodologies” that can
be applied to help in the systematic design of programs. (Most of these methodologies seem to
involve drawing little boxes to represent program components, with labeled arrows to represent
relationships among the boxes.)
We have been discussing object orientation in programming languages, which is relevant to
the coding stage of program development. But there are also object-oriented methodologies for
analysis and design. The question in this stage of the software life cycle is, How can one discover
or invent the overall structure of a program? As an example of a rather simple object-oriented
approach to analysis and design, consider this advice: Write down a description of the problem.
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 232

Underline all the nouns in that description. The nouns should be considered as candidates for
becoming classes or objects in the program design. Similarly, underline all the verbs. These
are candidates for methods. This is your starting point. Further analysis might uncover the
need for more classes and methods, and it might reveal that subclassing can be used to take
advantage of similarities among classes.
This is perhaps a bit simple-minded. (This is not a software engineering textbook.) But
the idea is clear and the general approach can be effective: Analyze the problem to discover the
concepts that are involved, and create classes to represent those concepts. The design should
arise from the problem itself, and you should end up with a program whose structure reflects
the structure of the problem in a natural way.

5.4 Programming Example: Card, Hand, Deck

In this section, we look at some specific examples of object-oriented design in a domain that
is simple enough that we have a chance of coming up with something reasonably reusable.
Consider card games that are played with a standard deck of playing cards (a so-called “poker”
deck, since it is used in the game of poker).

5.4.1 Designing the classes

In a typical card game, each player gets a hand of cards. The deck is shuffled and cards are
dealt one at a time from the deck and added to the players’ hands. In some games, cards can
be removed from a hand, and new cards can be added. The game is won or lost depending on
the value (ace, 2, 3, . . . , king) and suit (spades, diamonds, clubs, hearts) of the cards that a
player receives. If we look for nouns in this description, there are several candidates for objects:
game, player, hand, card, deck, value, and suit. Of these, the value and the suit of a card are
simple values, and they might just be represented as instance variables in a Card object. In a
complete program, the other five nouns might be represented by classes. But let’s work on the
ones that are most obviously reusable: card, hand, and deck.
If we look for verbs in the description of a card game, we see that we can shuffle a deck and
deal a card from a deck. This gives use us two candidates for instance methods in a Deck class:
shuffle() and dealCard(). Cards can be added to and removed from hands. This gives two
candidates for instance methods in a Hand class: addCard() and removeCard(). Cards are
relatively passive things, but we at least need to be able to determine their suits and values.
We will discover more instance methods as we go along.
First, we’ll design the deck class in detail. When a deck of cards is first created, it contains
52 cards in some standard order. The Deck class will need a constructor to create a new deck.
The constructor needs no parameters because any new deck is the same as any other. There will
be an instance method called shuffle() that will rearrange the 52 cards into a random order.
The dealCard() instance method will get the next card from the deck. This will be a function
with a return type of Card, since the caller needs to know what card is being dealt. It has no
parameters—when you deal the next card from the deck, you don’t provide any information to
the deck; you just get the next card, whatever it is. What will happen if there are no more
cards in the deck when its dealCard() method is called? It should probably be considered an
error to try to deal a card from an empty deck, so the deck can throw an exception in that case.
But this raises another question: How will the rest of the program know whether the deck is
empty? Of course, the program could keep track of how many cards it has used. But the deck
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 233

itself should know how many cards it has left, so the program should just be able to ask the
deck object. We can make this possible by specifying another instance method, cardsLeft(),
that returns the number of cards remaining in the deck. This leads to a full specification of all
the subroutines in the Deck class:
Constructor and instance methods in class Deck:
/**
* Constructor. Create an unshuffled deck of cards.
*/
public Deck()
/**
* Put all the used cards back into the deck,
* and shuffle it into a random order.
*/
public void shuffle()
/**
* As cards are dealt from the deck, the number of
* cards left decreases. This function returns the
* number of cards that are still left in the deck.
*/
public int cardsLeft()
/**
* Deals one card from the deck and returns it.
* @throws IllegalStateException if no more cards are left.
*/
public Card dealCard()
This is everything you need to know in order to use the Deck class. Of course, it doesn’t tell us
how to write the class. This has been an exercise in design, not in coding. You can look at the
source code, Deck.java, if you want. It should not be a surprise that the class includes an array
of Cards as an instance variable, but there are a few things you might not understand at this
point. Of course, you can use the class in your programs as a black box, without understanding
the implementation.
We can do a similar analysis for the Hand class. When a hand object is first created, it
has no cards in it. An addCard() instance method will add a card to the hand. This method
needs a parameter of type Card to specify which card is being added. For the removeCard()
method, a parameter is needed to specify which card to remove. But should we specify the
card itself (“Remove the ace of spades”), or should we specify the card by its position in the
hand (“Remove the third card in the hand”)? Actually, we don’t have to decide, since we can
allow for both options. We’ll have two removeCard() instance methods, one with a parameter
of type Card specifying the card to be removed and one with a parameter of type int specifying
the position of the card in the hand. (Remember that you can have two methods in a class
with the same name, provided they have different numbers or types of parameters.) Since a
hand can contain a variable number of cards, it’s convenient to be able to ask a hand object
how many cards it contains. So, we need an instance method getCardCount() that returns
the number of cards in the hand. When I play cards, I like to arrange the cards in my hand so
that cards of the same value are next to each other. Since this is a generally useful thing to be
able to do, we can provide instance methods for sorting the cards in the hand. Here is a full
specification for a reusable Hand class:
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 234

Constructor and instance methods in class Hand:

/**
* Constructor. Create a Hand object that is initially empty.
*/
public Hand()
/**
* Discard all cards from the hand, making the hand empty.
*/
public void clear()
/**
* Add the card c to the hand. c should be non-null.
* @throws NullPointerException if c is null.
*/
public void addCard(Card c)
/**
* If the specified card is in the hand, it is removed.
*/
public void removeCard(Card c)
/**
* Remove the card in the specified position from the
* hand. Cards are numbered counting from zero.
* @throws IllegalArgumentException if the specified
* position does not exist in the hand.
*/
public void removeCard(int position)
/**
* Return the number of cards in the hand.
*/
public int getCardCount()
/**
* Get the card from the hand in given position, where
* positions are numbered starting from 0.
* @throws IllegalArgumentException if the specified
* position does not exist in the hand.
*/
public Card getCard(int position)
/**
* Sorts the cards in the hand so that cards of the same
* suit are grouped together, and within a suit the cards
* are sorted by value.
*/
public void sortBySuit()
/**
* Sorts the cards in the hand so that cards are sorted into
* order of increasing value. Cards with the same value
* are sorted by suit. Note that aces are considered
* to have the lowest value.
*/
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 235

public void sortByValue()

Again, there are a few things in the implementation of the class that you won’t understand at
this point, but that doesn’t stop you from using the class in your projects. The source code
can be found in the file Hand.java

5.4.2 The Card Class

We will look at the design and implementation of a Card class in full detail. The class will
have a constructor that specifies the value and suit of the card that is being created. There
are four suits, which can be represented by the integers 0, 1, 2, and 3. It would be tough
to remember which number represents which suit, so I’ve defined named constants in the Card
class to represent the four possibilities. For example, Card.SPADES is a constant that represents
the suit, “spades.” (These constants are declared to be public final static ints. It might
be better to use an enumerated type, but I will stick here to integer-valued constants.) The
possible values of a card are the numbers 1, 2, . . . , 13, with 1 standing for an ace, 11 for a jack,
12 for a queen, and 13 for a king. Again, I’ve defined some named constants to represent the
values of aces and face cards. (When you read the Card class, you’ll see that I’ve also added
support for Jokers.)
A Card object can be constructed knowing the value and the suit of the card. For example,
we can call the constructor with statements such as:
card1 = new Card( Card.ACE, Card.SPADES ); // Construct ace of spades.
card2 = new Card( 10, Card.DIAMONDS ); // Construct 10 of diamonds.
card3 = new Card( v, s ); // This is OK, as long as v and s
// are integer expressions.
A Card object needs instance variables to represent its value and suit. I’ve made these
private so that they cannot be changed from outside the class, and I’ve provided getter methods
getSuit() and getValue() so that it will be possible to discover the suit and value from outside
the class. The instance variables are initialized in the constructor, and are never changed after
that. In fact, I’ve declared the instance variables suit and value to be final, since they are
never changed after they are initialized. An instance variable can be declared final provided
it is either given an initial value in its declaration or is initialized in every constructor in the
class. Since all its instance variables are final, a Card is an immutable object.
Finally, I’ve added a few convenience methods to the class to make it easier to print out
cards in a human-readable form. For example, I want to be able to print out the suit of a
card as the word “Diamonds”, rather than as the meaningless code number 2, which is used
in the class to represent diamonds. Since this is something that I’ll probably have to do in
many programs, it makes sense to include support for it in the class. So, I’ve provided instance
methods getSuitAsString() and getValueAsString() to return string representations of the
suit and value of a card. Finally, I’ve defined the instance method toString() to return a
string with both the value and suit, such as “Queen of Hearts”. Recall that this method will
be used automatically whenever a Card needs to be converted into a String, such as when the
card is concatenated onto a string with the + operator. Thus, the statement
System.out.println( "Your card is the " + card );
is equivalent to
System.out.println( "Your card is the " + card.toString() );
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 236

If the card is the queen of hearts, either of these will print out “Your card is the Queen of
Hearts”.
Here is the complete Card class, which can also be found in Card.java. This class is general
enough to be highly reusable, so the work that went into designing, writing, and testing it pays
off handsomely in the long run.
/**
* An object of type Card represents a playing card from a
* standard Poker deck, including Jokers. The card has a suit, which
* can be spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs, or joker. A spade, heart,
* diamond, or club has one of the 13 values: ace, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,
* 8, 9, 10, jack, queen, or king. Note that "ace" is considered to be
* the smallest value. A joker can also have an associated value;
* this value can be anything and can be used to keep track of several
* different jokers.
*/
public class Card {
public final static int SPADES = 0; // Codes for the 4 suits, plus Joker.
public final static int HEARTS = 1;
public final static int DIAMONDS = 2;
public final static int CLUBS = 3;
public final static int JOKER = 4;
public final static int ACE = 1; // Codes for the non-numeric cards.
public final static int JACK = 11; // Cards 2 through 10 have their
public final static int QUEEN = 12; // numerical values for their codes.
public final static int KING = 13;
/**
* This card’s suit, one of the constants SPADES, HEARTS, DIAMONDS,
* CLUBS, or JOKER. The suit cannot be changed after the card is
* constructed.
*/
private final int suit;
/**
* The card’s value. For a normal card, this is one of the values
* 1 through 13, with 1 representing ACE. For a JOKER, the value
* can be anything. The value cannot be changed after the card
* is constructed.
*/
private final int value;
/**
* Creates a Joker, with 1 as the associated value. (Note that
* "new Card()" is equivalent to "new Card(1,Card.JOKER)".)
*/
public Card() {
suit = JOKER;
value = 1;
}
/**
* Creates a card with a specified suit and value.
* @param theValue the value of the new card. For a regular card (non-joker),
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 237

* the value must be in the range 1 through 13, with 1 representing an Ace.
* You can use the constants Card.ACE, Card.JACK, Card.QUEEN, and Card.KING.
* For a Joker, the value can be anything.
* @param theSuit the suit of the new card. This must be one of the values
* Card.SPADES, Card.HEARTS, Card.DIAMONDS, Card.CLUBS, or Card.JOKER.
* @throws IllegalArgumentException if the parameter values are not in the
* permissible ranges
*/
public Card(int theValue, int theSuit) {
if (theSuit != SPADES && theSuit != HEARTS && theSuit != DIAMONDS &&
theSuit != CLUBS && theSuit != JOKER)
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Illegal playing card suit");
if (theSuit != JOKER && (theValue < 1 || theValue > 13))
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Illegal playing card value");
value = theValue;
suit = theSuit;
}
/**
* Returns the suit of this card.
* @returns the suit, which is one of the constants Card.SPADES,
* Card.HEARTS, Card.DIAMONDS, Card.CLUBS, or Card.JOKER
*/
public int getSuit() {
return suit;
}
/**
* Returns the value of this card.
* @return the value, which is one of the numbers 1 through 13, inclusive for
* a regular card, and which can be any value for a Joker.
*/
public int getValue() {
return value;
}
/**
* Returns a String representation of the card’s suit.
* @return one of the strings "Spades", "Hearts", "Diamonds", "Clubs"
* or "Joker".
*/
public String getSuitAsString() {
switch ( suit ) {
case SPADES: return "Spades";
case HEARTS: return "Hearts";
case DIAMONDS: return "Diamonds";
case CLUBS: return "Clubs";
default: return "Joker";
}
}
/**
* Returns a String representation of the card’s value.
* @return for a regular card, one of the strings "Ace", "2",
* "3", ..., "10", "Jack", "Queen", or "King". For a Joker, the
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 238

* string is always numerical.

*/
public String getValueAsString() {
if (suit == JOKER)
return "" + value;
else { // (Note use of traditional syntax for the switch statement.)
switch ( value ) {
case 1: return "Ace";
case 2: return "2";
case 3: return "3";
case 4: return "4";
case 5: return "5";
case 6: return "6";
case 7: return "7";
case 8: return "8";
case 9: return "9";
case 10: return "10";
case 11: return "Jack";
case 12: return "Queen";
default: return "King";
}
}
}
/**
* Returns a string representation of this card, including both
* its suit and its value (except that for a Joker with value 1,
* the return value is just "Joker"). Sample return values
* are: "Queen of Hearts", "10 of Diamonds", "Ace of Spades",
* "Joker", "Joker #2"
*/
public String toString() {
if (suit == JOKER) {
if (value == 1)
return "Joker";
else
return "Joker #" + value;
}
else
return getValueAsString() + " of " + getSuitAsString();
}

} // end class Card

5.4.3 Example: A Simple Card Game

I will finish this section by presenting a complete program that uses the Card and Deck classes.
The program lets the user play a very simple card game called HighLow. A deck of cards is
shuffled, and one card is dealt from the deck and shown to the user. The user predicts whether
the next card from the deck will be higher or lower than the current card. If the user predicts
correctly, then the next card from the deck becomes the current card, and the user makes
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 239

another prediction. This continues until the user makes an incorrect prediction. The number
of correct predictions is the user’s score.
My program has a static method that plays one game of HighLow. The main() routine lets
the user play several games of HighLow. At the end, it reports the user’s average score.
I won’t go through the development of the algorithms used in this program, but I encourage
you to read it carefully and make sure that you understand how it works. Note in particular
that the subroutine that plays one game of HighLow returns the user’s score in the game as its
return value. This gets the score back to the main program, where it is needed. Here is the
program:
import textio.TextIO;
/**
* This program lets the user play HighLow, a simple card game
* that is described in the output statement at the beginning of
* the main() routine. After the user plays several games,
* the user’s average score is reported.
*/
public class HighLow {

public static void main(String[] args) {

System.out.println("""
This program lets you play the simple card game,
HighLow. A card is dealt from a deck of cards.
You have to predict whether the next card will be
higher or lower. Your score in the game is the
number of correct predictions you make before
you guess wrong.
""");
int gamesPlayed = 0; // Number of games user has played.
int sumOfScores = 0; // The sum of all the scores from
// all the games played.
double averageScore; // Average score, computed by dividing
// sumOfScores by gamesPlayed.
boolean playAgain; // Record user’s response when user is
// asked whether he wants to play
// another game.
do {
int scoreThisGame; // Score for one game.
scoreThisGame = play(); // Play the game and get the score.
sumOfScores += scoreThisGame;
gamesPlayed++;
System.out.print("Play again? ");
playAgain = TextIO.getlnBoolean();
} while (playAgain);
averageScore = ((double)sumOfScores) / gamesPlayed;
System.out.println();
System.out.println("You played " + gamesPlayed + " games.");
System.out.printf("Your average score was %1.3f.\n", averageScore);
} // end main()
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 240

/**
* Lets the user play one game of HighLow, and returns the
* user’s score in that game. The score is the number of
* correct guesses that the user makes.
*/
private static int play() {
Deck deck = new Deck(); // Get a new deck of cards, and
// store a reference to it in
// the variable, deck.
Card currentCard; // The current card, which the user sees.
Card nextCard; // The next card in the deck. The user tries
// to predict whether this is higher or lower
// than the current card.
int correctGuesses ; // The number of correct predictions the
// user has made. At the end of the game,
// this will be the user’s score.
char guess; // The user’s guess. ’H’ if the user predicts that
// the next card will be higher, ’L’ if the user
// predicts that it will be lower.
deck.shuffle(); // Shuffle the deck into a random order before
// starting the game.
correctGuesses = 0;
currentCard = deck.dealCard();
System.out.println("The first card is the " + currentCard);
while (true) { // Loop ends when user’s prediction is wrong.
/* Get the user’s prediction, ’H’ or ’L’ (or ’h’ or ’l’). */
System.out.print("Will the next card be higher (H) or lower (L)? ");
do {
guess = TextIO.getlnChar();
guess = Character.toUpperCase(guess);
if (guess != ’H’ && guess != ’L’)
System.out.print("Please respond with H or L: ");
} while (guess != ’H’ && guess != ’L’);
/* Get the next card and show it to the user. */
nextCard = deck.dealCard();
System.out.println("The next card is " + nextCard);
/* Check the user’s prediction. */
if (nextCard.getValue() == currentCard.getValue()) {
System.out.println("The value is the same as the previous card.");
System.out.println("You lose on ties. Sorry!");
break; // End the game.
}
else if (nextCard.getValue() > currentCard.getValue()) {
if (guess == ’H’) {
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 241

System.out.println("Your prediction was correct.");

correctGuesses++;
}
else {
System.out.println("Your prediction was incorrect.");
break; // End the game.
}
}
else { // nextCard is lower
if (guess == ’L’) {
System.out.println("Your prediction was correct.");
correctGuesses++;
}
else {
System.out.println("Your prediction was incorrect.");
break; // End the game.
}
}
/* To set up for the next iteration of the loop, the nextCard
becomes the currentCard, since the currentCard has to be
the card that the user sees, and the nextCard will be
set to the next card in the deck after the user makes
his prediction. */
currentCard = nextCard;
System.out.println();
System.out.println("The card is " + currentCard);
} // end of while loop
System.out.println();
System.out.println("The game is over.");
System.out.println("You made " + correctGuesses
+ " correct predictions.");
System.out.println();
return correctGuesses;
} // end play()

} // end class HighLow

5.5 Inheritance, Polymorphism, and Abstract Classes

A class represents a set of objects which share the same structure and behaviors.
The class determines the structure of objects by specifying variables that are contained in each
instance of the class, and it determines behavior by providing the instance methods that express
the behavior of the objects. This is a powerful idea. However, something like this can be done
in most programming languages. The central new idea in object-oriented programming—the
idea that really distinguishes it from traditional programming—is to allow classes to express
the similarities among objects that share some, but not all, of their structure and behavior.
Such similarities can be expressed using inheritance and polymorphism.
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 242

5.5.1 Extending Existing Classes

Any programmer should know what is meant by subclass, inheritance, and polymorphism.
However, it will probably be a while before you actually do anything with inheritance except
for extending classes that already exist. In the first part of this section, we look at how that is
done.
In day-to-day programming, especially for programmers who are just beginning to work
with objects, subclassing is used mainly in one situation: There is an existing class that can be
adapted with a few changes or additions. This is much more common than designing groups of
classes and subclasses from scratch. The existing class can be extended to make a subclass.
The syntax for this is
public class hsubclass-name i extends hexisting-class-name i {
.
. // Changes and additions.
.
}
As an example, suppose you want to write a program that plays the card game, Blackjack.
You can use the Card, Hand, and Deck classes developed in Section 5.4. However, a hand in the
game of Blackjack is a little different from a hand of cards in general, since it must be possible
to compute the “value” of a Blackjack hand according to the rules of the game. The rules are
as follows: The value of a hand is obtained by adding up the values of the cards in the hand.
The value of a numeric card such as a three or a ten is its numerical value. The value of a Jack,
Queen, or King is 10. The value of an Ace can be either 1 or 11. An Ace should be counted
as 11 unless doing so would put the total value of the hand over 21. Note that this means that
the second, third, or fourth Ace in the hand will always be counted as 1.
One way to handle this is to extend the existing Hand class by adding a method that
computes the Blackjack value of the hand. Here’s the definition of such a class:
public class BlackjackHand extends Hand {
/**
* Computes and returns the value of this hand in the game
* of Blackjack.
*/
public int getBlackjackValue() {
int val; // The value computed for the hand.
boolean ace; // This will be set to true if the
// hand contains an ace.
int cards; // Number of cards in the hand.
val = 0;
ace = false;
cards = getCardCount(); // (method defined in class Hand.)
for ( int i = 0; i < cards; i++ ) {
// Add the value of the i-th card in the hand.
Card card; // The i-th card;
int cardVal; // The blackjack value of the i-th card.
card = getCard(i);
cardVal = card.getValue(); // The normal value, 1 to 13.
if (cardVal > 10) {
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 243

cardVal = 10; // For a Jack, Queen, or King.

}
if (cardVal == 1) {
ace = true; // There is at least one ace.
}
val = val + cardVal;
}
// Now, val is the value of the hand, counting any ace as 1.
// If there is an ace, and if changing its value from 1 to
// 11 would leave the score less than or equal to 21,
// then do so by adding the extra 10 points to val.
if ( ace == true && val + 10 <= 21 )
val = val + 10;
return val;
} // end getBlackjackValue()
} // end class BlackjackHand
Since BlackjackHand is a subclass of Hand, an object of type BlackjackHand contains
all the instance variables and instance methods defined in Hand, plus the new in-
stance method named getBlackjackValue(). For example, if bjh is a variable of type
BlackjackHand, then the following are all legal: bjh.getCardCount(), bjh.removeCard(0),
and bjh.getBlackjackValue(). The first two methods are defined in Hand, but are inherited
by BlackjackHand.
Variables and methods from the Hand class are inherited by BlackjackHand, and they can
be used in the definition of BlackjackHand just as if they were actually defined in that class—
except for any that are declared to be private, which prevents access even by subclasses. The
statement “cards = getCardCount();” in the above definition of getBlackjackValue() calls
the instance method getCardCount(), which was defined in Hand.
Extending existing classes is an easy way to build on previous work. We’ll see that many
standard classes have been written specifically to be used as the basis for making subclasses.
∗ ∗ ∗
Access modifiers such as public and private are used to control access to members of a
class. There is one more access modifier, protected , that comes into the picture when subclasses
are taken into consideration. When protected is applied as an access modifier to a method or
member variable in a class, that member can be used in subclasses—direct or indirect—of the
class in which it is defined, but it cannot be used in non-subclasses. (There is an exception:
A protected member can also be accessed by any class in the same package as the class that
contains the protected member. Recall that using no access modifier makes a member accessible
to classes in the same package, and nowhere else. Using the protected modifier is strictly more
liberal than using no modifier at all: It allows access from classes in the same package and from
subclasses that are not in the same package.)
When you declare a method or member variable to be protected, you are saying that it
is part of the implementation of the class, rather than part of the public interface of the class.
However, you are allowing subclasses to use and modify that part of the implementation.
For example, consider a PairOfDice class that has instance variables die1 and die2 to
represent the numbers appearing on the two dice. We could make those variables private to
make it impossible to change their values from outside the class, while still allowing read access
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 244

through getter methods. However, if we think it possible that PairOfDice will be used to create
subclasses, we might want to make it possible for subclasses to change the numbers on the dice.
For example, a GraphicalDice subclass that draws the dice might want to change the numbers
at other times besides when the dice are rolled. In that case, we could make die1 and die2
protected, which would allow the subclass to change their values without making them public
to the rest of the world. (An even better idea would be to define protected setter methods for
the variables. A setter method could, for example, ensure that the value that is being assigned
to the variable is in the legal range 1 through 6.)

5.5.2 Inheritance and Class Hierarchy

The term inheritance refers to the fact that one class can inherit part or all of its structure
and behavior from another class. The class that does the inheriting is said to be a subclass of
the class from which it inherits. If class B is a subclass of class A, we also say that class A is a
superclass of class B. (Sometimes the terms derived class and base class are used instead
of subclass and superclass; this is the common terminology in C++.) A subclass can add to the
structure and behavior that it inherits. It can also replace or modify inherited behavior (though
not inherited structure). The relationship between subclass and superclass is sometimes shown
by a diagram in which the subclass is shown below, and connected to, its superclass, as shown
on the left below:

class A {|}~~ 
(superclass)

{|}~~  {|}~~ € {|}~~ ‚

kmoqq v
wqxykmoqqz
{|}~~ ƒ

In Java, to create a class named “B” as a subclass of a class named “A”, you would write
class B extends A {
.
. // additions to, and modifications of,
. // stuff inherited from class A
.
}
Several classes can be declared as subclasses of the same superclass. The subclasses, which
might be referred to as “sibling classes,” share some structures and behaviors—namely, the ones
they inherit from their common superclass. The superclass expresses these shared structures
and behaviors. In the diagram shown on the right above, classes B, C, and D are sibling classes.
Inheritance can also extend over several “generations” of classes. This is shown in the diagram,
where class E is a subclass of class D which is itself a subclass of class A. In this case, class E
is considered to be a subclass of class A, even though it is not a direct subclass. This whole set
of classes forms a small class hierarchy .
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 245

5.5.3 Example: Vehicles

Let’s look at an example. Suppose that a program has to deal with motor vehicles, including
cars, trucks, and motorcycles. (This might be a program used by a Department of Motor
Vehicles to keep track of registrations.) The program could use a class named Vehicle to
represent all types of vehicles. Since cars, trucks, and motorcycles are types of vehicles, they
would be represented by subclasses of the Vehicle class, as shown in this class hierarchy diagram:

„ehicle

Car Truck …†‡†ˆ‰Š‰‹Œ

The Vehicle class would include instance variables such as registrationNumber and owner and
instance methods such as transferOwnership(). These are variables and methods common
to all vehicles. The three subclasses of Vehicle—Car, Truck, and Motorcycle—could then be
used to hold variables and methods specific to particular types of vehicles. The Car class
might add an instance variable numberOfDoors, the Truck class might have numberOfAxles,
and the Motorcycle class could have a boolean variable hasSidecar. (Well, it could in theory
at least, even if it might give a chuckle to the people at the Department of Motor Vehicles.)
The declarations of these classes in a Java program would look, in outline, like this (although
they are likely to be defined in separate files and declared as public classes):
class Vehicle {
int registrationNumber;
Person owner; // (Assuming that a Person class has been defined!)
void transferOwnership(Person newOwner) {
. . .
}
. . .
}
class Car extends Vehicle {
int numberOfDoors;
. . .
}
class Truck extends Vehicle {
int numberOfAxles;
. . .
}
class Motorcycle extends Vehicle {
boolean hasSidecar;
. . .
}
Suppose that myCar is a variable of type Car that has been declared and initialized with the
statement
Car myCar = new Car();
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 246

Given this declaration, a program could refer to myCar.numberOfDoors, since numberOfDoors

is an instance variable in the class Car. But since class Car extends class Vehicle, a car also
has all the structure and behavior of a vehicle. This means that myCar.registrationNumber,
myCar.owner, and myCar.transferOwnership() also exist.
Now, in the real world, cars, trucks, and motorcycles are in fact vehicles. The same is true
in a program. That is, an object of type Car or Truck or Motorcycle is automatically an object
of type Vehicle too. This brings us to the following Important Fact:

A variable that can hold a reference

to an object of class A can also hold a reference
to an object belonging to any subclass of A.

The practical effect of this in our example is that an object of type Car can be assigned to a
variable of type Vehicle. That is, it would be legal to say
Vehicle myVehicle = myCar;
or even
Vehicle myVehicle = new Car();
After either of these statements, the variable myVehicle holds a reference to a Vehicle object
that happens to be an instance of the subclass, Car. The object “remembers” that it is in fact
a Car, and not just a Vehicle. Information about the actual class of an object is stored as part
of that object. It is even possible to test whether a given object belongs to a given class, using
the instanceof operator. The test:
if (myVehicle instanceof Car) ...
determines whether the object referred to by myVehicle is in fact a car.
On the other hand, the assignment statement
myCar = myVehicle; // ERROR!
would be illegal because myVehicle could potentially refer to other types of vehicles that are
not cars. This is similar to a problem we saw previously in Subsection 2.5.6: The computer
will not allow you to assign an int value to a variable of type short, because not every int is a
short. Similarly, it will not allow you to assign a value of type Vehicle to a variable of type Car
because not every vehicle is a car. As in the case of ints and shorts, the solution here is to use
type-casting. If, for some reason, you happen to know that myVehicle does in fact refer to a
Car, you can use the type cast (Car)myVehicle to tell the computer to treat myVehicle as if
it were actually of type Car. So, you could say
myCar = (Car)myVehicle;
and you could even refer to ((Car)myVehicle).numberOfDoors. (The parentheses are
necessary because of precedence. The “.” has higher precedence than the type-cast, so
(Car)myVehicle.numberOfDoors would be read as (Car)(myVehicle.numberOfDoors), an
attempt to type-cast the int myVehicle.numberOfDoors into a Vehicle, which is impossible.)
As an example of how this could be used in a program, suppose that you want to print out
relevant data about the Vehicle referred to by myVehicle. If it’s a Car, you will want to print
out the car’s numberOfDoors, but you can’t say myVehicle.numberOfDoors, since there is no
numberOfDoors in the Vehicle class. But you could say:
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 247

System.out.println("Vehicle Data:");
System.out.println("Registration number: "
+ myVehicle.registrationNumber);
if (myVehicle instanceof Car) {
System.out.println("Type of vehicle: Car");
Car myCar;
myCar = (Car)myVehicle; // Type-cast to get access to numberOfDoors!
System.out.println("Number of doors: " + myCar.numberOfDoors);
}
else if (myVehicle instanceof Truck) {
System.out.println("Type of vehicle: Truck");
Truck myTruck;
myTruck = (Truck)myVehicle; // Type-cast to get access to numberOfAxles!
System.out.println("Number of axles: " + myTruck.numberOfAxles);
}
else if (myVehicle instanceof Motorcycle) {
System.out.println("Type of vehicle: Motorcycle");
Motorcycle myCycle;
myCycle = (Motorcycle)myVehicle; // Type-cast to get access to hasSidecar!
System.out.println("Has a sidecar: " + myCycle.hasSidecar);
}
Note that for object types, when the computer executes a program, it checks whether
type-casts are valid. So, for example, if myVehicle refers to an object of type Truck, then
the type cast (Car)myVehicle would be an error. When this happens, an exception of type
ClassCastException is thrown. This check is done at run time, not compile time, because the
actual type of the object referred to by myVehicle is not known when the program is compiled.
The code above avoids ClassCastExceptions by using instanceof to test the type of the variable
before doing a type cast.
∗ ∗ ∗
In Java 17, the previous example can also be written using one of the more obscure new
language features, known as pattern matching for instanceof. Pattern matching makes
it possible to include declaration and initialization of a variable in an instanceof test. For
example,
if (myVehicle instanceof Car myCar) {
System.out.println("Type of vehicle: Car");
System.out.println(Number of doors: " + myCar.numberOfDoors);
}
If the test succeeds, then the variable myCar is created and automatically assigned the value
(Car)myVehicle. The scope of the variable is limited to the body of the if statement.

5.5.4 Polymorphism
As another example, consider a program that deals with shapes drawn on the screen. Let’s say
that the shapes include rectangles, ovals, and roundrects of various colors. (A “roundrect” is
just a rectangle with rounded corners.)
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 248

Rectangles Ovals RoundRects

Three classes, Rectangle, Oval, and RoundRect, could be used to represent the three types of
shapes. These three classes would have a common superclass, Shape, to represent features that
all three shapes have in common. The Shape class could include instance variables to represent
the color, position, and size of a shape, and it could include instance methods for changing the
values of those properties. Changing the color, for example, might involve changing the value
of an instance variable, and then redrawing the shape in its new color:
class Shape {
Color color; // (must be imported from package javafx.scene.paint)
void setColor(Color newColor) {
// Method to change the color of the shape.
color = newColor; // change value of instance variable
redraw(); // redraw shape, which will appear in new color
}
void redraw() {
// method for drawing the shape
? ? ? // what commands should go here?
}
. . . // more instance variables and methods
} // end of class Shape
Now, you might see a problem here with the method redraw(). The problem is that each
different type of shape is drawn differently. The method setColor() can be called for any type
of shape. How does the computer know which shape to draw when it executes the redraw()
command in the setColor() method? Informally, we can answer the question like this: The
computer executes redraw() by asking the shape to redraw itself. Every shape object knows
what it has to do to redraw itself.
In practice, this means that each of the specific shape classes has its own redraw() method:
class Rectangle extends Shape {
void redraw() {
. . . // commands for drawing a rectangle
}
. . . // possibly, more methods and variables
}
class Oval extends Shape {
void redraw() {
. . . // commands for drawing an oval
}
. . . // possibly, more methods and variables
}
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 249

class RoundRect extends Shape {

void redraw() {
. . . // commands for drawing a rounded rectangle
}
. . . // possibly, more methods and variables
}
Suppose that someShape is a variable of type Shape. Then it could refer to an object
of any of the types Rectangle, Oval, or RoundRect. As a program executes, and the value of
someShape changes, it could even refer to objects of different types at different times! Whenever
the statement
someShape.redraw();
is executed, the redraw method that is actually called is the one appropriate for the type of
object to which someShape actually refers. There may be no way of telling, from looking at the
text of the program, what shape this statement will draw, since it depends on the value that
someShape happens to have when the program is executed. Even more is true. Suppose the
statement is in a loop and gets executed many times. If the value of someShape changes as the
loop is executed, it is possible that the very same statement “someShape.redraw();” will call
different methods and draw different kinds of shapes as it is executed several times. We say that
the redraw() method is polymorphic. A method is polymorphic if the action performed by
the method depends on the actual type of the object to which the method is applied at run time.
Polymorphism is one of the major distinguishing features of object-oriented programming. This
can be seen most vividly, perhaps, if we have an array of shapes. Suppose that shapelist is
a variable of type Shape[ ], and that the array has already been created and filled with data.
Some of the elements in the array might be Rectangles, some might be Ovals, and some might
be RoundRects. We can draw all the shapes in the array by saying
for (int i = 0; i < shapelist.length; i++ ) {
Shape shape = shapelist[i];
shape.redraw();
}
As the computer goes through this loop, the statement shape.redraw() will sometimes draw
a rectangle, sometimes an oval, and sometimes a roundrect, depending on the type of object to
which array element number i refers.
Perhaps this becomes more understandable if we change our terminology a bit: In object-
oriented programming, calling a method is often referred to as sending a message to an object.
The object responds to the message by executing the appropriate method. The statement
“someShape.redraw();” is a message to the object referred to by someShape. Since that
object knows what type of object it is, it knows how it should respond to the message. From
this point of view, the computer always executes “someShape.redraw();” in the same way: by
sending a message. The response to the message depends, naturally, on who receives it. From
this point of view, objects are active entities that send and receive messages, and polymorphism
is a natural, even necessary, part of this view. Polymorphism just means that different objects
can respond to the same message in different ways.
One of the most beautiful things about polymorphism is that it lets code that you write do
things that you didn’t even conceive of, at the time you wrote it. Suppose that I decide to add
beveled rectangles to the types of shapes my program can deal with. A beveled rectangle has
a triangle cut off each corner:
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 250

BeveledRects

To implement beveled rectangles, I can write a new subclass, BeveledRect, of class Shape
and give it its own redraw() method. Automatically, code that I wrote previously—such as
the statement someShape.redraw()—can now suddenly start drawing beveled rectangles, even
though the beveled rectangle class didn’t exist when I wrote the statement!
∗ ∗ ∗
In the statement “someShape.redraw();”, the redraw message is sent to the object
someShape. Look back at the method in the Shape class for changing the color of a shape:
void setColor(Color newColor) {
color = newColor; // change value of instance variable
redraw(); // redraw shape, which will appear in new color
}
A redraw message is sent here, but which object is it sent to? Well, the setColor method is
itself a message that was sent to some object. The answer is that the redraw message is sent to
that same object, the one that received the setColor message. If that object is a rectangle,
then it contains a redraw() method for drawing rectangles, and that is the one that is executed.
If the object is an oval, then the redraw() method from the Oval class is executed. This is what
you should expect, but it means that the “redraw();” statement in the setColor() method
does not necessarily call the redraw() method in the Shape class! The redraw() method that
is executed could be in any subclass of Shape. This is just another case of polymorphism.

5.5.5 Abstract Classes

Whenever a Rectangle, Oval, or RoundRect object has to draw itself, it is the redraw() method in
the appropriate class that is executed. This leaves open the question, What does the redraw()
method in the Shape class do? How should it be defined?
The answer may be surprising: We should leave it blank! The fact is that the class Shape
represents the abstract idea of a shape, and there is no way to draw such a thing. Only
particular, concrete shapes like rectangles and ovals can be drawn. So, why should there
even be a redraw() method in the Shape class? Well, it has to be there, or it would be
illegal to call it in the setColor() method of the Shape class, and it would be illegal to write
“someShape.redraw();”. The compiler would complain that someShape is a variable of type
Shape and there’s no redraw() method in the Shape class.
Nevertheless the version of redraw() in the Shape class itself will never actually be called.
In fact, if you think about it, there can never be any reason to construct an actual object of
type Shape! You can have variables of type Shape, but the objects they refer to will always
belong to one of the subclasses of Shape. We say that Shape is an abstract class. An abstract
class is one that is not used to construct objects, but only as a basis for making subclasses. An
abstract class exists only to express the common properties of all its subclasses. A class that
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 251

is not abstract is said to be concrete. You can create objects belonging to a concrete class,
but not to an abstract class. A variable whose type is given by an abstract class can only refer
to objects that belong to concrete subclasses of the abstract class.
Similarly, we say that the redraw() method in class Shape is an abstract method , since
it is never meant to be called. In fact, there is nothing for it to do—any actual redrawing is
done by redraw() methods in the subclasses of Shape. The redraw() method in Shape has
to be there. But it is there only to tell the computer that all Shapes understand the redraw
message. As an abstract method, it exists merely to specify the common interface of all the
actual, concrete versions of redraw() in the subclasses. There is no reason for the abstract
redraw() in class Shape to contain any code at all.
Shape and its redraw() method are semantically abstract. You can also tell the computer,
syntactically, that they are abstract by adding the modifier “abstract” to their definitions.
For an abstract method, the block of code that gives the implementation of an ordinary method
is replaced by a semicolon. An implementation must then be provided for the abstract method
in any concrete subclass of the abstract class. Here’s what the Shape class would look like as
an abstract class:
public abstract class Shape {
Color color; // color of shape.
void setColor(Color newColor) {
// method to change the color of the shape
color = newColor; // change value of instance variable
redraw(); // redraw shape, which will appear in new color
}
abstract void redraw();
// abstract method---must be defined in
// concrete subclasses
. . . // more instance variables and methods
} // end of class Shape
Once you have declared the class to be abstract, it becomes illegal to try to create actual
objects of type Shape, and the computer will report a syntax error if you try to do so.
Note, by the way, that the Vehicle class discussed above would probably also be an abstract
class. There is no way to own a vehicle as such—the actual vehicle has to be a car or a truck
or a motorcycle, or some other “concrete” type of vehicle.
∗ ∗ ∗
Recall from Subsection 5.3.2 that a class that is not explicitly declared to be a subclass of
some other class is automatically made a subclass of the standard class Object. That is, a class
declaration with no “extends” part such as
public class myClass { . . .
is exactly equivalent to
public class myClass extends Object { . . .
This means that class Object is at the top of a huge class hierarchy that includes every
other class. (Semantically, Object is an abstract class, in fact the most abstract class of all.
Curiously, however, it is not declared to be abstract syntactically, which means that you can
create objects of type Object. However, there is not much that you can do with them.)
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 252

Since every class is a subclass of Object, a variable of type Object can refer to any object
whatsoever, of any type. Similarly, an array of type Object[ ] can hold objects of any type.
∗ ∗ ∗
The sample source code file ShapeDraw.java uses an abstract Shape class and an array of
type Shape[ ] to hold a list of shapes. You might want to look at this file, even though you
won’t be able to understand all of it at this time. Even the definitions of the shape classes
are somewhat different from those that I have described in this section. (For example, the
draw() method has a parameter of type GraphicsContext>. This parameter is required because
all drawing in Java requires a graphics context.) I’ll return to similar examples in later chapters
when you know more about GUI programming. However, it would still be worthwhile to look
at the definition of the Shape class and its subclasses in the source code. You might also check
how an array is used to hold the list of shapes. Here is a scaled-down screenshot from the
program:

If you run the ShapeDraw program, you can click one of the buttons along the bottom to
add a shape to the picture. The new shape will appear in the upper left corner of the drawing
area. The color of the shape is given by the “pop-up menu” of colors below the drawing area.
Once a shape is on the screen, you can drag it around with the mouse. A shape will maintain
the same front-to-back order with respect to other shapes on the screen, even while you are
dragging it. However, you can move a shape out in front of all the other shapes if you hold
down the shift key as you click on it.
In the program, the only time when the actual class of a shape is used is when that shape is
added to the screen. Once the shape has been created, it is manipulated entirely as an abstract
shape. The routine that implements dragging, for example, works with variables of type Shape
and makes no reference to any of its subclasses. As the shape is being dragged, the dragging
routine just calls the shape’s draw method each time the shape has to be drawn, so it doesn’t
have to know how to draw the shape or even what type of shape it is. The object is responsible
for drawing itself. If I wanted to add a new type of shape to the program, I would define a
new subclass of Shape, add another button, and program the button to add the correct type of
shape to the screen. No other changes in the programming would be necessary.
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 253

5.5.6 Final Methods and Classes

We have seen how the final modifier applies to variables: It makes it impossible to assign
a new value to the variable after it has been initialized. (For a final instance variable,
the initialization can take place in the constructors for the class that contains the variable.)
However, the final modifier can also be applied to classes and to method definitions.
A final class cannot be used be used as a basis for making subclasses. That is, if a class
is defined as “final class A...”, then it is a syntax error to try to extend A with “class B
extends A. . . ”.
If a method is declared final in a class, then it is not possible for a subclass to contain a
method with the same signature. That is, the method cannot be “overridden”. This is true
both for static methods and for instance methods. Note that in a final class, all methods
are implicitly final since it is not even possible to make a subclass of that class.
The idea is that a final class or method is in its final form—it cannot be modified or
replaced by a subclass. With final, it is possible to make a guarantee about the behavior of
a method. For example, suppose that a Rectangle class has an instance method draw() that
draws a rectangle, and that rect is a variable of type Rectangle. If draw() is a final method,
then we are guaranteed that a call to rect.draw() will draw a rectangle. But if draw() is not
final, then it could draw anything, or nothing! The problem is that rect could actually refer
to an object belonging to some subclass of Rectangle, and that subclass could define its own
draw() method that overrides the draw() method from class Rectangle. Using final can make
it easier to reason about the behavior of a program.

5.6 this and super

Although the basic ideas of object-oriented programming are reasonably simple and clear,
they are subtle, and they take time to get used to. And unfortunately, beyond the basic ideas
there are a lot of details. The rest of this chapter covers more of those annoying details.
Remember that you don’t need to master everything in this chapter the first time through. In
this section, we’ll look at two variables, this and super, that are automatically defined in any
instance method or constructor.

5.6.1 The Special Variable this

What does it mean when you use a simple identifier such as amount or process() to refer to a
variable or method? The answer depends on scope rules that tell where and how each declared
variable and method can be accessed in a program. Inside the definition of a method, a simple
variable name might refer to a local variable or parameter, if there is one “in scope,” that is,
one whose declaration is in effect at the point in the source code where the reference occurs. If
not, it must refer to a member variable of the class in which the reference occurs. Similarly, a
simple method name must refer to a method in the same class.
A static member of a class has a simple name that can only be used inside the class
definition; for use outside the class, it has a full name of the form hclass-namei.hsimple-namei.
For example, “Math.PI” is a static member variable with simple name “PI” in the class “Math”.
It’s always legal to use the full name of a static member, even within the class where it’s defined.
Sometimes it’s even necessary, as when the simple name of a static member variable is hidden
by a local variable or parameter of the same name.
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 254

Instance variables and instance methods also have simple names. The simple name of such
an instance member can be used in instance methods in the class where the instance member
is defined (but not in static methods). Instance members also have full names—but remember
that an instance variable or instance method is actually contained in an object rather than in
a class, and each object has its own version. A full name of an instance member starts with
a reference to the object that contains the instance member. For example, if std is a variable
that refers to an object of type Student, then std.test1 could be a full name for an instance
variable named test1 that is contained in that object.
But when we are working inside a class and use a simple name to refer to an instance variable
like test1, where is the object that contains the variable? The solution to this riddle is simple:
Suppose that a reference to “test1” occurs in the definition of some instance method. The
method is part of some particular object of type Student. When that method gets executed,
the occurrence of the name “test1” refers to the test1 variable in that same object. (This
is why simple names of instance members cannot be used in static methods—when a static
method is executed, it is not part of an object, and hence there are no instance members in
sight!)
This leaves open the question of full names for instance members inside the same class
where they are defined. We need a way to refer to “the object that contains this method.” Java
defines a special variable named this for just this purpose. The variable this can be used in
the source code of an instance method to refer to the object that contains the method. This
intent of the name, “this,” is to refer to “this object,” the one right here that this very method
is in. If var is an instance variable in the same object as the method, then “this.var” is a
full name for that variable. If otherMethod() is an instance method in the same object, then
this.otherMethod() could be used to call that method. Whenever the computer executes an
instance method, it automatically sets the variable this to refer to the object that contains the
method.
(Some object oriented languages use the name “self” instead of “this.” Here, an object is seen
as an entity that receives messages and responds by performing some action. From the point
of view of that entity, an instance variable such as self.name refers to the entity’s own name,
something that is part of the entity itself. Calling an instance method such as self.redraw()
is like saying “message to self: redraw!”)
One common use of this is in constructors. For example:
public class Student {
private String name; // Name of the student.
public Student(String name) {
// Constructor. Create a student with specified name.
this.name = name;
}
.
. // More variables and methods.
.
}
In the constructor, the instance variable called name is hidden by a formal parameter that is also
called “name.” However, the instance variable can still be referred to by its full name, which
is this.name. In the assignment statement “this.name = name”, the “name” on the right is
the formal parameter, and the value of that formal parameter is being assigned to the instance
variable, this.name. This is considered to be acceptable style: There is no need to dream up
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 255

cute new names for formal parameters that are just used to initialize instance variables. You
can use the same name for the parameter as for the instance variable.
There are other uses for this. Sometimes, when you are writing an instance method, you
need to pass the object that contains the method to a subroutine, as an actual parameter. In
that case, you can use this as the actual parameter. For example, if you wanted to print out
a string representation of the object, you could say “System.out.println(this);”. Or you
could assign the value of this to another variable in an assignment statement. You can store it
in an array. In fact, you can do anything with this that you could do with any other variable,
except change its value. (Consider it to be a final variable.)

5.6.2 The Special Variable super

Java also defines another special variable, named “super”, for use in the definitions of instance
methods. The variable super is for use in a subclass. Like this, super refers to the object
that contains the method. But it’s forgetful. It forgets that the object belongs to the class you
are writing, and it remembers only that it belongs to the superclass of that class. The point is
that the class can contain additions and modifications to the superclass. super doesn’t know
about any of those additions and modifications; it can only be used to refer to methods and
variables in the superclass.
Let’s say that you use a method call super.doSomething() in a class that you are writing.
Now, super doesn’t know anything about any doSomething() method in the same class. It
only knows about things in the superclass of that class, so super.doSomething() represents an
attempt to execute a method named doSomething() from the superclass. If there is no such
method in the superclass, you’ll get a syntax error—even if there is a doSomething() method
in the class that you are writing.
The reason super exists is so you can get access to things in the superclass that are hidden
by things in the subclass. For example, super.var always refers to an instance variable named
var in the superclass. This can be useful for the following reason: If a class contains an instance
variable with the same name as an instance variable in its superclass, then an object of that
class will actually contain two variables with the same name: one defined as part of the class
itself and one defined as part of the superclass. The variable in the subclass does not replace
the variable of the same name in the superclass; it merely hides it. The variable from the
superclass can still be accessed, using super.
When a subclass contains an instance method that has the same signature as a method in
its superclass, the method from the superclass is hidden in the same way. We say that the
method in the subclass overrides the method from the superclass. Again, however, super can
be used to access the method from the superclass.
The major use of super is to override a method with a new method that extends the
behavior of the inherited method, instead of replacing that behavior entirely. The new method
can use super to call the method from the superclass, and then it can add additional code to
provide additional behavior. As an example, suppose you have a PairOfDice class that includes
a roll() method. Suppose that you want a subclass, GraphicalDice, to represent a pair of
dice drawn on the computer screen. The roll() method in the GraphicalDice class should do
everything that the roll() method in the PairOfDice class does. We can express this with a
call to super.roll(), which calls the method in the superclass. But in addition to that, the
roll() method for a GraphicalDice object has to redraw the dice to show the new values. The
GraphicalDice class might look something like this:
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 256

public class GraphicalDice extends PairOfDice {

public void roll() {
// Roll the dice, and redraw them.
super.roll(); // Call the roll method from PairOfDice.
redraw(); // Call a method to draw the dice.
}
.
. // More stuff, including definition of redraw().
.
}
Note that this allows you to extend the behavior of the roll() method even if you don’t know
how the method is implemented in the superclass!

5.6.3 super and this As Constructors

Constructors are not inherited. That is, if you extend an existing class to make a subclass, the
constructors in the superclass do not become part of the subclass. If you want constructors in
the subclass, you have to define new ones from scratch. If you don’t define any constructors
in the subclass, then the computer will make up a default constructor, with no parameters, for
you.
This could be a problem, if there is a constructor in the superclass that does a lot of necessary
work. It looks like you might have to repeat all that work in the subclass! This could be a
real problem if you don’t have the source code to the superclass, and don’t even know how it
is implemented. It might look like an impossible problem, if the constructor in the superclass
uses private member variables that you don’t even have access to in the subclass!
Obviously, there has to be some fix for this, and there is. It involves the special variable,
super. As the very first statement in a constructor, you can use super to call a constructor
from the superclass. The notation for this is a bit ugly and misleading, and it can only be used
in this one particular circumstance: It looks like you are calling super as a subroutine (even
though super is not a subroutine and you can’t call constructors the same way you call other
subroutines anyway). As an example, assume that the PairOfDice class has a constructor that
takes two integers as parameters. Consider a subclass:
public class GraphicalDice extends PairOfDice {
public GraphicalDice() { // Constructor for this class.
super(3,4); // Call the constructor from the
// PairOfDice class, with parameters 3, 4.
initializeGraphics(); // Do some initialization specific
// to the GraphicalDice class.
}
.
. // More constructors, methods, variables...
.
}
The statement “super(3,4);” calls the constructor from the superclass. This call must
be the first line of the constructor in the subclass. Note that if you don’t explicitly call a
constructor from the superclass in this way, then the default constructor from the superclass,
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 257

the one with no parameters, will be called automatically. (And if no such constructor exists in
the superclass, the compiler will consider it to be a syntax error.)
You can use the special variable this in exactly the same way to call another constructor
in the same class. That is, the very first line of a constructor can look like a subroutine call
with “this” as the name of the subroutine. The result is that the body of another constructor
in the same class is executed. This can be very useful since it can save you from repeating the
same code in several different constructors. As an example, consider MosaicCanvas.java, which
was used indirectly in Section 4.7. A MosaicCanvas represents a grid of colored rectangles. It
has a constructor with four parameters:
public MosaicCanvas(int rows, int columns,
int preferredBlockWidth, int preferredBlockHeight)
This constructor provides several options and does a lot of initialization. I wanted to provide
easier-to-use constructors with fewer options, but all the initialization still has to be done. The
class also contains these constructors:
public MosaicCanvas() {
this(42,42);
}
public MosaicCanvas(int rows, int columns) {
this(rows,columns,16,16);
}
Each of these constructors exists just to call another constructor, while providing constant
values for some of the parameters. For example, this(42,42) calls the second constructor
listed here, while that constructor in turn calls the main, four-parameter constructor. That
main constructor is eventually called in all cases, so that all the essential initialization gets
done in every case.

5.7 Interfaces
Some object-oriented programming languages, such as C++, allow a class to extend two or
more superclasses. This is called multiple inheritance. In the illustration below, for example,
class E is shown as having both class A and class B as direct superclasses, while class F has
three direct superclasses.

class A Ž ’

class C

class D Ž “

Ž ‘

Multiple inheritance (NOT allowed in Java)

CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 258

Such multiple inheritance is not allowed in Java. The designers of Java wanted to keep the
language reasonably simple, and felt that the benefits of multiple inheritance were not worth the
cost in increased complexity. However, Java does have a feature that can be used to accomplish
many of the same goals as multiple inheritance: interfaces. We have already encountered
“functional interfaces” in Section 4.5 in connection with lambda expressions. A functional
interface specifies a single method. However, interfaces can be much more complicated than
that, and they have many other uses.
You are not likely to need to write your own interfaces until you get to the point of writing
fairly complex programs. However, there are several interfaces that are used in important ways
in Java’s standard packages, and you will need to learn how to use them.

5.7.1 Defining and Implementing Interfaces

We encountered the term “interface” in other contexts, in connection with black boxes in
general and subroutines in particular. The interface of a subroutine consists of the name of the
subroutine, its return type, and the number and types of its parameters. This is the information
you need to know if you want to call the subroutine. A subroutine also has an implementation:
the block of code which defines it and which is executed when the subroutine is called.
In Java, interface is a reserved word with an additional, technical meaning. An
“interface” in this sense consists of a set of instance method interfaces, without any associated
implementations. (Actually, a Java interface can contain other things as well, as we’ll see later.)
A class can implement an interface by providing an implementation for each of the methods
specified by the interface. Here is an example of a very simple Java interface:
public interface Strokeable {
public void stroke(GraphicsContext g);
}
This looks much like a class definition, except that the implementation of the stroke() method
is omitted. A class that implements the interface Strokeable must provide an implementation
for stroke(). Of course, the class can also include other methods and variables. For example,
public class Line implements Strokeable {
public void stroke(GraphicsContext g) {
. . . // do something---presumably, draw a line
}
. . . // other methods, variables, and constructors
}
Note that to implement an interface, a class must do more than simply provide an
implementation for each method in the interface; it must also state that it implements the
interface, using the reserved word implements as in this example: “public class Line
implements Strokeable”. Any concrete class that implements the Strokeable interface must
define a stroke() instance method. Any object created from such a class includes a stroke()
method. We say that an object implements an interface if it belongs to a class that
implements the interface. For example, any object of type Line implements the Strokeable
interface.
While a class can extend only one other class, it can implement any number of interfaces.
In fact, a class can both extend one other class and implement one or more interfaces. So, we
can have things like
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 259

class FilledCircle extends Circle

implements Strokeable, Fillable {
. . .
}
The point of all this is that, although interfaces are not classes, they are something very
similar. An interface is very much like an abstract class, that is, a class that can never be used
for constructing objects, but can be used as a basis for making subclasses. The subroutines
in an interface are abstract methods, which must be implemented in any concrete class that
implements the interface. You can compare the Strokeable interface with the abstract class
public abstract class AbstractStrokeable {
public abstract void stroke(GraphicsContext g);
}
The main difference is that a class that extends AbstractStrokeable cannot extend any other
class, while a class that implements Strokeable can also extend some class, as well as implement
other interfaces. Of course, an abstract class can contain non-abstract methods as well as
abstract methods. An interface is like a “pure” abstract class, which contains only abstract
methods.
Note that the methods declared in an interface must be public and abstract. In fact, since
that is the only option, it is not necessary to specify either of these modifiers in the declaration.
In addition to method declarations, an interface can also include variable declarations. The
variables must be "public static final" and effectively become public static final variables
in every class that implements the interface. In fact, since the variables can only be public and
static and final, specifying the modifiers is optional. For example,
public interface ConversionFactors {
int INCHES PER FOOT = 12;
int FEET PER YARD = 3;
int YARDS PER MILE = 1760;
}
This is a convenient way to define named constants that can be used in several classes. A class
that implements ConversionFactors can use the constants defined in the interface as if they were
defined in the class.
Note in particular that any variable that is defined in an interface is a constant. It’s not
really a variable at all. An interface cannot add instance variables to the classes that implement
it.
An interface can extend one or more other interfaces. For example, if Strokeable is the
interface given above and Fillable is an interface that defines a method fill(g), then we could
define
public interface Drawable extends Strokeable, Fillable {
// (more methods/constants could be defined here)
}
A concrete class that implements Drawable must then provide implementations for the stroke()
method from Strokeable and the fill() method from Fillable, as well as for any abstract
methods specified directly in the Drawable interface.
An interface is usually defined in its own .java file, whose name must match the name of
the interface. For example, Strokeable would be defined in a file named Strokeable.java.
Just like a class, an interface can be in a package and can import things from other packages.
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 260

This discussion has been about the syntax rules for interfaces. But of course, an
interface also has a semantic component. That is, the person who creates the interface
intends for the methods that it defines to have some specific meaning. The interface definition
should include comments to express that meaning, and classes that implement the interface
should take that meaning into account. The Java compiler, however, can only check the syntax;
it can’t enforce the meaning. For example, the stroke() method in an object that implements
Strokeable is presumably meant to draw a graphical representation of the object by stroking it,
but the compiler can only check that the stroke() method exists in the object.

5.7.2 Default Methods

Starting in Java 8, interfaces can contain default methods. Unlike the usual abstract methods
in interfaces, a default method has an implementation. When a class implements the interface,
it does not have to provide an implementation for the default method—although it can do so
if it wants to provide a different implementation. Essentially, default methods are inherited
from interfaces in much the same way that ordinary methods are inherited from classes. This
moves Java partway towards supporting multiple inheritance. It’s not true multiple inheritance,
however, since interfaces still cannot define instance variables. Default methods can call abstract
methods that are defined in the same interface, but they cannot refer to any instance variables.
Note that a functional interface can include default methods in addition to the single abstract
method that it specifies.
A default method in an interface must be marked with the modifier default. It can
optionally be marked public but, as for everything else in interfaces, default methods are
automatically public and the public modifier can be omitted. Here is an example:
public interface Readable { // represents a source of input
public char readChar(); // read the next character from the input
default public String readLine() { // read up to the next line feed
StringBuilder line = new StringBuilder();
char ch = readChar();
while (ch != ’\n’) {
line.append(ch);
ch = readChar();
}
return line.toString();
}
}
A concrete class that implements this interface must provide an implementation for readChar().
It will inherit a definition for readLine() from the interface, but can provide a new definition if
necessary. When a class includes an implementation for a default method, the implementation
given in the class overrides the default method from the interface.
Note that the default readLine() calls the abstract method readChar(), whose definition
will only be provided in an implementing class. The reference to readChar() in the definition
is polymorphic. The default implementation of readLine() is one that would make sense
in almost any class that implements Readable. Here’s a rather silly example of a class that
implements Readable, including a main() routine that tests the class. Can you figure out what
it does?
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 261

public class Stars implements Readable {

public char readChar() {
if (Math.random() > 0.02)
return ’*’;
else
return ’\n’;
}
public static void main(String[] args) {
Stars stars = new Stars();
for (int i = 0 ; i < 10; i++ ) {
String line = stars.readLine(); // Calls the default method!
System.out.println( line );
}
}
}
Default methods provide Java with a capability similar to something called a “mixin” in
other programming languages, namely the ability to mix functionality from another source into
a class. Since a class can implement several interfaces, it is possible to mix in functionality
from several different sources.

5.7.3 Interfaces as Types

As with abstract classes, even though you can’t construct an object from an interface, you
can declare a variable whose type is given by the interface. For example, if Strokeable is the
interface given above, and if Line and Circle are classes that implement Strokeable, as above,
then you could say:
Strokeable figure; // Declare a variable of type Strokeable. It
// can refer to any object that implements the
// Strokeable interface.
figure = new Line(); // figure now refers to an object of class Line
figure.stroke(g); // calls stroke() method from class Line
figure = new Circle(); // Now, figure refers to an object
// of class Circle.
figure.stroke(g); // calls stroke() method from class Circle
A variable of type Strokeable can refer to any object of any class that implements the Strokeable
interface. A statement like figure.stroke(g), above, is legal because figure is of type
Strokeable, and any Strokeable object has a stroke() method. So, whatever object figure
refers to, that object must have a stroke() method.
Note that a type is something that can be used to declare variables. A type can also be
used to specify the type of a parameter in a subroutine, or the return type of a function. In
Java, a type can be either a class, an interface, or one of the eight built-in primitive types.
These are the only possibilities (given a few special cases, such as an enum, which is considered
to be a special kind of class). Of these, however, only classes can be used to construct new
objects.
An interface can also be the base type of an array. For example, we can use an array type
Strokeable[ ] to declare variables and create arrays. The elements of the array can refer to any
objects that implement the Strokeable interface:
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 262

Strokeable[] listOfFigures;
listOfFigures = new Strokeable[10];
listOfFigures[0] = new Line();
listOfFigures[1] = new Circle();
listOfFigures[2] = new Line();
.
.
.
Every element of the array will then have a stroke() method, so that we can say things like
listOfFigures[i].stroke(g).

5.8 Nested Classes

A class seems like it should be a pretty important thing. A class is a high-level building
block of a program, representing a potentially complex idea and its associated data and
behaviors. I’ve always felt a bit silly writing tiny little classes that exist only to group a
few scraps of data together. However, such trivial classes are often useful and even essential.
Fortunately, in Java, I can ease the embarrassment, because one class can be nested inside
another class. My trivial little class doesn’t have to stand on its own. It becomes part of a
larger more respectable class. This is particularly useful when you want to create a little class
specifically to support the work of a larger class. And, more seriously, there are other good
reasons for nesting the definition of one class inside another class.
In Java, a nested class is any class whose definition is inside the definition of another
class. (In fact, a class can even be nested inside a method, which must, of course, itself be
inside a class.) Nested classes can be either named or anonymous. I will come back to the
topic of anonymous classes later in this section. A named nested class, like most other things
that occur in classes, can be either static or non-static. Interfaces, like classes, can be nested
inside class definitions and can be either static or non-static. (In fact, interface definitions can
contain static nested classes and interfaces, but that is not something that you will see in this
textbook.)

5.8.1 Static Nested Classes

The definition of a static nested class looks just like the definition of any other class, except
that it is nested inside another class and it has the modifier static as part of its declaration.
A static nested class is part of the static structure of the containing class. It can be used inside
that class to create objects in the usual way. If it is used outside the containing class, its name
must indicate its membership in the containing class. That is, the full name of the static nested
class consists of the name of the class in which it is nested, followed by a period, followed by
the name of the nested class. This is similar to other static components of a class: A static
nested class is part of the class itself in the same way that static member variables are parts of
the class itself.
For example, suppose a class named WireFrameModel represents a set of lines in three-
dimensional space. (Such models are used to represent three-dimensional objects in graphics
programs.) Suppose that the WireFrameModel class contains a static nested class, Line, that
represents a single line. The definition of the WireFrameModel class with its nested Line class
would look, in outline, like this:
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 263

public class WireFrameModel {

. . . // other members of the WireFrameModel class
static public class Line {
// Represents a line from the point (x1,y1,z1)
// to the point (x2,y2,z2) in 3-dimensional space.
double x1, y1, z1;
double x2, y2, z2;
} // end class Line
. . . // other members of the WireFrameModel class
} // end WireFrameModel
The full name of the nested class is WireFrameModel.Line. That name can be used, for example,
to declare variables. Inside the WireFrameModel class, a Line object would be created with the
constructor “new Line()”. Outside the class, “new WireFrameModel.Line()” would be used.
A static nested class has full access to the static members of the containing class, even to the
private members. Similarly, the containing class has full access to the members of the nested
class, even if they are marked private. This can be another motivation for declaring a nested
class, since it lets you give one class access to the private members of another class without
making those members generally available to other classes. Note also that a nested class can
itself be private, meaning that it can only be used inside the class in which it is nested.
When you compile the above class definition, two class files will be created. Even though
the definition of Line is nested inside WireFrameModel, the compiled Line class is stored in a
separate file. The name of the class file for Line will be WireFrameModel$Line.class.

5.8.2 Inner Classes

Non-static nested classes are referred to as inner classes. Inner classes are not, in practice,
very different from static nested classes, but a non-static nested class is actually associated
with an object rather than with the class in which its definition is nested. This can take some
getting used to.
Any non-static member of a class is not really part of the class itself (although its source
code is contained in the class definition). This is true for inner classes, just as it is for any other
non-static part of a class. The non-static members of a class specify what will be contained in
objects that are created from that class. The same is true—at least logically—for inner classes.
It’s as if each object that belongs to the containing class has its own copy of the nested class
(although it does not literally contain a copy of the compiled code for the nested class). This
copy has access to all the instance methods and instance variables of the object, even to those
that are declared private. The two copies of the inner class in two different objects differ
because the instance variables and methods they refer to are in different objects. In fact, the
rule for deciding whether a nested class should be static or non-static is simple: If the nested
class needs to use any instance variable or instance method from the containing class, make the
nested class non-static. Otherwise, it might as well be static.
In most cases, an inner class is used only within the class where it is defined. When that
is true, using the inner class is really not much different from using any other class. You can
create variables and declare objects using the simple name of the inner class in the usual way
(although you can only do that in the non-static part of the class).
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 264

From outside the containing class, however, an inner class has to be referred to using a name
of the form hvariableNamei.hNestedClassNamei, where hvariableNamei is a variable that refers
to the object that contains the inner class. In order to create an object that belongs to an inner
class, you must first have an object that belongs to the containing class. (When working inside
the class, the object “this” is used implicitly.)
Looking at an example will help, and will hopefully convince you that inner classes are
really very natural. Consider a class that represents poker games. This class might include a
nested class to represent the players of the game. The structure of the PokerGame class could
be:
public class PokerGame { // Represents a game of poker.
class Player { // Represents one of the players in this game.
.
.
.
} // end class Player
private Deck deck; // A deck of cards for playing the game.
private int pot; // The amount of money that has been bet.
.
.
.
} // end class PokerGame
If game is a variable of type PokerGame, then, conceptually, game contains its own copy of
the Player class. In an instance method of a PokerGame object, a new Player object would
be created by saying “new Player()”, just as for any other class. (A Player object could be
created outside the PokerGame class with an expression such as “game.new Player()”. Again,
however, this is rare.) The Player object will have access to the deck and pot instance variables
in the PokerGame object. Each PokerGame object has its own deck and pot and Players.
Players of that poker game use the deck and pot for that game; players of another poker game
use the other game’s deck and pot. That’s the effect of making the Player class non-static: it
associates any Player object with some particular PokerGame object and gives it access to the
instance variables for that particular game. This is the most natural way for players to behave.
A Player object represents a player of one particular poker game. If Player were an independent
class or a static nested class, on the other hand, it would represent the general idea of a poker
player, independent of a particular poker game.

5.8.3 Anonymous Inner Classes

In some cases, you might find yourself writing an inner class and then using that class in just a
single line of your program. Is it worth creating such a class? Indeed, it can be, but for cases
like this you have the option of using an anonymous inner class. An anonymous class is
created with a variation of the new operator that has the form
new hsuperclass-or-interface i ( hparameter-list i ) {
hmethods-and-variables i
}
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 265

This constructor defines a new class, without giving it a name. At run time, it creates an
object that belongs to that class. This form of the new operator can be used in any statement
where a regular “new” could be used. The intention of this expression is to create: “a new object
belonging to a class that is the same as hsuperclass-or-interfacei but with these hmethods-and-
variablesi added.” The effect is to create a uniquely customized object, just at the point in
the program where you need it. Note that it is possible to base an anonymous class on an
interface, rather than a class. In this case, the anonymous class must implement the interface
by defining all the methods that are declared in the interface. If an interface is used as a base,
the hparameter-listi must be empty. Otherwise, it can contain parameters for a constructor in
the hsuperclassi.
For now, we will look at one not-very-plausible example. Suppose that Drawable is an
interface defined as:
public interface Drawable {
public void draw(GraphicsContext g);
}
Suppose that we want a Drawable object that draws a filled, red, 100-pixel square. Rather than
defining a new, separate class and then using that class to create the object, we can use an
anonymous class to create the object in one statement:
Drawable redSquare = new Drawable() {
public void draw(GraphicsContext g) {
g.setFill(Color.RED);
g.fillRect(10,10,100,100);
}
};
Then redSquare refers to an object that implements Drawable and that draws a red square
when its draw() method is called. By the way, the semicolon at the end of the statement is not
part of the class definition; it’s the semicolon that is required at the end of every declaration
statement.
Anonymous classes are often used for actual parameters. For example, consider the following
simple method, which draws a Drawable in two different graphics contexts:
void drawTwice( GraphicsContext g1, GraphicsContext g2, Drawable figure ) {
figure.draw(g1);
figure.draw(g2);
}
When calling this method, the third parameter can be created using an anonymous inner class.
For example:
drawTwice( firstG, secondG, new Drawable() {
void draw(GraphicsContext g) {
g.fillOval(10,10,100,100);
}
} );
When a Java class is compiled, each anonymous nested class will produce a separate
class file. If the name of the main class is MainClass, for example, then the names of the
class files for the anonymous nested classes will be MainClass$1.class, MainClass$2.class,
MainClass$3.class, and so on.
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 266

Of course, in this example, Drawable is a functional interface, and we could use lambda
expressions (Section 4.5) instead of anonymous classes. The last example could then be written
simply
drawTwice( firstG, secondG, g -> g.fillOval(10,10,100,100) );
and redSquare could be defined as
Drawable redSquare = g -> {
g.setFill(Color.RED);
g.fillRect(10,10,100,100);
};
This approach has the advantage that it does not create an extra .class file. However, lambda
expressions can only be used with functional interfaces, while anonymous classes can be used
with any interface or class.

5.8.4 Local Classes and Lambda Expressions

A class can be defined inside a subroutine definition. Such classes are called local classes. A
local class can only be used inside the subroutine where it is defined. However, an object that
is defined by a local class can be used outside that subroutine. It can be returned as the value
of the subroutine, or it can be passed as a parameter to another subroutine. This is possible
because an object belonging to some class B can be assigned to a variable of type A, as long
as B is a subclass of A or, if A is an interface, as long as class B implements interface A. For
example, if a subroutine takes a parameter of type Drawable, where Drawable is the interface
defined above, then any object that implements Drawable can be passed as a parameter to that
subroutine. And that object can be defined by a local class.
In an example earlier in this section, we passed a customized object of type Drawable to the
drawTwice() method, which takes a parameter of type Drawable. In that example, the class
was an anonymous inner class. Local classes are often anonymous, but that is not required. It
is also true that anonymous classes are often local classes, but that is also not required. For
example, an anonymous class could be used to define the initial value of a global variable. In
that case, the anonymous class is not enclosed in any subroutine and therefore is not local.
The definition of a local class can use local variables from the subroutine where it is defined.
It can also use parameters to that subroutine. However, there is a restriction on the use of such
variables and parameters in a local class: The local variable or parameter must be declared
to be final or, if it is not explicitly declared final, then it must be “effectively final.” A
parameter is effectively final if its value is not changed inside the subroutine (including in any
local class that references the parameter). A local variable is effectively final if its value is never
changed after it is initialized. Note that there is no such restriction on global variables that are
used in the definition of a local class.
The same restriction on the use of local variables also applies to lambda expressions, which
are very similar to anonymous classes. Here is an example using the FunctionR2R functional in-
terface from Subsection 4.5.2, which defines the single method “double valueAt(double x))”.
This code segment creates an array of FunctionR2R objects, where multpliers[i] is a function
that multiplies its parameter by i:
FunctionR2R[] multipliers = new FunctionR2R[100];
for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
int n = i;
multipliers[i] = z -> n * z;
CHAPTER 5. OBJECTS AND CLASSES 267

}
The local variable n is effectively final and therefore can be used in the lambda expression.
On the other hand, it would have been illegal to use the variable i directly in the lambda
expression, since i is not effectively final; its value is changed when i++ is executed. Note also
that this example could be written using an anonymous class instead of a lambda expression:
FunctionR2R[] multipliers = new FunctionR2R[100];
for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
int n = i;
multipliers[i] = new FunctionR2R() {
public double valueAt(double x) {
return n * x;
}
};
}
Exercises 268

Exercises for Chapter 5

1. In all versions of the PairOfDice class in Section 5.2, the instance variables die1 and die2 (solution)
are declared to be public. They really should be private, so that they would be protected
from being changed from outside the class. Write another version of the PairOfDice class
in which the instance variables die1 and die2 are private. Your class will need “getter”
methods that can be used to find out the values of die1 and die2. (The idea is to protect
their values from being changed from outside the class, but still to allow the values to be
read.) Include other improvements in the class, including at least a toString() method.
Test your class with a short program that counts how many times a pair of dice is rolled,
before the total of the two dice is equal to two.

2. A common programming task is computing statistics of a set of numbers. (A statistic is (solution)

a number that summarizes some property of a set of data.) Common statistics include
the mean (also known as the average) and the standard deviation (which tells how spread
out the data are from the mean). I have written a little class called StatCalc that can be
used to compute these statistics, as well as the sum of the items in the dataset and the
number of items in the dataset. You can read the source code for this class in the file
StatCalc.java. If calc is a variable of type StatCalc, then the following instance methods
are available:
• calc.enter(item) where item is a number, adds the item to the dataset.
• calc.getCount() is a function that returns the number of items that have been
added to the dataset.
• calc.getSum() is a function that returns the sum of all the items that have been
added to the dataset.
• calc.getMean() is a function that returns the average of all the items.
• calc.getStandardDeviation() is a function that returns the standard deviation
of the items.
Typically, all the data are added one after the other by calling the enter() method
over and over, as the data become available. After all the data have been entered, any
of the other methods can be called to get statistical information about the data. The
methods getMean() and getStandardDeviation() should only be called if the number
of items is greater than zero.
Modify the current source code, StatCalc.java, to add instance methods getMax() and
getMin(). The getMax() method should return the largest of all the items that have been
added to the dataset, and getMin() should return the smallest. You will need to add two
new instance variables to keep track of the largest and smallest items that have been seen
so far.
Test your new class by using it in a program to compute statistics for a set of non-zero
numbers entered by the user. Start by creating an object of type StatCalc:
StatCalc calc; // Object to be used to process the data.
calc = new StatCalc();
Read numbers from the user and add them to the dataset. Use 0 as a sentinel value
(that is, stop reading numbers when the user enters 0). After all the user’s non-zero
Exercises 269

numbers have been entered, print out each of the six statistics that are available from
calc.

3. This problem uses the PairOfDice class from Exercise 5.1 and the StatCalc class from (solution)
Exercise 5.2.
The program in Exercise 4.4 performs the experiment of counting how many times a
pair of dice is rolled before a given total comes up. It repeats this experiment 10000 times
and then reports the average number of rolls. It does this whole process for each possible
total (2, 3, . . . , 12).
Redo that exercise. But instead of just reporting the average number of rolls, you
should also report the standard deviation and the maximum number of rolls. Use a
PairOfDice object to represent the dice. Use a StatCalc object to compute the statistics.
(You’ll need a new StatCalc object for each possible total, 2, 3, . . . , 12. You can use a
new pair of dice if you want, but it’s not required.)

4. The BlackjackHand class from Subsection 5.5.1 is an extension of the Hand class (solution)
from Section 5.4. The instance methods in the Hand class are discussed in that
section. In addition to those methods, BlackjackHand includes an instance method,
getBlackjackValue(), which returns the value of the hand for the game of Blackjack.
For this exercise, you will also need the Deck and Card classes from Section 5.4.
A Blackjack hand typically contains from two to six cards. Write a program to test the
BlackjackHand class. You should create a BlackjackHand object and a Deck object. Pick
a random number between 2 and 6. Deal that many cards from the deck and add them to
the hand. Print out all the cards in the hand, and then print out the value computed for
the hand by getBlackjackValue(). Repeat this as long as the user wants to continue.
In addition to TextIO.java, your program will depend on Card.java, Deck.java,
Hand.java, and BlackjackHand.java.

5. Write a program that lets the user play Blackjack. The game will be a simplified version (solution)
of Blackjack as it is played in a casino. The computer will act as the dealer. As in
the previous exercise, your program will need the classes defined in Card.java, Deck.java,
Hand.java, and BlackjackHand.java. (This is the longest and most complex program that
has come up so far in the exercises.)
You should first write a subroutine in which the user plays one game. The subroutine
should return a boolean value to indicate whether the user wins the game or not. Return
true if the user wins, false if the dealer wins. The program needs an object of class
Deck and two objects of type BlackjackHand, one for the dealer and one for the user.
The general object in Blackjack is to get a hand of cards whose value is as close to 21 as
possible, without going over. The game goes like this.
• First, two cards are dealt into each player’s hand. If the dealer’s hand has a value of
21 at this point, then the dealer wins. Otherwise, if the user has 21, then the user
wins. (This is called a “Blackjack”.) Note that the dealer wins on a tie, so if both
players have Blackjack, then the dealer wins.
• Now, if the game has not ended, the user gets a chance to add some cards to her
hand. In this phase, the user sees her own cards and sees one of the dealer’s two
cards. (In a casino, the dealer deals himself one card face up and one card face down.
All the user’s cards are dealt face up.) The user makes a decision whether to “Hit”,
Exercises 270

which means to add another card to her hand, or to “Stand”, which means to stop
taking cards.
• If the user Hits, there is a possibility that the user will go over 21. In that case, the
game is over and the user loses. If not, then the process continues. The user gets to
decide again whether to Hit or Stand.
• If the user Stands, the game will end, but first the dealer gets a chance to draw cards.
The dealer only follows rules, without any choice. The rule is that as long as the
value of the dealer’s hand is less than or equal to 16, the dealer Hits (that is, takes
another card). The user should see all the dealer’s cards at this point. Now, the
winner can be determined: If the dealer has gone over 21, the user wins. Otherwise,
if the dealer’s total is greater than or equal to the user’s total, then the dealer wins.
Otherwise, the user wins.
Two notes on programming: At any point in the subroutine, as soon as you know who
the winner is, you can say “return true;” or “return false;” to end the subroutine
and return to the main program. To avoid having an overabundance of variables in your
subroutine, remember that a function call such as userHand.getBlackjackValue() can
be used anywhere that a number could be used, including in an output statement or in
the condition of an if statement.
Write a main program that lets the user play several games of Blackjack. To make
things interesting, give the user 100 dollars, and let the user make bets on the game. If
the user loses, subtract the bet from the user’s money. If the user wins, add an amount
equal to the bet to the user’s money. End the program when the user wants to quit or
when she runs out of money.

6. Exercise 4.8 asked you to write a program that administers a 10-question addition quiz. (solution)
Rewrite that program so that it uses the following class to represent addition questions:
public class AdditionQuestion {
private int a, b; // The numbers in the problem.
public AdditionQuestion() { // constructor
a = (int)(Math.random() * 50 + 1);
b = (int)(Math.random() * 50);
}
public String getQuestion() {
return "What is " + a + " + " + b + " ?";
}
public int getCorrectAnswer() {
return a + b;
}
}

7. Rewrite the program from the previous exercise so that it administers a quiz with several (solution)
different kinds of questions. In the previous exercise, you used a class to represent addition
questions. For this exercise, you will use the following interface, or an equivalent abstract
class, to represent the more general idea of a question that has an integer as its answer:
Exercises 271

public interface IntQuestion {

public String getQuestion();
public int getCorrectAnswer();
}
You can make the AdditionQuestion class implement the interface simply by adding
“implements IntQuestion” to its definition. Write a similar class to represent subtrac-
tion questions. When creating a subtraction problem, you should make sure that the
answer is not negative.
For the new program, use an array of type IntQuestion[ ] to hold the quiz questions.
Include some addition questions and some subtraction questions in the quiz. You can also
add a couple non-math questions, including this one, created as an anonymous class:
IntQuestion bigQuestion = new IntQuestion() {
public String getQuestion() {
return "What is the answer to the ultimate question " +
" of life, the universe, and everything?";
}
public int getCorrectAnswer() {
return 42;
}
};
Quiz 272

Quiz on Chapter 5
(answers)

1. Object-oriented programming uses classes and objects. What are classes and what are
objects? What is the relationship between classes and objects?

2. Explain carefully what null means in Java, and why this special value is necessary.

3. What is a constructor? What is the purpose of a constructor in a class?

4. Suppose that Kumquat is the name of a class and that fruit is a variable of type Kumquat.
What is the meaning of the statement “fruit = new Kumquat();”? That is, what does
the computer do when it executes this statement? (Try to give a complete answer. The
computer does several things.)

5. What is meant by the terms instance variable and instance method ?

6. Explain what is meant by the terms subclass and superclass.

7. Modify the following class so that the two instance variables are private and there is a
getter method and a setter method for each instance variable:
public class Player {
String name;
int score;
}

8. Explain why the class Player that is defined in the previous question has an instance
method named toString(), even though no definition of this method appears in the
definition of the class.

9. Explain the term polymorphism.

10. Java uses “garbage collection” for memory management. Explain what is meant here by
garbage collection. What is the alternative to garbage collection?

11. What is an abstract class, and how can you recognize an abstract class in Java?

12. What is this?

13. For this problem, you should write a very simple but complete class. The class represents
a counter that counts 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, . . . . The name of the class should be Counter. It has
one private instance variable representing the value of the counter. It has two instance
methods: increment() adds one to the counter value, and getValue() returns the current
counter value. Write a complete definition for the class, Counter.

14. This problem uses the Counter class from the previous question. The following program
segment is meant to simulate tossing a coin 100 times. It should use two Counter objects,
headCount and tailCount, to count the number of heads and the number of tails. Fill in
the blanks so that it will do so:
Quiz 273

Counter headCount, tailCount;

tailCount = new Counter();
headCount = new Counter();
for ( int flip = 0; flip < 100; flip++ ) {
if (Math.random() < 0.5) // There’s a 50/50 chance that this is true.
; // Count a "head".
else
; // Count a "tail".
}
System.out.println("There were " + + " heads.");
System.out.println("There were " + + " tails.");

15. Explain why it can never make sense to test “if (obj.equals(null))”.
Chapter 6

Introduction to GUI Programming

Computer users today expect to interact with their computers using a graphical user
interface (GUI), and Java can be used to write sophisticated GUI programs.
GUI programs differ from traditional “straight-through” programs that you have encoun-
tered in the first few chapters of this book. One big difference is that GUI programs are
event-driven. That is, user actions such as clicking on a button or pressing a key on the
keyboard generate events, and the program must respond to these events as they occur.
Event-driven programming builds on all the skills you have learned in the first five chapters
of this text. You need to be able to write the methods that respond to events. Inside those
methods, you are doing the kind of programming-in-the-small that was covered in Chapter 2
and Chapter 3. And of course, objects are everywhere in GUI programming. Events are objects.
Colors and fonts are objects. GUI components such as buttons and menus are objects. Events
are handled by instance methods contained in objects. In Java, GUI programming is object-
oriented programming. The purpose of this chapter is, as much as anything, to give you some
experience with a large-scale object-oriented API.
This chapter is just an introduction to JavaFX, but it covers the essential features of GUI
programming in enough detail to write some interesting programs. The discussion of JavaFX
will continue in Chapter 13 with more details and with more advanced techniques, but complete
coverage of JavaFX would require an entire book of its own.
Note that JavaFX is not distributed as part of the Java Development Kit. For information
about how to obtain JavaFX and how to compile and run programs that use it, see Section 2.6.
This edition of this textbook covers GUI programming using the JavaFX GUI toolkit. An
alternative edition covers the Swing GUI toolkit instead of JavaFX. Swing is included as a
standard part of Java, so does not require any extra downloads or configuration. The Swing
edition can be found at https://math.hws.edu/javanotes9-swing. The only really significant
differences between the two editions are in this chapter and in Chapter 13.

6.1 A Basic JavaFX Application

The command-line programs that you have learned how to write would seem very alien
to most computer users. The style of interaction where the user and the computer take turns
typing strings of text seems like something out of the early days of computing, although it was
only in the mid 1980s that home computers with graphical user interfaces started to become
available. Today, most people interact with their computers exclusively through a GUI. A GUI
program offers a much richer type of user interface, where the user uses a mouse and keyboard

275
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 276

(or other input devices) to interact with GUI components such as windows, menus, buttons,
check boxes, text input boxes, scroll bars, and so on.
This section introduces some of the basic ideas of programming with JavaFX by looking
at a very simple GUI application. (“Application” is the preferred term for “program” in this
context.) The application simply displays a window containing a message and three buttons.
Here’s what the window looks like when it first opens:

Clicking “Say Hello” will get the computer to tell you, “Hello World!”. Clicking “Say Goodbye”
will change the text of the message to “Goodbye”. Clicking the “Quit” button will end the
application, which can also be ended by clicking the window’s close box.

6.1.1 JavaFX Applications

A JavaFX program (or “application”) is represented by an object of type Application, which
is defined in the package javafx.application. Application is an abstract class, which defines,
among other things, one abstract instance method, named start(). To create a JavaFX
program, you need to create a class that extends Application and provides a definition for the
start() method. (See Subsection 5.5.1 and Subsection 5.5.5.)
The class that you write to create a JavaFX application also typically includes a main()
method that simply “launches” the application:
public static void main(String[] args) {
launch();
}
(The call to launch() can be replace by launch(args) for an application that uses command-
line arguments (Subsection 4.3.6), but the parameter is optional for all of the examples in this
book.) When this main() routine is executed, the launch() method creates a new thread,
called the JavaFX application thread . Recall from Section 1.2 that a thread can execute
a sequence of instructions that can be run in parallel with other threads. It is important
that anything that affects the GUI be done on the JavaFX application thread. That will be
pretty much automatic for the things that we do in this chapter, but it’s something that will
become important when we cover threads in Chapter 12 and write some GUI programs that use
several threads. The launch() method then creates the object that represents the application;
that object is an instance of the class that contains the call to the launch() method. The
start() method of that object is then called on the JavaFX application thread, and it is the
responsibility of that start() method to set up the GUI and open a window on the screen.
Here, then is our first JavaFX application. We will spend the rest of this section discussing
it:
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 277

import javafx.application.Application;
import javafx.scene.Scene;
import javafx.stage.Stage;
import javafx.application.Platform;
import javafx.scene.layout.BorderPane;
import javafx.scene.layout.HBox;
import javafx.geometry.Pos;
import javafx.scene.control.Label;
import javafx.scene.control.Button;
import javafx.scene.text.Font;
public class HelloWorldFX extends Application {
public void start(Stage stage) {
Label message = new Label("First FX Application!");
message.setFont( new Font(40) );
Button helloButton = new Button("Say Hello");
helloButton.setOnAction( evt -> message.setText("Hello World!") );
Button goodbyeButton = new Button("Say Goodbye");
goodbyeButton.setOnAction( evt -> message.setText("Goodbye!!") );
Button quitButton = new Button("Quit");
quitButton.setOnAction( evt -> Platform.exit() );
HBox buttonBar = new HBox( 20, helloButton, goodbyeButton, quitButton );
buttonBar.setAlignment(Pos.CENTER);
BorderPane root = new BorderPane();
root.setCenter(message);
root.setBottom(buttonBar);
Scene scene = new Scene(root, 450, 200);
stage.setScene(scene);
stage.setTitle("JavaFX Test");
stage.show();
} // end start();
public static void main(String[] args) {
launch(); // Run this Application.
}
} // end class HelloWorldFX
The first thing that you will notice is the large number of imports at the start of the program,
all from subpackages of the javafx package. A typical JavaFX program uses many classes
from such packages. When I discuss a JavaFX class for the first time, I will usually mention
the package that it comes from. But in any case, you can look up the class in the JavaFX
API documentation. As I write this, the documentation for JavaFX 17 can be be found at
https://openjfx.io/javadoc/17/.
The HelloWorldFX program contains a main method to launch the application, and it
contains the required start() method. Of course, we will often add other methods to our
application classes, to be called by start(). There are also a couple other methods in
Application that can be overridden. In particular, there is an init(), that will be called by the
system before start(), and a stop() method that is called by the system when the application
is shutting down. These two methods are defined in class Application to do nothing. A
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 278

programmer can redefine init() to do some initialization and stop() to do cleanup. However,
we will rarely if ever need them. Any initialization that we need can be done in start().

6.1.2 Stage, Scene, and SceneGraph

The start() method has a parameter of type Stage, from package javafx.stage. A Stage
object represents a window on the computer’s screen. The stage that is passed as a parameter
to start() is constructed by the system. It represents the main window of a program, and is
often referred to as the “primary stage.” A program can create other windows by constructing
new objects of type Stage.
A window is an area on the screen that can be filled with content. It can contain GUI
components such as menus, buttons, and text input boxes, as well as drawing areas like those
used in the graphical programs from Section 3.9. Although the primary stage is created before
start() is called, the window does not have any content, and it is not yet visible on the screen.
The start() method is responsible for adding content to the window and making it visible.
The very last line of start() in the HelloWorldFX program, stage.show(), is what makes the
window visible. The rest of the method creates content, adds the content to the window, and
sets various configuration options for the content and for the window itself. For example, the
line
stage.setTitle("JavaFX Test");
sets the text that will appear in the title bar at the top of the window.
A stage shows a scene, which fills its content area and serves as a container for the GUI
components in the window. A scene is represented by an object of type Scene. In the sample
program, the statement
stage.setScene(scene);
sets the scene that will be displayed in the content area of the stage.
A scene can be filled with things called GUI components, such as buttons and menu bars.
Each component is represented by an object belonging to a JavaFX class. For example, a push
button such as the “Say Hello” button in the sample program, is represented by an object
belonging to the class Button, from the package javafx.scene.control. Some components,
such as the object buttonBar of type HBox, are containers. A container represents a
region in the window that can contain other components, including other containers. So, a
window contains GUI components, inside containers, which can be inside bigger containers,
each represented by an object. All of these objects make up something called the scene graph
for the window. The scene graph shows the containment relationships among all the components
in the scene. For the sample program, the scene graph looks like this:

message
(class Label)

GoodbyeButton
(class Button)
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 279

Note that this is not a class hierarchy. It does not show the relationships among the classes of
the objects in the program; rather, it is a containment hierarchy that shows how the components
are contained within other components on the screen. In this scene graph, root and buttonBar
are containers while message and the three buttons are simple components.
A scene contains a single “root” component, which is a container that contains all of the
other components in the scene. In the sample program, the root component is named root
(although of course that is not required), and the root of the scene is set when the Scene object
is constructed:
Scene scene = new Scene(root, 450, 200);
The numbers in this constructor specify the width and the height of the scene, in pixels. The
numbers can be omitted, in which case the size will be computed based on the contents of the
scene.

6.1.3 Nodes and Layout

Objects that can be part of a scene graph are referred to as nodes. Scene graph nodes must
belong to one of the subclasses of javafx.scene.Node. Scene graph objects that can act as
containers must belong to one of the subclasses of javafx.scene.Parent, which is a subclass
of Node. The nodes that are contained in a parent are called children of that node. The root
node in a scene graph must be a Parent.
The buttons in HelloWorldFX are represented by objects of type Button. The constructor
that is used to create the button objects specifies the text that is displayed on the button.
Similarly, message is a node of type Label, from package javafx.scene.control, whose
purpose is simply to passively display a String. One of the properties of a Label object is
a font, which specifies the size and style of the characters in the displayed string. The font for
the text is set by calling the label’s setFont() method. The Font constructor that is used in
the sample program, new Font(40), takes a parameter that specifies the size of the font.
Containers are Nodes which can have other nodes as children. The act of arranging a
container’s children on the screen is referred to as layout. Layout means setting the size and
location of the components inside the container. While it is possible for a program to set the
sizes and locations directly, it is more commonly done automatically by the container. Different
containers implement different layout policies. For example, an HBox is a container that simply
arranges the components that it contains in a horizontal row. In the constructor
HBox buttonBar = new HBox( 20, helloButton, goodbyeButton, quitButton );
the first parameter specifies the size of a gap that the HBox will place between its children, and
the remaining parameters are nodes to be added as children of the container.
A BorderPane is a container that implements a completely different layout policy. A
BorderPane can contain up to five components, one in the center of the pane and up to four
more placed at the top, at the bottom, to the left, and to the right of the center. In the sample
program, the root of the scene is a BorderPane and components are added in the pane’s center
and bottom positions with the statements
root.setCenter(message);
root.setBottom(buttonBar);
Layout is configurable by a large number of options. The sample program has only one
example of this,
buttonBar.setAlignment(Pos.CENTER);
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 280

This command centers the buttons within the HBox; without it, they would be shoved
over to the left edge of the window. Pos, short for “position,” is an enumerated type (see
Subsection 2.3.5). JavaFX uses many enumerated types for specifying various options.

6.1.4 Events and Event Handlers

In addition to setting up the physical layout of the window, the start() method configures
event handling . In HelloWorldFX, an event occurs when the user clicks one of the buttons.
The application must be configured to respond to, or “handle,” these events. Handling an event
involves two objects. The event itself is represented by an object that holds information about
the event. For a button click, the event is of type ActionEvent, and the information that it
carries is the button that was clicked. The second object is of type EventHandler, a functional
interface that defines a method handle(evt), where the parameter, evt, is the event object.
To program a response to an event, you can create a class that implements the EventHandler
interface and provides a definition for the handle() method. However, since EventHandler is
a functional interface, the handler can alternatively be specified as a lambda expression (see
Section 4.5). Lambda expressions are very commonly used in JavaFX for writing event handlers,
among other uses. For example, the lambda expression
evt -> message.setText("Hello World!")
represents an event handler that responds to an event by changing the text of the message to
read “Hello World!”. The parameter, evt, is the ActionEvent object that represents the event.
In this case, the parameter is not used in the response in any way, but it still has to be there to
satisfy the syntax of the lambda expression: Since the function in the EventHandler interface
has a parameter, the lambda expression must have a parameter to match the interface.
In addition to writing the event handler, you also have to register the handler with the
object that will produce the event. In this case, the object is helloButton, and the handler is
registered by calling the button’s setOnAction() method:
helloButton.setOnAction( evt -> message.setText("Hello World!") );
Handlers for each of the other two buttons are set up in a similar way. Remember that in each
case, there is an object that generates the event in response to a user action, an object that
represents the event, and an event handler that contains the code that is executed in response
to the event. This diagram summarizes how it all works:
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—š››œ ¥™™Ÿ¦›™– ™§™› Ƴ´µ µ½ º»Æµ³´³Â
instanceof ¨©ª«¬­®«¯°er
Quit
handle(e)
”•–•—˜™ —š››œž
Ÿ™ Ÿ™–™›ed by ±²³´µ¶·¸´¹º»´¼ ½¾¿³Àµ
a Button œ—¡™¢› Á½Â º¸Ã¾¹¸ ³ÄųÆÆ»on)
³ÆŽ´¹Æ to the event

About all that still remains to be explained in the sample program is the response to a click on
the “Quit” button: Platform.exit(). The static exit() method in the Platform class is the
preferred way to programmatically end a JavaFX program. It is preferred to System.exit()
because it cleanly shuts down the application thread and gives it an opportunity to clean up
by calling the application’s stop() method before terminating.
∗ ∗ ∗
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 281

This section has been only a brief overview of JavaFX applications, but it has introduced
many of the fundamental concepts. We will cover all of this in much greater detail in the
following sections.

6.2 Some Basic Classes

In this section, we will look at some basic classes, including classes representing colors, fonts,
and images. We will see how these classes are used in the GraphicsContext API, which you
already encountered in a preliminary way in Section 3.9, but they are also useful in other parts
of JavaFX. There is also a brief introduction to CSS style sheets, which can be used to control
many aspects of the visual appearance of GUI components.

6.2.1 Color and Paint

Computer color uses an RGB color system. That is, a color on a computer screen is specified
by three numbers, called color components, giving the level of red, green, and blue in the
color. A color is represented by an object of type Color, from package javafx.scene.paint.
In JavaFX, each color component is a double value in the range 0.0 to 1.0. A Color object
also has a fourth component in the range 0.0 to 1.0, referred as the alpha color component,
which is generally used to represent the transparency or opaqueness of the color when it is used
for drawing. When a fully opaque color (alpha component equal to 1.0) is used for drawing,
the drawing color completely replaces the current color of the drawing surface. When a fully
transparent color (alpha component equal to 0.0) is used for drawing, it has no effect at all.
When the alpha component is between 0.0 and 1.0, the drawing color is combined with the
current color to give the new color of the drawing surface, as if the original contents of the
drawing surface were being viewed through colored, translucent glass. A Color object can be
constructed by giving its red, green, blue, and alpha components; for example,
Color myColor = new Color( r, g, b, a );
where r, g, b, and a are in the range 0.0 to 1.0. However, the Color class also has a number
of static methods for making color objects. Static methods whose job is to create objects are
sometimes called factory methods. So instead of using the constructor, you could also say
Color myColor = Color.color( r, g, b, a );
and in the common case of a fully opaque color, with a equal to 1.0, you can use
Color myColor = Color.color( r, g, b );
These static factory methods are preferable to the constructor because they have the option of
reusing color objects. For example, two calls to Color.color(0.2,0.3,1.0) might return the
same Color object. This is OK because color objects are immutable; that is, there is no way to
change a color after it has been constructed. So there is really no reason to use two different
objects to represent the same color.
Your computer screen probably uses “32-bit color,” which means that the color of each
pixel is actually represented using just 8 bits for each of the four color components. Eight bits
can represent the 256 integers in the range 0 to 255, so computer colors have traditionally been
specified using integer color components in the range 0 to 255. The Color class has the following
static method for making colors in this way:
Color.rgb( r, g, b )
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 282

where r, g, and b are integers in the range 0 to 255. There is also Color.rgb(r,g,b,a) where
r, g, and b are ints in the range 0 to 255, and a is a double in the range 0.0 to 1.0.
An alternative to RGB is the HSB color system. In the HSB system, a color is specified by
three numbers called the hue, the saturation, and the brightness. The hue is the basic color,
ranging from red through orange through all the other colors of the rainbow. The brightness is
pretty much what it sounds like. A fully saturated color is a pure color tone. Decreasing the
saturation is like mixing white or gray paint into the pure color. In JavaFX, the hue is given
by a double value in the range 0.0 to 360.0, while saturation and brightness are double values
in the range 0.0 to 1.0. (The hue value is given in degrees, were the colors are seen as laid
out along a circle, with both 0.0 and 360.0 representing pure red.) The Color class has static
methods Color.hsb(h,s,b) and Color.hsb(h,s,b,a) for making HSB colors. For example,
to make a color with a random hue that is as bright and as saturated as possible, you could
use:
Color randomColor = Color.hsb( 360*Math.random(), 1.0, 1.0 );
The RGB system and the HSB system are just different ways of describing the same set of
colors. It is possible to translate between one system and the other. The best way to understand
the color systems is to experiment with them. The sample program SimpleColorChooser.java
lets you do that. You won’t understand the source code at this time, but you can run it to play
with color selection or to find RGB or HSB values for the color that want.
The Color class also contains a large number of constants representing colors, such
as Color.RED, Color.BLACK, Color.LIGHTGRAY, and Color.GOLDENROD. It might be worth
mentioning that Color.GREEN is the fairly dark green color given by Color.rgb(0,128,0); the
constant representing Color.rgb(0,255,0) is Color.LIME. There is also Color.TRANSPARENT,
which represents a fully transparent color, with all RGBA color components equal to zero.
Given a Color, c, you can find out the values of the various color components by calling
functions such as c.getRed(), c.getHue(), and c.getOpacity(). These methods return
double values in the range 0.0 to 1.0, except for c.getHue(), which returns a double in the
range 0.0 to 360.0.
∗ ∗ ∗
Color is a subclass of another class, Paint, which represents the more general idea of
“something that can be used to fill and to stroke shapes.” In addition to colors, there are
image paints and gradient paints. I will not use these more general paints in this chapter, but
they will be covered in Subsection 13.2.2. For now, you should just know that when a method
has a parameter of type Paint, you can use a Color.

6.2.2 Fonts
A font represents a particular size and style of text. The same character will appear different
in different fonts. In JavaFX, a font is represented by an object of type Font, from the package
javafx.scene.text. Although the Font defines a couple of constructors, the best way to make
a font object is with one of the static factory methods from that class.
A font has a name, which is a string that specifies a font family such as “Times New Roman.”
A given family can have variations such as a bold or an italic version of the font. And a font
has a size, which is specified in “points,” where a point should really be 1/72 inch but might in
practice be equal to the size of a pixel. The most general function for making fonts can specify
all of these options:
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 283

Font myFont = Font.font( family, weight, posture, size );

If the system can’t match the requested font properties exactly, it will return the font that it
thinks best matches the parameters. Here, family is a String that should specify a font family
that is available to the program. Unfortunately, there is no set of fonts that is required to be
available. “Times New Roman,” “Arial,” and “Verdana” are likely to work. (These are fonts
that were created by Microsoft and released for free use; they are installed on many systems.)
You can pass null as the familyName to use the default font family.
Font “weight” is given as an enumerated type value from the enum FontWeight. It will
usually be either FontWeight.BOLD or FontWeight.NORMAL, although there are a few other
values such as FontWeight.EXTRA BOLD. Similarly, font “posture” is one of the constants
FontPosture.ITALIC or FontPosture.REGULAR. Both FontWeight and FontPosture are from
package javafx.scene.text.
The Font class has several other static functions for making fonts, which specify only a subset
of the four properties family, weight, posture, and size. These include: Font.font(size),
Font.font(family), Font.font(family,weight,size), and a few others. The missing
properties will have default values, which can depend on the computer where the program
is running. The static function Font.getDefault() returns a font that has default values for
all the properties. You can call Font.getDefault().getSize() to find the default point size.
(It’s 13.0 on my computer, but might be different on yours.) Here are a few examples of making
fonts:
Font font1 = Font.font(40);
Font font2 = Font.font("Times New Roman", FontWeight.BOLD, 24);
Font font3 = Font.font(null, FontWeight.BOLD, FontPosture.ITALIC, 14);

6.2.3 Image
The term “image” refers to something like a photograph or drawing—anything that can be
represented by a rectangular grid of colored pixels. Images are often stored in files. JavaFX
makes it easy to load an image from a file so that it can be displayed by a program. An image
is represented by an object of type Image, from package javafx.scene.image. The constructor
new Image( path )
is used to load an image from an image file. The path parameter is a string that specifies the
location of the file. The location can be very general, such as an image on the Internet or on
the user’s computer, but for now I’m interested in images from resource files. A resource is
something that is part of a program but is not code. Resources can include things like sounds,
data files, and fonts, as well as images. The system can load resources for a program from the
same places where it looks for the program’s .class files. For a resource file in the program’s top-
level directory, the path to the file is simply the name of the file. If the file is in a subdirectory
of the main directory, then the path includes the subdirectory name. For example, the path
“images/cards.png” refers to a file named “cards.png” inside a subdirectory named “images,”
and “resources/sounds/beep.aiff” refers to a file named “beep.aiff” inside a directory named
“sounds” that is in turn inside a directory named “resources.”
There are many kinds of image files, which store the image data in a variety of formats. For
JavaFX Image objects, you can use image files whose names end with .gif, .jpeg (or .jpg), .png,
and .bmp. So, for example, if “cards.png” is a file in the top-level program directory, you can
create the image object
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 284

Image cards = new Image( "cards.png" );

The image can then be displayed in a GraphicsContext, as we will soon see. There will be other
uses for images later in this chapter.

6.2.4 Canvas and GraphicsContext

The screen of a computer is a grid of little squares called pixels. The color of each pixel can
be set individually, and drawing on the screen just means setting the colors of individual pixels.
Every visible GUI component is drawn by coloring pixels, and every component has a coordinate
system that maps (x,y) coordinates to points within the component. Most components draw
themselves, but there is one JavaFX component on which you can draw anything you want
by calling the appropriate methods. Such “drawing surface” components are of type Canvas,
in package javafx.scene.canvas. A Canvas is a Node and so can be part of a scene graph.
(However, it is not a Parent, so it cannot act as a container for other nodes and it cannot be
the root of a scene graph. This means that even when a canvas is the only thing that you want
to show in a window, it must still be placed into a container that will serve as the root of the
scene graph.)
A Canvas appears on the screen as a rectangle made up of pixels. A position in the rectangle
is specified by a pair of coordinates, (x,y). The upper left corner has coordinates (0,0). The x
coordinate increases from left to right, and the y coordinate increases from top to bottom. The
illustration shows a 20-pixel by 12-pixel canvas (with very large pixels). A small line, rectangle,
and oval are shown as they would be drawn by coloring individual pixels:

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Note that, properly speaking, the coordinates don’t belong to the pixels but to the grid lines
between them, and coordinates can, in fact, be numbers of type double and can refer to points
inside a pixel. For example, the center of the top left pixel in a canvas has coordinates (0.5,0.5).
In fact, all drawing is done using coordinates of type double.
The width and height of a Canvas can be specified in the constructor that is used to create
the canvas object. For example, to create a tiny 20-by-12 canvas:
Canvas canvas = new Canvas(20,12)
You can query the size of a canvas by calling canvas.getWidth() and canvas.getHeight(),
which return values of type double. Canvasses are usually meant to be non-resizable, but the
size can be changed if necessary by calling canvas.setWidth(w) and canvas.setHeight(h).
When a canvas is first created, it is filled with “transparent black,” that is, with a color
that has all RGBA components set to zero. This makes the canvas transparent: You will see
whatever lies behind the canvas in the scene.
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 285

In order to draw on a canvas, you need an object of type GraphicsContext. Every Canvas has
an associated GraphicsContext; different GraphicsContexts draw on different Canvases. You can
get the graphics context for a Canvas, canvas, by calling canvas.getGraphicsContext2D().
For any given Canvas, this method will always return the same GraphicsContext object.
Section 3.9 discussed some of the things that can be done with a graphics context. In particular,
you learned that a shape can be stroked and, if it has an interior, it can also be filled. Methods
in GraphicsContext, g, that can be used for drawing include the following, where all numeric
parameters are of type double:
• g.strokeRect(x,y,w,h) and g.fillRect(x,y,w,h) — Draw a rectangle with top left
corner at (x,y), with width w and with height h. If w or h is less than or equal to zero,
nothing is drawn.
• g.clearRect(x,y,w,h) — Fill the same rectangle with a fully transparent color, so that
whatever lies behind the rectangle will be visible through the canvas. Note that this is
not the same as calling g.fillRect(x,y,w,h) with a transparent fill color; doing that
has no effect at all on the contents of the rectangle.
• g.strokeOval(x,y,w,h) and g.fillOval(x,y,w,h) — Draw an oval that just fits inside
the rectangle with top left corner at (x,y), with width w and with height h.
• g.strokeRoundRect(x,y,w,h,rh,rv) and g.fillRoundRect(x,y,w,h,rh,rv) — Draw
a rectangle with rounded corners. The rectangle has top left corner at (x,y), with width
w and with height h. A quarter oval is cut off each corner, where the horizontal radius of
the oval is rh and its vertical radius is rv.
• g.strokeText(str,x,y) and g.fillText(str,x,y) — Draw the text of the String str.
The point (x,y) is the left end of the baseline of the text. (A string is drawn on top of
its baseline, with descenders such as the tail of a “y” extending below the baseline.) The
string can contain multiple lines separated by newline (’\n’) characters; (x,y) then gives
the baseline of the first line of the string. Note that stroking text means drawing just the
outlines of the characters.
• g.strokePolygon(xcoords,ycoords,n) and g.fillPolygon(xcoords,ycoords,n) —
Draw a polygon, consisting of line segments connecting a sequence of points. The
number of points is given by the third parameter, n. The first two parameters are
arrays of type double[ ] containing the coordinates of the points. An extra line segment
is automatically added to connect the last point back to the first. That is, the
polygon connects the points (xcoords[0],ycoords[0]), (xcoords[1],ycoords[1]), . . . ,
(xcoords[n-1],ycoords[n-1]), (xcoords[0],ycoords[0]).
• g.strokeLine(x1,y1,x2,y2) — Draws a line from (x1,y1) to (x2,y2). (It’s no use
trying to fill a line, since it has no interior.)
The GraphicsContext object, g has a number of properties that affect drawing. When
anything is drawn using g, the current values of the relevant properties are used. This means
that changing the value of a property does not affect anything that has already been drawn;
the change only applies to things drawn in the future. Each property has a setter method and
a getter method. One of the properties is the Paint that is used for filling (which in this chapter
will always be a Color ); this property can be set by calling g.setFill(paint), and you can
get its current value by calling g.getFill(). Similarly, the Paint that is used for stroking can
be set and get using g.setStroke(paint) and g.getStroke(), and the width of strokes can
be set and get using g.setLineWidth(w) and g.getLineWidth(), where w is of type double.
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 286

And you can set and get the font that will be used for drawing text with g.setFont(font)
and g.getFont().
Note that stroking a shape is like dragging the center of a pen along the outline of the
shape. The size of the pen is given by the linewidth property. The stroke that is drawn extends
on both sides of the actual path of the pen by an amount equal to half of the linewidth. For
example, if you draw a horizontal line of width 1 with endpoints (100,100) and (300,100), half
of the stroke lies above the geometric line and half lies below it. The computer might show this
by blending the color of the stroke color with the current color. If you want the stroke to nicely
cover complete pixels, you should actually use (100.5,100.5) and (300.5,100.5) as the coordinates
of the endpoints of the line. (Whenever you draw something, you might find that for pixels
that are only partially covered, the drawing color is blended with the current color instead of
replacing it. This is done to decrease the jagged appearance of shapes that are made out of
whole pixels, like the line and oval in the above illustration. This is known as antialiasing .)
It is also possible to draw an image onto a canvas, where the image is represented by an
object of type Image. There are several methods for drawing images:
• g.drawImage(image,x,y) — Draws the image with its upper left corner at (x,y), using
the actual size of the image.
• g.drawImage(image,x,y,w,h) — Draws the image in the rectangle with upper left corner
at (x,y), with width w, and with height h. The image is stretched or shrunk to fit that
rectangle if necessary.
• g.drawImage(image, sx,sy,sw,sh, dx,dy,dh,dw) — Draws the contents of a specified
“source” rectangle in the image to a specified “destination” rectangle on the canvas. This
method lets you draw just part of an image. The source rectangle has upper left corner
at (sx,sy), width sw, and height sh. The last four parameters specify the destination
rectangle in a similar way.

∗ ∗ ∗
It’s time for a couple of actual examples. First, an example that draws some text using a
variety of fonts. The program draws multiple copies of the string “Hello JavaFX” using random
fonts and locations. The text is filled with random colors and stroked with a thin black stroke:

The program uses five fonts, which are created in the start() method using several different
static factory methods from the Font class:
font1 = Font.font("Times New Roman", FontWeight.BOLD, 20);
font2 = Font.font("Arial", FontWeight.BOLD, FontPosture.ITALIC, 28);
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 287

font3 = Font.font("Verdana", 32);

font4 = Font.font(40);
font5 = Font.font("Times New Roman",FontWeight.BOLD,FontPosture.ITALIC,60);

The program defines a draw() method that completely redraws the content of a canvas. It is
called when the canvas is first created, and it is also called when the user clicks the “Redraw”
button. The method first fills the canvas with a white background, which erases the previous
contents of the canvas. It then fills and strokes 25 copies of “Hello JavaFX”, using a random
fill color, a random position for the text, and a randomly selected font for each copy:
private void draw() {
GraphicsContext g = canvas.getGraphicsContext2D();
double width = canvas.getWidth();
double height = canvas.getHeight();
g.setFill( Color.WHITE ); // fill with white background
g.fillRect(0, 0, width, height);
for (int i = 0; i < 25; i++) {
// Draw one string. First, set the font to be one of the five
// available fonts, at random.
int fontNum = (int)(5*Math.random()) + 1;
switch (fontNum) {
case 1 -> g.setFont(font1);
case 2 -> g.setFont(font2);
case 3 -> g.setFont(font3);
case 4 -> g.setFont(font4);
case 5 -> g.setFont(font5);
} // end switch
// Set the color to a bright, saturated color, with random hue.
double hue = 360*Math.random();
g.setFill( Color.hsb(hue, 1.0, 1.0) );
// Select the position of the string, at random.
double x,y;
x = -50 + Math.random()*(width+40);
y = Math.random()*(height+20);
// Draw the message.
g.fillText("Hello JavaFX",x,y);
// Also stroke the outline of the strings with black.
g.setStroke(Color.BLACK);
g.strokeText("Hello JavaFX",x,y);
} // end for
} // end draw()
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 288

You can find the full source code for the program in RandomStrings.java.
The second sample program is similar, but instead of drawing random strings, it draws five
playing cards dealt at random from a deck:

The deck and cards are represented using the Deck and Card classes from Section 5.4. The card
images come from the file cards.png, which is a resource file for the program. The file contains
a single image that contains images of all the cards, arranged in rows and columns. Here it is,
shown at reduced size:

(This image is from the Gnome desktop project, http://www.gnome.org.) The image file is
loaded into the program in the start() method simply by saying
cardImages = new Image("cards.png");
where cardImages is an instance variable of type Image. Suppose that we want to draw the
card from row number R and column number C in a GraphicsContext g (where both rows and
columns are numbered starting at zero). Each card in the image is 79 pixels by 123 pixels, so
the card that we want has its top left corner at (79*C,123*R). If we want to place the card on
the canvas with its top left corner at (x,y), we can use the third drawImage() method given
above, which specifies a source rectangle in the image and a destination rectangle on the canvas:
g.drawImage( cardImages, 79*C,123*R,79,123, x,y,79,123 );
In the program, the card that we want to draw is given by a variable card of type Card. The
row and column in the image are determined by the suit and value of the card, which are given
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 289

by card.getSuit() and card.getValue(). The values returned by these functions have to be

manipulated a little to get the correct row and column numbers, and the position of the card
on the canvas is calculated to leave a 20-pixel gap between one card and the next. Here is the
draw() method from the program, which deals five random cards from a deck and draws them:
private void draw() {
GraphicsContext g = canvas.getGraphicsContext2D();
Deck deck = new Deck();
deck.shuffle();
double sx,sy; // top left corner of source rect for card in cardImages
double dx,dy; // corner of destination rect for card in the canvas
for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
Card card = deck.dealCard();
System.out.println(card); // for testing
sx = 79 * (card.getValue()-1);
sy = 123 * (3 - card.getSuit());
dx = 20 + (79+20) * i;
dy = 20;
g.drawImage( cardImages, sx,sy,79,123, dx,dy,79,123 );
}
} // end draw()
For the complete program, see RandomCards.java.

6.2.5 A Bit of CSS

JavaFX makes it possible to control the style—that is, the visual appearance—of components
in a GUI using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). CSS is one of several languages that are used
to make web pages. It can control things like colors, fonts, and borders of elements of a web
page. It has been adapted to play a similar role in other contexts, such as JavaFX. I do not
intend to cover CSS in any detail, and anything that can be done with CSS can also be done
with Java code. However, there are some things that are just easier to do with CSS; I will cover
a few of them in this short section and will use them in my programs. For people who already
know CSS, a guide to its use in JavaFX is available as I write this at
https://openjfx.io/javadoc/17/javafx.graphics/javafx/scene/doc-files/cssref.html
A CSS style rule consists of a property and a value for that property. For example, CSS
can be used to place a border around many kinds of GUI components. A border has properties
with names such as -fx-border-color and -fx-border-width. (All JavaFX CSS properties
have names that begin with “-fx-” to distinguish them from regular CSS properties.) A value for
-fx-border-color can be a color name such as red or lightblue, among other formats. One
color format that I will use takes the form #RRGGBB, where R, G, and B stand for hexadecimal
digits. A two-digit hexadecimal number can represent numbers from 0 to 255. The RR, GG,
and BB in #RRGGBB represent the red, green, and blue components of a color, each in the range
0 to 255. For example, #FF0000 represents pure red, and #004444 represents a dark blue-green.
For the border width, the value can be a single size, such as 3px or 0.2cm. The syntax is
a number followed by a unit of measure, with no space between them. Here, “px” stands for
“pixels,” and 3px means 3 pixels. When a width is given by a single size, the size applies to all
four sides of the border. Alternatively, four sizes can be given, separated by spaces, specifying
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 290

the border width on the top, right, bottom, and left, in that order. For example, a thick, blue
border could be specified as
-fx-border-color: blue; -fx-border-width: 5px
and for a dark red border that is thicker on the top than on the other sides, you can use
-fx-border-color: #550000; -fx-border-width: 3px 1px 1px 1px
When several CSS rules are used together, they should be separated by semicolons.
The background color of a component can be set using -fx-background-color as the
property name. The value is the same sort of color specification that would be used with
-fx-border-color.
And the CSS property -fx-padding represents space that is left between the content of a
component and its edge (or border if there is one). Like border width, padding can be specified
as either a single size or a list of four sizes. For example: -fx-padding: 8px.
You can apply a style to a component using its setStyle() method, whose parameter is a
String containing one or more CSS style rules. For example, suppose message is a Label. By
default, labels have no padding or border. They can be added with a command such as
message.setStyle(
"-fx-padding: 5px; -fx-border-color: black; -fx-border-width: 1px" );
You can set the font for a component that displays text using the -fx-font property. The
value for this property specifies the size and font family for the font, and can optionally be
modified by a weight (“bold”), or by a style (“italic”), or both. Some examples:
-fx-font: 30pt "Times New Roman";
-fx-font: bold italic 18pt serif;
-fx-font: bold 42pt monospace;
Note that if the font family name contains spaces, it must be enclosed in quotes. The font
families in the last two examples, “serif” and “monospace”, are so-called generic family names
that specify a certain style of font. Other generic names include “sans-serif”, “cursive”, and
“fantasy”. The characters in a serif font have short lines as decorations such as at the top and
bottom of an upper case “I”. A “sans-serif” font lacks these decorations. The characters in a
“monospace” font all have the same width. Monospace fonts are good for drawing characters
that are meant to line up in columns.
Many other properties can be set using CSS, but I will not cover them here. I will use CSS
only for borders, padding, background colors, and fonts.
∗ ∗ ∗
Setting the style for many components can be tedious. A CSS style sheet can be used to
apply style to all components of a given type as well as to individual components and sets of
components. A style sheet is a file, usually with a name ending with .css. I will not discuss the
syntax, but here is a style sheet that will apply some style rules to all Labels and Buttons:
Button {
-fx-font: bold 16pt "Times New Roman";
-fx-text-fill: darkblue;
}
Label {
-fx-font: 15pt sans-serif;
-fx-padding: 7px;
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 291

-fx-border-color: darkred;
-fx-border-width: 2px;
-fx-text-fill: darkred;
-fx-background-color: pink;
}
A style sheet file, just like an image file, can be a resource for a program. That is, it can
be stored in the same place as the .class files for the program. Suppose that a style sheet
named “mystyle.css” is in the program’s top-level directory. You can then apply the style to
all components in a scene with the statement
scene.getStylesheets().add("mystyle.css");
A Scene can have several style sheets, and style sheets can also be added to individual containers.

6.3 Basic Events

Events are central to programming for a graphical user interface. A GUI program doesn’t
have a main() routine that outlines what will happen when the program is run, in a step-by-step
process from beginning to end. Instead, the program must be prepared to respond to various
kinds of events that can happen at unpredictable times and in an order that the program doesn’t
control. The most basic kinds of events are generated by the mouse and keyboard. The user
can press any key on the keyboard, move the mouse, or press a button on the mouse. The user
can do any of these things at any time, and the computer has to respond appropriately.
In Java, events are represented by objects. When an event occurs, the system collects all
the information relevant to the event and constructs an object to contain that information.
Different types of events are represented by objects belonging to different classes. For example,
when the user presses one of the buttons on a mouse, an object belonging to a class called
MouseEvent is constructed. The object contains information such as the target of the event
(that is, the component on which the user clicked), the (x,y) coordinates of the point in the
component where the click occurred, which modifier keys (such as the shift key) are being
held down, and which button on the mouse was pressed. When the user presses a key on the
keyboard, on the other hand, it is a KeyEvent object that is created, containing information
relevant to an event generated by using the keyboard. After the event object is constructed,
it can be passed as a parameter to a designated method. That method is called an event
handler for the event. In JavaFX, event handlers are often written as lambda expressions. By
writing an event handler, the programmer says what should happen when the event occurs.
As a Java programmer, you get a fairly high-level view of events. There is a lot of processing
that goes on between the time that the user presses a key or moves the mouse and the time
that a method in your program is called to respond to the event. Fortunately, you don’t need
to know much about that processing. But you should understand this much: Even though you
didn’t write it, there is a routine running somewhere that executes a loop of the form
while the program is still running:
Wait for the next event to occur
Handle the event
This loop is called an event loop. Every GUI program has an event loop. In Java, you
don’t have to write the loop. It’s part of “the system.” If you write a GUI program in some
other language, you might have to provide a main routine that runs the event loop.
In this section, we’ll look at handling mouse and key events in Java, and we’ll cover the
framework for handling events in general. We will also see how to make an animation.
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 292

6.3.1 Event Handling

For an event to have any effect, a program must detect the event and react to it. In order
to detect an event, the program must “listen” for it. Listening for events is something that is
done by an event listener , which contains an event handler method that can respond to the
event. An event listener is defined by an interface that specifies the event handling methods
that it contains. Listeners for different kinds of events are defined by different interfaces. In
most cases, the interface is a functional interface, defining a single event handler method; in
that case, the listener can be given by a lambda expression.
For many kinds of events in JavaFX, listeners are defined by a functional interface named
EventHandler, which defines the method handle(event). The parameter to this method, event,
is the event object that contains information about the event. When you provide a definition
for handle(), you write the code that will be executed to handle the event.
(EventHandler is actually a parameterized type, something that we have not encoun-
tered before and will not encounter officially until Section 7.3. Basically, all this re-
ally means is that EventHandler really defines many different types, with names like Even-
tHandler<MouseEvent>, EventHandler<KeyEvent>, and EventHandler<ActionEvent>. The type
EventHandler<MouseEvent> defines a handle(event) method in which the event is of type
MouseEvent, the type EventHandler<KeyEvent> defines a handle(event) method in which the
event is of type KeyEvent, and so on. Fortunately, you don’t need to understand parameterized
types in this chapter; you only need to know that the event object that you use when handling
an event will have the appropriate type for that event. For example, when handling a mouse
event, the event object is of type MouseEvent.)
Many events in JavaFX are associated with GUI components. For example, when the user
presses a button on the mouse, the associated component is the one that contains the mouse
cursor when the button is pressed. This object is called the target of the event. In order to
respond to the event, you need to register a listener either with the target of the event or with
some other object that knows about the event. For example, lets look again at this statement
from HelloWorldFX.java, our first GUI program from Section 6.1:
helloButton.setOnAction( evt -> message.setText("Hello World!") );
Here, helloButton is an object of type Button. When the user clicks on the button, an event
of type ActionEvent is generated. The target of that event is helloButton. The method
helloButton.setOnAction() registers an event listener that will receive notification of any
ActionEvents from the button. The listener in this case is defined by a lambda expression.
In the lambda expression, the parameter, evt, is the ActionEvent object, and the code in the
lambda expression is what happens in response to the event. Most event handling in this
chapter will be set up in a similar way.
For key events and some mouse events, it’s not just the event target that gets a chance to
respond to the event. For example, suppose that you press a mouse button over a Canvas that
is inside a BorderPane that is in turn inside a Scene. The target of the mouse event is the Canvas
but the BorderPane and the Scene also have a chance to respond to the event. That is, you
can register a mouse event listener on any or all of these objects to respond to the event. The
object that the listener is registered with is called the source of the event. The event object
parameter, evt, in an event handler method has both a source, given by evt.getSource(),
and a target, given by evt.getTarget(); often they are the same, but they don’t have to be.
Note that the same event can be sent to several handlers. A handler can “consume” an event,
by calling evt.consume(), to stop it from being sent to any additional handlers. For example,
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 293

when you are typing in a text input box, the input box consumes the key events that you
generate by typing, so that the scene doesn’t get a chance to handle them.
(Actually, it’s more complicated than that. For key events and some kinds of mouse events,
the event first travels down through the scene and then through scene graph nodes that contain
the event target; this is called the “event filtering” or “bubble down” phase of event processing.
After reaching the target, the event travels back up through the scene graph and finally to
the scene; this is the “event handling” or “bubble up” phase. The event can be consumed
at any point along the way, and if that happens, the process stops. None of this is used in
this chapter, but for more information, see the documentation for the addEventFilter() and
addEventHandler() methods in the Scene and Node classes.)
Most of this section is concerned with mouse and key events. It is important to understand
that many GUI programs do not need to deal with such events directly. Instead, you work with
GUI components that are already programmed to handle mouse and key events on their own.
For example, when the user clicks a Button, it is the button that listens for mouse events and
responds to them. When the button detects that it has been clicked, it generates an ActionEvent.
When you write an application that uses buttons, you program responses to ActionEvents, not
to mouse events. Similarly, when the user types in a text input box, it is the input box that
listens for key events and responds to them. Nevertheless, at base, it’s mouse and keyboard
events that drive the action in a program. It’s useful to understand them—and you can do
some interesting things by processing them directly.

6.3.2 Mouse Events

A mouse event is represented by an object of type MouseEvent. (In fact, mouse events can
actually be generated by other input devices, such as a trackpad or touch screen; events
from these devices are translated by the system into MouseEvents.) That class, and all of
the classes related to mouse and key events, can be found in package javafx.scene.input.
As the user manipulates the mouse, several kinds of event are generated. For example, clicking
a mouse button generates three events, a “mouse pressed” event, a “mouse released” event,
and a “mouse clicked” event. Simply moving the mouse generates a sequence of events as
the mouse cursor moves from point to point on the screen. To respond to mouse events on
a component, you can register listeners with that component. You can register a separate
listener for each kind of mouse event on a component c using instance methods such as
c.setOnMousePressed(handler) and c.setOnMouseMoved(handler). The parameter is a
mouse event handler, generally given as a lambda expression. Suppose, for example, that
canvas is a component of type canvas, and that you would like a method, redraw(), to be
called when the user clicks the canvas. You can make that happen by saying
canvas.setOnMousePressed( evt -> redraw() );
Generally, you would put this statement in the start() method of an Application, while setting
up the GUI for the program. Mouse clicks on the canvas could be also be handled by the scene
or by any scene graph node that contains the canvas, directly or indirectly, but it is much more
usual for the target of a mouse event to handle the event.
Mouse event types include: MouseEntered, generated when the mouse cursor moves from
outside a component into the component; MouseExited, generated when the mouse cursor
moves out of a component; MousePressed, generated when the user presses one of the buttons
on the mouse; MouseReleased, generated when the user releases one of the buttons on the
mouse; MouseClicked, generated after a mouse released event if the user pressed and released
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 294

the mouse button on the same component; MouseDragged, generated when the user moves the
mouse while holding down a mouse button; and MouseMoved, generated when the user moves
the mouse without holding down a button.
The target of a MouseDragged, MouseReleased, or MouseClicked event is the same
component where the mouse button was pressed, even if the mouse has moved outside of
that component. The target of a MousePressed or MouseMoved event is the component that
contains the mouse cursor when the event occurs. And for MouseEntered and MouseExited,
the target is the component that is being entered or exited.
Often, when a mouse event occurs, you want to know the location of the mouse cursor.
This information is available from the MouseEvent parameter in the event-handling method,
which contains instance methods that return information about the event. If evt is the
parameter, then you can find out the coordinates of the mouse cursor by calling evt.getX()
and evt.getY(). These methods return values of type double that give the x and y coordinates
where the mouse cursor was positioned at the time when the event occurred. The coordinates
are expressed in the coordinate system of the source of the event, where the top left corner of
the component is (0,0). (The source is the component on which the event listener is registered;
this is not necessarily the same as the event target, but it usually is.)
The user can hold down certain modifier keys while using the mouse. The possible
modifier keys include: the Shift key, the Control key, the Alt key (called the Option key
on the Mac), and the Meta key (called the Command or Apple key on the Mac). Not
every computer has a Meta key. You might want to respond to a mouse event differently
when the user is holding down a modifier key. The boolean-valued instance methods
evt.isShiftDown(), evt.isControlDown(), evt.isAltDown(), and evt.isMetaDown() can
be called to test whether the modifier keys are pressed.
You might also want to have different responses depending on whether the user presses
the left mouse button, the middle mouse button, or the right mouse button. For events
triggered by a mouse button, you can determine which button was pressed or released by calling
evt.getButton(), which returns one of the enumerated type constants MouseButton.PRIMARY,
MouseButton.MIDDLE, or MouseButton.SECONDARY. Generally, the left mouse button is the
primary button and the right mouse button is secondary. For events such as mouseEntered and
mouseExited that are not triggered by buttons, evt.getButton() returns MouseButton.NONE.
The user can hold down several mouse buttons at the same time. If you want to
know which mouse buttons are actually down at the time of an event, you can use
the boolean-valued functions evt.isPrimaryButtonDown(), evt.isMiddleButtonDown(), and
evt.isSecondaryButtonDown().
As a simple example, suppose that when the user clicks a Canvas, canvas, you would like
to draw a red rectangle at the point where the user clicked. But if the shift key is down, you
want to draw a blue oval instead. An event handler to do that can be defined as:
canvas.setOnMousePressed( evt -> {
GraphicsContext g = canvas.getGraphicsContext2D();
if ( evt.isShiftDown() ) {
g.setFill( Color.BLUE );
g.fillOval( evt.getX() - 30, evt.getY() - 15, 60, 30 )
}
else {
g.setFill( Color.RED );
g.fillRect( evt.getX() - 30, evt.getY() - 15, 60, 30 );
}
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 295

} );
To get a better idea of how mouse events work, you should try the sample program
SimpleTrackMouse.java. This program responds to any of the seven different kinds of mouse
events by displaying the coordinates of the mouse, the type of event, and a list of the modifier
keys and buttons that are down. You can experiment with the program to see what happens
as you do various things with the mouse. I also encourage you to read the source code.

6.3.3 Dragging
A drag gesture occurs when the user moves the mouse while holding down one of the buttons
on the mouse. It is interesting to look at what a program needs to do in order to respond to
dragging operations. The drag gesture starts when the user presses a mouse button, it continues
while the mouse is dragged, and it ends when the user releases the button. This means that
the programming for the response to one dragging gesture must be spread out over the three
event handlers, one for MousePressed, one for MouseDragged, and one for MouseReleased!
Furthermore, the MouseDragged handler can be called many times as the mouse moves. To keep
track of what is going on between one method call and the next, you need to set up some instance
variables. In many applications, for example, in order to process a MouseDragged event, you
need to remember the previous coordinates of the mouse. You can store this information in two
instance variables prevX and prevY of type double. It can also be useful to save the starting
coordinates, where the original MousePressed event occurred, in instance variables. And I
suggest having a boolean variable, dragging, which is set to true while a dragging gesture
is being processed. This is necessary because in many applications, not every MousePressed
event starts a dragging operation to which you want to respond. Also, if the user presses a
second mouse button without releasing the first, there will be two MousePressed events before
the MouseReleased event; usually, you don’t want the second MousePressed to start a new
drag operation. The event-handling methods can use the value of dragging to check whether
a drag operation is actually in progress. Often, I will write instance methods to handle the
events, which in outline look something like this:
private double startX, startY; // Point where original mouse press occurred.
private double prevX, prevY; // Most recently processed mouse coords.
private boolean dragging; // Set to true when dragging is in progress.
. . . // other instance variables for use in dragging
public void mousePressed(MouseEvent evt) {
if (dragging) {
// The user pressed a second mouse button before releasing the first.
// Ignore the second button press.
return;
}
if ( hwe-want-to-start-dragging i ) {
dragging = true;
startX = evt.getX(); // Remember starting position.
startY = evt.getY();
prevX = startX; // Remember most recent coords.
prevY = startY;
.
. // Other processing.
.
}
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 296

}
public void mouseDragged(MouseEvent evt) {
if ( dragging == false ) // First, check if we are
return; // processing a dragging gesture.
int x = evt.getX(); // Current position of Mouse.
int y = evt.getY();
.
. // Process a mouse movement from (prevX, prevY) to (x,y).
.
prevX = x; // Remember the current position for the next call.
prevY = y;
}
public void mouseReleased(MouseEvent evt) {
if ( dragging == false ) // First, check if we are
return; // processing a dragging gesture.
dragging = false; // We are done dragging.
.
. // Other processing and clean-up.
.
}
I will then install event handlers on the relevant component that simply call these methods:
c.setOnMousePressed( e -> mousePressed(e) );
c.setOnMouseDragged( e -> mouseDragged(e) );
c.setOnMouseReleased( e -> mouseReleased(e) );
Note that the event handlers in these statements simply call another method in the same class,
and that method has the same parameter as the event handler. That means that it’s possible
to write the lambda expressions as method references (Subsection 4.5.4). The methods that are
called are instance methods in the object “this”, so the method references would have names
like this::mousePressed, and the event handlers could be installed using
c.setOnMousePressed( this::mousePressed );
c.setOnMouseDragged( this::mouseDragged );
c.setOnMouseReleased( this::mouseReleased );

∗ ∗ ∗
As an example, let’s look at a typical use of dragging: allowing the user to sketch a curve
by dragging the mouse. This example also shows many other features of graphics and mouse
processing. In the program, you can draw a curve by dragging the mouse on a large white
drawing area, and you can select a color for drawing by clicking on one of several colored
rectangles to the right of the drawing area. The complete source code can be found in
SimplePaint.java. Here is a picture of the program window after some drawing has been done:
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 297

I will discuss a few aspects of the source code here, but I encourage you to read it carefully
in its entirety. There are lots of informative comments in the source code.
In this program, all drawing is done on a single canvas that fills the entire window. The
program is designed to work for any reasonable canvas size, that is, unless the canvas is too small.
This means that coordinates are computed in terms of the actual width and height of the canvas.
(The width and height are obtained by calling canvas.getWidth() and canvas.getHeight().)
This makes things quite a bit harder than they would be if we assumed some particular fixed
size for the canvas. Let’s look at some of these computations in detail. For example, the
large white drawing area extends from y = 3 to y = height - 3 vertically and from x = 3 to
x = width - 56 horizontally. These numbers are needed in order to interpret the meaning of
a mouse click. They take into account a gray border around the canvas and the color palette
along the right edge of the canvas. The gray border is 3 pixels wide. The colored rectangles
are 50 pixels wide. Together with the 3-pixel border around the canvas and a 3-pixel divider
between the drawing area and the colored rectangles, this adds up to put the right edge of the
drawing area 56 pixels from the right edge of the canvas.
A white square labeled “CLEAR” occupies the region beneath the colored rectangles on the
right edge of the canvas. Allowing for this region, we can figure out how much vertical space
is available for the seven colored rectangles, and then divide that space by 7 to get the vertical
space available for each rectangle. This quantity is represented by a variable, colorSpace. Out
of this space, 3 pixels are used as spacing between the rectangles, so the height of each rectangle
is colorSpacing - 3. The top of the N-th rectangle is located (N*colorSpacing + 3) pixels
down from the top of the canvas, assuming that we count the rectangles starting with zero.
This is because there are N rectangles above the N-th rectangle, each of which uses colorSpace
pixels. The extra 3 is for the border at the top of the canvas. After all that, we can write down
the command for drawing the N-th rectangle:
g.fillRect(width - 53, N*colorSpace + 3, 50, colorSpace - 3);
That was not easy! But it shows the kind of careful thinking and precision graphics that are
sometimes necessary to get good results.
The mouse in this program is used to do three different things: Select a color, clear the
drawing, and draw a curve. Only the third of these involves dragging, so not every mouse
click will start a dragging operation. The mousePressed() method has to look at the (x,y)
coordinates where the mouse was clicked and decide how to respond. If the user clicked on the
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 298

CLEAR rectangle, the drawing area is cleared by calling a clearAndDrawPalette() method that
redraws the entire canvas. If the user clicked somewhere in the strip of colored rectangles, the
corresponding color is selected for drawing. This involves computing which color the user clicked
on, which is done by dividing the y coordinate by colorSpacing. Finally, if the user clicked on
the drawing area, a drag operation is initiated. In this case, a boolean variable, dragging, is
set to true so that the mouseDragged and mouseReleased methods will know that a curve is
being drawn. The code for this follows the general form given above. The actual drawing of the
curve is done in the mouseDragged() method, which draws a line from the previous location of
the mouse to its current location. Some effort is required to make sure that the line does not
extend beyond the white drawing area of the canvas. This is not automatic, since as far as the
computer is concerned, the border and the color bar are part of the canvas. If the user drags
the mouse outside the white drawing area while drawing a curve, the mouseDragged() routine
changes the x and y coordinates to make them lie within the drawing area.

6.3.4 Key Events

In Java, user actions become events in a program, with a GUI component as the target of the
event. When the user presses a button on the mouse, the component that contains the mouse
cursor is the target of the event. But what about keyboard events? When the user presses a
key, what component is the target of the KeyEvent that is generated?
A GUI uses the idea of input focus to determine the target of keyboard events. At any
given time, just one interface element on the screen can have the input focus, and that is where
keyboard events are directed. If the interface element happens to be a JavaFX component,
then the information about the keyboard event becomes an object of type KeyEvent, and it
is delivered to any key event handlers that are listening for KeyEvents associated with that
component. Note that because of the way key events are processed, the Scene object in the
window that contains the focused component also gets a chance to handle a key event. If there
is no other focused component in the window, then the scene itself will be the target for key
events. In my sample programs, I will usually add key event handlers to the scene object.
A program generally gives some visual feedback to the user about which component has the
input focus. For example, if the component is a text-input box, the feedback is usually in the
form of a blinking text cursor. Another possible visual clue is to draw a brightly colored border
around the edge of a component when it has the input focus. You might see that on a button
that has focus. When a button has focus, pressing the space bar is equivalent to clicking the
button.
If comp is any component, and you would like it to have the input focus, you can call
comp.requestFocus(). In a typical user interface, the user can choose to give the focus to
a component by clicking on that component with the mouse. And pressing the tab key will
often move the focus from one component to another. This is handled automatically by the
components involved, without any programming on your part. However, some components do
not automatically request the input focus when the user clicks on them. That includes, for
example, a Canvas. Such a component can still receive the input focus if its requestFocus() is
called. However, you can’t automatically move the focus to that component with the tab key.
To enable that, you can call comp.setFocusTraversable(true). And you can test whether a
component is focused by calling comp.isFocused().
The focused component is contained in—or sometimes is itself—a window. That window is
said to be the “focused” or “active” window. It is usually the front window on the screen. In
JavaFX a Stage object is a window. You can call stage.requestFocus() to request that the
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 299

window be moved to the front of the screen and become the active window. And you can call
stage.isFocused() to test whether the window is active.
∗ ∗ ∗
Java makes a careful distinction between the keys that you press and the characters that
you type. There are lots of keys on a keyboard: letter keys, number keys, modifier keys such as
Control and Shift, arrow keys, page up and page down keys, keypad keys, function keys, and
so on. In some cases, such as the shift key, pressing a key does not type a character. On the
other hand, typing a character sometimes involves pressing several keys. For example, to type
an uppercase “A”, you have to press the Shift key and then press the A key before releasing
the Shift key. On my MacOS computer, I can type an accented e, by holding down the Option
key, pressing the E key, releasing the Option key, and pressing E again. Only one character was
typed, but I had to perform three key-presses and I had to release a key at the right time.
In JavaFX, there are three types of key event: KeyPressed, which is generated when the user
depresses any key on the keyboard; KeyReleased, which is generated when the user releases a
key that had been pressed; and KeyTyped, which is generated when the user types a character,
possibly using a series of key presses and key releases. Note that one user action, such as
pressing the E key, can be responsible for two events, a keyPressed event and a keyTyped
event. Typing an upper case “A” can generate two keyPressed events, two keyReleased
events, and one keyTyped event.
Usually, it is better to think in terms of two separate streams of events, one consisting of
keyPressed and keyReleased events and the other consisting of keyTyped events. For some
applications, you want to monitor the first stream; for other applications, you want to monitor
the second one. Of course, the information in the keyTyped stream could be extracted from
the keyPressed/keyReleased stream, but it would be difficult (and also system-dependent
to some extent). Some user actions, such as pressing the Shift key, can only be detected as
keyPressed events. I used to have a computer solitaire game that highlighted every card that
could be moved, when I held down the Shift key. You can do something like that in Java by
highlighting the cards when the Shift key is pressed and removing the highlight when the Shift
key is released.
There is one more complication. When you hold down a key on the keyboard, that key
might auto-repeat. This means that it will generate multiple KeyPressed events with just
one KeyReleased at the end of the sequence. It can also generate multiple KeyTyped events.
For the most part, this will not affect your programming, but you should not expect every
KeyPressed event to have a corresponding KeyReleased event.
Each key on the keyboard has a code that identifies it. In JavaFX, key codes are
represented by enumerated type constants from the enum KeyCode. When an event handler
for a KeyPressed or KeyReleased event is called, the parameter, evt, contains the code of
the key that was pressed or released. The code can be obtained by calling the function
evt.getCode(). For example, when the user presses the shift key, this function will return
the value KeyCode.SHIFT. You can find all the codes in the documentation for KeyCode, but
names for most keys are easy to guess. Letter keys have names like KeyCode.A and KeyCode.Q.
The arrow keys are named KeyCode.LEFT, KeyCode.RIGHT, KeyCode.UP, and KeyCode.DOWN.
The space bar is KeyCode.SPACE. And function keys have names like KeyCode.F7.
In the case of a KeyTyped event, you want to know which character was typed. This
information can be obtained by calling the function evt.getCharacter(). This function
returns a value of type String that contains the character that was typed.
As a first example, you can check out the sample program KeyboardEventDemo.java. This
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 300

program draws a small square on a canvas. The user can move the square left, right, up, and
down by pressing arrow keys. This is implemented in a method
private void keyPressed( KeyEvent evt )
that is called by an event handler for KeyPressed events. The handler is installed on the Scene
object in the start() method with the statement
scene.setOnKeyPressed( e -> keyPressed(e) );
In the keyPressed() method, the value of evt.getCode() is checked. If it’s one of the arrow
keys that was pressed, the canvas is redrawn to show the square in a different position.
The program also installs handlers for KeyReleased and KeyTyped events in a similar way.
To give the KeyTyped handler something to do, it changes the color of the square when the user
types “r”, “g”, “b”, or “k”. I encourage you to run the program and to read the entire source
code.

6.3.5 AnimationTimer
There is another kind of basic event that I would like to introduce before turning to a more
interesting example; that is, events that are used to drive an animation. The events in this
case happen in the background, and you don’t have to register a listener to respond to them.
However, you do need to write a method that will be called by the system when the events
occur.
A computer animation is just a sequence of still images, presented to the user one after
the other. If the time between images is short, and if the change from one image to another
is not too great, then the user perceives continuous motion. In JavaFX, you can program
an animation using an object of type AnimationTimer from package javafx.animation. An
AnimationTimer, animator, has a method animator.start() that you can call to start the
animation running or to restart it if it has been paused. It has the method animator.stop()
to pause the animation. It also has a method handle(time), but handle() is not a method
that you call; it’s one that you need to write to say what happens in the animation. The system
will call your handle() method once for each frame of the animation. Its job is to do whatever
is necessary to implement each frame.
The handle() method will be called on the JavaFX application thread, which means that
you can do things like draw on a canvas or manipulate a GUI component. However, whatever
you do should not take very long, since JavaFX animations are meant to run at at least 60
frames per second, which means handle() should ideally take less than 1/60 second to run.
AnimationTimer itself is an abstract class, and handle() is an abstract method. This
means that to make an animation, you need to write a subclass of AnimationTimer and provide
a definition for the handle() method. Suppose, for example, that you simply want to call a
draw() method for each frame. This could be done as follows, using an anonymous subclass of
AnimationTimer (see Subsection 5.8.3):
AnimationTimer animator = new AnimationTimer() {
public void handle( long time ) {
draw();
}
};
Then, to get the animation started, you would need to call animator.start(). This could all
be done in an application’s start() method.
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 301

The parameter, time, gives the current time, measured as the number of nanoseconds since
some arbitrary time in the past (the same arbitrary time that is used by System.nanoTime()).
You can use time in the calculations that you do for the frame, as a way of making each frame
different from the next. Another option is to use a frame number that increases by one each
time a frame is drawn, but you should keep in mind that the rate at which handle() is called
can vary, and the time between frames is not guaranteed to be 1/60 second.

6.3.6 State Machines

We are ready to look at a program that uses animation and key events to implement a simple
game. The program uses an AnimationTimer to drive the animation, and it uses a number of
instance variables to keep track of the current state of the game. The idea of “state” is an
important one.
The information stored in an object’s instance variables is said to represent the state of
that object. When one of the object’s methods is called, the action taken by the object can
depend on its state. (Or, in the terminology we have been using, the definition of the method
can look at the instance variables to decide what to do.) Furthermore, the state can change.
(That is, the definition of the method can assign new values to the instance variables.) In
computer science, there is the idea of a state machine, which is just something that has a
state and can change state in response to events or inputs. The response of a state machine
to an event depends on what state it’s in when the event occurs. An object is a kind of state
machine. Sometimes, this point of view can be very useful in designing classes.
The state machine point of view can be especially useful in the type of event-oriented
programming that is required by graphical user interfaces. When designing a GUI program,
you can ask yourself: What information about state do I need to keep track of? What events
can change the state of the program? How will my response to a given event depend on the
current state? Should the appearance of the GUI be changed to reflect a change in state? How
should the state be taken into account when drawing the content of a canvas? All this is an
alternative to the top-down, step-wise-refinement style of program design, which does not apply
to the overall design of an event-oriented program.
In the KeyboardEventDemo program, discussed above, the state of the program is recorded
in instance variables such as squareColor, squareLeft, and squareTop, which record the color
and position of the colored square. These state variables are used in a draw() method that
draws the square on a canvas. Their values are changed in the key-event-handling methods.
In the rest of this section, we’ll look at another example, where the state plays an even
bigger role. In this example, the user plays a simple arcade-style game by pressing the arrow
keys. The program is defined in the source code file SubKiller.java. As usual, it would be a
good idea to compile and run the program as well as read the full source code. Here is a picture:
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 302

The entire application window is filled by a canvas. The program shows a black “submarine”
near the bottom of the canvas. The submarine moves erratically back and forth near the bottom
of the window. Near the top, there is a blue “boat.” You can move this boat back and forth
by pressing the left and right arrow keys. Attached to the boat is a red “bomb” (or “depth
charge”). You can drop the bomb by hitting the down arrow key. The objective is to blow up
the submarine by hitting it with the bomb. If the bomb falls off the bottom of the screen, you
get a new one. If the submarine explodes, a new sub is created and you get a new bomb. Try
it! Make sure to hit the sub at least once, so you can see the explosion.
Let’s think about how this game can be programmed. First of all, since we are doing object-
oriented programming, I decided to represent the boat, the depth charge, and the submarine as
objects. Each of these objects is defined by a separate nested class inside the main application
class, and each object has its own state which is represented by the instance variables in the
corresponding class. I use variables boat, bomb, and sub to refer to the boat, bomb, and
submarine objects.
Now, what constitutes the “state” of the program? That is, what things change from time
to time and affect the appearance or behavior of the program? Of course, the state includes the
positions of the boat, submarine, and bomb, so those objects have instance variables to store
the positions. Anything else, possibly less obvious? Well, sometimes the bomb is falling, and
sometimes it’s not. That is a difference in state. Since there are two possibilities, I represent
this aspect of the state with a boolean variable in the bomb object, bomb.isFalling. Sometimes
the submarine is moving left and sometimes it is moving right. The difference is represented
by another boolean variable, sub.isMovingLeft. Sometimes, the sub is exploding. This is
also part of the state, and it is represented by a boolean variable, sub.isExploding. However,
the explosions require a little more thought. An explosion is something that takes place over
a series of frames. While an explosion is in progress, the sub looks different in each frame,
as the size of the explosion increases. Also, I need to know when the explosion is over so
that I can go back to moving and drawing the sub as usual. So, I use an integer variable,
sub.explosionFrameNumber to record how many frames have been drawn since the explosion
started; the value of this variable is used only when an explosion is in progress.
How and when do the values of these state variables change? Some of them seem to change
on their own: For example, as the sub moves left and right, the state variables that specify
its position change. Of course, these variables are changing because of an animation, and
that animation is driven by an AnimationTimer. Each time the animator’s handle() method
is called, some of the state variables have to change to get ready to draw next frame of the
animation. The changes are made in the handle() method before redrawing the canvas. The
boat, bomb, and sub objects each contain an updateForNextFrame() method that updates the
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 303

state variables of the object to get ready for the next frame of the animation. The handle()
method calls these methods with the statements
boat.updateForNewFrame();
bomb.updateForNewFrame();
sub.updateForNewFrame();
There are several state variables that change in these update methods, in addition to the
position of the sub: If the bomb is falling, then its y-coordinate increases from one frame to
the next. If the bomb hits the sub, then the isExploding variable of the sub changes to
true, and the isFalling variable of the bomb becomes false. The isFalling variable also
becomes false when the bomb falls off the bottom of the screen. If the sub is exploding, then its
explosionFrameNumber increases by one in each frame, and if it has reached a certain value, the
explosion ends and isExploding is reset to false. At random times, the sub switches between
moving to the left and moving to the right. Its direction of motion is recorded in the sub’s
isMovingLeft variable. The sub’s updateForNewFrame() method includes the following lines
to change the value of isMovingLeft at random times:
if ( Math.random() < 0.02 ) {
isMovingLeft = ! isMovingLeft;
}
There is a 1 in 50 chance that Math.random() will be less than 0.02, so the statement
“isMovingLeft = ! isMovingLeft” is executed in one out of every fifty frames, on average.
The effect of this statement is to reverse the value of isMovingLeft, from false to true or from
true to false. That is, the direction of motion of the sub is reversed.
In addition to changes in state that take place from one frame to the next, a few state
variables change when the user presses certain keys. In the program, this is checked in a
handler for KeyPressed events. If the user presses the left or right arrow key, the position of
the boat is changed. If the user presses the down arrow key, the bomb changes from not-falling
to falling. The handler is a long lambda expression that is registered with the scene in the
application’s start() method:
scene.setOnKeyPressed( evt -> {
// The key listener responds to keyPressed events on the canvas.
// The left- and right-arrow keys move the boat while down-arrow
// releases the bomb.
KeyCode code = evt.getCode(); // Which key was pressed?
if (code == KeyCode.LEFT) {
boat.centerX -= 15;
}
else if (code == KeyCode.RIGHT) {
boat.centerX += 15;
}
else if (code == KeyCode.DOWN) {
if ( bomb.isFalling == false )
bomb.isFalling = true;
}
} );
Note that it’s not necessary to redraw the canvas in this method, since this canvas shows an
animation that is constantly being redrawn anyway. Any changes in the state will become
visible to the user as soon as the next frame is drawn. At some point in the program, I have to
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 304

make sure that the user does not move the boat off the screen. I could have done this in the
key event handler, but I chose to check for this in another routine, in the boat object, since it
seems natural to let the boat object be responsible for keeping itself on the screen.
I encourage you to read the source code in SubKiller.java. Although a few points are
tricky, you should with some effort be able to read and understand the entire program. Try to
understand the program in terms of state machines. Note how the state of each of the three
objects in the program changes in response to events from the timer and from the user.
While it’s not at all sophisticated as arcade games go, the SubKiller game does use some
interesting programming. And it nicely illustrates how to apply state-machine thinking in
event-oriented programming.

6.3.7 Observable Values

There is one more kind of basic event that plays an important role in JavaFX: events that
are generated when an observable value is modified. There is an example in the SubKiller
program. A Stage, stage, has a property of type ObservableBooleanValue that tells whether
or not stage is currently the focused window. You can access the property by calling
stage.focusedProperty(). When the value of an ObservableBooleanProperty changes, an
event is generated. You can register a ChangeListener with the property, containing an event
handler method that will be called when the event occurs. The handler method in this case
has three parameters: the observable property that generated the event, the previous value
of the property, and the new value. For an ObservableBooleanValue, the old and new values
are of type boolean. There are other observable value types, such as ObservableIntegerValue,
ObservableStringValue, and ObservableObjectValue.
When I first wrote SubKiller, the animation would continue to run even when the
SubKiller window was not the focused window, which I found annoying when I was trying to
work in another window. I decided to pause the animation when the window loses the input
focus and to restart it when the window regains focus. When the window loses or gains focus,
the value of the observable boolean property stage.focusedProperty() changes. To react to
that change, I added a change listener to the property, which stops the animation when the
value of the property changes to false and starts the animation when the value changes to
true. So, I added this code to the start() method:
stage.focusedProperty().addListener( (obj,oldVal,newVal) -> {
// This listener turns the animation off when this program’s
// window does not have the input focus.
if (newVal) { // The window has gained focus.
timer.start();
}
else { // The window has lost focus.
timer.stop();
}
draw(); // Redraw canvas. (Appearance changes depending on focus.)
});
The addListener() method of an observable property registers a change listener with the
property. Note that the lambda expression for the event handler takes three parameters. The
only one that I need here is newVal which represents the current value of the stage’s focused
property. The draw() method draws draws some things differently, depending on whether the
stage is focused. It tests for that calling stage.isFocused().
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JavaFX GUI components have many observable properties, of various types. For example,
the text on a Button is a property of type ObservableStringProperty, and the width and the height
of a canvas are values of type ObservableDoubleProperty. We will encounter more examples in
the next section.

6.4 Basic Controls

In preceding sections, you’ve seen how to use a graphics context to draw on the screen
and how to handle mouse events and keyboard events. In one sense, that’s all there is to
GUI programming. If you’re willing to program all the drawing and handle all the mouse and
keyboard events, you have nothing more to learn. However, you would either be doing a lot
more work than you need to do, or you would be limiting yourself to very simple user interfaces.
A typical user interface uses standard GUI components such as buttons, scroll bars, text-input
boxes, and menus. These components have already been written for you, so you don’t have to
duplicate the work involved in developing them. They know how to draw themselves, and they
can handle the details of processing the mouse and keyboard events that concern them.
Consider one of the simplest user interface components, a push button. The button has a
border, and it displays some text. This text can be changed. Sometimes the button is disabled,
so that clicking on it doesn’t have any effect. When it is disabled, its appearance changes.
When the user clicks on the button, it changes appearance when the mouse button is pressed
and changes back when the mouse button is released. In fact, it’s more complicated than that.
If the user moves the mouse outside the push button before releasing the mouse button, the
button changes to its regular appearance, and releasing the mouse at that time will not trigger
the button. To implement this, it is necessary to respond to mouse exit or mouse drag events.
Furthermore, on many platforms, a button can receive the input focus. The button changes
appearance when it has the focus. If the button has the focus and the user presses the space
bar, the button is triggered. This means that the button must respond to keyboard and focus
events as well.
Fortunately, you don’t have to program any of this, provided you use an object belonging to
the standard class javafx.scene.control.Button. A Button object draws itself and processes
mouse, keyboard, and focus events on its own. You only hear from the Button when the
user triggers it by clicking on it or pressing the space bar while the button has the input
focus. When this happens, the Button object creates an event object belonging to the class
javafx.event.ActionEvent. The event object is sent to any registered listener to tell it that
the button has been pushed. Your program gets only the information it needs—the fact that a
button was pushed.
∗ ∗ ∗
Many standard components that are defined as part of the JavaFX graphical user interface
API are defined by subclasses of the class Control, from package javafx.scene.control.
Controls (with just a couple of exceptions) can be manipulated by the user to generate input
and events for the program. A number of useful methods are defined for controls. I begin by
mentioning three methods that can be used with any Control control:
• control.setDisable(true) can be called to disable the control. The control can be re-
enabled with control.setDisable(false). When a control is disabled, its appearance
might change, and it cannot be the target of mouse or key events. This function can
actually be called with any scene graph node, not just controls; when you disable a node,
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 306

any nodes contained inside that node are also disabled. There is a boolean-valued function,
control.isDisabled() that you can call to discover whether the control is disabled, either
because it was explicitly disabled or because it is inside a container node that was explicitly
disabled.
• control.setTooltip(new Tooltip(string)) sets the specified string as a “tool tip” for
the control. The tool tip is displayed if the mouse cursor is inside the control and the
mouse is not moved for a few seconds. The tool tip should give some information about
the meaning of the control or how to use it.
• control.setStyle(cssString) sets the CSS style of the control. CSS was discussed in
Subsection 6.2.5.
Note that using a control, or any scene graph node, is a multi-step process. The component
object must be created with a constructor. It must be added to a container. In many cases,
a listener must be registered to respond to events from the component. And in some cases, a
reference to the component must be saved in an instance variable so that the component can
be manipulated by the program after it has been created. In this section, we will look at a few
of the basic standard control components that are available in JavaFX. They are all defined by
classes in the package javafx.scene.control. In the next section we will consider the problem of
laying out components in containers.

6.4.1 ImageView
But before we turn to controls, I want to mention one other node type: ImageView from package
javafx.scene.image. Recall from Subsection 6.2.3 that an Image object represents a picture,
and that images can be loaded from resource files. An Image can be drawn on a Canvas, but
an Image is not a Node. That is, it can’t be part of a scene graph.
An ImageView is a scene graph node that is a simple wrapper for an image. Its purpose is
simply to display the image. It makes it possible to add the image to a scene graph without
having to draw the image on a canvas. The image can be specified as a parameter to the
ImageView constructor. For example, suppose that “icons/tux.png” is the path to an image
resource file. Then an ImageView can be created to display the image like this:
Image tux = new Image("icons/tux.png");
ImageView tuxIcon = new ImageView( tux );
In this case, I am thinking of the image as an “icon,” that is, a small image that is typically
used on a button, label, or menu item to add a graphical element to the usual plain text. In
fact, we’ll see that you can do exactly that in JavaFX.

6.4.2 Label and Button

The first four controls that we will look at have something in common: They all display a
string of text to the user, which the user can view but not edit. Furthermore they can all
display a graphical element in addition to or instead of the text. The graphic can be any
Node but is usually a small icon, implemented as an object of type ImageView. In fact, all
four types of controls inherit their behavior from a common superclass named Labeled. In
Subsection 6.6.2, we look at menu items, which also inherit from Labeled. That class defines a
number of instance methods that can be used with labels, buttons, and other labeled controls.
Those methods include:
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 307

• setText(string) for setting the text that is displayed on the control. The text can be
multi-line. The new line character, “\n”, in the string represents a line break.
• setGraphic(node) for setting the control’s graphical element.
• setFont(font) for setting the font that is used for the text.
• setTextFill(color) for setting the paint that is used for drawing the text.
• setGraphicTextGap(size) for setting the amount of space that is put between the text
and the graphic. The parameter is of type double.
• setContentDisplay(displayCode) for setting where the graphic should be placed
with respect to the text. The parameter is a constant from an enum, ContentDis-
play, such as ContentDisplay.LEFT, ContentDisplay.RIGHT, ContentDisplay.TOP or
ContentDisplay.BOTTOM.
All of these setter methods have corresponding getters, such as getText() and getFont(). I
have not listed a setter method for the background color. It is possible to set a background
color, but it’s cumbersome. (Setting the background color of a control, c, to white looks like
this:
c.setBackground(new Background(new BackgroundFill(Color.WHITE,null,null)));
where Background and BackgroundFill are in package javafx.scene.layout.) It is more easily
done by setting the CSS style of the control with the setStyle() method. CSS is also useful for
setting the border and for setting padding (the amount of empty space left around the content).
∗ ∗ ∗
A Label is certainly the simplest type of control. It adds almost nothing to the Labeled
class. Its purpose is simply to display some unedited text and/or a graphic to the user. The
label class has two constructors. The first has one parameter of type String specifying the text
for the label. The second adds a parameter of type Node specifying a graphic for the label. For
example, assuming that tuxIcon is the ImageView object from the previous subsection,
Label message = new Label("Hello World");
Label linuxAd = new Label("Choose Linux First!", tuxIcon);
The default background of a label is completely transparent, and the label has no border
or padding by default. Often I would like to add at least some padding. Here is an example of
setting all three properties using CSS:
message.setStyle("-fx-border-color: blue; -fx-border-width: 2px; " +
"-fx-background-color: white; -fx-padding: 6px");

∗ ∗ ∗
You’ve already seen buttons used in Section 6.1. A Button, like a Label, displays some text
and/or a graphic to the user, and the Button class, like the Label class, has two constructors:
Button stopButton = new Button("Stop");
Button linuxButton = new Button("Get Linux", tuxIcon);
When the user clicks a button, an event of type ActionEvent is generated. You can register
an event handler for the action with the button’s setOnAction method. For example,
stopButton.setOnAction( e -> animator.stop() );
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 308

In addition to the methods inherited from Labeled, a button has the instance methods
setDisable(boolean) and setToolTip(string) that were mentioned at the beginning of this
section. The setDisable() and setText() methods are particularly useful for giving the user
information about what is going on in the program. A disabled button is better than a button
that gives an obnoxious error message such as “Sorry, you can’t click on me now!” For example,
suppose that we want to use two buttons to start and stop an AnimationTimer, animator.
When the animation is running, the start button should be disabled, and when the animation
is paused, the stop button should be disabled. The code for this might look like:
Button startButton = new Button("Run Animation");
Button stopButton = new Button("Stop Animation");
stopButton.setDisable(true); // Stop button is initially disabled.
startButton.setOnAction( e -> {
animator.start();
startButton.setDisable(true);
stopButton.setDisable(false);
} );
stopButton.setOnAction( e -> {
animator.stop();
startButton.setDisable(false);
stopButton.setDisable(true);
} );
This ensures that the user can’t try to start the animation when it is already started or stop it
when it is already stopped.
Often, there is a button that triggers some default action in a program. For example, the
user might enter data into some text input boxes and then click a “Compute” button to process
the data. It would be nice if the user could just press Return when done typing, instead of
having to click the button. In JavaFX, you can make a Button, button, into the default button
for the window that contains it by calling
button.setDefaultButton(true);
When a window has a default button, then pressing the Return (or Enter) key on the keyboard
is equivalent to clicking the default button, unless the key event generated by the Return key
is consumed by another component. This can be very convenient for the user.

6.4.3 CheckBox and RadioButton

A CheckBox is a component that has two states: selected or unselected. (Being “selected”
means that the checkbox is checked.) The user can change the state of a check box by clicking
on it. The state of a checkbox is represented by a boolean value that is true if the box is
selected and is false if the box is unselected. A checkbox has a label, which is specified when
the box is constructed:
CheckBox showTime = new CheckBox("Show Current Time");
CheckBox is a subclass of Labeled, so a checkbox can also have a graphic, and all the instance
methods from the Labeled class can also be used with checkboxes. (There is no constructor that
specifies a graphic for the checkbox; any graphic has to be set by calling setGraphic(node).)
Usually, it’s the user who sets the state of a CheckBox by clicking on it, but you
can also set the state programmatically. The current state of a checkbox is set using
its setSelected(boolean) method. For example, if you want the checkbox showTime to
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 309

be checked, you would say “showTime.setSelected(true)". To uncheck the box, say

“showTime.setSelected(false)". You can determine the current state of a checkbox by
calling its isSelected() method, which returns a boolean value.
In many cases, you don’t need to worry about events from checkboxes. Your program
can just check the state whenever it needs to know it by calling the isSelected() method.
However, a checkbox does generate an event when its state is changed by the user, and you
can detect this event and respond to it if you want something to happen at the moment the
state changes. When the state of a checkbox is changed by the user, it generates an event of
type ActionEvent. If you want something to happen when the user changes the state, you must
register a handler with the checkbox by calling its setOnAction() method. (Note that if you
change the state by calling the setSelected() method, no ActionEvent is generated. However,
there is another method in the CheckBox class, fire(), which simulates a user click on the
checkbox and does generate an ActionEvent.)
It is actually possible for a checkbox to be in a third state, called “indeterminate,” although
that possibility is turned off by default. See the API documentation for details.
∗ ∗ ∗
Closely related to checkboxes are radio buttons. Like a checkbox, a radio button can
be either selected or not. However, radio buttons are expected to occur in groups, where at
most one radio button in a given group can be selected at any given time. Radio button
groups let the user select one choice among several alternatives. In JavaFX, a radio button
is represented by an object of type RadioButton. When used in isolation, a RadioButton acts
just like a CheckBox, and it has the same constructor, methods, and events, including methods
inherited from Labeled. Ordinarily, however, a RadioButton is used in a group. A group of radio
buttons is represented by an object belonging to the class ToggleGroup. A ToggleGroup is not a
component and does not itself have a visible representation on the screen. A ToggleGroup works
behind the scenes to organize a group of radio buttons, to ensure that at most one button in
the group can be selected at any given time.
To use a group of radio buttons, you must create a RadioButton object for each button
in the group, and you must create one object of type ToggleGroup to organize the individual
buttons into a group. Each RadioButton must be added individually to the scene graph, so that
it will appear on the screen. (A ToggleGroup plays no role in the placement of the buttons on
the screen.) Each RadioButton must also be added to the ToggleGroup. You do that by calling
the radio button’s setToggleGroup(group) instance method. If you want one of the buttons
to be selected initially, you can call setSelected(true) for that button. If you don’t do this,
then none of the buttons will be selected until the user clicks on one of them.
As an example, here is how you could set up a group of radio buttons that can be used to
select a color:
RadioButton redRadio, blueRadio, greenRadio, yellowRadio;
// Variables to represent the radio buttons.
// These might be instance variables, so that
// they can be used throughout the program.
ToggleGroup colorGroup = new ToggleGroup();
redRadio = new RadioButton("Red"); // Create a button.
redRadio.setToggleGroup(colorGroup); // Add it to the ToggleGroup.
blueRadio = new RadioButton("Blue");
blueRadio.setToggleGroup(colorGroup);
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 310

greenRadio = new RadioButton("Green");

greenRadio.setToggleGroup(colorGroup);
yellowRadio = new RadioButton("Yellow");
yellowRadio.setToggleGroup(colorGroup);
redRadio.setSelected(true); // Make an initial selection.
As an alternative to calling redRadio.setSelected(true), you can use the selectToggle()
instance method in the ToggleGroup class to select the radio button:
colorGroup.selectToggle( redRadio );
Just as for checkboxes, it is not always necessary to register listeners for radio buttons. You
can test the state of an individual RadioButton by calling its isSelected() method, or you
can call the toggle group’s getSelectedToggle() method. The return type of this method is
Toggle, which is an interface implemented by RadioButton. For example:
Toggle selection = colorGroup.getSelectedToggle();
if (selection == redRadio) {
color = Color.RED;
}
else if (selection == greenRadio){
.
.
.
Here’s what these radio buttons look like, lined up vertically in a container:

6.4.4 TextField and TextArea

The TextField and TextArea classes represent components that contain text that can be edited
by the user. A TextField holds a single line of text, while a TextArea can hold multiple lines.
It is also possible to set a TextField or TextArea to be read-only so that the user can read the
text that it contains but cannot edit the text. Both classes are subclasses of an abstract class,
TextInputControl, which defines their common properties.
TextField and TextArea have many methods in common. The instance method
setText(text), which takes a parameter of type String, can be used to change the text that is
displayed in an input component. The contents of the component can be retrieved by calling
its getText() instance method, which returns a value of type String. You can add a String of
text onto the end of the text that is already in the component by calling the instance method
appendText(text). The text in the setText() and appendText() methods can include “\n”
characters to represent line breaks; in a TextField they will be ignored. The instance method
setFont(font) can be used to change the font that is used in the text component.
If you want to stop the user from modifying the text, you can call setEditable(false).
Call the same method with parameter true to make the input component user-editable again.
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 311

The user can only type into a text component when it has the input focus. The user can
give the input focus to a text component by clicking it with the mouse, but sometimes it is
useful to give the input focus to a text field programmatically. You can do this by calling its
requestFocus() method.
A substring of the text in a text component can be “selected.” The selected text is
highlighted and can be cut or copied from the text component. (The user can right-click
in the component to bring up a pop-up menu of editing commands.) TextInputComponent has
several instance methods for working with the text selection, but I only mention one of them:
selectAll(), which selects the entire string of text in the text component.
For example, when I discover an error in the user’s input in a TextField, input, I usually call
both input.requestFocus() and input.selectAll(). This helps the user see where the error
occurred and lets the user start typing the correction immediately. If the user starts typing,
the old text in the input box, which is highlighted, will automatically be deleted.
∗ ∗ ∗
Both the TextField class and the TextArea class have two constructors. One of the
constructors has no parameter and makes an initially empty text input box. The second
constructor takes a parameter of type String, specifying the initial content of the box.
A TextField has a preferred number of columns, which by default is 12. This determines
the preferred width of the text field, that is, the size that is used if the size is not reset by the
program or when the text field is laid out by a container. The preferred number of columns
for a TextField, input, can be changed by calling input.setPrefColumnCount(n), where n is
a positive integer.
Similarly, a TextArea has both a preferred number of columns and a preferred number of
rows, which by default are 40 and 10. The value can be changed using the TextArea instance
methods setPrefColumnCount(n) and setPrefRowCount(n).
The TextArea class adds a few useful methods to those inherited from TextInputControl,
including some methods for getting and setting the amount by which the text has been scrolled.
Most important is setWrapText(wrap), where wrap is of type boolean. This method says what
should happen when a line of text is too long to be displayed in the text area. If wrap is true,
then any line that is too long will be “wrapped” onto the next line, with the line break occurring
between words if possible; if wrap is false, the line will simply extend outside the text area, and
the user will have to scroll the text area horizontally to see the entire line. The default value
of wrap is false.
Since it might be necessary to scroll a text area to see all the text that it contains, a TextArea
comes with scroll bars. The scroll bars are visible only when they are needed because the text
cannot fit in the available space.
See the sample program TextInputDemo.java for a short example of using a text field and
a text area. Here is the window from that program, after the text has been edited and scrolled
down a few lines:
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 312

(I pasted the source code of the program into the text area!)

6.4.5 Slider
A Slider provides a way for the user to select an integer value from a range of possible values.
The user does this by dragging a “knob” along a bar, or by clicking at some point along the
bar. A slider can, optionally, be decorated with tick marks and with labels. This picture, from
the sample program SliderDemo.java, shows three sliders with different decorations and with
different ranges of values:

Here, the second slider is decorated with tick marks, and the third one is decorated with labels.
It’s possible for a single slider to have both types of decorations.
The most commonly used constructor for Sliders specifies the start and end of the range of
values for the slider and its initial value when it first appears on the screen:
public Slider(double minimum, double maximum, double value)
If the parameters are omitted, the values 0, 100, and 0 are used. By default, a slider is horizontal,
but you can make it vertical by calling its method setOrientation(Orientation.VERTICAL).
Orientation is an enum from package javafx.geometry.
The current value of a Slider can be read at any time with its getValue() method, which
returns a value of type double. If you want to change the value programmatically, you can do
so with the method setValue(val), which takes a parameter of type double. If the specified
value is not between the minimum and maximum slider values, it is adjusted to lie in that
range.
If you want to respond immediately when the user changes the value of a slider, you can
register a listener with the slider. Sliders, unlike other components we have seen, do not generate
ActionEvents. Instead, they have an observable property of type Double that represents the
value. (See Subsection 6.3.7.) You can access the value property of a Slider, slider, by calling
slider.valueProperty(), and you can add a listener to the property that will be called
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 313

whenever the value changes. For example, in the sample program, I add listeners to the sliders
with commands such as
slider1.valueProperty().addListener( e -> sliderValueChanged(slider1) );
The listener will be called whenever the value changes, either because the user is dragging the
knob on the slider or because the program calls setValue(). If you want to know whether
the user generated the event by dragging the slider’s knob, call the slider’s boolean-valued
isValueChanging() method, which returns true if the user is dragging the knob.
Using tick marks on a slider is a two-step process: Specify the interval between the tick
marks, and tell the slider that the tick marks should be displayed. There are actually two
types of tick marks, “major” tick marks and “minor” tick marks. You can have one or
the other or both. Major tick marks are a bit longer than minor tick marks. The method
setMajorTickSpacing(x) indicates that there should be a major tick mark every x units along
the slider. The parameter is of type double. (The spacing is in terms of values on the slider, not
pixels.) To control the minor tick marks, you can call setMinorTickCount(n). The parameter
is an int that specifies how many minor tick marks are placed between consecutive major tick
marks. The default value is 4. If you don’t want minor tick marks, set the count to zero.
Calling these methods is not enough to make the tick marks appear. You also have to call
setShowTickMarks(true). For example, the second slider in the sample program was created
and configured using the commands:
slider2 = new Slider(); // Use default values (0,100,0)
slider2.setMajorTickUnit(25); // space between big tick marks
slider2.setMinorTickCount(5); // 5 small tick marks between big tick marks.
slider2.setShowTickMarks(true);

Labels on a slider are handled similarly. A label will be placed at every major tick mark,
but some labels will be omitted if they would overlap. To see the labels, you need to call
setShowTickLabels(true). For example, the third slider in the above illustration was created
and configured to show labels with the commands:
slider3 = new Slider(2000,2100,2022);
slider3.setMajorTickUnit(50); // tick marks are not shown!
slider3.setShowTickLabels(true)
The value of a slider is of type double. You might want to restrict the value to
be an integer, or to be some multiple of a given value. What you can do is call
slider.setSnapToTicks(true). After the user finishes dragging the slider’s knob, the value
will be moved to the value at the nearest major or minor tick mark, even if the tick marks are
not visible. The value will not be restricted while the user is dragging the knob; the value is just
adjusted at the end of the drag. The value set by calling setValue(x) is also not restricted,
but there is another method, adjustValue(x), that will set the value to the value at the tick
mark nearest to x. For example, if you want a slider to snap to integral values in the range 0
to 10, you could say:
Slider sldr = new Slider(0,10,0);
sldr.setMajorTickUnit(1); // major ticks 1 unit apart
sldr.setMinorTickCount(0); // no minor tick marks
sldr.setSnapToTicks(true);
In the sample program, the third slider has been configured to snap to an integer value at the
end of a drag operation.
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 314

6.5 Basic Layout

Components are the fundamental building blocks of a graphical user interface. But you have
to do more with components besides create them. Another aspect of GUI programming is
laying out components on the screen, that is, deciding where they are placed and how big
they are. You have probably noticed that computing coordinates can be a difficult problem,
especially if you don’t assume a fixed size for the drawing area. Java has a solution for this, as
well.
Components are the visible objects that make up a GUI. Some components are containers,
which can hold other components. In JavaFX terms, a container is a scene graph node that
can contain other scene graph nodes as “children.” The children of a container must be “laid
out,” which means setting their sizes and positions. It is possible for you to program the layout
yourself, but layout is usually done automatically by the container. Different kinds of containers
implement different policies for laying out their child nodes. In this section, we will cover some
common types of JavaFX containers and their layout policies. In this section and the next, we
will look at several programming examples that use components and layout.
Because a container is itself a scene graph node, you can add a container as a child of another
container. This makes complex nesting of components possible, as shown in this illustration:

In this picture, a large container holds two smaller containers. Each of the two smaller containers
in turn holds three components.
∗ ∗ ∗
Every scene graph node has a minimum width and height, a maximum width and height, and
a preferred width and height. A container consults these values when it is deciding how to lay
out its children. (Some nodes, however, are not resizable, meaning not meant to be resized by
a container during layout; for such components, the minimum, maximum, and preferred width
and height are effectively equal to the component’s actual size. Canvas and ImageView are
examples of non-resizable components.) In general, a container will compute its own preferred
size based on the components that it contains. The container’s preferred size will allow each
component that it contains to have at least its preferred size. The container will compute its
own minimum and maximum sizes in a similar way, based on the minimum and maximum sizes
of its children.
When setting the size of a child while doing layout, most containers will not set the width
of the child to be less than the child’s minimum width or greater than the child’s maximum
width, and the same for the child’s height. This will be true even if it means that the child will
overlap other components or will extend outside the container. (The part outside the container
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 315

might or might not be shown, depending on the container.) This can also leave empty space in
the container.
Resizable nodes, which includes controls and most containers, have instance methods for
setting the minimum, preferred, and maximim width: setMinWidth(w), setPrefWidth(w),
and setMaxWidth(w), where the parameter is of type double, with similar instance methods
for the height. You can also set width and height values simultaneously with methods such as
setMaxSize(w,h) and setPrefSize(w,h). For a container, the values set by these methods
will override the values that would have been computed by the container based the children
that it contains.
In JavaFX, containers that do layout are defined by the class Pane and its subclasses. (Pane
and its subclasses are in package javafx.scene.layout.) Here, we look at a few of these layout
classes, starting with using Pane directly.

6.5.1 Do Your Own Layout

Sometimes, you would like to do your own layout, instead of letting it up to one of the standard
container classes. You can get complete control of the size and location of a node by setting it
to be “unmanaged”:
node.setManaged(false);
When you do that, any container that contains node as a child will completely ignore node, as
far as layout is concerned. It is your responsibility to set its location and (for resizable nodes)
size. Note that an unmanaged node must still be placed inside a container for it to appear on
the screen.
For our first layout example, we’ll look at using the Pane class itself for the container. The
Pane will manage the size, but not the location, of the managed nodes that it contains. That
is, by using a Pane as container, you assume responsibility for setting the positions of the child
nodes. The Pane will, by default, resize each child to its preferred size; if you want to take over
that job too, you need to make the child unmanaged.
If node is any scene graph node that is unmanaged or is in a container that does not set
the location of its child nodes, then you can set the location by calling
node.relocate( x, y );
This puts the top left corner of the node at the point (x,y), measured in the coordinate system
of the container that contains the node. Similarly, you can set the size of node, when that is
allowed, by calling
node.resize( width, height )
The width and height are measured in pixels.
∗ ∗ ∗
We will look at an example that contains four components: two buttons, a label, and a
canvas that displays a checkerboard pattern:
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 316

The program is just an example of layout; it doesn’t do anything, except that clicking the
buttons changes the text of the label. (I will use this example in Section 7.6 as a starting point
for a checkers game.)
This example uses a Pane as the root node of the scene and as the container for the four
components. This means that the program is responsible for setting the locations of the
components, by calling their relocate() method. (Without that, they will all appear with
their top left corners at the default location, (0,0)!) After looking at the result, I decided that
I wanted the two buttons to have the same size and to be larger than their preferred sizes.
For that to work, the buttons had to be made unmanaged. (Otherwise, calling their resize()
method would have no effect because the pane would set them back to their preferred size.)
Here is the code from the application’s start() method that creates the four components and
configures them, including setting their locations and sizes:
/* Create the child nodes. */
board = new Checkerboard(); // a nested subclass of Canvas
board.draw(); // draws the content of the checkerboard
newGameButton = new Button("New Game");
newGameButton.setOnAction( e -> doNewGame() );
resignButton = new Button("Resign");
resignButton.setOnAction( e -> doResign() );
message = new Label("Click \"New Game\" to begin.");
message.setTextFill( Color.rgb(100,255,100) ); // Light green.
message.setFont( Font.font(null, FontWeight.BOLD, 18) );
/* Set the location of each child by calling its relocate() method */
board.relocate(20,20);
newGameButton.relocate(370, 120);
resignButton.relocate(370, 200);
message.relocate(20, 370);
/* Set the sizes of the buttons. For this to have an effect, make
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 317

* the butons "unmanaged." If they are managed, the Pane will set
* their sizes. */
resignButton.setManaged(false);
resignButton.resize(100,30);
newGameButton.setManaged(false);
newGameButton.resize(100,30);
The Pane that holds the components is the root node of the scene. The window for the
program will be sized to be just large enough to hold the Pane at its preferred size. By default,
a Pane computes its preferred size to be just large enough to show all of its managed children.
Since I made the buttons unmanaged, they would not be included in the preferred size. To
make the window large enough to include them (and to allow more empty space below the
label), the program sets the preferred width and height of the pane:
Pane root = new Pane();
root.setPrefWidth(500);
root.setPrefHeight(420);
The buttons, label, and board must still be added as children of the pane, to make them appear
on the screen. This is done with the command:
root.getChildren().addAll(board, newGameButton, resignButton, message);
Alternatively, they could have been added one by one using statements such as
root.getChildren().add(board);
or the child nodes could have been given as parameters to the constructor:
Pane root = new Pane(board, newGameButton, resignButton, message);
The pane still has to be made the root of the scene, the scene has to be placed in the
stage, and the stage has to be configured and shown on the screen. See the source code,
OwnLayoutDemo.java, for the complete story.
It’s fairly easy in this case to get a reasonable layout. It’s much more difficult to do your
own layout if you want to allow for changes in the size of the window. To do that, you
would probably write your own subclass of Pane (or of its superclass, Region), and override the
layoutChildren() method, which is called by the system when a container needs to do layout,
including when the container is resized. However, my real advice is that if you want to allow
for changes in the container’s size, try to find a standard container that will do the layout work
for you.

6.5.2 BorderPane
A BorderPane is a subclass of Pane that is designed to display one large, central component,
with up to four smaller components arranged around the edges of the central component. The
five positions are referred to as center, top, right, bottom, and left. The meaning of the five
positions is shown in this diagram:
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 318

Top
Ó
ÛÚ ÔÕ
Ù Center Ö
Ø ×

Bottom

Note that a border layout can contain fewer than five components, so that not all five of the
possible positions need to be filled. It would be very unusual, however, to have no center
component.
The BorderPane class has two constructors, one with no parameters and one that takes a
single parameter giving the center child of the pane. Child nodes can be added to a BorderPane,
pane, using the methods
pane.setCenter(node);
pane.setTop(node);
pane.setRight(node);
pane.setBottom(node);
pane.setLeft(node);
Calling one of these methods with parameter null will remove the child from that position in
the pane.
A BorderPane sets the sizes of its child nodes as follows, except that the width and height of
a component is always restricted to lie between the minimum and maximum width and height
of that component: The top and bottom components (if present) are shown at their preferred
heights, but their width is set equal to the full width of the container. The left and right
components are shown at their preferred widths, but their height is set to the height of the
container, minus the space occupied by the top and bottom components. Finally, the center
component takes up any remaining space.
The default preferred size of BorderPane is set just big enough to accommodate the preferred
sizes of its (managed) children. The minimum size is computed in a similar way. The default
maximum size of a BorderPane is unlimited.
∗ ∗ ∗
For some subclasses of Pane, it is possible to tweak the layout of the children by applying
things called layout constraints. For example, what happens in a BorderPane if a child cannot
be resized to exactly fit the available space? In that case, the child has a default position within
the available space. The center child is centered within the center space of the pane, the bottom
child is placed at the bottom left corner of the bottom space in the pane, and so on. You can
change this default placement using a static method from the BorderPane class:
BorderPane.setAlignment( child, position );
where child is the child node whose position you want to tweak and position is one of the
constants from the enumerated type Pos, from package javafx.geometry. Possible positions
include Pos.CENTER, POS.TOP LEFT, Pos.BOTTOM RIGHT, and so on. (I find it strange that the
alignment is set using a static method, but that’s the way layout constraints work in JavaFX.)
You can also set a margin for any child of a BorderPane. A margin is empty space around
the child. The background color of the pane will show in the margin. A margin is specified as a
value of type Insets, from package javafx.geometry. An object of type Insets has four double
properties, top, right, bottom, and left, which can be specified in the constructor:
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 319

new Insets(top,right,bottom,left)
There is also a constructor that takes a single parameter, which is used as the value for all four
properties. When used as a margin for a child node, the properties specify the width of the
margin along the top, right, bottom, and left edges of the child. The margin can be specified
using another static method:
BorderPane.setMargin( child, insets );
For example,
BorderPane.setMargin( topchild, new Insets(2,5,2,5) );
Remember that you can also tweak the appearance of a container using CSS (Subsec-
tion 6.2.5), which is the easiest way to set a border or background color for the container.

6.5.3 HBox and VBox

It is common to want to lay out a set of components in a horizontal row or in a vertical column.
For that, the classes HBox and VBox can be used. HBox is a subclass of Pane that lays out its
children next to each other, in a horizontal row. VBox is a subclass of Pane that lays out its
children in vertical column. An HBox might be used as the bottom component in a BorderPane,
making it possible to line up several components along the bottom of the border pane. Similarly,
a VBox might be used as the left or right component of a BorderPane. Here, I will only discuss
HBox, but VBox is used in an entirely analogous way.
An HBox, hbox, can be configured to leave a gap between each child and the next. The
amount of the gap is given by a value of type double, which can be set by calling
hbox.setSpacing( gapAmount );
The default value is zero. Children can be added to hbox in the same way as for Pane, that is, by
calling hbox.getChildren().add(child) or hbox.getChildren().addAll(child1,child2,...).
The HBox class has a constructor with no parameters, as well as one that takes the size of the
gap as its first parameter, optionally followed by child nodes to be added to the box.
By default, an HBox will resize its children to their preferred widths, possibly leaving some
blank extra space on the right. (The blank space would be there because the width of the
HBox has been set to be larger than its preferred width.) If using the children’s preferred
widths would make the total width greater than the actual width of the HBox, it will shrink
the children, within the limit of their minimum widths. The height of the children will be set
to the full available height in the HBox, but, as always, within the limits set by their minimum
and maximum heights.
Perhaps you would like the children to grow beyond their preferred widths, to fill the
available space in an HBox. To make that happen, you need to set a layout constraint on
each child that you want to grow, using a static method:
HBox.setHgrow( child, priority );
The second parameter is a constant of the enumerated type Priority, from package
javafx.scene.layout. The value will likely be Priority.ALWAYS, which means that the child
will always get a share of the extra space. The child’s width will still be limited by its maximum
width, so you might need to increase that maximum to get the child to grow to the extent that
you want.
As an example, suppose that an HBox contains three Buttons, but1, but2, and but3, and
that you would like them to grow to fill the entire HBox. You need to set the HGrow constraint
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 320

on each button. Furthermore, since the maximum width of a button is equal to its preferred
width, you need to increase each button’s maximum width. Here, I set the maximum width to
be Double.POSITIVE INFINITY, which means that the button can grow without any limit:
HBox.setHgrow(but1, Priority.ALWAYS);
HBox.setHgrow(but2, Priority.ALWAYS);
HBox.setHgrow(but3, Priority.ALWAYS);
but1.setMaxWidth(Double.POSITIVE INFINITY);
but2.setMaxWidth(Double.POSITIVE INFINITY);
but3.setMaxWidth(Double.POSITIVE INFINITY);
Any extra space will be distributed equally to the three buttons and added on to their preferred
widths. This does not mean that they will all have the same width, because their original,
preferred widths might not be equal. For a sample program in the next section, I wanted the
three buttons in an HBox to be the same size. To accomplish that, I simply gave all three
buttons the same large preferred width:
but1.setPrefWidth(1000);
but2.setPrefWidth(1000);
but3.setPrefWidth(1000);
The HBox will then shrink the buttons proportionately to fit in the available space, and they
all end up with the same width.
There are other ways to tweak the layout in an HBox. You can add a margin around
any child using a static method similar to the one that is used for the same purpose in a
BorderPane. You can set the HBox to use the preferred heights of its children, instead of
stretching them to fit the height of the hbox by calling hbox.setFillHeight(false). You can
say where in the hbox the children are placed, when they do not fill the entire hbox by calling
hbox.setAlignment(position); the parameter is of type Pos with a default of Pos.TOP LEFT.
And, of course, you can apply CSS style properties.
∗ ∗ ∗
As an example, we look at a GUI built entirely using HBox and VBox. The complete
program can be found in SimpleCalc.java. The program has two TextFields where the user can
enter numbers, four Buttons that the user can click to add, subtract, multiply, or divide the
two numbers, and a Label that displays the result of the operation. Here is a picture of the
program’s window:

The root node for the window is a VBox containing four items, where the first three items are
HBoxes. The first HBox contains two components, a Label displaying the text “x =” and a
TextField. It is created with the commands
xInput = new TextField("0"); // Text input box initially containing "0"
HBox xPane = new HBox( new Label(" x = "), xInput );
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 321

and it is later added as the first child of the VBox Note that the label is simply created with a
constructor and added to the HBox, since there is no need to keep a reference to it.
The third HBox contains the four buttons. The buttons’ default widths would be rather
small. To make them fill the entire HBox, I add an hgrow constraint to each button and increase
its maximum width. Here is how it’s done:
/* Create the four buttons and an HBox to hold them. */
Button plus = new Button("+");
plus.setOnAction( e -> doOperation(’+’) );
Button minus = new Button("-");
minus.setOnAction( e -> doOperation(’-’) );
Button times = new Button("*");
times.setOnAction( e -> doOperation(’*’) );
Button divide = new Button("/");
divide.setOnAction( e -> doOperation(’/’) );
HBox buttonPane = new HBox( plus, minus, times, divide );
/* The four buttons need to be tweaked so that they will fill
* the entire buttonPane. This can be done by giving each button
* a large maximum width and setting an hgrow constraint
* for the button. */
HBox.setHgrow(plus, Priority.ALWAYS);
plus.setMaxWidth(Double.POSITIVE INFINITY);
HBox.setHgrow(minus, Priority.ALWAYS);
minus.setMaxWidth(Double.POSITIVE INFINITY);
HBox.setHgrow(times, Priority.ALWAYS);
times.setMaxWidth(Double.POSITIVE INFINITY);
HBox.setHgrow(divide, Priority.ALWAYS);
divide.setMaxWidth(Double.POSITIVE INFINITY);
The last position in the VBox is occupied by a Label. Since there is only one component,
it is added directly to the VBox; there is no need to wrap it in an HBox. However, in order
to get the text in the label to appear in the center instead of at the left edge of the window, I
needed to increase the maximum width of the label (so that the VBox will set its width to fill
the entire available space). Furthermore, I had to set the alignment property of the label, to
tell the label to place its text in the center of the label and not at the left:
answer.setMaxWidth(Double.POSITIVE INFINITY);
answer.setAlignment(Pos.CENTER);
One point of interest in this example, aside from the layout, is the doOperation() method
that is called when the user clicks one of the buttons. This method must retrieve the user’s
numbers from the text fields, perform the appropriate arithmetic operation on them (depending
on which button was clicked), and set the text of the Label to represent the result. However, the
contents of the text fields can only be retrieved as strings, and these strings must be converted
into numbers. If the conversion fails, the label is set to display an error message:
private void doOperation( char op ) {
double x, y; // The numbers from the input boxes.
try { // Get x from the first input box.
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 322

String xStr = xInput.getText();

x = Double.parseDouble(xStr);
}
catch (NumberFormatException e) {
// The string xStr was not a legal number.
// Show an error message, move the input focus
// to xInput and select all the text in that box.
answer.setText("Illegal data for x.");
xInput.requestFocus();
xInput.selectAll();
return; // stop processing when an error occurs!
}
try { // Get a number from the second input box.
String yStr = yInput.getText();
y = Double.parseDouble(yStr);
}
catch (NumberFormatException e) {
answer.setText("Illegal data for y.");
yInput.requestFocus();
yInput.selectAll();
return;
}
/* Perform the operation based on the parameter, op. */
if (op == ’+’)
answer.setText( "x + y = " + (x+y) );
else if (op == ’-’)
answer.setText( "x - y = " + (x-y) );
else if (op == ’*’)
answer.setText( "x * y = " + (x*y) );
else if (op == ’/’) {
if (y == 0) { // Can’t divide by zero! Show an error message.
answer.setText("Can’t divide by zero!");
yInput.requestFocus();
yInput.selectAll();
}
else {
answer.setText( "x / y = " + (x/y) );
}
}
} // end doOperation()
The complete source code for this example can be found in SimpleCalc.java.

6.5.4 GridPane and TilePane

Next, we consider GridPane, a subclass of Pane that lays out its children in rows and columns.
Rows and columns are numbered, starting from zero. Here is an illustration of a typical grid
with 4 rows and 5 columns:
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 323

4
è è è è è
æç æç æç æç æç
äå äå äå äå äå
ã ã ã ã ã
ÜÝÞ ß

ÜÝÞ à

ÜÝÞ á

ÜÝÞ â

Note that the rows are not necessarily all the same height, and columns are not necessarily all
the same width.
It is possible to leave gaps between rows or between columns, where the background of the
GridPane will show. If grid is the GridPane, set the size of the gaps by calling
grid.setHGap( gapSize ); // gap between columns
gris.setVGap( gapSize ); // gap between rows
You can specify the row and column where a child is to be placed when you add the child
to the GridPane:
grid.add( child, column, row );
(Note that the column number is specified first.) In fact, it is possible for a child to span several
rows or several columns in the grid. The number of columns and number of rows that the child
should occupy can be given as additional parameters to the add() method:
grid.add( child, column, row, columnCount, rowCount );
The number of rows and number of columns in the grid are determined by the positions of the
children that have been added to it.
A GridPane will resize each child to fill the position or positions that it occupies in the grid
(within minimum and maximum size limits). The preferred width of a column will be just large
enough to accommodate the preferred widths of all the children in that column, and similarly
for the preferred height. There are several ways to tweak this behavior, but here I will only
mention that the actual column width and row height can be controlled.
A GridPane can have a set of column constraints and a set of row constraints that
determine how the column width and row height are computed. The width of a column can be
computed based on the widths of its children (the default), it can be set to a constant value, or
it can be computed as a percentage of available space. Computation of row height is similar.
Here is how to set constant row heights for a gridpane that has four rows:
gridpane.getRowConstraints().addAll(
new RowConstraints(100), // row 0 has height 100 pixels
new RowConstraints(150), // row 1 has height 150 pixels
new RowConstraints(100), // row 2 has height 100 pixels
new RowConstraints(200), // row 3 has height 200 pixels
);
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 324

In this case, the total height of the gridpane is the same, no matter how much space is available
for it.
When percentages are used, the grid pane will expand to fill available space, and the row
height or column width will be computed from the percentages. For example, to force a five-
column gridpane to fill the available width and to force all columns to have the same size:
for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
ColumnConstraints constraints = new ColumnConstraints();
constraints.setPercentWidth(20); // (there is no constructor that does this)
gridpane.getColumnConstraints().add(constraints);
}
If the percentages add up to more than 100, then they will be decreased proportionately. In
the example, setting all five percentages to be 50 would have the same effect as setting them all
to be 20. Things can get more complicated than this, but these are probably the most common
cases.
For an example of using a GridPane see the source code of SimpleColorChooser.java from
Subsection 6.2.1. You should now be able to read and understand the entire program.
∗ ∗ ∗
If you would like a grid in which all the rectangles are the same size, you can use a TilePane.
A TilePane arranges equal-size “tiles” in rows and columns. Each tile holds one of the child
nodes; there is no way to spread out a child over several tiles.
A TilePane, tpane, has a preferred number of rows and a preferred number of columns,
which you should set by calling
tpane.setPrefColumns(cols);
The preferred number of columns will be used if the TilePane is shown at its preferred size,
which is the usual case. However, that is not necessarily true if it is shown at a different size;
in that case, the number of columns will be determined by the width of the available space.
The number of rows will be determined by the number of child nodes that are added to the
TilePane. The children will be laid out in order, filling the first row from left to right, then the
second row, and so on. It is not required that the last row be completely filled. (All of this is
true if the “orientation” of the TilePane is horizontal. It is possible to change the orientation
to vertical. In that case, the number of preferred rows is specified instead of the number of
columns. However, I have found little reason to do that.)
It’s very common to have a TilePane in which the number of preferred columns is one. In
that case, it is similar to a VBox. It is also common for the number of columns to be equal to
the number of child nodes, and in that case, it is similar to an HBox.
At its preferred size, the width of each tile is equal to the largest preferred width of any
child node, and similarly for the height. The TilePane will resize each child to completely fill
its tile, except that it will not make a child larger than its maximum width and height.
There is a TilePane constructor with no parameters and one that takes a list of any number
of children to be added to the pane. You can also add children later using one of
tpane.getChildren().add(child);
tpane.getChildren().addAll(child1, child2, ...);
You can specify the size of a horizontal gap that will be placed between columns and of a
vertical gap that will be placed between rows. The background of the pane will show through
the gaps. The gap amounts can be specified in the constructor (optionally followed by a list of
children):
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 325

TilePane tpane = new TilePane( hgapAmount, vgapAmount );

or they can be specified later with tpane.setHgap(h) and tpane.setVgap(v).
For an example that uses TilePanes for layout, see the solution to Exercise 6.7.

6.6 Complete Programs

In this chapter, we have covered many of the basic aspects of GUI programming. There is
still a lot more to learn, and we will return to the topic in Chapter 13. But you already know
enough to write some interesting programs. In this section, we look at two complete programs
that use what you have learned about GUI programming in this chapter, as well as what you
learned about programming in general in earlier chapters. Along the way, we will also encounter
a few new ideas.

6.6.1 A Little Card Game

The first program that we will consider is a GUI version of the command-line card game
HighLow.java from Subsection 5.4.3. In the new version, HighLowGUI.java, you look at a
playing card and try to predict whether the next card will be higher or lower in value. (Aces
have the lowest value in this game.) In this GUI version of the program, you click on a button
to make your prediction. If you predict wrong, you lose. If you make three correct predictions,
you win. After completing a game, you can click “New Game” to start another game. Here is
what the program looks like in the middle of a game:

The complete source code for the program can be found in the file HighLowGUI.java. I
encourage you to compile and run it. Note that the program also requires Card.java, Deck.java,
and Hand.java, from Section 5.4, since they define classes that are used in the program.
And it requires the file of card images, cards.png, that was used in RandomCards.java from
Subsection 6.2.4.
The layout of the program should be easy to guess: HighLowGUI uses a BorderPane as the
root of the scene graph. The center position is occupied by a Canvas on which the cards and a
message are drawn. The bottom position contains an HBox that in turn contains three Buttons.
In order to make the buttons fill the HBox, I set them all to have the same width, as discussed
in Subsection 6.5.3. You can see all this in the start() method from the program:
public void start(Stage stage) {
cardImages = new Image("cards.png"); // Load card images.
board = new Canvas(4*99 + 20, 123 + 80); // Space for 4 cards.
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 326

Button higher = new Button("Higher"); // Create the buttons, and

higher.setOnAction( e -> doHigher() ); // install event handlers.
Button lower = new Button("Lower");
lower.setOnAction( e -> doLower() );
Button newGame = new Button("New Game");
newGame.setOnAction( e -> doNewGame() );
HBox buttonBar = new HBox( higher, lower, newGame );
higher.setPrefWidth(board.getWidth()/3.0); // Make each button fill
lower.setPrefWidth(board.getWidth()/3.0); // 1/3 of the width.
newGame.setPrefWidth(board.getWidth()/3.0);
BorderPane root = new BorderPane(); // Create the scene graph root node.
root.setCenter(board);
root.setBottom(buttonBar);
doNewGame(); // set up for the first game
Scene scene = new Scene(root); // Finish setting up the scene and stage.
stage.setScene(scene);
stage.setTitle("High/Low Game");
stage.setResizable(false);
stage.show();
} // end start()
Note that the event handlers call methods such as doNewGame() that are defined elsewhere
in the program. The programming of those methods is a nice example of thinking in terms of a
state machine. (See Subsection 6.3.6.) It is important to think in terms of the states that the
game can be in, how the state can change, and how the response to events can depend on the
state. The approach that produced the original, text-oriented game in Subsection 5.4.3 is not
appropriate here. Trying to think about the game in terms of a process that goes step-by-step
from beginning to end is more likely to confuse you than to help you.
The state of the game includes the cards and the message. The cards are stored in an object
of type Hand. The message is a String. These values are stored in instance variables. There is
also another, less obvious aspect of the state: Sometimes a game is in progress, and the user is
supposed to make a prediction about the next card. Sometimes we are between games, and the
user is supposed to click the “New Game” button. It’s a good idea to keep track of this basic
difference in state. The program uses a boolean instance variable named gameInProgress for
this purpose.
The state of the game can change whenever the user clicks on a button. The program has
three methods to respond to button clicks: doHigher(), doLower(), and newGame(). It’s in
these three event-handling methods that the action of the game takes place.
We don’t want to let the user start a new game if a game is currently in progress. That would
be cheating. So, the response in the newGame() method is different depending on whether the
state variable gameInProgress is true or false. If a game is in progress, the message instance
variable should be set to be an error message. If a game is not in progress, then all the state
variables should be set to appropriate values for the beginning of a new game. In any case,
the board must be redrawn so that the user can see that the state has changed. The complete
newGame() method is as follows:
/**
* Called by the start() method, and called by an event handler if
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 327

* the user clicks the "New Game" button. Start a new game.
*/
private void doNewGame() {
if (gameInProgress) {
// If the current game is not over, it is an error to try
// to start a new game.
message = "You still have to finish this game!";
drawBoard();
return;
}
deck = new Deck(); // Create the deck and hand to use for this game.
hand = new Hand();
deck.shuffle();
hand.addCard( deck.dealCard() ); // Deal the first card into the hand.
message = "Is the next card higher or lower?";
gameInProgress = true;
drawBoard();
} // end doNewGame()
The doHigher() and doLower() methods are almost identical to each other (and could
probably have been combined into one method with a parameter, if I were more clever). Let’s
look at the doHigher() routine. This is called when the user clicks the “Higher” button. This
only makes sense if a game is in progress, so the first thing doHigher() should do is check the
value of the state variable gameInProgress. If the value is false, then doHigher() should just
set up an error message. If a game is in progress, a new card should be added to the hand and
the user’s prediction should be tested. The user might win or lose at this time. If so, the value
of the state variable gameInProgress must be set to false because the game is over. In any
case, the board is redrawn to show the new state. Here is the doHigher() method:
/**
* Called by an event handler when user clicks "Higher" button.
* Check the user’s prediction. Game ends if user guessed
* wrong or if the user has made three correct predictions.
*/
private void doHigher() {
if (gameInProgress == false) {
// If the game has ended, it was an error to click "Higher",
// So set up an error message and abort processing.
message = "Click \"New Game\" to start a new game!";
drawBoard();
return;
}
hand.addCard( deck.dealCard() ); // Deal a card to the hand.
int cardCt = hand.getCardCount();
Card thisCard = hand.getCard( cardCt - 1 ); // Card just dealt.
Card prevCard = hand.getCard( cardCt - 2 ); // The previous card.
if ( thisCard.getValue() < prevCard.getValue() ) {
gameInProgress = false;
message = "Too bad! You lose.";
}
else if ( thisCard.getValue() == prevCard.getValue() ) {
gameInProgress = false;
message = "Too bad! You lose on ties.";
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 328

}
else if ( cardCt == 4) {
gameInProgress = false;
message = "You win! You made three correct guesses.";
}
else {
message = "Got it right! Try for " + cardCt + ".";
}
drawBoard();
} // end doHigher()
The drawBoard() method, which is responsible for drawing the content of the canvas, uses
the values in the state variables to decide what to show. It displays the string stored in the
message variable. It draws each of the cards in the hand. There is one little tricky bit: If a
game is in progress, it draws an extra face-down card, which is not in the hand, to represent
the next card in the deck. The technique for drawing the individual cards was explained in
Section 6.2. See the source code for the method definition.

6.6.2 Menus and Menubars

Our second example program, “MosaicDraw,” is a kind of drawing program. The source code
for the program is in the file MosaicDraw.java. The program also requires MosaicCanvas.java.
Here is a half-size screenshot showing a sample drawing made with the program:

As the user clicks-and-drags the mouse in the large drawing area of this program, it leaves a
trail of little colored squares. There is some random variation in the color of the squares. (This
is meant to make the picture look a little more like a real mosaic, which is a picture made out
of small colored stones in which there would be some natural color variation.) The program
has one feature that we have not encountered before: There is a menu bar above the drawing
area. The “Control” menu contains commands for filling and clearing the drawing area, along
with a few options that affect the appearance of the picture. The “Color” menu lets the user
select the color that will be used when the user draws. The “Tools” menu affects the behavior
of the mouse. Using the default “Draw” tool, the mouse leaves a trail of single squares. Using
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 329

the “Draw 3x3” tool, the mouse leaves a swatch of colored squares that is three squares wide.
There are also “Erase” tools, which let the user set squares back to their default black color.
The drawing area of the program is a panel that belongs to the MosaicCanvas class, a
subclass of Canvas that is defined in MosaicCanvas.java. MosaicCanvas is a highly reusable
class for representing mosaics of colored rectangles. It was also used behind the scenes in the
sample program in Subsection 4.7.3. The MosaicCanvas class does not directly support drawing
on the mosaic, but it does support setting the color of each individual square. The MosaicDraw
program installs mouse handlers on the canvas. The handlers respond to MousePressed and
MouseDragged events on the canvas by applying the currently selected tool to the canvas at the
square that contains the mouse position. This is a nice example of applying event listeners to
an object to do something that was not programmed into the object itself.
I urge you to study MosaicDraw.java. I will not be discussing all aspects of the code here,
but you should be able to understand it all after reading this section. As for MosaicCanvas.java,
it uses some techniques that you would not understand at this point, but I encourage you to at
least read the comments in that file to learn about the API for MosaicCanvas.
∗ ∗ ∗
MosaicDraw is the first example that we have seen that uses a menu bar. Fortunately, menus
are very easy to use in JavaFX. The items in a menu are represented by objects belonging to
class MenuItem or to one of its subclasses. (MenuItem and other menu-related classes are in
package javafx.scene.control.) Menu items are used in almost exactly the same way as
buttons. In particular, a MenuItem can be created using a constructor that specifies the text of
the menu item, such as:
MenuItem fillCommand = new MenuItem("Fill");
Menu items, like buttons, can have a graphic as well as text, and there is a second constructor
that allows you to specify both text and graphic. When the user selects a MenuItem from
a menu, an ActionEvent is generated. Just as for a button, you can add an action event
listener to the menu item using its setOnAction(handler) method. A menu item has a
setDisable(disabled) method that can be used to enable and disable the item. And it
has a setText() method for changing the text that is displayed in the item.
The main difference between a menu item and a button, of course, is that a menu item is
meant to appear in a menu. (Actually, a menu item is a Node that can appear anywhere in
a scene graph, but the usual place for it is in a menu.) A menu in JavaFX is represented by
the class Menu. (In fact, Menu is actually a subclass of MenuItem, which means that you can
add a menu as an item in another menu. The menu that you add becomes a submenu of the
menu that you add it to.) A Menu has a name, which is specified in the constructor. It has an
instance method getItems() that returns a list of menu items contained in the menu. To add
items to the menu, you need to add them to that list:
Menu sampleMenu = new Menu("Sample");
sampleMenu.getItems().add( menuItem ); // Add one menu item to the menu.
sampleMenu.getItems().addAll( item1, item2, item3 ); // Add multiple items.
Once a menu has been created, it can be added to a menu bar. A menu bar is represented
by the class MenuBar. A menu bar is just a container for menus. It does not have a name.
The MenuBar constructor can be called with no parameters, or it can have a parameter list
containing Menus to be added to the menu bar. The instance method getMenus() returns
a list of menus, with methods add() and addAll() for adding menus to the menu bar. For
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 330

example, the MosaicDraw program uses three menus, controlMenu, colorMenu, and toolMenu.
We could create a menu bar and add the menus to it with the statements:
MenuBar menuBar = new MenuBar();
menuBar.getMenus().addAll(controlMenu, colorMenu, toolMenu);
Or we could list the menus in the menu bar constructor:
MenuBar menuBar = new MenuBar(controlMenu, colorMenu, toolMenu);
The final step in using menus is to add the menu bar to the program’s scene graph. The
menu bar could actually appear anywhere, but typically, it should be at the top of the window.
A program that has a menu bar will usually use a BorderPane as the root of its scene graph,
and it will add the menu bar as the top component in that root pane. The rest of the GUI for
the program can be placed in the other four positions of the border pane.
So using menus generally follows the same pattern: Create a menu bar. Create menus and
add them to the menu bar. Create menu items and add them to the menus (and set up listening
to handle action events from the menu items). Place the menu bar at the top of a BorderPane,
which is the root of the scene graph.
∗ ∗ ∗
There are other kinds of menu items, defined by subclasses of MenuItem, that can be added
to menus. A very simple example is SeparatorMenuItem, which appears in a menu as a line
between other menu items. You can see an example in the “Control” menu of MosaicDraw. To
add a separator to a Menu, menu, you just need to say
menu.getItems().add( new SeparatorMenuItem() );
Much more interesting are the subclasses CheckMenuItem and RadioMenuItem.
A CheckMenuItem represents a menu item that can be in one of two states, selected
or not selected. The state is changed when the user selects the item from the menu that
contains it. A CheckMenuItem has the same functionality and is used in the same way as a
CheckBox (see Subsection 6.4.3). Three CheckMenuItems are used in the “Control” menu of
the MosaicDraw program. One is used to turn the random color variation of the squares on
and off. Another turns a symmetry feature on and off; when symmetry is turned on, the user’s
drawing is reflected horizontally and vertically to produce a symmetric pattern. And the third
CheckMenuItem shows and hides “grouting” in the mosaic (grouting consists of gray lines drawn
around each of the little squares in the mosaic). The CheckMenuItem that corresponds to the
“Use Randomness” option in the “Control” menu could be set up with the statements:
useRandomness = new CheckMenuItem("Use Randomness");
useRandomness.setSelected(true); // Randomness is initially turned on.
controlMenu.getMenus().add(useRandomness); // Add menu item to the menu.
No ActionEvent handler is added to useRandomness; the program simply checks its state by
calling useRandomness.isSelected() whenever it is coloring a square, to decide whether
to add some random variation to the color. On the other hand, when the user selects the
“Use Grouting” check box from the menu, the canvas must immediately be redrawn to reflect
the new state. A handler is added to the CheckMenuItem to take care of that by calling an
appropriate method:
useGrouting.setOnAction( e -> doUseGrouting(useGrouting.isSelected()) );

∗ ∗ ∗
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 331

The “Color” and “Tools” menus contain items of type RadioMenuItem, which are used in the
same way as the RadioButtons that were discussed in Subsection 6.4.3: A RadioMenuItem, like
a check box, can be either selected or unselected, but when several RadioMenuItems are added
to a ToggleGroup, then at most one of the group members can be selected. In the program,
the user selects the tool that they want to use from the “Tools” menu. Only one tool can be
selected at a time, so it makes sense to use RadioMenuItems to represent the available tools,
and to put all of those items into the same ToggleGroup. The currently selected option in
the “Tools” menu will be marked as selected; when the user chooses a new tool, the mark is
moved. This gives the user some visible feedback about which tool is currently selected for use.
Furthermore, the ToggleGroup has an observable property representing the currently selected
option (see Subsection 6.3.7). The program adds a listener to that property with an event
handler that will be called whenever the user selects a new tool. Here is the code that creates
the “Tools” menu:
Menu toolMenu = new Menu("Tools");
ToggleGroup toolGroup = new ToggleGroup();
toolGroup.selectedToggleProperty().addListener(
e -> doToolChoice(toolGroup.getSelectedToggle()) );
addRadioMenuItem(toolMenu,"Draw",toolGroup, true);
addRadioMenuItem(toolMenu,"Erase",toolGroup, false);
addRadioMenuItem(toolMenu,"Draw 3x3",toolGroup, false);
addRadioMenuItem(toolMenu,"Erase 3x3",toolGroup, false);
The addRadioMenuItem method that is used in this code is a utility method that is defined
elsewhere in the program:
/**
* Utility method to create a radio menu item, add it
* to a ToggleGroup, and add it to a menu.
*/
private void addRadioMenuItem(Menu menu, String command,
ToggleGroup group, boolean selected) {
RadioMenuItem menuItem = new RadioMenuItem(command);
menuItem.setToggleGroup(group);
menu.getItems().add(menuItem);
if (selected) {
menuItem.setSelected(true);
}
}
The complete code for creating the menu bar in MosaicDraw can be found in a method
createMenuBar(). Again, I encourage you to study the source code.

6.6.3 Scene and Stage

Before ending this brief introduction to GUI programming, we look at two fundamental
classes in a little more detail: Scene, from package javafx.scene, and Stage, from package
javafx.stage.
A Scene represents the content area of a window (that is, not including the window’s border
and title bar), and it serves as a holder for the root of the scene graph. The Scene class has
several constructors, but they all require the root of the scene graph as one of the parameters,
and the root cannot be null. Perhaps the most common constructor is the one that has only
the root as parameter: new Scene(root).
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 332

A scene has a width and a height, which can be specified as parameters to the constructor:
new Scene(root,width,height). In the typical case where the root is a Pane, the size of the
pane will be set to match the size of the scene, and the pane will lay out its contents based on
that size. If the size of the scene is not specified in the constructor, then the size of the scene
will be set to the preferred size of the pane. It is not possible for a program to set the width
or height of a Scene after it has been created, but if the size of the stage that contains a scene
is changed, then the size of the scene is automatically changed to match the new size of the
stage’s content area, and the root node of the scene (if it is a Pane) will be resized as well.
A Scene can have a background fill color (actually a Paint), which can be specified in the
constructor. Generally, the scene’s background is not seen, since it is covered by the background
of the root node. The default style sets the background of the root to be light gray. However,
you can set the background color of the root to be transparent if you want to see the scene
background instead.
∗ ∗ ∗
A Stage, from package javafx.stage, represents a window on the computer’s screen. Any
JavaFX Application has at least one stage, called the primary stage, which is created by the
system and passed as a parameter to the application’s start() method. Although we have not
seen any examples so far in this textbook, many programs use more than one window. It is
possible for a program to create new Stage objects; we will see how to do that in Chapter 13.
A stage contains a scene, which fills its content area. The scene is installed in the stage by
calling the instance method stage.setScene(scene). It is possible to show a stage that does
not contain a scene, but its content area will just be a blank rectangle.
In addition to a content area, a stage has a title bar above the content. The title bar
contains a title for the window and some “decorations”—little controls that the user can click
to do things like close and maximize the window. The title bar is provided by the operating
system, not by Java, and its style is set by the operating system. The instance method
stage.setTitle(string) sets the text that is shown in the title bar. The title can be changed
at any time.
By default a stage is resizable. That is, the size of the window can be changed by the user,
by dragging its borders or corners. To prevent the user from changing the window size, you can
call stage.setResizable(false). However, a program can change the size of a stage with the
instance methods stage.setWidth(w) and stage.setHeight(h), and this can be done even if
the stage has been made non-resizable. Usually, the initial size of a stage is determined by the
size of the scene that it contains, but it is also possible to set the initial size before showing the
window using setWidth() and setHeight().
By default, when a stage is resizable, the user can make the window arbitrarily small
and arbitrarily large. It is possible to put limits on the resizability of a window with the
instance methods stage.setMinWidth(w), stage.setMaxWidth(w), stage.setMinHeight(h),
and stage.setMaxHeight(h). The size limits apply only to what the user can do by dragging
the borders or corners of the window.
It is also possible to change the position of a stage on the screen, using the instance methods
stage.setX(x) and stage.setY(y). The x and y coordinates specify the position of the top
left corner of the window, in the coordinate system of the screen. Typically, you would do this
before showing the stage.
Finally, for now, remember that a stage is not visible on the screen until you show it by
calling the instance method stage.show(). Showing the primary stage is typically the last
thing that you do in a application’s start() method.
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 333

6.6.4 Creating Jar Files

Java classes and resource files are often distributed in jar (“java archive”) files. For a program
that consists of multiple files, it can make sense to pack them into a single jar file. As the last
topic for this chapter, we look at how to do that. The program can be run directly from the jar
file, without unpacking it. However, for JavaFX programs, the user will still need access to the
JavaFX SDK. A jar file can be “executable,” meaning that it specifies the class that contains
the main() routine that will be run when the jar file is executed. If you have an executable jar
file that does not require JavaFX or other external resources, you can run it on the command
line using a command of the form:
java -jar JarFileName.jar
and you might even be able to run the jar file by double-clicking its icon in a file browser
window. If an executable jar file requires JavaFX, you will need to add the same options to the
java command that were discussed in Subsection 2.6.7. For example,
java -p /opt/jfx17/lib --add-modules=ALL-MODULE-PATH JarFileName.jar
The question, then, is how to create a jar file. The answer depends on what programming
environment you are using. The two basic types of programming environment—command line
and IDE—were discussed in Section 2.6. Any IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for
Java should have a command for creating jar files. In the Eclipse IDE, for example, it can be
done as follows: In the Package Explorer pane, select the programming project (or just all the
individual source and resource files that you want to include). Right-click on the selection, and
choose “Export” from the menu that pops up. In the window that appears, select “JAR file”
and click “Next”. In the window that appears next, enter a full path name for the jar file in
the box labeled “JAR file”. (Click the “Browse” button next to this box to select the file name
using a file dialog box.) The name of the file should end with “.jar”. If you are creating a
regular jar file, not an executable one, you can hit “Finish” at this point, and the jar file will be
created. To create an executable file, hit the “Next” button twice to get to the “Jar Manifest
Specification” screen. At the bottom of this screen is an input box labeled “Main class”. You
have to enter the name of the class that contains the main() routine that will be run when
the jar file is executed. If you hit the “Browse” button next to the “Main class” box, you can
select the class from a list of classes that contain main() routines. Once you’ve selected the
main class, you can click the “Finish” button to create the executable jar file.
It is also possible to create jar files on the command line. The Java Development Kit includes
a command-line program named jar that can be used to create jar files. If all your classes are
in the default package (like most of the examples in this book), then the jar command is easy
to use. To create a non-executable jar file on the command line, change to the directory that
contains the class files that you want to include in the jar. Then give the command
jar -c -f JarFileName.jar *.class
where JarFileName can be any name that you want to use for the jar file. The -c option is
used to create a jar file. The -f is followed by the name of the jar file that is to be created.
The “*” in “*.class” is a wildcard that makes *.class match every class file in the current
directory. This means that all the class files in the directory will be included in the jar file.
If you want to include only certain class files, you can name them individually, separated by
spaces. You can also list the class file names separately. If the program uses resource files,
such as images, they should also be listed in the command. (Things get more complicated if
your classes and resources are not in the default package. In that case, the files must be in
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 334

subdirectories of the directory in which you issue the jar command, and you have to include
the path to the file in the name. For example: textio/TextIO.class on MacOS and Linux,
or textio\TextIO.class on Windows.)
Making an executable jar file on the command line is only a little more complicated. There
has to be some way of specifying which class contains the main() routine. This can be done
by adding the -e option to the command, with a value giving the full name of the class that is
to be executed when the jar file is run. For example, if the name of the class is MyMainClass,
then the jar file could be created with:
jar -c -f JarFileName.jar -e MyMainClass *.class
For a program defined in two packages, grapher.ui and grapher.util, with a main class
defined in the file Main.java in package grapher.ui, the command would become
jar -c -f Grapher.jar -e grapher.ui.Main grapher/ui/*.class grapher/util/*.class
except that on Windows, the slashes would be replaced by backslashes.
(The options -c, -f, and -e are abbreviations for the longer forms --create, --file, and
--main-class, and you can use the longer forms, if you prefer clarity to brevity.)

6.6.5 jpackage
You can collect the class files and resource files for a program into a jar file, and you can give
that jar file to someone who would like to use your program. However, that person will still
need to have Java installed on their computer—something that is really not very likely these
days, unless that person is a Java developer. A possible solution is to bundle a Java virtual
machine along with your program. The Java Development Kit includes the jpackage command
to make that possible.
The jpackage command can create an installer that will install your program along with as
much Java support as is needed to run it. It has some significant limitations. It can only make
an installer for the type of computer and operating system that you are using; for example, it
is not possible to use jpackage on Linux to make an installer for Windows. And the files that
it makes are very large, since they have to include large parts of a Java execution environment.
So jpackage is really meant for packaging large, serious applications. But if you want to try it,
here is a basic example, using only a few of the options that are available for jpackage. For the
example, I made an installer for the network poker game from Subsection 12.5.4. This might
also help you understand how to work with packages in general.
To apply jpackage to a program that uses JavaFX, you have to make Java packages
available to the jpackage command. For this purpose, you can’t use the JavaFX SDK.
Instead, you need the JavaFX “jmods”. See Subsection 2.6.7 for a discussion of the JavaFX
SDK. For jpackage, you will need to download the jmods for your operating system from
https://gluonhq.com/products/javafx/. For my computer, I extracted the downloaded file into
/opt/javafx-jmods-17.0.2. (The jmods are required because they include specific operating
system support that is not in the SDK jar files.)
To use jpackage, you need a jar file that contains the classes and resource files for
your program. The poker game uses classes from the packages netgame.common and
netgame.fivecarddraw, plus a resource image file cards.png in netgame.fivecarddraw. To
make the jar file, I first compiled the Java files for the program. Since the poker game uses
JavaFX, I included the necessary options in the javac command. I used the following command
in the directory that contained the netgame directory, typed all on one line:
CHAPTER 6. INTRODUCTION TO GUI PROGRAMMING 335

javac --module-path /opt/jfx17/lib --add-modules=ALL-MODULE-PATH

netgame/common/*.java netgame/fivecarddraw/*.java
I then created a jar file, Poker.jar, with this command, typed all on one line:
jar -c -f Poker.jar netgame/common/*.class netgame/fivecarddraw/*.class
netgame/fivecarddraw/cards.png
It is important to include the image resource file along with the class files. (Note that on
Windows, the slashes, “/”, would be replaced by backslashes, “\”.)
I moved Poker.jar to a new directory. Working in that new directory, I used the following
very long jpackage command, again typed all on one line:
jpackage --input . --main-jar Poker.jar
--main-class netgame.fivecarddraw.Main --name NetPoker
--module-path /opt/javafx-jmods-17.0.2
--add-modules javafx.base,javafx.controls,javafx.graphics
The value for the --input option is a period, which represents the current working directory;
it could be replaced by a path to the directory that contains Poker.jar. The value for the
--main-class option is the full name of the class that contains the main program; this option
is not needed if the jar file is executable. The value of the --name option is used to name
the installer and to name the executable file that it will install. The --module-path refers to
the directory that contains the JavaFX jmods. And the added modules are just those JavaFX
modules that are needed for this program.
When used on my computer, running Linux Mint, this produced a file named
netpoker 1.0-1 amd64.deb that I could then install in the usual way. It installed the poker
executable as /opt/netpoker/bin/NetPoker.
On MacOS 10.15, using the JDK from adoptium.net (see Subsection 2.6.1), I found that
jpackage was installed as part of the JDK, but it was not made available on the command-line.
I was able to define it myself as an alias:
alias jpackage=
"/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/temurin-17.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/jpackage"
Again, type this all on one line. With that done, I used the same commands as given above,
with appropriate directory names for the JavaFX SDK and jmods. The result was a .dmg
file containing a program, netpoker.app, that could be run by double-clicking. (The jpackage
command might be properly set up in newer versions of MacOS.)
The jpackage command should also work on Windows, but it requires something called the
“WiX toolset” in addition to the JDK. I have not tried it.
Exercises 336

Exercises for Chapter 6

1. In Subsection 6.3.2, the following code was given as an example. It installs a MousePressed (solution)
event handler on a canvas. The handler lets the user draw a red rectangle at the point
where the user clicks the mouse, or, by holding the shift key down, a blue oval:
canvas.setOnMousePressed( evt -> {
GraphicsContext g = canvas.getGraphicsContext2D();
if ( evt.isShiftDown() ) {
g.setFill( Color.BLUE );
g.fillOval( evt.getX() - 30, evt.getY() - 15, 60, 30 )
}
else {
g.setFill( Color.RED );
g.fillRect( evt.getX() - 30, evt.getY() - 15, 60, 30 );
}
} );
Write a complete program that does the same, but in addition, the program will continue
to draw figures if the user drags the mouse. That is, the mouse will leave a trail of figures
as the user drags. However, if the user right-clicks the canvas, then the canvas should
simply be cleared and no figures should be drawn even if the user drags the mouse after
right-clicking. See the discussion of dragging in Subsection 6.3.3. Here is a picture of my
solution:

Note that a black border has been added around each shape to make them more distinct.
To make the problem a little more challenging, when drawing shapes during a drag
operation, make sure that the shapes that are drawn are at least, say, 5 pixels apart.
To implement this, you have to keep track of the position where the previous shape was
drawn.

2. Write a program that shows a small red square and a small blue square. The user should be (solution)
able to drag either square with the mouse. (You’ll need an instance variable to remember
which square the user is dragging.) The user can drag the square out of the window if she
wants, and it will disappear. To allow the user to get the squares back into the window,
add a KeyPressed event handler that will restore the squares to their original positions
when the user presses the Escape key. The key code for the Escape key is KeyCode.ESCAPE.
Exercises 337

3. Write a program that shows a pair of dice. The dice are drawn on a Canvas. You (solution)
can assume that the size of the canvas is 100 by 100 pixels. When the user clicks
on the canvas, the dice should be rolled (that is, the dice should be assigned newly
computed random values). Each die should be drawn as a square showing from 1 to
6 dots. Since you have to draw two dice, its a good idea to write a subroutine, such as
“void drawDie(GraphicsContext g, int val, int x, int y)”, to draw a die at the
specified (x,y) coordinates. The second parameter, val, specifies the number of dots that
are showing on the die. Here is a picture of a canvas displaying two the dice:

4. In Exercise 6.3, you wrote a graphical pair-of-dice program where the dice are rolled when (solution)
the user clicks on the canvas. Now make a pair-of-dice program where the user rolls the
dice by clicking a button. The button should appear under the canvas that shows the
dice. Also make the following change: When the dice are rolled, instead of just showing
the new value, show a short animation during which the values on the dice are changed in
every frame. The animation is supposed to make the dice look more like they are actually
rolling.

5. In Exercise 3.8, you drew a checkerboard. For this exercise, write a program where the user (solution)
can select a square by clicking on it. Highlight the selected square by drawing a colored
border around it. When the program starts, no square is selected. When the user clicks
on a square that is not currently selected, it becomes selected, and the previously selected
square, if any, is unselected. If the user clicks the square that is selected, it becomes
unselected. Assume that the size of the checkerboard is exactly 400 by 400 pixels, so that
each square on the checkerboard is 50 by 50 pixels. Here is my checkerboard, with the
square in row 3, column 3 selected, shown at reduced size:

6. For this exercise, you should modify the SubKiller game from Subsection 6.3.6. You can (solution)
start with the existing source code, from the file SubKiller.java. Modify the game so it
keeps track of the number of hits and misses and displays these quantities. That is, every
time the depth charge blows up the sub, the number of hits goes up by one. Every time
Exercises 338

the depth charge falls off the bottom of the screen without hitting the sub, the number of
misses goes up by one. There is room at the top of the canvas to display these numbers.
To do this exercise, you only have to add a half-dozen lines to the source code. But you
have to figure out what they are and where to add them. To do this, you’ll have to read
the source code closely enough to understand how it works.

7. Exercise 5.2 involved a class, StatCalc.java, that could compute some statistics of a set (solution)
of numbers. Write a GUI program that uses the StatCalc class to compute and display
statistics of numbers entered by the user. The program will have an instance variable of
type StatCalc that does the computations. The program should include a TextField where
the user enters a number. It should have four labels that display four statistics for the
numbers that have been entered: the number of numbers, the sum, the mean, and the
standard deviation. Every time the user enters a new number, the statistics displayed
on the labels should change. The user enters a number by typing it into the TextField
and then either clicking an “Enter” button or pressing the Return (or Enter) key. There
should be a “Clear” button that clears out all the data. This means creating a new
StatCalc object and changing the text that is displayed on the labels. (See the discussion
of “default buttons” at the end of Subsection 6.4.2 for one way of implementing a response
the Return key.) Here is a picture of my solution to this problem:

Getting the interface to look just like I wanted it was the hardest part. In the end, I used
TilePanes (Subsection 6.5.4) for the layout.

8. Write a program that has a TextArea where the user can enter some text. The program (solution)
should have a button such that when the user clicks on the button, the program will count
the number of lines in the user’s input, the number of words in the user’s input, and
the number of characters in the user’s input. This information should be displayed on
three Labels. Recall that if textInput is a TextArea, then you can get the contents of the
TextArea by calling the function textInput.getText(). This function returns a String
containing all the text from the text area. The number of characters is just the length
of this String. Lines in the String are separated by the new line character, ’\n’, so the
number of lines is just the number of new line characters in the String, plus one. Words
are a little harder to count. Exercise 3.4 has some advice about finding the words in a
String. Essentially, you want to count the number of characters that are first characters
in words. Here is a picture of my solution:
Exercises 339

9. A polygon is a geometric figure made up of a sequence of connected line segments. (solution)

The points where the line segments meet are called the vertices of the polygon.
Subsection 6.2.4 has a list of shape-drawing methods in a GraphicsContext. Among them
are methods for stroking and for filling polygons: g.strokePolygon(xcoords,ycoords,n)
and g.fillPolygon(xcoords,ycoords,n), For these commands, the coordinates of the
vertices of the polygon are stored in arrays xcoords and ycoords of type double[ ], and
the number of vertices of the polygon is given by the third parameter, n. Note that it
is OK for the sides of a polygon to cross each other, but the interior of a polygon with
self-intersections might not be exactly what you expect.
Write a program that lets the user draw polygons. As the user clicks a sequence of
points in a Canvas, count the points and store their x- and y-coordinates in two arrays.
These points will be the vertices of the polygon. As the user is creating the polygon,
you should just connect all the points with line segments. When the user clicks near the
starting point, draw the complete polygon. Draw it with a red interior and a black border.
Once the user has completed a polygon, the next click should clear the data and start a
new polygon from scratch.
Here is a picture of my solution after the user has drawn a fairly complex polygon:
Exercises 340

10. Write a GUI Blackjack program that lets the user play a game of Blackjack, with the (solution)
computer as the dealer. The program should draw the user’s cards and the dealer’s cards,
just as was done for the graphical HighLow card game in Subsection 6.6.1. You can use
the source code for that game, HighLowGUI.java, for some ideas about how to write your
Blackjack game. The structures of the HighLow program and the Blackjack program are
very similar. You will certainly want to use the drawCard() method from the HighLow
program.
You can find a description of the game of Blackjack in Exercise 5.5. Add the following
rule to that description: If a player takes five cards without going over 21, that player
wins immediately. This rule is used in some casinos. For your program, it means that you
only have to allow room for five cards. You should make the canvas just wide enough to
show five cards, and tall enough to show both the user’s hand and the dealer’s hand.
Note that the design of a GUI Blackjack game is very different from the design of the
text-oriented program that you wrote for Exercise 5.5. The user should play the game by
clicking on “Hit” and “Stand” buttons. There should be a “New Game” button that can
be used to start another game after one game ends. You have to decide what happens
when each of these buttons is pressed. You don’t have much chance of getting this right
unless you think in terms of the states that the game can be in and how the state can
change.
Your program will need the classes defined in Card.java, Hand.java, Deck.java, and
BlackjackHand.java. It will also need the images file cards.png, which contains pictures
of the cards.
The next exercise has a picture of a Blackjack game that you can use a guide, except
that the version for this exercise does not allow betting. (Some aesthetic changes to the
GUI were made in that Blackjack program, compared to the HighLow program.)

11. In the Blackjack game from Exercise 6.10, the user can click on the “Hit”, “Stand”, and (solution)
“NewGame” buttons even when it doesn’t make sense to do so. It would be better if
the buttons were disabled at the appropriate times. The “New Game” button should be
disabled when there is a game in progress. The “Hit” and “Stand” buttons should be
disabled when there is not a game in progress. The instance variable gameInProgress
tells whether or not a game is in progress, so you just have to make sure that the
buttons are properly enabled and disabled whenever this variable changes value. I
strongly advise writing a method that can be called every time it is necessary to set
the value of the gameInProgress variable. That method can take full responsibility for
enabling and disabling the buttons (as long as it is used consistently). Recall that if
bttn is a variable of type Button, then bttn.setDisable(true) disables the button and
bttn.setDisable(false) enables the button.
As a second (and more difficult) improvement, make it possible for the user to place bets
on the Blackjack game. When the program starts, give the user $100. Add a TextField
to the strip of controls along the bottom of the panel. The user enters the bet in this
TextField. When the game begins, check the amount of the bet. You should do this when
the game begins, not when it ends, because several errors can occur: The contents of the
TextField might not be a legal number, the bet that the user places might be more money
than the user has, or the bet might be <= 0. You should detect these errors and show an
error message instead of starting the game. The user’s bet should be an integral number
of dollars.
Exercises 341

It would be a good idea to make the TextField uneditable while the game is in progress.
If betInput is the TextField, you can make it editable and uneditable by the user with the
commands betInput.setEditable(true) and betInput.setEditable(false).
In the drawBoard() method, you should include commands to display the amount of
money that the user has left.
There is one other thing to think about: Ideally, the program should not start a new
game when it is first created. The user should have a chance to set a bet amount before
the game starts. So, in the start() method, you should not call doNewGame(). You might
want to display a message such as “Welcome to Blackjack” before the first game starts.
Here is a picture of my program:
Quiz 342

Quiz on Chapter 6
(answers)

1. Programs written for a graphical user interface have to deal with “events.” Explain what
is meant by the term event. Give at least two different examples of events, and discuss
how a program might respond to those events.

2. A central concept in JavaFX is the scene graph? What is a scene graph?

3. JavaFX has standard classes called Canvas and GraphicsContext. Explain the purpose of
these classes.

4. Suppose that canvas is a variable of type Canvas. Write a code segment that will draw a
green square centered inside a red circle on the canvas, as illustrated.

5. Draw the picture that will be produced by the following for loop, where g is a variable
of type GraphicsContext:
for (int i=10; i <= 210; i = i + 50) {
for (int j = 10; j <= 210; j = j + 50) {
g.strokeLine(i,10,j,60);
}
}

6. JavaFX has a standard class called MouseEvent. What is the purpose of this class? What
does an object of type MouseEvent do?

7. Explain the difference between a KeyPressed event and a KeyTyped event.

8. Explain how AnimationTimers are used to do animation.

9. What is a CheckBox and how is it used? How does it differ from a RadioButton?

10. What is meant by layout of GUI components? Explain briefly how layout is done in
JavaFX.

11. How does a BorderPane arrange the components that it contains?

12. How is the preferred size of a component set, and how is it used?
Chapter 7

Arrays, ArrayLists, and Records

Computers get a lot of their power from working with data structures. A data
structure is an organized collection of related data. An object is a data structure, combined
usually with some methods, but this type of data structure—consisting of a fairly small
number of named instance variables—is just the beginning. In many cases, programmers
build complicated data structures by hand, by linking objects together. We’ll look at these
custom-built data structures in Chapter 9. This chapter looks at more basic data structures.
There is one type of data structure that is so important and so basic that it is built into every
programming language: the array.
You have already encountered arrays in Section 3.8 and Subsection 5.1.4. We continue the
study of arrays in this chapter, including some new details of their use and some additional
array-processing techniques. In particular, we will look at the important topic of algorithms
for searching and sorting an array in Section 7.5.
An array has a fixed size that can’t be changed after the array is created. But in many
cases, it is useful to have a data structure that can grow and shrink as necessary. In Section 7.3,
we will look at a standard class, ArrayList, that represents such a data structure.
An array is a numbered sequence of items, all of the same type. A record is another kind of
standard data structure. Like an array, a record consists of a sequence of items, but in a record,
the items are referred to by name instead of by number, and the items can be of different types.
Any object in Java can be thought of as a record in this sense, but Java 17 introduced records
explicitly into the language as a special kind of class with certain restrictions. We will look at
record classes in Section 7.4.

7.1 Array Details

Array basics have been discussed in previous chapters, but there are still details of Java
syntax to be filled in, and there is a lot more to say about using arrays. This section looks at
some of the syntactic details, with more information about array processing to come in the rest
of the chapter.
To briefly review some of the basics. . . . An array is a numbered sequence of elements, and
each element acts like a separate variable. All of the elements are of the same type, which is
called the base type of the array. The array as a whole also has a type. If the base type is btype,
then the array is of type btype[ ]. Each element in the array has an index, which is just its
numerical position in the sequence of elements with numbering starting from zero. If the array
is A, then element number i of the array is A[i]. The number of elements in an array is called

343
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 344

its length. The length of an array A is A.length. The length of an array can’t be changed after
the array is created. The elements of the array A are A[0], A[1], . . . , A[A.length-1]. An
attempt to refer to an array element with an index outside the range from zero to A.length-1
causes an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException.
Arrays in Java are objects, so an array variable can only refer to an array; it does not
contain the array. The value of an array variable can also be null. In that case, it does
not refer to any array, and an attempt to refer to an array element such as A[i] will cause a
NullPointerException. Arrays are created using a special form of the new operator. For example,
int[] A = new int[10];
creates a new array with base type int and length 10, and it sets the variable A to refer to the
newly created array.

7.1.1 For-each Loops

Arrays are often processed using for loops. A for loop makes it easy to process each element
in an array from beginning to end. For example, if namelist is an array of Strings, then all the
values in the list can be printed using
for (int i = 0; i < namelist.length; i++) {
System.out.println( namelist[i] );
}
This type of processing is so common that there is an alternative form of the for loop that
makes it easier to write. The alternative is called a for-each loop. It is probably easiest to
start with an example. Here is a for-each loop for printing all the values in an array of Strings:
for ( String name : namelist ) {
System.out.println( name );
}
The meaning of “for (String name : namelist)” is “for each String, name, in the array,
namelist, do the following”. The effect is that the variable name takes on each of the values
in namelist in turn, and the body of the loop is executed for each of those values. Note that
there is no array index in the loop. The loop control variable, name, represents one of the values
in the array, not the index of one of the values.
The for-each loop is meant specifically for processing all the values in a data structure,
and we will see in Section 7.3 and Chapter 10 that it applies to other data structures besides
arrays. The for-each loop makes it possible to process the values in a data structure without
even knowing the details of how the data is structured. In the case of arrays, it lets you avoid
the complications of using array indices.
A for-each loop will perform the same operation for each value that is stored in an array. If
itemArray is an array of type BaseType[ ], then a for-each loop for itemArray has the form:
for ( BaseType item : itemArray ) {
.
. // process the item
.
}
As usual, the braces are optional if there is only one statement inside the loop. In this loop,
item is the loop control variable. It is declared as a variable of type BaseType, where BaseType
is the base type of the array. (In a for-each loop, the loop control variable must be declared
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 345

in the loop; it cannot be a variable that already exists outside the loop.) When this loop is
executed, each value from the array is assigned to item in turn and the body of the loop is
executed for each value. Thus, the above loop is exactly equivalent to:
for ( int index = 0; index < itemArray.length; index++ ) {
BaseType item;
item = itemArray[index]; // Get one of the values from the array
.
. // process the item
.
}
For example, if A is an array of type int[ ], then we could print all the values from A with
the for-each loop:
for ( int item : A )
System.out.println( item );
and we could add up all the positive integers in A with:
int sum = 0; // This will be the sum of all the positive numbers in A.
for ( int item : A ) {
if (item > 0)
sum = sum + item;
}
I also note that the use of var for declaring local variables, which was introduced in
Subsection 4.8.2, applies to the loop control variable in a for-each loop. So, instead of
“for (BaseType item : itemArray)”, we could write “for (var item : itemArray)”. The
type of the variable is deduced from the base type of the array. This syntax becomes more useful
when dealing with more complicated types.
The for-each loop is not always appropriate. For example, there is no simple way to use
it to process the items in just a part of an array, or to process the elements in reverse order.
However, it does make the code a little simpler when you do want to process all the values, in
order. since it eliminates any need to use array indices.
But it’s important to note that a for-each loop processes the values in the array, not the
elements (where an element means the actual memory location that is part of the array and
that holds the value). For example, consider the following incorrect attempt to fill an array of
integers with 17’s:
int[] intList = new int[10];
for ( int item : intList ) { // INCORRECT! DOES NOT MODIFY THE ARRAY!
item = 17;
}
The assignment statement item = 17 assigns the value 17 to the loop control variable, item.
However, this has nothing to do with the array. When the body of the loop is executed, the
value from one of the elements of the array is copied into item. The statement item = 17
replaces that copied value but has no effect on the array element from which it was copied; the
value in the array is not changed. The loop is equivalent to
int[] intList = new int[10];
for ( int i = 0; i < intList.length; i++ ) {
int item = intList[i];
item = 17;
}
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 346

which certainly does not change the value of any element in the array.

7.1.2 Variable Arity Methods

Before Java 5, every method in Java had a fixed arity. (The arity of a method is defined as
the number of parameters in a call to the method.) In a fixed arity method, the number of
parameters must be the same in every call to the method and must be the same as the number of
formal parameters in the method’s definition. Java 5 introduced variable arity methods. In
a variable arity method, different calls to the method can have different numbers of parameters.
For example, the formatted output method System.out.printf, which was introduced in
Subsection 2.4.1, is a variable arity method. The first parameter of System.out.printf must
be a String, but it can have any number of additional parameters, of any types.
Calling a variable arity method is no different from calling any other sort of method, but
writing one requires some new syntax. As an example, consider a method that can compute
the average of any number of values of type double. The definition of such a method could
begin with:
public static double average( double... numbers ) {
Here, the ... after the type name, double, is what makes this a variable arity method. It
indicates that any number of values of type double can be provided when the subroutine is
called, so that for example average(1,4,9,16), average(3.14,2.17), average(0.375), and
even average() are all legal calls to this method. Note that actual parameters of type int can
be passed to average. The integers will, as usual, be automatically converted to real numbers.
When the method is called, the values of all the actual parameters that correspond to the
variable arity parameter are placed into an array, and it is this array that is actually passed to
the method. That is, in the body of a method, a variable arity parameter of type T actually
looks like an ordinary parameter of type T[ ]. The length of the array tells you how many
actual parameters were provided in the method call. In the average example, the body of the
method would see an array named numbers of type double[ ]. The number of actual parameters
in the method call would be numbers.length, and the values of the actual parameters would
be numbers[0], numbers[1], and so on. A complete definition of the method would be:
public static double average( double... numbers ) {
// Inside this method, numbers is of type double[].
double sum; // The sum of all the actual parameters.
double average; // The average of all the actual parameters.
sum = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < numbers.length; i++) {
sum = sum + numbers[i]; // Add one of the actual parameters to the sum.
}
average = sum / numbers.length;
return average; // (Will be Double.NaN if numbers.length is zero.)
}
By the way, it is possible to pass a single array to a variable arity method, instead of a list
of individual values. For example, suppose that salesData is a variable of type double[ ]. Then
it would be legal to call average(salesData), and this would compute the average of all the
numbers in the array.
The formal parameter list in the definition of a variable-arity method can include more than
one parameter, but the ... can only be applied to the very last formal parameter.
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 347

As an example, consider a method that can draw a polygon through any number of points.
The points are given as values of type Point, where an object of type Point has two instance
variables, x and y, of type double. In this case, the method has one ordinary parameter—
the graphics context that will be used to draw the polygon—in addition to the variable arity
parameter. Remember that inside the definition of the method, the parameter points becomes
an array of Points:
public static void drawPolygon(GraphicsContext g, Point... points) {
if (points.length > 1) { // (Need at least 2 points to draw anything.)
for (int i = 0; i < points.length - 1; i++) {
// Draw a line from i-th point to (i+1)-th point
g.strokeLine( points[i].x, points[i].y, points[i+1].x, points[i+1].y );
}
// Now, draw a line back to the starting point.
g.strokeLine( points[points.length-1].x, points[points.length-1].y,
points[0].x, points[0].y );
}
}
When this method is called, the subroutine call statement must have one actual parameter of
type GraphicsContext, which can be followed by any number of actual parameters of type Point.
For a final example, let’s look at a method that strings together all of the values in a list of
strings into a single, long string. This example uses a for-each loop to process the array:
public static String concat( String... values ) {
StringBuilder buffer; // Use StringBuilder for more efficient concatenation.
buffer = new StringBuilder(); // Start with an empty StringBuilder.
for ( String str : values ) { // A "for each" loop for processing the values.
buffer.append(str); // Add string to the buffer.
}
return buffer.toString(); // return the contents of the buffer
}
Given this method definition, the method call concat("Hello", "World") would return the
string “HelloWorld”, and concat() would return an empty string. Since a variable arity method
can also accept an array as actual parameter, we could also call concat(lines) where lines
is of type String[ ]. This would concatenate all the elements of the array into a single string.

7.1.3 Array Literals

We have seen that it is possible to initialize an array variable with a list of values at the time
it is declared. For example,
int[] squares = { 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49 };
This initializes squares to refer to a newly created array that contains the seven values in the
list.
A list initializer of this form can be used only in a declaration statement, where it gives an
initial value to a newly declared array variable. It cannot be used in an assignment statement
to assign a value to a variable that already existed. However, there is another, similar notation
for creating a new array that can be used in other places. The notation uses another form of the
new operator to both create a new array object and fill it with values. (The rather odd syntax
is similar to the syntax for anonymous inner classes, which were discussed in Subsection 5.8.3.)
As an example, to assign a new value to an array variable, cubes, of type int[ ], you could use:
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 348

cubes = new int[] { 1, 8, 27, 64, 125, 216, 343 };

This is an assignment statement rather than a declaration, so the array initializer syntax,
without “new int[],” would not be legal here. The general syntax for this form of the new
operator is
new hbase-type i [ ] { hlist-of-values i }
This is actually an expression whose value is a reference to a newly created array object. In this
sense, it is an “array literal,” since it is something that you can type in a program to represent
a value. This means that it can be used in any context where an object of type hbase-typei[]
is legal. For example, you could pass the newly created array as an actual parameter to a
subroutine. Consider the following utility method for creating a menu from an array of strings.
(Menus were discussed in Subsection 6.6.2.)
/**
* Creates a Menu. The names for the MenuItems in the menu are
* given as an array of Strings.
* @param menuName the name for the Menu that is to be created.
* @param itemNames an array holding the text that appears in each
* MenuItem. If a null value appears in the array, the corresponding
* item in the menu will be a separator rather than a MenuItem.
* @return the menu that has been created and filled with items.
*/
public static Menu createMenu( String menuName, String[] itemNames ) {
Menu menu = new Menu(menuName);
for ( String itemName : itemNames ) {
if ( itemName == null ) {
menu.getItems().add( new SeparatorMenuItem() );
}
else {
MenuItem item = new MenuItem(itemName);
menu.getItems().add(item);
}
}
return menu;
}

The second parameter in a call to createMenu is an array of strings. The array that is passed
as an actual parameter could be created in place, using the new operator. For example, we can
use the following statement to create an entire File menu:
Menu fileMenu = createMenu( "File",
new String[] { "New", "Open", "Close", null, "Quit" } );
This should convince you that being able to create and use an array “in place” in this way can
be very convenient, in the same way that anonymous inner classes are convenient. (However,
this example could have been done even more conveniently if createMenu() had been written
as a variable arity method!)
By the way, it is perfectly legal to use the “new BaseType[] { ... }” syntax instead of
the array initializer syntax in the declaration of an array variable. For example, instead of
saying:
int[] primes = { 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19 };
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 349

you can say, equivalently,

int[] primes = new int[] { 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 17, 19 };
In fact, rather than use a special notation that works only in the context of declaration
statements, I sometimes prefer to use the second form.
∗ ∗ ∗
One final note: For historical reasons, an array declaration such as
int[] list;
can also be written as
int list[];
which is a syntax used in the languages C and C++. However, this alternative syntax does not
really make much sense in the context of Java, and it is probably best avoided. After all, the
intent is to declare a variable of a certain type, and the name of that type is “int[ ]”. It makes
sense to follow the “htype-namei hvariable-namei;” syntax for such declarations.

7.2 Array Processing

Most examples of array processing that we have looked at have actually been fairly
straightforward: processing the elements of the array in order from beginning to end, or random
access to an arbitrary element of the array. In this section and later in the chapter, you’ll see
some of the more interesting things that you can do with arrays.

7.2.1 Some Processing Examples

To begin, here’s an example to remind you to be careful about avoiding array indices outside the
legal range. Suppose that lines is an array of type String[], and we want to know whether
lines contains any duplicate elements in consecutive locations. That is, we want to know
whether lines[i].equals(lines[i+1]) for any index i. Here is a failed attempt to check
that condition:
boolean dupp = false; // Assume there are no duplicates
for ( int i = 0; i < list.length; i++ ) {
if ( lines[i].equals(lines[i+1]) ) { // THERE IS AN ERROR HERE!
dupp = true; // we have found a duplicate!
break;
}
}
This for loop looks like many others that we have written, so what’s the problem? The
error occurs when i takes on its final value in the loop, when i is equal to lines.length-1.
In that case, i+1 is equal to lines.length. But the last element in the array has index
lines.length-1, so lines.length is not a legal index. This means that the reference to
lines[i+1] causes an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException. This is easy to fix; we just need to
stop the loop before i+1 goes out of range:
boolean dupp = false; // Assume there are no duplicates
for ( int i = 0; i < list.length - 1 ; i++ ) {
if ( lines[i].equals(lines[i+1]) ) {
dupp = true; // we have found a duplicate!
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 350

break;
}
}
This type of error can be even more insidious when working with partially full arrays (see
Subsection 3.8.4), where usually only part of the array is in use, and a counter is used to keep
track of how many spaces in the array are used. With a partially full array, the problem is
not looking beyond the end of the array, but looking beyond the part of the array that is in
use. When your program tries to look beyond the end of an array, at least the program will
crash to let you know that there is a problem. With a partially full array, the problem can go
undetected.
∗ ∗ ∗
For the next example, let’s continue with partially full arrays. We have seen how to add
an item to a partially full array, but suppose that we also want to be able to remove items?
Suppose that you write a game program, and that players can join the game and leave the game
as it progresses. As a good object-oriented programmer, you probably have a class named Player
to represent the individual players in the game. A list of all players who are currently in the
game could be stored in an array, playerList, of type Player[ ]. Since the number of players can
change, you will follow the partially full array pattern, and you will need a variable, playerCt,
to record the number of players currently in the game. Assuming that there will never be more
than 10 players in the game, you could declare the variables as:
Player[] playerList = new Player[10]; // Up to 10 players.
int playerCt = 0; // At the start, there are no players.
After some players have joined the game, playerCt will be greater than 0, and
the player objects representing the players will be stored in the array elements
playerList[0], playerList[1], . . . , playerList[playerCt-1]. Note that the array ele-
ment playerList[playerCt] is not in use: Besides being the number of items in the array,
playerCt is also the index of the next open spot in the array. The procedure for adding a new
player, newPlayer, to the game is simple:
playerList[playerCt] = newPlayer; // Put new player in next
// available spot.
playerCt++; // And increment playerCt to count the new player.
But deleting a player from the game is a little harder, since you don’t want to leave a “hole”
in the array where the deleted player used to be. Suppose you want to delete the player at
index k in playerList. The number of players goes down by one, so one fewer space is used
in the array. If you are not worried about keeping the players in any particular order, then
one way to delete player number k is to move the player from the last occupied position in the
array into position k and then to decrement the value of playerCt:
playerList[k] = playerList[playerCt - 1];
playerCt--;
The player previously in position k has been replaced and is no longer in the array, so we have
deleted that player from the list. The player previously in position playerCt - 1 is now in
the array twice. But it’s only in the occupied or valid part of the array once, since playerCt
has decreased by one. Remember that every element of the array has to hold some value, but
only the values in positions 0 through playerCt - 1 will be looked at or processed in any way.
You can set playerList[playerCt] = null, which could free up the deleted Player object
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 351

for garbage collection, but that is not necessary to correctly delete the player from the list of
(active) players. (By the way, you should think about what happens if the player that is being
deleted is in the last position in the list. The code does still work in this case. What exactly
happens?)
Suppose that when deleting the player in position k, you’d like to keep the remaining players
in the same order. (Maybe because they take turns in the order in which they are stored in the
array.) To do this, all the players in positions k+1 and following must move up one position in
the array. Player k+1 replaces player k, who is out of the game. Player k+2 fills the spot left
open when player k+1 is moved. And so on. The code for this is
for (int i = k+1; i < playerCt; i++) {
playerList[i-1] = playerList[i];
}
playerCt--;
Here is an illustration of the two ways of deleting an item from a partially full array. Here,
player “C” is being deleted:

playerList playerList

playerCt 6 A playerCt 6 ë 
ë
B B
ê
C C D
ìí îïðïñï òóò ôõíö Aðñïõÿøñioïðùú øðð
ñ÷ï øõõøùú ûðøùïõóñ D ñ÷ï iñïöü ñ÷øñ D é
îõíûü ôõíö ý ñí þ é ôíððíw ó iÿ ñ÷ï é ê
øÿî ñ÷ï a öíoïü øõõøù søÿ öíoï
ê û íÿï üûøsï
ê
iÿñí ñ÷ï üûøsï
w÷ïõï ó üïî ñí eï
D õïûðøsïü ó
ì÷ï üûøsï ñ÷øñ .. E õïûðøsïü D ..
üïî ñí ÷íðî ñ÷ï a . a õïûðøsïü E. .
iü ÿí ðíÿïõ iÿ üï

∗ ∗ ∗
This leaves open the question of what happens when a partially full array becomes full, but
you still want to add more items to it? We can’t change the size of the array—but we can make
a new, bigger array and copy the data from the old array into the new array. But what does it
mean to copy an array in the first place?
Suppose that A and B are array variables, with the same base type, and that A already refers
to an array. Suppose that we want B to refer to a copy of A. The first thing to note is that the
assignment statement
B = A;
does not make a copy of A. Arrays are objects, and an array variable can only hold a pointer
to an array. The assignment statement copies the pointer from A into B, and the result is that
A and B now point to the same array. For example, A[0] and B[0] are just different names for
exactly the same array element. To make B refer to a copy of A, we need to make an entirely
new array and copy all the items from A into B. Let’s say that A and B are of type double[ ].
Then to make a copy of A, we can say
double[] B;
B = new double[A.length]; // Make a new array with the same length as A.
for ( int i = 0; i < A.length; i++ ) {
B[i] = A[i];
}
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 352

To solve the problem of adding to a partially full array that has become full, we just need
to make a new array that is bigger than the existing array. The usual choice is to make a
new array twice as big as the old. We need to meet one more requirement: At the end, the
variable that referred to the old array must now point to the new array. That variable is what
gives us access to the data, and in the end, the data is in the new array. Fortunately, a simple
assignment statement will make the variable point to the correct array. Let’s suppose that we
are using playerList and playerCt to store the players in a game, as in the example above,
and we want to add newPlayer to the game. Here is how we can do that even if the playerList
array is full:
if ( playerCt == playerList.length ) {
// The number of players is already equal to the size of the array.
// The array is full. Make a new array that has more space.
Player[] temp; // A variable to point to the new array.
temp = new Player[ 2*playerList.length ]; // Twice as big as the old array.
for ( int i = 0; i < playerList.length; i++ ) {
temp[i] = playerList[i]; // Copy item from old array into new array.
}
playerList = temp; // playerList now points to the new, bigger array.
}
// At this point, we know that there is room in the array for newPlayer.
playerList[playerCt] = newPlayer;
playerCt++;

After the new array has been created, there is no longer any variable that points to the old
array, so it will be garbage collected.

7.2.2 Some Standard Array Methods

Copying an array seems like such a common method that you might expect Java to have a built-
in method already defined to do it. In fact, Java comes with several standard array-processing
methods. The methods are defined as static methods in a class named Arrays, which is in the
package java.util. For example, for any array, list,
Arrays.copyOf( list, lengthOfCopy )
is a function that returns a new array whose length is given by lengthOfCopy, containing items
copied from list. If lengthOfCopy is greater than list.length, then extra spaces in the new
array will have their default value (zero for numeric arrays, null for object arrays, and so on).
If lengthOfCopy is less than or equal to list.length, then only as many items are copied
from list as will fit in the new array. So if A is any array, then
B = Arrays.copyOf( A, A.length );
sets B to refer to an exact copy of A, and
playerList = Arrays.copyOf( playerList, 2*playerList.length );
could be used to double the amount of space available in a partially full array with just one
line of code. We can also use Arrays.copyOf to decrease the size of a partially full array. We
might want to do that to avoid having a lot of excess, unused spaces. To implement this idea,
the code for deleting player number k from the list of players might become
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 353

playerList[k] = playerList[playerCt-1];
playerCt--;
if ( playerCt < playerList.length/4 ) {
// More than 3/4 of the spaces are empty. Cut the array size in half.
playerList = Arrays.copyOf( playerList, playerList.length/2 );
}
I should mention that class Arrays actually contains a bunch of copyOf methods, one for
each of the primitive types and one for objects. I should also note that when an array of objects
is copied, it is only pointers to objects that are copied into the new array. The contents of the
objects are not copied. This is the usual rule for assignment of pointers.
If what you want is a simple copy of an array, with the same size as the original, there is
an even easier way to do it. Every array has an instance method named clone() that makes
a copy of the array. To get a copy of an int array, A, for example, you can simply say
int[] B = A.clone();

∗ ∗ ∗
The Arrays class contains other useful methods. I’ll mention a few of them. As with
Arrays.copyOf, there are actually multiple versions of all of these methods, for different array
types.
• Arrays.fill( array, value ) — Fill an entire array with a specified value. The type
of value must be compatible with the base type of the array. For example, assuming
that numlist is an array of type double[ ], then Arrays.fill(numlist,17) will set every
element of numlist to have the value 17.
• Arrays.fill( array, fromIndex, toIndex, value ) — Fills part of the array with
value, starting at index number fromIndex and ending with index number toIndex-1.
Note that toIndex itself is not included.
• Arrays.toString( array ) — A function that returns a String containing all the values
from array, separated by commas and enclosed between square brackets. The values in
the array are converted into strings in the same way they would be if they were printed
out.
• Arrays.sort( array ) — Sorts the entire array. To sort an array means to rearrange
the values in the array so that they are in increasing order. This method works for arrays
of String and arrays of primitive type values (except for boolean, which would be kind of
silly). But it does not work for all arrays, since it must be meaningful to compare any two
values in the array, to see which is “smaller.” We will discuss array-sorting algorithms in
Section 7.5.
• Arrays.sort( array, fromIndex, toIndex ) — Sorts just the elements from
array[fromIndex] up to array[toIndex-1]
• Arrays.binarySearch( array, value ) — Searches for value in the array. The array
must already be sorted into increasing order. This is a function that returns an int. If
the value is found in the array, the return value is the index of an element that contains
that value. If the value does not occur in the array, the return value is -1. We will discuss
the binary search algorithm in Section 7.5.
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 354

7.2.3 RandomStrings Revisited

One of the examples in Subsection 6.2.4 was a GUI program, RandomStrings.java, that shows
multiple copies of a message in random positions, colors, and fonts. When the user clicks a
button, the positions, colors, and fonts are changed to new random values. But suppose that
we want the message strings to move. That is, we want to run an animation where the strings
drift around in the window. In that case, we need to store the properties of each string, since
they will be needed to redraw the strings in each frame of the animation. A new version of the
program that does that is RandomStringsWithArray.java.
There are 25 strings. We need to store the (x,y) coordinates where each string is drawn,
the color of each string, and the font that is used for each string. To make the strings move, I
also store a velocity for each string, represented as two numbers dx and dy. In each frame, the
dx for each string, multiplied by the elapsed time since the previous frame, is added to the x
coordinate of the string, similarly for dy. Now, the data for the string could be stored in six
arrays
double[] x = new double[25];
double[] y = new double[25];
double[] dx = new double[25];
double[] dy = new double[25];
Color[] color = new Color[25];
Font[] font = new Font[25];
These arrays would be filled with random values. In the method that draws the strings, the
i-th string would be drawn at the point (x[i],y[i]). Its color would be given by color[i].
And it would be drawn in the font font[i]. (The dx and dy would not be used for the drawing;
they are used when updating the data for the next frame.) This would be accomplished by
code such as:
g.setFill(Color.WHITE); // (Fill with white background.)
g.fillRect(0,0,canvas.getWidth(),canvas.getHeight());
for (int i = 0; i < 25; i++) {
g.setFill( color[i] );
g.setFont( font[i] );
g.fillText( MESSAGE, x[i], y[i] );
g.setStroke(Color.BLACK);
g.strokeText( MESSAGE, x[i], y[i] );
}
This approach is said to use parallel arrays. The data for a given copy of the message is
spread out across several arrays. If you think of the arrays as laid out in parallel columns—
array x in the first column, array y in the second, array color in the third, and array font
in the fourth—then the data for the i-th string can be found along the i-th row. There is
nothing wrong with using parallel arrays in this simple example, but it does go against the
object-oriented philosophy of keeping related data in one object. If we follow this rule, then we
don’t have to imagine the relationship among the data, because all the data for one copy of
the message is physically in one place. So, when I wrote the program, I made a simple class to
represent all the data that is needed for one copy of the message:
private static class StringData { // Info needed to draw one string.
double x,y; // location of the string;
double dx,dy; // velocity of the string;
Color color; // color of the string;
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 355

Font font; // the font that is used to draw the string

}
To store the data for multiple copies of the message, I use an array of type StringData[ ]. The
array is declared as an instance variable, with the name stringData:
StringData[] stringData;
Of course, the value of stringData is null until an actual array is created and assigned to
it. The array has to be created and filled with data. Furthermore, each element of the array
is an object of type StringData which has to be created before it can be used. The following
subroutine creates the array and fills it with random data:
private void createStringData() {
stringData = new StringData[25];
for (int i = 0; i < 25; i++) {
stringData[i] = new StringData();
stringData[i].x = canvas.getWidth() * Math.random();
stringData[i].y = canvas.getHeight() * Math.random();
stringData[i].dx = 1 + 3*Math.random();
if (Math.random() < 0.5) // 50% chance that dx is negative
stringData[i].dx = -stringData[i].dx;
stringData[i].dy = 1 + 3*Math.random();
if (Math.random() < 0.5) // 50% chance that dy is negative
stringData[i].dy = -stringData[i].dy;
stringData[i].color = Color.hsb( 360*Math.random(), 1.0, 1.0 );
stringData[i].font = fonts[ (int)(5*Math.random()) ];
}
}
This method is called in the start() method. It is also called to make new random data
when the user clicks a button. The strings can now be drawn using a for loop such as:
for (int i = 0; i < 25; i++) {
g.setFill( stringData[i].color );
g.setFont( stringData[i].font );
g.fillText( MESSAGE, stringData[i].x, stringData[i]. y );
g.setStroke(Color.BLACK);
g.strokeText( MESSAGE, stringData[i].x, stringData[i]. y );
}
But in fact, in my program, I used an equivalent for-each loop, which might be easier to
understand:
for ( StringData data : stringData ) {
g.setFill( data.color );
g.setFont( data.font);
g.fillText( MESSAGE, data.x, data.y );
g.setStroke( Color.BLACK );
g.strokeText( MESSAGE, data.x, data.y );
}
In this loop, the loop control variable, data, holds a copy of one of the values from the array.
That value is a reference to an object of type StringData, which has instance variables named
color, font, x, and y. Once again, the use of a for-each loop has eliminated the need to work
with array indices.
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 356

As for how the animation is done, you can check out the full source code. Animation was
discussed in Subsection 6.3.5.
∗ ∗ ∗
RandomStringsWithArray uses one other array of objects. The font for a given copy of the
message is chosen at random from a set of five possible fonts. In the original version, there
were five variables of type Font to represent the fonts. The variables were named font1, font2,
font3, font4, and font5. To select one of these fonts at random, a switch statement could
be used:
Font randomFont; // One of the 5 fonts, chosen at random.
int rand; // A random integer in the range 0 to 4.
fontNum = (int)(Math.random() * 5);
switch (fontNum) {
case 0 -> randomFont = font1;
case 1 -> randomFont = font2;
case 2 -> randomFont = font3;
case 3 -> randomFont = font4;
case 4 -> randomFont = font5;
}
In the new version of the program, the five fonts are stored in an array, which is named fonts.
This array is declared as a static final member variable of type Font[ ]:
private static final fonts= new Font[] {
Font.font("Times New Roman", FontWeight.BOLD, 20),
Font.font("Arial", FontWeight.BOLD, FontPosture .ITALIC, 28),
Font.font("Verdana", 32),
Font.font(40),
Font.font("Times New Roman", FontWeight.BOLD, FontPosture .ITALIC, 60)
};
This makes it much easier to select one of the fonts at random. It can be done with the
statements
Font randomFont; // One of the 5 fonts, chosen at random.
int fontIndex; // A random number in the range 0 to 4.
fontIndex = (int)(Math.random() * 5);
randomFont = fonts[ fontIndex ];
In fact, the preceding four lines can be replaced by the single line
Font randomFont = fonts[ (int)(Math.random() * 5) ];
The switch statement has been replaced by a single line of code. This is a very typical
application of arrays. Note that this example uses the random access property: We can pick
an array index at random and go directly to the array element at that index.
Here is another example of the same sort of thing. Months are often stored as numbers 1, 2,
3, . . . , 12. Sometimes, however, these numbers have to be translated into the names January,
February, . . . , December. The translation can be done very easily with an array. The array
can be declared and initialized as
static String[] monthName = { "January", "February", "March",
"April", "May", "June",
"July", "August", "September",
"October", "November", "December" };
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 357

If mnth is a variable that holds one of the integers 1 through 12, then monthName[mnth-1] is the
name of the corresponding month. We need the “-1” because months are numbered starting
from 1, while array elements are numbered starting from 0. Simple array indexing does the
translation for us!

7.2.4 Dynamic Arrays

Earlier, we discussed how a partially full array can be used to store a list of players in a game,
allowing the list to grow and shrink over the course of the game. The list is “dynamic” in the
sense that its size changes while the program is running. Dynamic lists are very common, and
we might think about trying to write a class to represent the concept. By writing a class, we can
avoid having to repeat the same code every time we want to use a similar data structure. We
want something that is like an array, except that its size can change. Think about operations
that we might want to perform on a dynamic array. Some essential and useful operations would
include
• add an item to the end of the array
• remove the item at a specified position in the array
• get the value of one of the elements in the array
• set the value of one of the elements in the array
• get the number of items currently in the array
When we design our class, these operations will become instance methods in that class. The
items in the dynamic array will actually be stored in a normal array, using the partially full
array pattern. Using what we know, the class is not difficult to write. We do have to decide
what to do when an attempt is made to access an array element that doesn’t exist. It seems
natural to throw an index-out-of-bounds exception in that case. Let’s suppose that the items
in the array will be of type int.
import java.util.Arrays;
/**
* Represents a list of int values that can grow and shrink.
*/
public class DynamicArrayOfInt {
private int[] items = new int[8]; // partially full array holding the ints
private int itemCt;
/**
* Return the item at a given index in the array.
* Throws ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException if the index is not valid.
*/
public int get( int index ) {
if ( index < 0 || index >= itemCt )
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException("Illegal index, " + index);
return items[index];
}
/**
* Set the value of the array element at a given index.
* Throws ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException if the index is not valid.
*/
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 358

public void set( int index, int item ) {

if ( index < 0 || index >= itemCt )
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException("Illegal index, " + index);
items[index] = item;
}
/**
* Returns the number of items currently in the array.
*/
public int size() {
return itemCt;
}
/**
* Adds a new item to the end of the array. The size increases by one.
*/
public void add(int item) {
if (itemCt == items.length)
items = Arrays.copyOf( items, 2*items.length );
items[itemCt] = item;
itemCt++;
}
/**
* Removes the item at a given index in the array. The size of the array
* decreases by one. Items following the removed item are moved up one
* space in the array.
* Throws ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException if the index is not valid.
*/
public void remove(int index) {
if ( index < 0 || index >= itemCt )
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException("Illegal index, " + index);
for (int j = index+1; j < itemCt; j++)
items[j-1] = items[j];
itemCt--;
}
} // end class DynamicArrayOfInt
Everything here should be clear, except possibly why the original size of the items array is 8. In
fact, the number 8 is arbitrary and has no effect on the functionality of the class. Any positive
integer would work, but it doesn’t make sense for the array to start off very big. The array will
grow as needed if the number of items turns out to be large.
The example ReverseInputNumbers.java used a partially full array of int to print a list
of input numbers in the reverse of the order in which they are input. In that program, an
ordinary array of length 100 was used to hold the numbers. In any given run of the program,
the size of the array could be much too large, or it could be too small, resulting in an exception.
The program can now be written using a DynamicArrayOfInt, which will adapt itself to any
reasonable number of inputs. For the program, see ReverseWithDynamicArray.java. It’s a
silly program, but the principle holds in any application where the amount of data cannot be
predicted in advance: The size of a dynamic data structure can adapt itself to any amount of
data, limited only by the amount of memory available to the program.
This is a nice example, but there is a real problem with it. Suppose that we want to have a
dynamic array of String. We can’t use a DynamicArrayOfInt object to hold strings, so it looks
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 359

like we need to write a whole new class, DynamicArrayOfString. If we want a dynamic array to
store players in a game, we would need a class DynamicArrayOfPlayer. And so on. It looks like
we have to write a dynamic array class for every possible type of data! That can’t be right! In
fact, Java has a solution to this problem, a standard class that implements dynamic arrays and
can work with any type of data. The class is called ArrayList, and we’ll see how it works in the
next section.

7.3 ArrayList
As we have just seen in Subsection 7.2.4, we can easily encode the dynamic array pattern
into a class, but it looks like we need a different class for each data type. In fact, Java has a
feature called “parameterized types” that makes it possible to avoid the multitude of classes,
and Java has a single class named ArrayList that implements the dynamic array pattern for all
data types that are defined as classes (but not, directly, for primitive types).

7.3.1 ArrayList and Parameterized Types

Java has a standard type with the rather odd name ArrayList<String> that represents dynamic
arrays of Strings. Similarly, there is a type ArrayList<Color> that can be used to represent
dynamic arrays of Colors. And if Player is a class representing players in a game, then the type
ArrayList<Player> can be used to represent a dynamic array of Players.
It might look like we still have a multitude of classes here, but in fact there is only one class,
the ArrayList class, defined in the package java.util. But ArrayList is a parameterized type.
A parameterized type can take a type parameter, so that from the single class ArrayList, we
get a multitude of types including ArrayList<String>, ArrayList<Color>, and in fact ArrayList<T>
for any object type T. The type parameter T must be an object type such as a class name or
an interface name. It cannot be a primitive type. This means that, unfortunately, you can not
have an ArrayList of int or an ArrayList of char.
Consider the type ArrayList<String>. As a type, it can be used to declare variables, such as
ArrayList<String> namelist;
It can also be used as the type of a formal parameter in a subroutine definition, or as the return
type of a subroutine. It can be used with the new operator to create objects:
namelist = new ArrayList<String>();
The object created in this way is of type ArrayList<String> and represents a dynamic list
of strings. It has instance methods such as namelist.add(str) for adding a String to the
list, namelist.get(i) for getting the string at index i, and namelist.size() for getting the
number of items currently in the list.
But we can also use ArrayList with other types. If Player is a class representing players in a
game, we can create a list of players with
ArrayList<Player> playerList = new ArrayList<Player>();
Then to add a player, plr, to the game, we just have to say playerList.add(plr). And we
can remove player number k with playerList.remove(k).
Furthermore if playerList is a local variable, then its declaration can be abbreviated to
var playlerList = new ArrayList<Player>();
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 360

using the alternative declaration syntax that was covered in Subsection 4.8.2. The Java compiler
uses the initial value that is assigned to playerList to deduce that its type is ArrayList<Player>.
When you use a type such as ArrayList<T>, the compiler will ensure that only objects of
type T can be added to the list. An attempt to add an object that is not of type T will be
a syntax error, and the program will not compile. However, note that objects belonging to
a subclass of T can be added to the list, since objects belonging to a subclass of T are still
considered to be of type T. Thus, if class Shape has subclasses Rectangle, Oval and RounRect,
then a variable of type ArrayList<Shape> can be used to hold objects of type Rectangle, Oval,
and RoundRect. (Of course, this is the same way arrays work: An array of type T[ ] can hold
objects belonging to any subclass of T.) Similarly, if T is an interface, then any object that
implements interface T can be added to the list.
An object of type ArrayList<T> has all of the instance methods that you would expect in
a dynamic array implementation. Here are some of the most useful. Suppose that list is a
variable of type ArrayList<T>. Then we have:
• list.size() — This function returns the current size of the list, that is, the number of
items currently in the list. The only valid positions in the list are numbers in the range
0 to list.size()-1. Note that the size can be zero. A call to the default constructor
new ArrayList<T>() creates a list of size zero.
• list.add(obj) — Adds an object onto the end of the list, increasing the size by 1. The
parameter, obj, can refer to an object of type T, or it can be null.
• list.get(N) — This function returns the value stored at position N in the list. The
return type of this function is T. N must be an integer in the range 0 to list.size()-1.
If N is outside this range, an error of type IndexOutOfBoundsException occurs. Calling
this function is similar to referring to A[N] for an array, A, except that you can’t use
list.get(N) on the left side of an assignment statement.
• list.set(N, obj) — Assigns the object, obj, to position N in the ArrayList, replacing the
item previously stored at position N. The parameter obj must be of type T. The integer
N must be in the range from 0 to list.size()-1. A call to this function is equivalent to
the command A[N] = obj for an array A.
• list.clear() — Removes all items from the list, setting its size to zero.
• list.remove(N) — For an integer, N, this removes the N-th item in the ArrayList. N must
be in the range 0 to list.size()-1. Any items in the list that come after the removed
item are moved up one position. The size of the list decreases by 1. This method returns
the removed item.
• list.remove(obj) — If the specified object occurs somewhere in the list, it is removed
from the list. Any items in the list that come after the removed item are moved up one
position. The size of the ArrayList decreases by 1. If obj occurs more than once in the
list, only the first copy is removed. If obj does not occur in the list, nothing happens; this
is not an error. This method returns a boolean value that says whether or not an item
was actually removed.
• list.indexOf(obj) — A function that searches for the object, obj, in the list. If the
object is found in the list, then the first position number where it is found is returned. If
the object is not found, then -1 is returned.
For the last two methods listed here, obj is compared to an item in the list by calling
obj.equals(item), unless obj is null. This means, for example, that strings are tested for
equality by checking the contents of the strings, not their location in memory.
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 361

Java comes with several parameterized classes representing different data structures. Those
classes make up the Java Collection Framework . Here we consider only ArrayList, but we
will return to this important topic in much more detail in Chapter 10.
By the way, ArrayList can also be used as a non-parametrized type. This means that you
can declare variables and create objects of type ArrayList such as
ArrayList list = new ArrayList();
The effect of this is similar to declaring list to be of type ArrayList<Object>. That is, list can
hold any object that belongs to a subclass of Object. Since every class is a subclass of Object,
this means that any object can be stored in list.

7.3.2 Wrapper Classes

As I have already noted, parameterized types don’t work with the primitive types. There is no
such thing as “ArrayList<int>”. However, this limitation turns out not to be very limiting after
all, because of the so-called wrapper classes such as Integer and Character.
We have already briefly encountered the classes Double and Integer in Section 2.5. These
classes contain the static methods Double.parseDouble() and Integer.parseInteger()
that are used to convert strings to numerical values, and they contain constants such as
Integer.MAX VALUE and Double.NaN. We have also encountered the Character class in some
examples, with the static method Character.isLetter(), that can be used to test whether
a given value of type char is a letter. There is a similar class for each of the other primitive
types, Long, Short, Byte, Float, and Boolean. These classes are wrapper classes. Although they
contain useful static members, they have another use as well: They are used for representing
primitive type values as objects.
Remember that the primitive types are not classes, and values of primitive type are not
objects. However, sometimes it’s useful to treat a primitive value as if it were an object. This
is true, for example, when you would like to store primitive type values in an ArrayList. You
can’t do that literally, but you can “wrap” the primitive type value in an object belonging to
one of the wrapper classes.
For example, an object of type Integer contains a single instance variable, of type int. The
object is a “wrapper” for the int value. You can get an object that wraps the int value 42 with
Integer n = Integer.valueOf(42);
The value of n has the same information as the value of type int, but it is an object. If you want
to retrieve the int value that is wrapped in the object, you can call the function n.intValue().
Similarly, you can wrap a double in an object of type Double, a boolean value in an object of
type Boolean, and so on. Each wrapper class has a static valueOf() method for wrapping a
primitive type value in an object.
The method Integer.valueOf() is a static factory method that returns an object of
type Integer. The Integer class also has a constructor for creating objects, but it has been
deprecated , meaning that it should not be used in new code and might be removed from the
language in the future. The static factory method has the advantage that if Integer.valueOf()
is called more than once with the same parameter value, it has the option of returning the same
object each time. This is OK because objects of type Integer are immutable, that is, the
content of the object cannot be modified after the object has been created. Someone who gets
their hands on an Integer will not be able to change the primitive int value that it represents.
We saw something similar for the Color class in Subsection 6.2.1, which also has static factory
methods for creating immutable objects.
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 362

∗ ∗ ∗
To make the wrapper classes even easier to use, there is automatic conversion between a
primitive type and the corresponding wrapper class. For example, if you use a value of type
int in a context that requires an object of type Integer, the int will automatically be wrapped
in an Integer object. If you say
Integer answer = 42;
the computer will silently read this as if it were
Integer answer = Integer.valueOf(42);
This is called autoboxing . It works in the other direction, too. For example, if d refers to an
object of type Double, you can use d in a numerical expression such as 2*d. The double value
inside d is automatically unboxed and multiplied by 2. Autoboxing and unboxing also apply
to subroutine calls. For example, you can pass an actual parameter of type int to a subroutine
that has a formal parameter of type Integer, and vice versa. In fact, autoboxing and unboxing
make it possible in many circumstances to ignore the difference between primitive types and
objects.
This is true in particular for parameterized types. Although there is no such thing as
“ArrayList<int>”, there is ArrayList<Integer>. An ArrayList<Integer> holds objects of type Integer,
but any object of type Integer really just represents an int value in a rather thin wrapper.
Suppose that we have an object of type ArrayList<Integer>:
ArrayList<Integer> integerList;
integerList = new ArrayList<Integer>();
Then we can, for example, add an object to integerList that represents the number 42:
integerList.add( Integer.valueOf(42) );
but because of autoboxing, we can actually say
integerList.add( 42 );
and the compiler will automatically wrap 42 in an object of type Integer before adding it to the
list. Similarly, we can say
int num = integerList.get(3);
The value returned by integerList.get(3) is of type Integer but because of unboxing, the
compiler will automatically convert the return value into an int, as if we had said
int num = integerList.get(3).intValue();
So, in effect, we can pretty much use integerList as if it were a dynamic array of int rather
than a dynamic array of Integer. Of course, a similar statement holds for lists of other wrapper
classes such as ArrayList<Double> and ArrayList<Character>.
There is one issue that sometimes causes problems: A list can hold null values, and a null
does not correspond to any primitive type value. This means, for example, that the statement
“int num = integerList.get(3);” can produce a null pointer exception in the case where
integerList.get(3) returns null. Unless you are sure that all the values in your list are
non-null, you need to take this possibility into account.
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 363

7.3.3 Programming With ArrayList

As a simple first example, we can redo ReverseWithDynamicArray.java, from the previous
section, using an ArrayList instead of a custom dynamic array class. In this case, we want to
store integers in the list, so we should use ArrayList<Integer>. Here is the complete program:
import textio.TextIO;
import java.util.ArrayList;
/**
* Reads a list of non-zero numbers from the user, then prints
* out the input numbers in the reverse of the order in which
* the were entered. There is no limit on the number of inputs.
*/
public class ReverseWithArrayList {
public static void main(String[] args) {
ArrayList<Integer> list;
list = new ArrayList<Integer>();
System.out.println("Enter some non-zero integers. Enter 0 to end.");
while (true) {
System.out.print("? ");
int number = TextIO.getlnInt();
if (number == 0)
break;
list.add(number);
}
System.out.println();
System.out.println("Your numbers in reverse are:");
for (int i = list.size() - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
System.out.printf("%10d%n", list.get(i));
}
}
}
As illustrated in this example, ArrayLists are commonly processed using for loops, in much
the same way that arrays are processed. for example, the following loop prints out all the items
for a variable namelist of type ArrayList<String>:
for ( int i = 0; i < namelist.size(); i++ ) {
String item = namelist.get(i);
System.out.println(item);
}
You can also use for-each loops with ArrayLists, so this example could also be written
for ( String item : namelist ) {
System.out.println(item);
}
When working with wrapper classes, the loop control variable in the for-each loop can be
a primitive type variable. This works because of unboxing. For example, if numbers is of type
ArrayList<Double>, then the following loop can be used to add up all the values in the list:
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 364

double sum = 0;
for ( double num : numbers ) {
sum = sum + num;
}
This will work as long as none of the items in the list are null. If there is a possibility of null
values, then you will want to use a loop control variable of type Double and test for nulls. For
example, to add up all the non-null values in the list:
double sum;
for ( Double num : numbers ) {
if ( num != null ) {
sum = sum + num; // Here, num is SAFELY unboxed to get a double.
}
}

∗ ∗ ∗
For a more complete and useful example, we will look at the program SimplePaint2.java.
This is a much improved version of SimplePaint.java from Subsection 6.3.3. In the new program,
the user can sketch curves in a drawing area by clicking and dragging with the mouse. The user
can select the drawing color using a menu. The background color of the drawing area can also
be selected using a menu. And there is a “Control” menu that contains several commands: An
“Undo” command, which removes the most recently drawn curve from the screen, a “Clear”
command that removes all the curves, and a “Use Symmetry” checkbox that turns a symmetry
feature on and off. Curves that are drawn by the user when the symmetry option is on are
reflected horizontally and vertically to produce a symmetric pattern. (Symmetry is there just
to look pretty.)
Unlike the original SimplePaint program, this new version uses a data structure to store
information about the picture that has been drawn by the user. When the user selects a new
background color, the canvas is filled with the new background color, and all of the curves that
were there previously are redrawn on the new background. To do that, we need to store enough
data to redraw all of the curves. Similarly, the Undo command is implemented by deleting the
data for most recently drawn curve, and then redrawing the entire picture using the remaining
data.
The data structure that we need is implemented using ArrayLists. The main data for an
individual curve consists of a list of the points on the curve. This data is stored in an object of
type ArrayList<Point2D>. (Point2D is standard class in package javafx.geometry: A Point2D
can be constructed from two double values, giving the (x,y) coordinates of the point. And
a Point2D object, pt, has getter methods pt.getX() and pt.getY() that return the x and y
coordinates.) But in addition to a list of points on a curve, to redraw the curve, we also need
to know its color, and we need to know whether the symmetry option should be applied to
the curve. All the data that is needed to redraw the curve is grouped into an object of type
CurveData that is defined as a nested class in the program:
private static class CurveData {
Color color; // The color of the curve.
boolean symmetric; // Are horizontal and vertical reflections also drawn?
ArrayList<Point2D> points; // The points on the curve.
}
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 365

However, a picture can contain many curves, not just one, so to store all the data necessary to
redraw the entire picture, we need a list of objects of type CurveData. For this list, the program
uses an ArrayList, curves, declared as
ArrayList<CurveData> curves = new ArrayList<CurveData>();
Here we have a list of objects, where each object contains a list of points as part of its data!
Let’s look at a few examples of processing this data structure. When the user clicks the mouse
on the drawing surface, it’s the start of a new curve, and a new CurveData object must be
created to represent that curve. The instance variables in the new CurveData object must
also be initialized. Here is the code from the mousePressed() routine that does this, where
currentCurve is a global variable of type CurveData:
currentCurve = new CurveData(); // Create a new CurveData object.
currentCurve.color = currentColor; // The color of a curve is taken from an
// instance variable that represents the
// currently selected drawing color.
currentCurve.symmetric = useSymmetry; // The "symmetric" property of the curve
// is also copied from the current value
// of an instance variable, useSymmetry.
currentCurve.points = new ArrayList<Point2D>(); // A new point list object.
As the user drags the mouse, new points are added to currentCurve, and line segments of the
curve are drawn between points as they are added. When the user releases the mouse, the curve
is complete, and it is added to the list of curves by calling
curves.add( currentCurve );
When the user changes the background color or selects the “Undo” command, the picture
has to be redrawn. The program has a redraw() method that completely redraws the picture.
That method uses the data in the list of CurveData to draw all the curves. The basic structure
is a for-each loop that processes the data for each individual curve in turn. This has the form:
for ( CurveData curve : curves ) {
.
. // Draw the curve represented by the object, curve, of type CurveData.
.
}
In the body of this loop, curve.points is a variable of type ArrayList<Point2D> that holds the
list of points on the curve. The i-th point on the curve can be obtained by calling the get()
method of this list: curve.points.get(i). This returns a value of type Point2D which has
getter methods named getX() and getY(). We can refer directly to the x-coordinate of the
i-th point as:
curve.points.get(i).getX()
This might seem rather complicated, but it’s a nice example of a complex name that specifies
a path to a desired piece of data: Go to the object, curve. Inside curve, go to points. Inside
points, get the i-th item. And from that item, get the x coordinate by calling its getX()
method. Here is the complete definition of the method that redraws the picture:
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 366

private void redraw() {

g.setFill(backgroundColor);
g.fillRect(0,0,canvas.getWidth(),canvas.getHeight());
for ( CurveData curve : curves ) {
g.setStroke(curve.color);
for (int i = 1; i < curve.points.size(); i++) {
// Draw a line segment from point number i-1 to point number i.
double x1 = curve.points.get(i-1).getX();
double y1 = curve.points.get(i-1).getY();
double x2 = curve.points.get(i).getX();
double y2 = curve.points.get(i).getY();
drawSegment(curve.symmetric,x1,y1,x2,y2);
}
}
}
drawSegment() is a method that strokes the line segment from (x1,y1) to (x2,y2). If the
first parameter is true, it also draws the horizontal and vertical reflections of that segment.
I have mostly been interested here in discussing how the program uses ArrayList, but I
encourage you to read the full source code, SimplePaint2.java, and to try out the program.
In addition to serving as an example of using parameterized types, it also serves as another
example of creating and using menus. You should be able to understand the entire program.

7.4 Records
Some programming languages have two basic kinds of built-in data structures: arrays and
records. An array consists of a sequence of items, where individual items are referred to by
their numerical position in the sequence. In a record, on the other hand, the positions in the
data structure have names instead of numbers. The items in a record are called its “fields,”
and the names for the items are “field names.” A field is accessed using its field name. We
recognize records as similar to objects, with the fields in a record playing the same role as
instance variables in an object, but records existed before object-oriented programming. The
actual word “record” is used in programming languages such as Pascal and Cobol. The C
programming language uses the term “struct” for the same idea. The “record” terminology
might have originated with databases, which are just large, organized collections of data, where
a record is a (typically small) set of related data items, and a database is a collection of records.
In Java, classes can be used to represent records, but the term “record” has not traditionally
been used. However, in Java 17, records have become an official part of the language in the form
of a special kind of class. Java records are not really equivalent to records in other languages,
since a record in Java is immutable, that is, its content cannot be modified after the record is
created. However, they are similar to other records is that they are fairly simple containers for
named fields.

7.4.1 Basic Java Records

A Java record is an object that belongs to a special kind of class, which I will call a record
class. In the simplest case, a record class specifies nothing but the set of instance variables that
represent the fields of the record. Here is an example:
public record FullName(String firstName, String lastName) { }
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 367

This is a class definition for a record class named FullName that has two instance variables of
type String named firstName and lastName. These instance variables are the fields of the
record. The “{ }” at the end of the definition is an empty class body. Note that the instance
variables in a record class are listed in parentheses after the class name. The syntax is the same
as the syntax for a list of formal parameters in a method definition, but the meaning is very
different. A record of type FullName—that is, an instance of the record class—is created in the
usual way, with the new operator. For example,
FullName fname = new FullName("Jane", "Doe");
This statement calls a constructor that has one parameter for each field of the record, whose
effect is simply to provide a value for each field. Note that this constructor was not explicitly
defined in the class. It is called the canonical constructor for the record class, and it is
provided automatically by the compiler. In fact, many things are added implicitly to a record
class definition by the compiler. The simple record definition of FullName, given above, is
essentially equivalent to the following regular class definition:
public final class FullName {
private final String firstName;
private final String lastName;
public FullName( String firstName, String lastName ) {
this.firstName = firstName;
this.lastName = lastName;
}
public firstName() {
return firstName;
}
public lastName() {
return lastName;
}
public String toString() {
return "FullName[firstName=" + firstName
+ ", lastName=" + lastName + "]";
}
public boolean equals(Object obj) {
// (definition omitted)
}
public int hashCode() {
// (definition omitted)
}
}
We see that a record class is automatically final, that is, it cannot be extended by subclasses.
Furthermore, a record class cannot extend another class (but it is a subclass of Object, as is
true for any class).
The instance variables in a record are private and final. Accessor, or “getter”, methods
for the instance variables are automatically defined, but instead of using the typical getXXX()
naming convention for getter methods, their names are the same as the names of the instance
variables. For example, if fname is a variable of type FullName, then the instance variables would
be accessed as fname.firstName() and fname.lastName(). Because its instance variables are
final, a record is immutable, so no “setter” methods can be defined.
Furthermore, reasonable definitions are automatically provided for three methods inherited
from class Object: toString(), equals(), and hashCode(). The toString() method returns a
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 368

string that includes the name of the class and the names and values of its fields. The equals()
method returns true if its parameter is an object of the same type that has the same values
for its fields. (We will not encounter the hashCode() method until Section 10.3.)
We will see that record class definitions can be more complex, but you should expect basic
record classes, with empty class bodies, to be very common, since they provide a simple way
to group together a set of related data items. For example, the CurveData class from the
SimplePaint2.java example in the previous section was created to group together all the data
relevant to a single curve:
private static class CurveData {
Color color;
boolean symmetric;
ArrayList<Point2D> points;
}
This nested class could be replaced by a nested record class:
private record CurveData(
Color color,
boolean symmetric,
ArrayList<Point2D> points
) { }
Note that the nested CurveData record class does not have to be declared static, because
nested record classes are automatically static.
After this change, when a CurveData object is created, values must be provided for its fields.
For example,
currentCurve = new CurveData(currentColor, useSymmetry, new ArrayList<Point2D>());
Another change is that CurveData objects are now immutable. That happens to be OK in
SimplePaint2.java, but it’s not something that will work in all cases. For example, class
Point2D is a simple container for xy coordinates, but it could not be a record class because
points are not immutable.

7.4.2 More Record Syntax

It is not possible to add additional instance variables to a record class, beyond those that
are defined in the list after the class name. But almost anything else can be added in the
class body. For example, a record class can contain static items of any kind. It can
define instance methods, including replacements for the default toString(), equals(), and
hashCode() methods. And it can define constructors, with just a few restrictions. First of all,
it is possible to extend the definition for the canonical constructor that is defined automatically,
using a syntax in which the parameter list for the constructor is omitted. For example, the
canonical constructor for the FullName class might throw an exception if firstName is null:
public FullName { // canonical constructor for the FullName class
if ( firstName == null) {
throw new IllegalArgumentException("First name can’t be null.");
}
}
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 369

This extends the canonical constructor. Although the parameter list is omitted in the definition,
a call to this constructor still requires two parameters, and it still uses those parameters to
initialize firstName and lastName, before the code in the constructor definition is executed.
Additional constructors can be defined, but any non-canonical constructor must begin with
a call to a constructor in the same class, using the special variable this as discussed in
Subsection 5.6.3. This means that the canonical constructor will be called, directly or indirectly,
by any other constructor.
As an example, noting that there are people who use only a single name, we might want to
provide a FullName constructor that takes just one parameter representing that name:
public FullName(String onlyName) {
this( onlyName, null ); // call the canonical constructor
}
This constructor calls the default constructor to set the firstName field equal to onlyName and
the lastName field equal to null.
We might also want to define a more natural version of toString() for the FullName
record class. For a full class definition that implements all of these ideas, see the sample file
FullName.java.
A final syntax note: Although a record class cannot extend another class, it can implement
one or more interfaces.

7.4.3 A Complex Example

A complex number consists of two real numbers, which are called the real part and the
imaginary part of the complex number. Without knowing anything about the mathematics of
complex numbers, you should see that this is a natural application for records. To represent a
complex number in Java, we need a simple container for two values of type double. That could
be done with a basic record class
record Complex( double re, double im ) { }
But there are many things that can be done with complex numbers, and we would want to
include some of those things in a class that could truly be said to represent them. Here is a
record class that includes a few of those things:
/**
* A record type for representing complex numbers, where
* a complex number consists of two real numbers called its
* real and imaginary parts. The class includes methods for
* doing arithmetic with complex numbers.
*/
public record Complex(double re, double im) {
// Some named constants for common complex numbers.
public final static Complex ONE = new Complex(1,0);
public final static Complex ZERO = new Complex(0,0);
public final static Complex I = new Complex(0,1);
/**
* This constructor creates a complex number with a given
* real part and with imaginary part zero.
*/
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 370

public Complex(double re) {

this(re,0);
}
/**
* Creates string representations of complex number such
* as: 3.0 + I*5.0, -I*3.14, 2.7 - I*8.6, 3.14
*/
public String toString() {
if (im == 0)
return String.valueOf(re);
else if (re == 0) {
if (im < 0)
return "-I*" + (-im);
else
return "I*" + im;
}
else if (im < 0)
return re + " - " + "I*" + (-im);
else
return re + " + " + "I*" + im;
}
// Some methods for doing arithmetic on two complex numbers
public Complex plus(Complex c) {
return new Complex(re + c.re, im + c.im);
}
public Complex minus(Complex c) {
return new Complex(re - c.re, im - c.im);
}
public Complex times(Complex c) {
return new Complex(re*c.re - im*c.im,
re*c.im + im*c.re);
}
public Complex dividedBy(Complex c) {
double denom = c.re*c.re + c.im*c.im;
double real = (re*c.re + im*c.im)/denom;
double imaginary = (im*c.re - re*c.im)/denom;
return new Complex(real,imaginary);
}
} // end record Complex
This class adds some static member variables, a constructor that creates a complex number
from a single real number, a toString() method that prints a complex number in a reasonable
format, and some instance variables that implement arithmetic operations on complex numbers.
Of course, it also has the canonical constructor that creates a complex number from two real
numbers. The sample program RecordDemo.java tests both Complex.java and FullName.java.
∗ ∗ ∗
It might be worth thinking about why record classes should be final and why records
should be immutable. One reason for them to be final is that it can make it possible for a
complier to apply certain kinds of optimization to the code that it generates. This applies not
just to record classes but to final classes in general.
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 371

Here is an example. It is common to compute complicated arithmetic expressions involving

complex numbers. Consider the quadratic formula Ax2 +Bx+C. If A, B, C, and x are objects
of type Complex, then the value of this expression can be computed as
(A.times(x).times(x)).plus(B.times(x)).plus(C)
If you check the definitions of the times() and plus() methods, you can see that every time
a method is called, it creates a new Complex object. In the quadratic formula example, five
new objects are generated, but we are only interested in the one that represents the final
answer. The other four objects are just scratch work: They are created, used very briefly and
then immediately become eligible for garbage collection. Creating and garbage collecting large
numbers of objects can be inefficient. However, in this case, the compiler might be able to
avoid creating those extra objects by replacing the calls to plus() and times() with code that
performs the same operations directly using temporary local variables of type double instead
of objects. It can do this because it knows exactly what each method call does—but that is
only the case because the Complex class is final. If that were not the case, then A, B, C, or x
might actually refer to objects belonging to subclasses of Complex that have redefined plus()
and times(). That is something that can only be checked at run time, not at compile time, so
if the class were not final, a compiler would have no way of knowing what the calls to plus()
and times() will do when the program is run.
As for immutability, it might also help with optimization, since a compiler can be sure that
calling a method on an object will not modify the instance variables in that object. However,
it is probably more important that immutability makes it easier to reason about a program. If
you can prove that some property of an immutable object is true at some point in time, you
can be sure that it won’t become false later because the object has been modified.

7.5 Searching and Sorting

Two array processing techniques that are particularly common are searching and
sorting . Searching here refers to finding an item in the array that meets some specified
criterion. Sorting refers to rearranging all the items in the array into increasing or decreasing
order (where the meaning of increasing and decreasing can depend on the context). We have
seen in Subsection 7.2.2 that Java has some built-in methods for searching and sorting arrays.
However, a computer science student should be familiar with the algorithms that are used in
those methods. In this section, you will learn some algorithms for searching and sorting.
Sorting and searching are often discussed, in a theoretical sort of way, using an array of
numbers as an example. In practical situations, though, more interesting types of data are
usually involved. For example, the array might be a mailing list, and each element of the array
might be an object containing a name and address. Given the name of a person, you might
want to look up that person’s address. This is an example of searching, since you want to find
the object in the array that contains the given name. It would also be useful to be able to sort
the array according to various criteria. One example of sorting would be ordering the elements
of the array so that the names are in alphabetical order. Another example would be to order
the elements of the array according to zip code before printing a set of mailing labels.
This example can be generalized to a more abstract situation in which we have an array
that contains objects, and we want to search or sort the array based on the value of one of
the instance variables in the objects. In that case, we might use the terminology of “records”
and “fields” that originated in work with databases, as discussed in the previous section. In
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 372

the mailing list example, we might have an array of records where each record contains a first
name, last name, street address, state, city, and zip code as fields. For the purpose of searching
or sorting, one of the fields is designated to be the key field. Searching then means finding a
record in the array that has a specified value in its key field. Sorting means moving the records
around in the array so that the key fields of the record are in increasing (or decreasing) order.
In this section, most of my examples follow the tradition of using arrays of numbers. But
I’ll also give a few examples using objects, to remind you of the more practical applications.

7.5.1 Searching
There is an obvious algorithm for searching for a particular item in an array: Look at each
item in the array in turn, and check whether that item is the one you are looking for. If so,
the search is finished. If you look at every item without finding the one you want, then you
can be sure that the item is not in the array. It’s easy to write a subroutine to implement this
algorithm. Let’s say the array that you want to search is an array of ints. Here is a method
that will search the array for a specified integer. If the integer is found, the method returns
the index of the location in the array where it is found. If the integer is not in the array, the
method returns the value -1 as a signal that the integer could not be found:
/**
* Searches the array A for the integer N. If N is not in the array,
* then -1 is returned. If N is in the array, then the return value is
* the first integer i that satisfies A[i] == N.
*/
static int find(int[] A, int N) {
for (int index = 0; index < A.length; index++) {
if ( A[index] == N )
return index; // N has been found at this index!
}
// If we get this far, then N has not been found
// anywhere in the array. Return a value of -1.
return -1;
}
This method of searching an array by looking at each item in turn is called linear search.
If nothing is known about the order of the items in the array, then there is really no better
alternative algorithm. But if the elements in the array are known to be in increasing or
decreasing order, then a much faster search algorithm can be used. An array in which the
elements are in order is said to be sorted . Of course, it takes some work to sort an array, but
if the array is to be searched many times, then the work done in sorting it can really pay off.
Binary search is a method for searching for a given item in a sorted array. Although
the implementation is not trivial, the basic idea is simple: If you are searching for an item in
a sorted list, then it is possible to eliminate half of the items in the list by inspecting a single
item. For example, suppose that you are looking for the number 42 in a sorted array of 1000
integers. Let’s assume that the array is sorted into increasing order. Suppose you check item
number 500 in the array, and find that the item is 93. Since 42 is less than 93, and since the
elements in the array are in increasing order, we can conclude that if 42 occurs in the array
at all, then it must occur somewhere before location 500. All the locations numbered 500 or
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 373

above contain values that are greater than or equal to 93. These locations can be eliminated
as possible locations of the number 42.
Once we know that 42 can only be in the first half of the array, the obvious next step is to
check location 250. If the number at that location is, say, -21, then you can eliminate locations
before 250 and limit further search to locations between 251 and 499. The next test will limit
the search to about 125 locations, and the one after that to about 62. After just 10 steps, there
is only one location left. This is a whole lot better than looking through every element in the
array. If there were a million items, it would still take only 20 steps for binary search to search
the array! (Mathematically, the number of steps is approximately equal to the logarithm, in
the base 2, of the number of items in the array.)
In order to make binary search into a Java subroutine that searches an array, A, for an item,
N, we just have to keep track of the range of locations that could possibly contain N. At each
step, as we eliminate possibilities, we reduce the size of this range. The basic operation is to
look at the item in the middle of the range. If this item is greater than N, then the second
half of the range can be eliminated. If it is less than N, then the first half of the range can
be eliminated. If the number in the middle just happens to be N exactly, then the search is
finished. If the size of the range decreases to zero, then the number N does not occur in the
array. Here is a subroutine that implements this idea:
/**
* Searches the array A for the integer N.
* Precondition: A must be sorted into increasing order.
* Postcondition: If N is in the array, then the return value, i,
* satisfies A[i] == N. If N is not in the array, then the
* return value is -1.
*/
static int binarySearch(int[] A, int N) {
int lowestPossibleLoc = 0;
int highestPossibleLoc = A.length - 1;
while (highestPossibleLoc >= lowestPossibleLoc) {
int middle = (lowestPossibleLoc + highestPossibleLoc) / 2;
if (A[middle] == N) {
// N has been found at this index!
return middle;
}
else if (A[middle] > N) {
// eliminate locations >= middle
highestPossibleLoc = middle - 1;
}
else {
// eliminate locations <= middle
lowestPossibleLoc = middle + 1;
}
}
// At this point, highestPossibleLoc < lowestPossibleLoc,
// which means that N is known to be not in the array. Return
// a -1 to indicate that N could not be found in the array.
return -1;
}
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 374

7.5.2 Association Lists

One particularly common application of searching is with association lists. The standard
example of an association list is a dictionary. A dictionary associates definitions with words.
Given a word, you can use the dictionary to look up its definition. We can think of the dictionary
as being a list of pairs of the form (w,d), where w is a word and d is its definition. A general
association list is a list of pairs (k,v), where k is some “key” value, and v is a value associated
to that key. In general, we want to assume that no two pairs in the list have the same key.
There are two basic operations on association lists: Given a key, k, find the value v associated
with k, if any. And given a key, k, and a value v, add the pair (k,v) to the association list
(replacing the pair, if any, that had the same key value). The two operations are usually called
get and put.
Association lists are very widely used in computer science. For example, a compiler has
to keep track of the location in memory associated with each variable. It can do this with an
association list in which each key is a variable name and the associated value is the address of
that variable in memory. Another example would be a mailing list, if we think of it as associating
an address to each name on the list. As a related example, consider a phone directory that
associates a phone number to each name. We’ll look at a highly simplified version of this
example. (This is not meant to be a realistic way to implement a phone directory!)
The items in the phone directory’s association list could be objects belonging to the class:
class PhoneEntry {
String name;
String phoneNum;
}
The data for a phone directory consists of an array of type PhoneEntry[ ] and an integer
variable to keep track of how many entries are actually stored in the directory. The technique
of dynamic arrays (Subsection 7.2.4) can be used in order to avoid putting an arbitrary limit on
the number of entries that the phone directory can hold. A PhoneDirectory class should include
instance methods that implement the “get” and “put” operations. Here is one possible simple
definition of the class:
import java.util.Arrays;
/**
* A PhoneDirectory holds a list of names with a phone number for
* each name. It is possible to find the number associated with
* a given name, and to specify the phone number for a given name.
*/
public class PhoneDirectory {
/**
* An object of type PhoneEntry holds one name/number pair.
*/
private static class PhoneEntry {
String name; // The name.
String number; // The associated phone number.
}
private PhoneEntry[] data; // Array that holds the name/number pairs.
private int dataCount; // The number of pairs stored in the array.
/**
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 375

* Constructor creates an initially empty directory.

*/
public PhoneDirectory() {
data = new PhoneEntry[1];
dataCount = 0;
}
/**
* Looks for a name/number pair with a given name. If found, the index
* of the pair in the data array is returned. If no pair contains the
* given name, then the return value is -1. This private method is
* used internally in getNumber() and putNumber().
*/
private int find( String name ) {
for (int i = 0; i < dataCount; i++) {
if (data[i].name.equals(name))
return i; // The name has been found in position i.
}
return -1; // The name does not exist in the array.
}
/**
* Finds the phone number, if any, for a given name.
* @return The phone number associated with the name; if the name does
* not occur in the phone directory, then the return value is null.
*/
public String getNumber( String name ) {
int position = find(name);
if (position == -1)
return null; // There is no phone entry for the given name.
else
return data[position].number;
}
/**
* Associates a given name with a given phone number. If the name
* already exists in the phone directory, then the new number replaces
* the old one. Otherwise, a new name/number pair is added. The
* name and number should both be non-null. An IllegalArgumentException
* is thrown if this is not the case.
*/
public void putNumber( String name, String number ) {
if (name == null || number == null)
throw new IllegalArgumentException("name and number cannot be null");
int i = find(name);
if (i >= 0) {
// The name already exists, in position i in the array.
// Just replace the old number at that position with the new.
data[i].number = number;
}
else {
// Add a new name/number pair to the array. If the array is
// already full, first create a new, larger array.
if (dataCount == data.length) {
data = Arrays.copyOf( data, 2*data.length );
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 376

}
PhoneEntry newEntry = new PhoneEntry(); // Create a new pair.
newEntry.name = name;
newEntry.number = number;
data[dataCount] = newEntry; // Add the new pair to the array.
dataCount++;
}
}
} // end class PhoneDirectory
The class defines a private instance method, find(), that uses linear search to find the
position of a given name in the array of name/number pairs. The find() method is used
both in the getNumber() method and in the putNumber() method. Note in particular that
putNumber(name,number) has to check whether the name is in the phone directory. If so, it
just changes the number in the existing entry; if not, it has to create a new phone entry and
add it to the array.
This class could also have be written using an ArrayList (Section 7.3) instead of a dynamic
array. And the nested PhoneEntry class is a natural candidate to be a record class (Section 7.4).
For a version that uses these ideas, see PhoneDirectory2.java.
This phone directory implementation could be improved by using binary search instead
of simple linear search in the find() method. However, we could only do that if the list of
PhoneEntries were sorted into alphabetical order according to name. In fact, it’s really not all
that hard to keep the list of entries in sorted order, as you’ll see in the next subsection.
I will mention that association lists are also called “maps,” and Java has a standard
parameterized type named Map that implements association lists for keys and values of any
type. The implementation is more efficient than anything you can do with basic arrays. You
will encounter this class in Section 10.3.

7.5.3 Insertion Sort

We’ve seen that there are good reasons for sorting arrays. There are many algorithms available
for doing so. One of the easiest to understand is the insertion sort algorithm. This technique
is also applicable to the problem of keeping a list in sorted order as you add new items to the
list. Let’s consider that case first:
Suppose you have a sorted list and you want to add an item to that list. If you want to
make sure that the modified list is still sorted, then the item must be inserted into the right
location, with all the smaller items coming before it and all the bigger items after it. This will
mean moving each of the bigger items up one space to make room for the new item.
/*
* Precondition: itemsInArray is the number of items that are
* stored in A. These items must be in increasing order
* (A[0] <= A[1] <= ... <= A[itemsInArray-1]).
* The array size is at least one greater than itemsInArray.
* Postcondition: The number of items has increased by one,
* newItem has been added to the array, and all the items
* in the array are still in increasing order.
* Note: To complete the process of inserting an item in the
* array, the variable that counts the number of items
* in the array must be incremented, after calling this
* subroutine.
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 377

*/
static void insert(int[] A, int itemsInArray, int newItem) {
int loc = itemsInArray - 1; // Start at the end of the array.
/* Move items bigger than newItem up one space;
Stop when a smaller item is encountered or when the
beginning of the array (loc == 0) is reached. */
while (loc >= 0 && A[loc] > newItem) {
A[loc + 1] = A[loc]; // Bump item from A[loc] up to loc+1.
loc = loc - 1; // Go on to next location.
}
A[loc + 1] = newItem; // Put newItem in last vacated space.
}
Conceptually, this could be extended to a sorting method if we were to take all the items
out of an unsorted array, and then insert them back into the array one-by-one, keeping the list
in sorted order as we do so. Each insertion can be done using the insert routine given above.
In the actual algorithm, we don’t really take all the items from the array; we just remember
what part of the array has been sorted:
static void insertionSort(int[] A) {
// Sort the array A into increasing order.
int itemsSorted; // Number of items that have been sorted so far.
for (itemsSorted = 1; itemsSorted < A.length; itemsSorted++) {
// Assume that items A[0], A[1], ... A[itemsSorted-1]
// have already been sorted. Insert A[itemsSorted]
// into the sorted part of the list.
int temp = A[itemsSorted]; // The item to be inserted.
int loc = itemsSorted - 1; // Start at end of list.
while (loc >= 0 && A[loc] > temp) {
A[loc + 1] = A[loc]; // Bump item from A[loc] up to loc+1.
loc = loc - 1; // Go on to next location.
}
A[loc + 1] = temp; // Put temp in last vacated space.
}
}
Here is an illustration of one stage in insertion sort. It shows what happens during one
execution of the for loop in the above method, when itemsSorted is 5:
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 378

Sorted items Items still t  


Start with a partially
sorted list of items.

Copy the next unsorted item into Temp:

Temp, leaving a hole in the array.

Move items in the unsorted part of

the array to make room for Temp. Temp:

35

Now, the sorted part Sorted items Items still to be sorted

of the list has
increased in size
35
by one item.

7.5.4 Selection Sort

Another typical sorting method uses the idea of finding the biggest item in the list and moving
it to the end—which is where it belongs if the list is to be in increasing order. Once the biggest
item is in its correct location, you can then apply the same idea to the remaining items. That is,
find the next-biggest item, and move it into the next-to-last space, and so forth. This algorithm
is called selection sort. It’s easy to write:
static void selectionSort(int[] A) {
// Sort A into increasing order, using selection sort
for (int lastPlace = A.length-1; lastPlace > 0; lastPlace--) {
// Find the largest item among A[0], A[1], ...,
// A[lastPlace], and move it into position lastPlace
// by swapping it with the number that is currently
// in position lastPlace.
int maxLoc = 0; // Location of largest item seen so far.
for (int j = 1; j <= lastPlace; j++) {
if (A[j] > A[maxLoc]) {
// Since A[j] is bigger than the maximum we’ve seen
// so far, j is the new location of the maximum value
// we’ve seen so far.
maxLoc = j;
}
}
int temp = A[maxLoc]; // Swap largest item with A[lastPlace].
A[maxLoc] = A[lastPlace];
A[lastPlace] = temp;
} // end of for loop
}
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 379

∗ ∗ ∗
A variation of selection sort is used in the Hand class that was introduced in Subsection 5.4.1.
(By the way, you are finally in a position to fully understand the source code for the Hand class
from that section; note that it uses an ArrayList. The source file is Hand.java.)
In the Hand class, a hand of playing cards is represented by an ArrayList<Card>. The objects
stored in the list are of type Card. A Card object contains instance methods getSuit() and
getValue() that can be used to determine the suit and value of the card. In my sorting method,
I actually create a new list and move the cards one-by-one from the old list to the new list.
The cards are selected from the old list in increasing order. In the end, the new list becomes
the hand and the old list is discarded. This is not the most efficient procedure, but hands of
cards are so small that the inefficiency is negligible. Here is the code for sorting cards by suit:
/**
* Sorts the cards in the hand so that cards of the same suit are
* grouped together, and within a suit the cards are sorted by value.
* Note that aces are considered to have the lowest value, 1.
*/
public void sortBySuit() {
ArrayList<Card> newHand = new ArrayList<Card>();
while (hand.size() > 0) {
int pos = 0; // Position of minimal card.
Card c = hand.get(0); // Minimal card.
for (int i = 1; i < hand.size(); i++) {
Card c1 = hand.get(i);
if ( c1.getSuit() < c.getSuit() ||
(c1.getSuit() == c.getSuit() && c1.getValue() < c.getValue()) ) {
pos = i; // Update the minimal card and location.
c = c1;
}
}
hand.remove(pos); // Remove card from original hand.
newHand.add(c); // Add card to the new hand.
}
hand = newHand;
}
This example illustrates the fact that comparing items in a list is not usually as simple as
using the operator “<”. In this case, we consider one card to be less than another if the suit
of the first card is less than the suit of the second, and also if the suits are the same and the
value of the second card is less than the value of the first. The second part of this test ensures
that cards with the same suit will end up sorted by value.
Sorting a list of Strings raises a similar problem: the “<” operator is not defined for strings.
However, the String class does define a compareTo method. If str1 and str2 are of type String,
then
str1.compareTo(str2)
returns an int that is 0 when str1 is equal to str2, is less than 0 when str1 precedes str2, and
is greater than 0 when str1 follows str2. For example, you can test whether str1 precedes or
is equal to str2 by testing
if ( str1.compareTo(str2) <= 0 )
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 380

The definition of “precedes” and “follows” for strings uses what is called lexicographic
ordering , which is based on the Unicode values of the characters in the strings. Lexicographic
ordering is not the same as alphabetical ordering, even for strings that consist entirely of
letters (because in lexicographic ordering, all the upper case letters come before all the lower
case letters). However, for words consisting strictly of the 26 lower case letters in the English
alphabet, lexicographic and alphabetic ordering are the same. (The same holds true if the
strings consist entirely of uppercase letters.) The method str1.compareToIgnoreCase(str2)
compares the two strings after converting any characters that they contain to lower case.
∗ ∗ ∗
Insertion sort and selection sort are suitable for sorting fairly small arrays (up to a few
hundred elements, say). There are more complicated sorting algorithms that are much faster
than insertion sort and selection sort for large arrays, to the same degree that binary search is
faster than linear search. The standard method Arrays.sort uses these fast sorting algorithms.
I’ll discuss one such algorithm in Chapter 9.

7.5.5 Unsorting
I can’t resist ending this section on sorting with a related problem that is much less common,
but is a bit more fun. That is the problem of putting the elements of an array into a random
order. The typical case of this problem is shuffling a deck of cards. A good algorithm for
shuffling is similar to selection sort, except that instead of moving the biggest item to the end
of the list, an item is selected at random and moved to the end of the list. Here is a subroutine
to shuffle an array of ints:
/**
* Postcondition: The items in A have been rearranged into a random order.
*/
static void shuffle(int[] A) {
for (int lastPlace = A.length-1; lastPlace > 0; lastPlace--) {
// Choose a random location from among 0,1,...,lastPlace.
int randLoc = (int)(Math.random()*(lastPlace+1));
// Swap items in locations randLoc and lastPlace.
int temp = A[randLoc];
A[randLoc] = A[lastPlace];
A[lastPlace] = temp;
}
}

7.6 Two-dimensional Arrays

Two-dimensional arrays were introduced in Subsection 3.8.5, but we haven’t done much
with them since then. A 2D array has a type such as int[ ][ ] or String[ ][ ], with two pairs of
square brackets. The elements of a 2D array are arranged in rows and columns, and the new
operator for 2D arrays specifies both the number of rows and the number of columns. For
example,
int[][] A;
A = new int[3][4];
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 381

This creates a 2D array of int that has 12 elements arranged in 3 rows and 4 columns. Although
I haven’t mentioned it, there are initializers for 2D arrays. For example, this statement creates
the 3-by-4 array that is shown in the picture below:
int[][] A = { { 1, 0, 12, -1 },
{ 7, -3, 2, 5 },
{ -5, -2, 2, -9 }
};
An array initializer for a 2D array contains the rows of A, separated by commas and enclosed
between braces. Each row, in turn, is a list of values separated by commas and enclosed between
braces. There are also 2D array literals with a similar syntax that can be used anywhere, not
just in declarations. For example,
A = new int[][] { { 1, 0, 12, -1 },
{ 7, -3, 2, 5 },
{ -5, -2, 2, -9 }
};
All of this extends naturally to three-dimensional, four-dimensional, and even higher-
dimensional arrays, but they are not used very often in practice.

7.6.1 The Truth About 2D Arrays

But before we go any farther, there is a little surprise. Java does not actually have two-
dimensional arrays. In a true 2D array, all the elements of the array occupy a continuous block
of memory, but that’s not true in Java. The syntax for array types is a clue: For any type
BaseType, we should be able to form the type BaseType[ ], meaning “array of BaseType.” If we
use int[ ] as the base type, the type that we get is “int[ ][ ] meaning “array of int[ ]” or “array of
array of int.” And in fact, that’s what happens. The elements in a 2D array of type int[ ][ ] are
variables of type int[ ]. And remember that a variable of type int[ ] can only hold a pointer to
an array of int. So, a 2D array is really an array of pointers, where each pointer can refer to a
one-dimensional array. Those one-dimensional arrays are the rows of the 2D array. A picture
will help to explain this. Consider the 3-by-4 array A defined above.
If you create an array A = new int[3][4],
A: you should think of it as a "m  with
3 rows and 4 columns.

B  eality, A holds a reference to

an array of 3 items, where each item
is a reference to an    ints.
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 382

For the most part, you can ignore the reality and keep the picture of a grid in mind.
Sometimes, though, you will need to remember that each row in the grid is really an array in
itself. These arrays can be referred to as A[0], A[1], and A[2]. Each row is in fact a value of
type int[ ]. It could, for example, be passed to a subroutine that asks for a parameter of type
int[ ].
Some of the consequences of this structure are a little subtle. For example, thinking of a 2D
array, A, as an array of arrays, we see that A.length makes sense and is equal to the number
of rows of A. If A has the usual shape for a 2D array, then the number of columns in A would
be the same as the number of elements in the first row, that is, A[0].length. But there is no
rule that says that all of the rows of A must have the same length (although an array created
with new BaseType[rows][columns] will always have that form). Each row in a 2D array is
a separate one-dimensional array, and each of those arrays can have a different length. In fact,
it’s even possible for a row to be null. For example, the statement
A = new int[3][];
with no number in the second set of brackets, creates an array of 3 elements where all the
elements are null. There are places for three rows, but no actual rows have been created. You
can then create the rows A[0], A[1], and A[2] individually.
As an example, consider a symmetric matrix . A symmetric matrix, M, is a two-
dimensional array in which the number of rows is equal to the number of columns and satisfying
M[i][j] equals M[j][i] for all i and j. Because of this equality, we only really need to store
M[i][j] for i >= j. We can store the data in a “triangular matrix”:

3 -7 12 6 0 17 21 In a symmetric matrix, 3
the elements above the
-7 -1 5 -2 9 11 2 -7 -1
diagonal (shown in red)
12 5 -3 12 22 15 30 duplicate elements 12 5 -3
below the diagonal
6 -2 12 15 13 4 -4 (blue). So a symmetric 6 -2 12 15
matrix can be stored 0 9 22 13 35
0 9 22 13 35 1 24
as a "triangular matrix"
17 11 15 4 1 8 -5 with rows of different 17 11 15 4 1 8
lengths.
21 2 30 -4 24 -5 16 21 2 30 -4 24 -5 16

It’s easy enough to make a triangular array, if we create each row separately. To create a 7-by-7
triangular array of double, we can use the code segment
double[][] matrix = new double[7][]; // rows have not yet been created!
for (int i = 0; i < 7; i++) {
matrix[i] = new double[i+1]; // Create row i with i + 1 elements.
}
We just have to remember that if we want to know the value of the matrix at (i,j), and if
i < j, then we actually have to get the value of matrix[j][i] in the triangular matrix. And
similarly for setting values. It’s easy to write a class to represent symmetric matrices:
/**
* Represents symmetric n-by-n matrices of real numbers.
*/
public class SymmetricMatrix {
private double[][] matrix; // A triangular matrix to hold the data.
/**
* Creates an n-by-n symmetric matrix in which all entries are 0.
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 383

*/
public SymmetricMatrix(int n) {
matrix = new double[n][];
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++)
matrix[i] = new double[i+1];
}
/**
* Returns the matrix entry at position (row,col). (If row < col,
* the value is actually stored at position (col,row).)
*/
public double get( int row, int col ) {
if (row >= col)
return matrix[row][col];
else
return matrix[col][row];
}
/**
* Sets the value of the matrix entry at (row,col). (If row < col,
* the value is actually stored at position (col,row).)
*/
public void set( int row, int col, double value ) {
if (row >= col)
matrix[row][col] = value;
else
matrix[col][row] = value;
}
/**
* Returns the number of rows and columns in the matrix.
*/
public int size() {
return matrix.length; // The size is the number of rows.
}
} // end class SymmetricMatrix
This class is in the file SymmetricMatrix.java, and a small program to test it can be found in
TestSymmetricMatrix.java.
By the way, the standard function Arrays.copyOf() can’t make a full copy of a 2D array
in a single step. To do that, you need to copy each row separately. To make a copy of a
two-dimensional array of int, for example:
int[][] B = new int[A.length][]; // B has as many rows as A.
for (int i = 0; i < A.length; i++) {
B[i] = Arrays.copyOf(A[i], A[i].length)); // Copy row i.
}

7.6.2 Conway’s Game Of Life

As an example of more typical 2D array processing, let’s look at a very well-known example:
Conway’s Game of Life, invented by mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. This Game
of Life is not really a game (although sometimes it’s referred to as a “zero-person game” that
plays itself). It’s a “two-dimensional cellular automaton.” This just means that it’s a grid of
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 384

cells whose content changes over time according to definite, deterministic rules. In Life, a cell
can only have two possible contents: It can be “alive” or “dead.” We will use a 2D array to
represent the grid, with each element of the array representing the content of one cell in the
grid. In the game, an initial grid is set up in which each cell is marked as either alive or dead.
After that, the game “plays itself.” The grid evolves through a series of time steps. The contents
of the grid at each time step are completely determined by the contents at the previous time
step, according to simple rules: Each cell in the grid looks at its eight neighbors (horizontal,
vertical, and diagonal) and counts how many of its neighbors are alive. Then the state of the
cell in the next step is determined by the rules:
• For a cell that is alive in the current time step: If the cell has 2 or 3 living neighbors,
then the cell remains alive in the next time step; otherwise, it dies. (A living cell dies of
loneliness if it has 0 or 1 living neighbor, and of overcrowding if it has more than 3 living
neighbors.)
• For a cell that is dead in the current time step: If the cell has 3 living neighbors, then the
cell becomes alive in the next time step; otherwise, it remains dead. (Three living cells
give birth to a new living cell.)
Here’s a picture of part of a Life board, showing the same board before and after the rules have
been applied. The rules are applied to every cell in the grid. The picture shows how they apply
to four of the cells:
  with 3 l
neighbors comes to life

Lll  !l"# $ l

neighbor dies.

Lll l with 5 l

neighbors dies.

Lll l with 3 l

S()* + neighbors %"&% l' S()* +,-

The Game of Life is interesting because it gives rise to many interesting and surprising
patterns. (Look it up on Wikipedia.) Here, we are just interested in writing a program to
simulate the game. The complete program can be found in the file Life.java. In the program,
the life grid is shown as a grid of squares in which dead squares are black and living squares
are white. (The program uses MosaicCanvas.java from Section 4.7 to represent the grid, so you
will also need that file to compile and run the program.) In the program, you can fill the life
board randomly with dead and alive cells, or you can use the mouse to set up the game board.
There is a “Step” button that will compute one time-step of the game, and a “Start” button
that will run time steps as an animation.
We’ll look at some of the array processing involved in implementing the Game of Life for
this program. Since a cell can only be alive or dead, it is natural to use a two-dimensional
array of boolean[ ][ ] to represent the states of all the cells. The array is named alive, and
alive[r][c] is true when the cell in row r, column c is alive. The number of rows and the
number of columns are equal and are given by a constant, GRID SIZE. So, for example, to fill
the Life grid with random values, the program uses simple nested for loops:
for (int r = 0; r < GRID SIZE; r++) {
for (int c = 0; c < GRID SIZE; c++) {
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 385

// Use a 25% probability that the cell is alive.

alive[r][c] = (Math.random() < 0.25);
}
}
Note that the expression (Math.random() < 0.25) is a true/false value that can be assigned to
a boolean array element. The array is also used to set the color of the cells on the screen. Since
the grid of cells is displayed on screen as a MosaicCanvas, setting the colors is done using the
MosaicCanvas API. Note that the actual drawing is done in the MosaicCanvas class (which has
its own 2D array of type Color[ ][ ] to keep track of the colors of each cell). The Life program just
has to set the colors in the mosaic, using the MosaicCanvas API. This is done in the program
in a method named showBoard() that is called each time the board changes. Again, simple
nested for loops are used to set the color of each square in the grid:
for (int r = 0; r < GRID SIZE; r++) {
for (int c = 0; c < GRID SIZE; c++) {
if (alive[r][c])
display.setColor(r,c,Color.WHITE);
else
display.setColor(r,c,null); // Shows the background color, black.
}
}
Of course, the most interesting part of the program is computing the new state of the board
by applying the rules to the current state. The rules apply to each individual cell, so again we
can use nested for loops to work through all the cells on the board, but this time the processing
is more complicated. Note first that we can’t make changes to the values in the array as we work
through it, since we will need to know the old state of a cell when processing its neighboring
cells. In fact, the program uses a second array to hold the new board as it is being created.
When the new board is finished, it can be substituted for the old board. The algorithm goes
like this in pseudocode:
let newboard be a new boolean[][] array
for each row r:
for each column c:
Let N be the number of neighbors of cell (r,c) in the alive array
if ((N is 3) or (N is 2 and alive[r][c]))
newboard[r][c] = true;
else
newboard[r][c] = false;
alive = newboard
Note that at the end of the process, alive is pointing to a new array. This doesn’t matter
as long as the contents of the array represent the new state of the game. The old array will
be garbage collected. The test for whether newboard[r][c] should be true or false might
not be obvious, but it implements the rules correctly. We still need to work on counting the
neighbors. Consider the cell in row r and column c. If it’s not at an edge of the board, then
it’s clear where its neighbors are:
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 386

Column c-1
Column c
Column c+1

R./ 0231
R./ 01
R./ 0431

The row above row number r is row number r-1, and the row below is r+1. Similarly
for the columns. We just have to look at the values of alive[r-1][c-1], alive[r-1][c],
alive[r-1][c+1], alive[r][c-1], alive[r][c+1], alive[r+1][c-1], alive[r+1][c], and
alive[r+1][c+1], and count the number that are true. (You should make sure that you
understand how the array indexing works here.)
But there is a problem when the cell is along one of the edges of the grid. In that case, some
of the array elements in the list don’t exist, and an attempt to use them will cause an exception.
To avoid the exception, we have to give special consideration to cells along the edges. One idea
is that before referencing any array element, check that the array element actually exists. In
that case, the code for neighbor counting becomes
if (r-1 >= 0 && c-1 >= 0 && alive[r-1][c-1])
N++; // A cell at position (r-1,c-1) exists and is alive.
if (r-1 >= 0 && alive[r-1][c])
N++; // A cell at position (r-1,c) exists and is alive.
if (r-1 >= 0 && c+1 <= GRID SIZE && alive[r-1][c+1])
N++; // A cell at position (r-1,c+1) exists and is alive.
// and so on...
All the possible exceptions are avoided. But in my program, I actually do something that is
common in 2D computer games—I pretend that the left edge of the board is attached to the
right edge and the top edge to the bottom edge. For example, for a cell in row 0, we say that the
row “above” is actually the bottom row, row number GRID SIZE-1. I use variables to represent
the positions above, below, left, and right of a given cell. The code turns out to be simpler
than the code shown above. Here is the complete method for computing the new board:
private void doFrame() { // Compute the new state of the Life board.
boolean[][] newboard = new boolean[GRID SIZE][GRID SIZE];
for ( int r = 0; r < GRID SIZE; r++ ) {
int above, below; // rows considered above and below row number r
int left, right; // columns considered left and right of column c
above = r > 0 ? r-1 : GRID SIZE-1; // (for "?:" see Subsection 2.5.5)
below = r < GRID SIZE-1 ? r+1 : 0;
for ( int c = 0; c < GRID SIZE; c++ ) {
left = c > 0 ? c-1 : GRID SIZE-1;
right = c < GRID SIZE-1 ? c+1 : 0;
int n = 0; // number of alive cells in the 8 neighboring cells
if (alive[above][left])
n++;
if (alive[above][c])
n++;
if (alive[above][right])
n++;
if (alive[r][left])
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 387

n++;
if (alive[r][right])
n++;
if (alive[below][left])
n++;
if (alive[below][c])
n++;
if (alive[below][right])
n++;
if (n == 3 || (alive[r][c] && n == 2))
newboard[r][c] = true;
else
newboard[r][c] = false;
}
}
alive = newboard;
}
Again, I urge you to check out the source code, Life.java, and try the program. Don’t forget
that you will also need MosaicCanvas.java.

7.6.3 Checkers
As a final example for this chapter, we’ll look at a more substantial example of using a 2D
array. This is the longest program that we have encountered so far, with 741 lines of code.
The program lets two users play checkers against each other. The checkers game is played on
an eight-by-eight board, which is based on an example from Subsection 6.5.1. The players are
called “red” and “black,” after the color of their checkers. I’m not going to explain the rules of
checkers here; possibly you can learn them by trying out the program.
In the program, a player moves by clicking on the piece that they want to move, and then
clicking on the empty square to which it is to be moved. As an aid to the players, any square
that the current player can legally click at a given time is highlighted with a brightly colored
border. The square containing a piece that has been selected to be moved, if any, is surrounded
by a yellow border. Other pieces that can legally be moved are surrounded by a cyan-colored
border. If a piece has already been selected to be moved, each empty square that it can legally
move to is highlighted with a green border. The game enforces the rule that if the current
player can jump one of the opponent’s pieces, then the player must jump. When a player’s
piece becomes a king, by reaching the opposite end of the board, a big white “K” is drawn on
the piece. Here is a picture of the program early in a game. It is black’s turn to move. Black
has selected the piece in the yellow-outlined square to be moved. Black can click one of the
squares outlined in green to complete the move, or can click one of the squares outlined in cyan
to select a different piece to be moved.
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 388

I will only cover a part of the programming for this example. I encourage you to read the
complete source code, Checkers.java. It’s long and complex, but with some study, you should
understand all the techniques that it uses. The program is a good example of state-based,
event-driven, object-oriented programming.
∗ ∗ ∗
The data about the pieces on the board are stored in a two-dimensional array. Because of
the complexity of the program, I wanted to divide it into several classes. In addition to the main
class, there are several nested classes. One of these classes is CheckersData, which handles the
data for the board. It is not directly responsible for any part of the graphics or event-handling,
but it provides methods that can be called by other classes that handle graphics and events. It
is mainly this class that I want to talk about.
The CheckersData class has an instance variable named board of type int[][]. The value
of board is set to “new int[8][8]”, an 8-by-8 grid of integers. The values stored in the grid
are defined as constants representing the possible contents of a square on a checkerboard:
static final int
EMPTY = 0, // Value representing an empty square.
RED = 1, // A regular red piece.
RED KING = 2, // A red king.
BLACK = 3, // A regular black piece.
BLACK KING = 4; // A black king.
The constants RED and BLACK are also used in my program (or, perhaps, misused) to represent
the two players in the game. When a game is started, the values in the array are set to represent
the initial state of the board. The grid of values looks like
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 389

C 1 F 3 G 5 H I
C 56789 :;<=> 56789 :;<=> 56789 :;<=> 56789 :;<=>
1 :;<=> 56789 :;<=> 56789 :;<=> 56789 :;<=> 56789
F 56789 :;<=> 56789 :;<=> 56789 :;<=> 56789 :;<=>
3 :;<=> :;<=> :;<=> :;<=> :;<=> :;<=> :;<=> :;<=>
G :;<=> :;<=> :;<=> :;<=> :;<=> :;<=> :;<=> :;<=>
5 :;<=> ?:@ :;<=> ?:@ :;<=> ?:@ :;<=> ?:@
H ?:@ :;<=> ?:@ :;<=> ?:@ :;<=> ?:@ :;<=>
I :;<=> ?:@ :;<=> ?:@ :;<=> ?:@ :;<=> ?:@

A regular black piece can only move “down” the grid. That is, the row number of the square
it moves to must be greater than the row number of the square it comes from. A regular red
piece can only move up the grid. Kings of either color can move in both directions.
One function of the CheckersData class is to take care of changes to the data structures
that need to be made when one of the users moves a checker. An instance method named
makeMove() is provided to do this. When a player moves a piece from one square to another,
the values of two elements in the array are changed. But that’s not all. If the move is a jump,
then the piece that was jumped is removed from the board. (The method checks whether the
move is a jump by checking if the square to which the piece is moving is two rows away from
the square where it starts.) Furthermore, a RED piece that moves to row 0 or a BLACK piece
that moves to row 7 becomes a king. Putting all that into a subroutine is good programming:
the rest of the program doesn’t have to worry about any of these details. It just calls this
makeMove() method:
/**
* Make the move from (fromRow,fromCol) to (toRow,toCol). It is
* ASSUMED that this move is legal! If the move is a jump, the
* jumped piece is removed from the board. If a piece moves
* to the last row on the opponent’s side of the board, the
* piece becomes a king.
*/
void makeMove(int fromRow, int fromCol, int toRow, int toCol) {
board[toRow][toCol] = board[fromRow][fromCol]; // Move the piece.
board[fromRow][fromCol] = EMPTY; // The square it moved from is now empty.
if (fromRow - toRow == 2 || fromRow - toRow == -2) {
// The move is a jump. Remove the jumped piece from the board.
int jumpRow = (fromRow + toRow) / 2; // Row of the jumped piece.
int jumpCol = (fromCol + toCol) / 2; // Column of the jumped piece.
board[jumpRow][jumpCol] = EMPTY;
}
if (toRow == 0 && board[toRow][toCol] == RED)
board[toRow][toCol] = RED KING; // Red piece becomes a king.
if (toRow == 7 && board[toRow][toCol] == BLACK)
board[toRow][toCol] = BLACK KING; // Black piece becomes a king.
} // end makeMove()
An even more important function of the CheckersData class is to find legal moves on the
board. In my program, a move in a Checkers game is represented by an object belonging to
the following class:
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 390

/**
* A CheckersMove object represents a move in the game of
* Checkers. It holds the row and column of the piece that is
* to be moved and the row and column of the square to which
* it is to be moved. (This class makes no guarantee that
* the move is legal.)
*/
private static class CheckersMove {
int fromRow, fromCol; // Position of piece to be moved.
int toRow, toCol; // Square it is to move to.
CheckersMove(int r1, int c1, int r2, int c2) {
// Constructor. Set the values of the instance variables.
fromRow = r1;
fromCol = c1;
toRow = r2;
toCol = c2;
}
boolean isJump() {
// Test whether this move is a jump. It is assumed that
// the move is legal. In a jump, the piece moves two
// rows. (In a regular move, it only moves one row.)
return (fromRow - toRow == 2 || fromRow - toRow == -2);
}
} // end class CheckersMove.
The CheckersData class has an instance method which finds all the legal moves that are
currently available for a specified player. This method is a function that returns an array
of type CheckersMove[ ]. The array contains all the legal moves, represented as CheckersMove
objects. The specification for this method reads
/**
* Return an array containing all the legal CheckersMoves
* for the specified player on the current board. If the player
* has no legal moves, null is returned. The value of player
* should be one of the constants RED or BLACK; if not, null
* is returned. If the returned value is non-null, it consists
* entirely of jump moves or entirely of regular moves, since
* if the player can jump, only jumps are legal moves.
*/
CheckersMove[] getLegalMoves(int player)
A brief pseudocode algorithm for the method is
Start with an empty list of moves
Find any legal jumps and add them to the list
if there are no jumps:
Find any other legal moves and add them to the list
if the list is empty:
return null
else:
return the list
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 391

Now, what is this “list”? We have to return the legal moves in an array. But since an array has
a fixed size, we can’t create the array until we know how many moves there are, and we don’t
know that until near the end of the method, after we’ve already made the list! A neat solution
is to use an ArrayList instead of an array to hold the moves as we find them. In fact, I use an
object defined by the parameterized type ArrayList<CheckersMove> so that the list is restricted
to holding objects of type CheckersMove. As we add moves to the list, it will grow just as large
as necessary. At the end of the method, we can create the array that we really want and copy
the data into it:
Let "moves" be an empty ArrayList<CheckersMove>
Find any legal jumps and add them to moves
if moves.size() is 0: // There are no legal jumps!
Find any other legal moves and add them to moves
if moves.size() is 0: // There are no legal moves at all!
return null
else:
Let moveArray be an array of CheckersMoves of length moves.size()
Copy the contents of moves into moveArray
return moveArray
Now, how do we find the legal jumps or the legal moves? The information we need is in the
board array, but it takes some work to extract it. We have to look through all the positions
in the array and find the pieces that belong to the current player. For each piece, we have to
check each square that it could conceivably move to, and check whether that would be a legal
move. If we are looking for legal jumps, we want to look at squares that are two rows and
two columns away from the piece. There are four squares to consider. Thus, the line in the
algorithm that says “Find any legal jumps and add them to moves” expands to:
For each row of the board:
For each column of the board:
if one of the player’s pieces is at this location:
if it is legal to jump to row + 2, column + 2
add this move to moves
if it is legal to jump to row - 2, column + 2
add this move to moves
if it is legal to jump to row + 2, column - 2
add this move to moves
if it is legal to jump to row - 2, column - 2
add this move to moves
The line that says “Find any other legal moves and add them to moves” expands to
something similar, except that we have to look at the four squares that are one column and one
row away from the piece. Testing whether a player can legally move from one given square to
another given square is itself non-trivial. The square the player is moving to must actually be
on the board, and it must be empty. Furthermore, regular red and black pieces can only move
in one direction. I wrote the following utility method to check whether a player can make a
given non-jump move:
/**
* This is called by the getLegalMoves() method to determine
* whether the player can legally move from (r1,c1) to (r2,c2).
* It is ASSUMED that (r1,c1) contains one of the player’s
* pieces and that (r2,c2) is a neighboring square.
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 392

*/
private boolean canMove(int player, int r1, int c1, int r2, int c2) {
if (r2 < 0 || r2 >= 8 || c2 < 0 || c2 >= 8)
return false; // (r2,c2) is off the board.
if (board[r2][c2] != EMPTY)
return false; // (r2,c2) already contains a piece.
if (player == RED) {
if (board[r1][c1] == RED && r2 > r1)
return false; // Regular red piece can only move down.
return true; // The move is legal.
}
else {
if (board[r1][c1] == BLACK && r2 < r1)
return false; // Regular black piece can only move up.
return true; // The move is legal.
}
} // end canMove()
This method is called by my getLegalMoves() method to check whether one of the possible
moves that it has found is actually legal. I have a similar method that is called to check whether
a jump is legal. In this case, I pass to the method the square containing the player’s piece,
the square that the player might move to, and the square between those two, which the player
would be jumping over. The square that is being jumped must contain one of the opponent’s
pieces. This method has the specification:
/**
* This is called by other methods to check whether
* the player can legally jump from (r1,c1) to (r3,c3).
* It is assumed that the player has a piece at (r1,c1), that
* (r3,c3) is a position that is 2 rows and 2 columns distant
* from (r1,c1) and that (r2,c2) is the square between (r1,c1)
* and (r3,c3).
*/
private boolean canJump(int player, int r1, int c1,
int r2, int c2, int r3, int c3) { . . .
Given all this, you should be in a position to understand the complete getLegalMoves()
method. It’s a nice way to finish off this chapter, since it combines several topics that we’ve
looked at: one-dimensional arrays, ArrayLists, and two-dimensional arrays:
CheckersMove[] getLegalMoves(int player) {
if (player != RED && player != BLACK)
return null; // (This will not happen in a correct program.)
int playerKing; // The constant for a King belonging to the player.
if (player == RED)
playerKing = RED KING;
else
playerKing = BLACK KING;
ArrayList<CheckersMove> moves = new ArrayList<CheckersMove>();
// Moves will be stored in this list.
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 393

/* First, check for any possible jumps. Look at each square on

the board. If that square contains one of the player’s pieces,
look at a possible jump in each of the four directions from that
square. If there is a legal jump in that direction, put it in
the moves ArrayList.
*/
for (int row = 0; row < 8; row++) {
for (int col = 0; col < 8; col++) {
if (board[row][col] == player || board[row][col] == playerKing) {
if (canJump(player, row, col, row+1, col+1, row+2, col+2))
moves.add(new CheckersMove(row, col, row+2, col+2));
if (canJump(player, row, col, row-1, col+1, row-2, col+2))
moves.add(new CheckersMove(row, col, row-2, col+2));
if (canJump(player, row, col, row+1, col-1, row+2, col-2))
moves.add(new CheckersMove(row, col, row+2, col-2));
if (canJump(player, row, col, row-1, col-1, row-2, col-2))
moves.add(new CheckersMove(row, col, row-2, col-2));
}
}
}
/* If any jump moves were found, then the user must jump, so we
don’t add any regular moves. However, if no jumps were found,
check for any legal regular moves. Look at each square on
the board. If that square contains one of the player’s pieces,
look at a possible move in each of the four directions from
that square. If there is a legal move in that direction,
put it in the moves ArrayList.
*/
if (moves.size() == 0) {
for (int row = 0; row < 8; row++) {
for (int col = 0; col < 8; col++) {
if (board[row][col] == player || board[row][col] == playerKing) {
if (canMove(player,row,col,row+1,col+1))
moves.add(new CheckersMove(row,col,row+1,col+1));
if (canMove(player,row,col,row-1,col+1))
moves.add(new CheckersMove(row,col,row-1,col+1));
if (canMove(player,row,col,row+1,col-1))
moves.add(new CheckersMove(row,col,row+1,col-1));
if (canMove(player,row,col,row-1,col-1))
moves.add(new CheckersMove(row,col,row-1,col-1));
}
}
}
}
/* If no legal moves have been found, return null. Otherwise, create
an array just big enough to hold all the legal moves, copy the
legal moves from the ArrayList into the array, and return the array.
*/
if (moves.size() == 0)
return null;
else {
CHAPTER 7. ARRAYS, ARRAYLISTS, AND RECORDS 394

CheckersMove[] moveArray = new CheckersMove[moves.size()];

for (int i = 0; i < moves.size(); i++)
moveArray[i] = moves.get(i);
return moveArray;
}
} // end getLegalMoves
The checkers program is complex, and you can be sure that it didn’t just fall together.
It took a good deal of design work to decide what classes and objects would be used, what
methods should be written, and what algorithms the methods should use. The complete source
code is in the file Checkers.java. Take a look!
Exercises 395

Exercises for Chapter 7

1. Write a subroutine that creates an ArrayList containing several different random integers (solution)
in the range from 1 up to some specified maximum. The number of integers and the
maximum allowed value for the integers should be parameters to the subroutine. Write a
main() routine to test your subroutine.

2. Suppose that M is a two-dimensional array that has R rows and C columns. The (solution)
transpose of M is defined to be an array T that has C rows and R columns such that
T[i][j] = M[j][i] for each i and j. Write a function that takes an array of type int[ ][ ]
as a parameter, and returns the transpose of that array. (Assume that the parameter is a
typical 2D array in which all the rows have the same length.) Also write a subroutine to
print a 2D array of integers in neat rows and columns, and include a main() routine to
test your work.

3. In Subsection 7.5.4, it is mentioned that the standard sorting method Arrays.sort() is (solution)
much faster and efficient than selection sort. Write a program to test this claim. To be
specific, your program should create a large array filled with random real numbers. It
should use both Arrays.sort() and selectionSort() to sort the array, and it should
time how long it takes to perform each sort. Furthermore, it should do the same thing for
a large array of random Strings. To find the times, you can use System.nanoTime() (see
Subsection 2.3.1 and the example TimedComputation.java).

4. In Exercise 6.2, you wrote a program DragTwoSquares that allows the user to drag a red (solution)
square and a blue square around on a canvas. Write a much improved version where the
user can add squares to a canvas and drag them around. In particular: If the user shift-
clicks or right-clicks the canvas, then the user is trying to drag a square; find the square
that contains the mouse position, if any, and move it as the user drags the mouse. Other
clicks should add squares. You can place the center of the new square at the current mouse
position. To make the picture more visually appealing, give each square a random color,
and when you draw the squares, draw a black outline around each square. (My program
also gives the square a random alpha value between 0.5 and 1.0).
Write a class to represent the data needed for drawing one square, and use an ArrayList
to store the data for all the squares in the picture. If the user drags a square completely
off the canvas, delete it from the list.

5. Write a program that will read a sequence of positive real numbers entered by the user (solution)
and will print the same numbers in sorted order from smallest to largest. The user will
input a zero to mark the end of the input. Assume that at most 100 positive numbers
will be entered. Do not use any built-in function such as Arrays.sort(). Do the sorting
yourself.

6. Write a program that will read a text file selected by the user, and will make an alphabetical (solution)
list of all the different words in that file. All words should be converted to lower case, and
duplicates should be eliminated from the list. The list should be written to an output file
selected by the user. As discussed in Subsection 2.4.4, you can use TextIO to read and
write files. Use a variable of type ArrayList<String> to store the words. It is not easy to
separate a file into words as you are reading it, especially if you want to allow apostrophes
in the middle of a word. You can use the following method in your program:
Exercises 396

/**
* Read the next word from TextIO, if there is one. First, skip past
* any non-letters in the input. If an end-of-file is encountered before
* a word is found, return null. Otherwise, read and return the word.
* A word is defined as a sequence of letters. Also, a word can include
* an apostrophe if the apostrophe is surrounded by letters on each side.
* @return the next word from TextIO, or null if an end-of-file is
* encountered
*/
private static String readNextWord() {
char ch = TextIO.peek(); // Look at next character in input.
while (ch != TextIO.EOF && ! Character.isLetter(ch)) {
// Skip past non-letters.
TextIO.getAnyChar(); // Read the character.
ch = TextIO.peek(); // Look at the next character.
}
if (ch == TextIO.EOF) // Encountered end-of-file
return null;
// At this point, we know the next character is a letter, so read a word.
String word = ""; // This will be the word that is read.
while (true) {
word += TextIO.getAnyChar(); // Append the letter onto word.
ch = TextIO.peek(); // Look at next character.
if ( ch == ’\’’ ) {
// The next character is an apostrophe. Read it, and
// if the following character is a letter, add both the
// apostrophe and the letter onto the word and continue
// reading the word. If the character after the apostrophe
// is not a letter, the word is done, so break out of the loop.
TextIO.getAnyChar(); // Read the apostrophe.
ch = TextIO.peek(); // Look at char that follows apostrophe.
if (Character.isLetter(ch)) {
word += "\’" + TextIO.getAnyChar();
ch = TextIO.peek(); // Look at next char.
}
else
break;
}
if ( ! Character.isLetter(ch) ) {
// If the next character is not a letter, the word is
// finished, so break out of the loop.
break;
}
// If we haven’t broken out of the loop, next char is a letter.
}
return word; // Return the word that has been read.
}
Note that this method will return null when the file has been entirely read. You can use
this as a signal to stop processing the input file.

7. The game of Go Moku (also known as Pente or Five Stones) is similar to Tic-Tac-Toe, (solution)
except that it is played on a much larger board and the object is to get five squares in a
Exercises 397

row rather than three. The board should have 13 rows and 13 columns of squares. Players
take turns placing pieces on a board. A piece can be placed in any empty square. The
first player to get five pieces in a row—horizontally, vertically, or diagonally—wins. If all
squares are filled before either player wins, then the game is a draw. Write a program
that lets two players play Go Moku against each other.
Your program will be simpler than the Checkers program from Subsection 7.6.3. Play
alternates strictly between the two players, and there is no need to highlight the legal
moves. You will only need one nested subclass, a subclass of Canvas to draw the board
and do all the work of the game, like the nested CheckersBoard class in the Checkers
program. You will probably want to look at the source code for the checkers program,
Checkers.java, for ideas about the general outline of the program.
The hardest part of the program is checking whether the move that a player makes is
a winning move. To do this, you have to look in each of the four possible directions from
the square where the user has placed a piece. You have to count how many pieces that
player has in a row in that direction. If the number is five or more in any direction, then
that player wins. As a hint, here is part of the code from my program. This code counts
the number of pieces that the user has in a row in a specified direction. The direction is
specified by two integers, dirX and dirY. The values of these variables are 0, 1, or -1, and
at least one of them is non-zero. For example, to look in the horizontal direction, dirX is
1 and dirY is 0.
int ct = 1; // Number of pieces in a row belonging to the player.
int r, c; // A row and column to be examined
r = row + dirX; // Look at square in specified direction.
c = col + dirY;
while ( r >= 0 && r < 13 && c >= 0 && c < 13
&& board[r][c] == player ) {
// Square is on the board, and it
// contains one of the player’s pieces.
ct++;
r += dirX; // Go on to next square in this direction.
c += dirY;
}
r = row - dirX; // Now, look in the opposite direction.
c = col - dirY;
while ( r >= 0 && r < 13 && c >= 0 && c < 13
&& board[r][c] == player ) {
ct++;
r -= dirX; // Go on to next square in this direction.
c -= dirY;
}
Here is a picture of my program, just after black has won the game.
Exercises 398
Quiz 399

Quiz on Chapter 7
(answers)

1. What is meant by the basetype of an array?

2. What is the purpose of the following variable-arity method? What are the values of
same(1,2,3), same(17,17,17,17), and same(2)? Why?
static double same( int... value ) {
for (int i = 1; i < value.length; i++) {
if ( value[i-1] != value[i] )
return false;
}
return true;
}

3. What does it mean to sort an array?

4. What is the main advantage of binary search over linear search? What is the main
disadvantage?

5. What is meant by a dynamic array? What is the advantage of a dynamic array over a
regular array?

6. What does it mean to say that ArrayList is a parameterized type?

7. Suppose that a variable strlst has been declared as

ArrayList<String> strlst = new ArrayList<String>();
Assume that the list is not empty and that all the items in the list are non-null. Write a
code segment that will find and print the string in the list that comes first in lexicographic
order.

8. Show the exact output produced by the following code segment.

char[][] pic = new char[6][6];
for (int i = 0; i < 6; i++)
for (int j = 0; j < 6; j++) {
if ( i == j || i == 0 || i == 5 )
pic[i][j] = ’*’;
else
pic[i][j] = ’.’;
}
for (int i = 0; i < 6; i++) {
for (int j = 0; j < 6; j++)
System.out.print(pic[i][j]);
System.out.println();
}
Quiz 400

9. Write a complete static method that finds the largest value in an array of ints. The
method should have one parameter, which is an array of type int[]. The largest number
in the array should be returned as the value of the method.

10. Suppose that temperature measurements were made on each day of 2021 in each of 100
cities. The measurements have been stored in an array
int[][] temps = new int[100][365];
where temps[c][d] holds the measurement for city number c on the dth day of the year.
Write a code segment that will print out the average temperature, over the course of the
whole year, for each city. The average temperature for a city can be obtained by adding
up all 365 measurements for that city and dividing the answer by 365.0.

11. Suppose that a class, Employee, is defined as follows:

class Employee {
String lastName;
String firstName;
double hourlyWage;
int yearsWithCompany;
}
Suppose that data about 100 employees is already stored in an array:
Employee[] employeeData = new Employee[100];
Write a code segment that will output the first name, last name, and hourly wage of each
employee who has been with the company for 20 years or more. Write two versions of the
code segment, one that uses a regular for loop, and one that uses a for-each loop.

12.
Convert the Employee class from the previous question into a record class. What
changes would then need to be made to the previous question’s solution?

13.
Write a record class to represent dates, where a Date object contains three integer fields
giving the month, day, and year of the date. The canonical constructor should throw an
exception if the values for the month and day are not legal. Also include a toString()
method that prints a date in a form such as “5/27/2022”.

14. What is the purpose of the following subroutine? What is the meaning of the value that
it returns, in terms of the value of its parameter?
static double[] sums( double[][] data ) {
double[] answers = new double[ data.length ];
for (int i = 0; i < data.length; i++) {
double sum = 0;
for (int j = 0; j < data[i].length; i++)
sum = sum + data[i][j];
answers[i] = sum;
}
return answers;
}
Chapter 8

Correctness, Robustness, Efficiency

In previous chapters, we have covered programming fundamentals. The chapters that

follow this one will cover more advanced aspects of programming. The ideas that are presented
will generally be more complex and the programs that use them a little more complicated. This
relatively short chapter is a kind of turning point in which we look at the problem of getting
such complex programs right.
Computer programs that fail are much too common. Programs are fragile. A tiny error
can cause a program to misbehave or crash. Most of us are familiar with this from our own
experience with computers. And we’ve all heard stories about software glitches that cause
spacecraft to crash, web sites to go offline, telephone service to fail, and, in a few cases, people
to die.
Programs don’t have to be as bad as they are. It might well be impossible to guarantee
that programs are problem-free, but careful programming and well-designed programming tools
can help keep the problems to a minimum. This chapter will look at issues of correctness and
robustness of programs. Section 8.2 discusses how you can think about and analyze programs
to make the programs that you write more likely to be correct—possibly even provably correct.
Section 8.3 looks more closely at exceptions and the try..catch statement, and Section 8.4
introduces assertions, another of the tools that Java provides as an aid in writing correct
programs.
In Section 8.5, we look at another issue that is important for programs in the real world:
efficiency. Even a completely correct program is not very useful if it takes an unreasonable
amount of time to run. The last section of this chapter introduces techniques for analyzing the
run time efficiency of algorithms.
Some of the topics in this chapter are the topics of advanced courses in computer science,
and only a brief overview can be given here. But what you do learn here will be useful in the
rest of the book.

8.1 Introduction to Correctness and Robustness

A program is correct if it accomplishes the task that it was designed to perform. It is robust
if it can handle illegal inputs and other unexpected situations in a reasonable way. For example,
consider a program that is designed to read some numbers from the user and then print the
same numbers in sorted order. The program is correct if it works for any set of input numbers.
It is robust if it can also deal with non-numeric input by, for example, printing an error message
and ignoring the bad input. A non-robust program might crash or give nonsensical output in

401
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 402

the same circumstance.

Every program should be correct. (A sorting program that doesn’t sort correctly is pretty
useless.) It’s not the case that every program needs to be completely robust. It depends on
who will use it and how it will be used. For example, a small utility program that you write
for your own use doesn’t have to be particularly robust.
The question of correctness is actually more subtle than it might appear. A programmer
works from a specification of what the program is supposed to do. The programmer’s work is
correct if the program meets its specification. But does that mean that the program itself is
correct? What if the specification is incorrect or incomplete? A correct program should be a
correct implementation of a complete and correct specification. The question is whether the
specification correctly expresses the intention and desires of the people for whom the program
is being written. This is a question that lies largely outside the domain of computer science.

8.1.1 Horror Stories

Most computer users have personal experience with programs that don’t work or that crash. In
many cases, such problems are just annoyances, but even on a personal computer there can be
more serious consequences, such as lost work or lost money. When computers are given more
important tasks, the consequences of failure can be proportionately more serious.
About twenty-three years ago, the failure of two multi-million dollar space missions to Mars
was prominent in the news. Both failures were probably due to software problems, but in both
cases the problem was not with an incorrect program as such. In September 1999, the Mars
Climate Orbiter burned up in the Martian atmosphere because data that was expressed in
English units of measurement (such as feet and pounds) was entered into a computer program
that was designed to use metric units (such as centimeters and grams). A few months later,
the Mars Polar Lander probably crashed because its software turned off its landing engines too
soon. The program was supposed to detect the bump when the spacecraft landed and turn
off the engines then. It has been determined that deployment of the landing gear might have
jarred the spacecraft enough to activate the program, causing it to turn off the engines when
the spacecraft was still high above the ground. The unpowered spacecraft would then have
fallen to the Martian surface. A more robust system would have checked the altitude before
turning off the engines!
There are many equally dramatic stories of problems caused by incorrect or poorly written
software. Let’s look at a few incidents recounted in the book Computer Ethics by Tom Forester
and Perry Morrison. (This book covers various ethical issues in computing. It, or something
like it, is essential reading for any student of computer science.)
• In 1985 and 1986, one person was killed and several were injured by excess radiation, while
undergoing radiation treatments by a mis-programmed computerized radiation machine.
In another case, over a ten-year period ending in 1992, almost 1,000 cancer patients
received radiation dosages that were 30% less than prescribed because of a programming
error.
• In 1985, a computer at the Bank of New York started destroying records of on-going
security transactions because of an error in a program. It took less than 24 hours to fix
the program, but by that time, the bank was out $5,000,000 in overnight interest payments
on funds that it had to borrow to cover the problem.
• The programming of the inertial guidance system of the F-16 fighter plane would have
turned the plane upside-down when it crossed the equator, if the problem had not been
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 403

discovered in simulation. The Mariner 18 space probe was lost because of an error in one
line of a program. The Gemini V space capsule missed its scheduled landing target by
a hundred miles, because a programmer forgot to take into account the rotation of the
Earth.
• In 1990, AT&T’s long-distance telephone service was disrupted throughout the United
States when a newly loaded computer program proved to contain a bug.
Of course, there have been more recent problems. For example, computer software error
contributed to the Northeast Blackout of 2003, one of the largest power outages in history. In
2006, the Airbus A380 was delayed by software incompatibility problems, at a cost of perhaps
billions of dollars. In 2007, a software problem grounded thousands of planes at the Los Angeles
International Airport. On May 6, 2010, a flaw in an automatic trading program apparently
resulted in a 1000-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
These are just a few examples. Software problems are all too common. As programmers,
we need to understand why that is true and what can be done about it.

8.1.2 Java to the Rescue

Part of the problem, according to the inventors of Java, can be traced to programming languages
themselves. Java was designed to provide some protection against certain types of errors. How
can a language feature help prevent errors? Let’s look at a few examples.
Some programming languages do not require variables to be declared. In such languages,
when a variable name is used in a program, the variable is created automatically. You might
consider this more convenient than having to declare every variable explicitly, but there is an
unfortunate consequence: An inadvertent spelling error might introduce an extra variable that
you had no intention of creating. This type of error was responsible, according to one famous
story, for yet another lost spacecraft. In the FORTRAN programming language, the command “DO
20 I = 1,5” is the first statement of a counting loop. Now, spaces are insignificant in FORTRAN,
so this is equivalent to “DO20I=1,5”. On the other hand, the command “DO20I=1.5”, with a
period instead of a comma, is an assignment statement that assigns the value 1.5 to the variable
DO20I. Supposedly, the inadvertent substitution of a period for a comma in a statement of this
type caused a rocket to blow up on take-off. Because FORTRAN doesn’t require variables to be
declared, the compiler would be happy to accept the statement “DO20I=1.5.” It would just
create a new variable named DO20I. If FORTRAN required variables to be declared, the compiler
would have complained that the variable DO20I was undeclared.
While most programming languages today do require variables to be declared, there are
other features in common programming languages that can cause problems. Java has eliminated
some of these features. Some people complain that this makes Java less efficient and less
powerful. While there is some justice in this criticism, the increase in security and robustness is
probably worth the cost in most circumstances. The best defense against some types of errors
is to design a programming language in which the errors are impossible. In other cases, where
the error can’t be completely eliminated, the language can be designed so that when the error
does occur, it will automatically be detected. This will at least prevent the error from causing
further harm, and it will alert the programmer that there is a bug that needs fixing. Let’s look
at a few cases where the designers of Java have taken these approaches.
An array is created with a certain number of locations, numbered from zero up to some
specified maximum index. It is an error to try to use an array location that is outside of the
specified range. In Java, any attempt to do so is detected automatically by the system. In some
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 404

other languages, such as C and C++, it’s up to the programmer to make sure that the index
is within the legal range. Suppose that an array, A, has three locations, A[0], A[1], and A[2].
Then A[3], A[4], and so on refer to memory locations beyond the end of the array. In Java,
an attempt to store data in A[3] will be detected. The program will be terminated (unless the
error is “caught”, as discussed in Section 3.7). In C or C++, the computer will just go ahead
and store the data in memory that is not part of the array. Since there is no telling what that
memory location is being used for, the result will be unpredictable. The consequences could
be much more serious than a terminated program. (See, for example, the discussion of buffer
overflow errors later in this section.)
Pointers are a notorious source of programming errors. In Java, a variable of object type
holds either a pointer to an object or the special value null. Any attempt to use a null
value as if it were a pointer to an actual object will be detected by the system. In some other
languages, again, it’s up to the programmer to avoid such null pointer errors. In my first
Macintosh computer, a long time ago, a null pointer was actually implemented as if it were a
pointer to memory location zero. A program could use a null pointer to change values stored
in memory near location zero. Unfortunately, the Macintosh stored important system data in
those locations. Changing that data could cause the whole system to crash, a consequence more
severe than a single failed program.
Another type of pointer error occurs when a pointer value is pointing to an object of the
wrong type or to a segment of memory that does not even hold a valid object at all. These
types of errors are impossible in Java, which does not allow programmers to manipulate pointers
directly. In other languages, it is possible to set a pointer to point, essentially, to any location
in memory. If this is done incorrectly, then using the pointer can have unpredictable results.
Another type of error that cannot occur in Java is a memory leak. In Java, once there are
no longer any pointers that refer to an object, that object is “garbage collected” so that the
memory that it occupied can be reused. In other languages, it is the programmer’s responsibility
to return unused memory to the system. If the programmer fails to do this, unused memory
can build up, leaving less memory for programs and data. There is a story that many common
programs for older Windows computers had so many memory leaks that the computer would
run out of memory after a few days of use and would have to be restarted.
Many programs have been found to suffer from buffer overflow errors. Buffer overflow
errors often make the news because they are responsible for many network security problems.
When one computer receives data from another computer over a network, that data is stored in
a buffer. The buffer is just a segment of memory that has been allocated by a program to hold
data that it expects to receive. A buffer overflow occurs when more data is received than will
fit in the buffer. The question is, what happens then? If the error is detected by the program
or by the networking software, then the only thing that has happened is a failed network
data transmission. The real problem occurs when the software does not properly detect buffer
overflows. In that case, the software continues to store data in memory even after the buffer is
filled, and the extra data goes into some part of memory that was not allocated by the program
as part of the buffer. That memory might be in use for some other purpose. It might contain
important data. It might even contain part of the program itself. This is where the real security
issues come in. Suppose that a buffer overflow causes part of a program to be replaced with
extra data received over a network. When the computer goes to execute the part of the program
that was replaced, it’s actually executing data that was received from another computer. That
data could be anything. It could be a program that crashes the computer or takes it over. A
malicious programmer who finds a convenient buffer overflow error in networking software can
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 405

try to exploit that error to trick other computers into executing his programs.
For software written completely in Java, buffer overflow errors are impossible. The language
simply does not provide any way to store data into memory that has not been properly allocated.
To do that, you would need a pointer that points to unallocated memory or you would have
to refer to an array location that lies outside the range allocated for the array. As explained
above, neither of these is possible in Java. (However, there could conceivably still be errors in
Java’s standard classes, since some of the methods in these classes are actually written in the
C programming language rather than in Java. In fact, Java’s internal security errors have at
times been a problem for the language.)
It’s clear that language design can help prevent errors or detect them when they occur.
Doing so involves restricting what a programmer is allowed to do. Or it requires tests, such as
checking whether a pointer is null, that take some extra processing time. Some programmers
feel that the sacrifice of power and efficiency is too high a price to pay for the extra security. In
some applications, this is true. However, there are many situations where safety and security
are primary considerations. Java is designed for such situations.

8.1.3 Problems Remain in Java

There is one area where the designers of Java chose not to detect errors automatically: numerical
computations. In Java, a value of type int is represented as a 32-bit binary number. With 32
bits, it’s possible to represent a little over four billion different values. The values of type int
range from -2147483648 to 2147483647. What happens when the result of a computation lies
outside this range? For example, what is 2147483647 + 1? And what is 2000000000 * 2? The
mathematically correct result in each case cannot be represented as a value of type int. These
are examples of integer overflow . In most cases, integer overflow should be considered an
error. However, Java does not automatically detect such errors. For example, it will compute
the value of 2147483647 + 1 to be the negative number, -2147483648. (What happens is
that any extra bits beyond the 32-nd bit in the correct answer are discarded. Values greater
than 2147483647 will “wrap around” to negative values. Mathematically speaking, the result
is always “correct modulo 232 .”)
For example, consider the 3N+1 program, which was discussed in Subsection 3.2.2. Starting
from a positive integer N, the program computes a certain sequence of integers:
while ( N != 1 ) {
if ( N % 2 == 0 ) // If N is even...
N = N / 2;
else
N = 3 * N + 1;
System.out.println(N);
}
But there is a problem here: If N is too large, then the value of 3*N+1 will not be mathematically
correct because of integer overflow. The problem arises whenever 3*N+1 > 2147483647, that is
when N > 2147483646/3. For a completely correct program, we should check for this possibility
before computing 3*N+1:
while ( N != 1 ) {
if ( N % 2 == 0 ) // If N is even...
N = N / 2;
else {
if (N > 2147483646/3) {
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 406

System.out.println("Sorry, but the value of N has become");

System.out.println("too large for your computer!");
break;
}
N = 3 * N + 1;
}
System.out.println(N);
}
(Be sure you understand why we can’t just test “if (3*N+1 > 2147483647)”.) The
problem here is not that the original algorithm for computing 3N+1 sequences was wrong. The
problem is that it just can’t be correctly implemented using 32-bit integers. Many programs
ignore this type of problem. But integer overflow errors have been responsible for their share
of serious computer failures, and a completely robust program should take the possibility of
integer overflow into account. (The infamous “Y2K” bug at the start of the year 2000 was, in
fact, just this sort of error.)
For numbers of type double, there are even more problems. There are still overflow errors,
which occur when the result of a computation is outside the range of values that can be
represented as a value of type double. This range extends up to about 1.7 times 10 to the
power 308. Numbers beyond this range do not “wrap around” to negative values. Instead, they
are represented by special values that have no real numerical equivalent. The special values
Double.POSITIVE INFINITY and Double.NEGATIVE INFINITY represent numbers outside the
range of legal values. For example, 20 * 1e308 is computed to be Double.POSITIVE INFINITY.
Another special value of type double, Double.NaN, represents an illegal or undefined result.
(“NaN” stands for “Not a Number”.) For example, the result of dividing zero by zero or taking
the square root of a negative number is Double.NaN. You can test whether a number x is this
special not-a-number value by calling the boolean-valued function Double.isNaN(x).
For real numbers, there is the added complication that most real numbers can only be
represented approximately on a computer. A real number can have an infinite number of digits
after the decimal point. A value of type double is only accurate to about 15 digits. The real
number 1/3, for example, is the repeating decimal 0.333333333333..., and there is no way to
represent it exactly using a finite number of digits. Computations with real numbers generally
involve a loss of accuracy. In fact, if care is not exercised, the result of a large number of such
computations might be completely wrong! There is a whole field of computer science, known as
numerical analysis, which is devoted to studying algorithms that manipulate real numbers.
So you see that not all possible errors are avoided or detected automatically in Java.
Furthermore, even when an error is detected automatically, the system’s default response is
to report the error and terminate the program. This is hardly robust behavior! So, a Java
programmer still needs to learn techniques for avoiding and dealing with errors. These are the
main topics of the next three sections.

8.2 Writing Correct Programs

Correct programs don’t just happen. It takes planning and attention to detail to avoid
errors in programs. There are some techniques that programmers can use to increase the
likelihood that their programs are correct.
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 407

8.2.1 Provably Correct Programs

In some cases, it is possible to prove that a program is correct. That is, it is possible to
demonstrate mathematically that the sequence of computations represented by the program
will always produce the correct result. Rigorous proof is difficult enough that in practice it can
only be applied to fairly small programs. Furthermore, it depends on the fact that the “correct
result” has been specified correctly and completely. As I’ve already pointed out, a program
that correctly meets its specification is not useful if its specification was wrong. Nevertheless,
even in everyday programming, we can apply some of the ideas and techniques that are used
in proving that programs are correct.
The fundamental ideas are process and state. A state consists of all the information
relevant to the execution of a program at a given moment during its execution. The state
includes, for example, the values of all the variables in the program, the output that has been
produced, any input that is waiting to be read, and a record of the position in the program
where the computer is working. A process is the sequence of states that the computer goes
through as it executes the program. From this point of view, the meaning of a statement in a
program can be expressed in terms of the effect that the execution of that statement has on the
computer’s state. As a simple example, the meaning of the assignment statement “x = 7;” is
that after this statement is executed, the value of the variable x will be 7. We can be absolutely
sure of this fact, so it is something upon which we can build part of a mathematical proof.
In fact, it is often possible to look at a program and deduce that some fact must be true at
a given point during the execution of a program. For example, consider the do loop:
do {
System.out.print("Enter a positive integer: ");
N = TextIO.getlnInt();
} while (N <= 0);
After this loop ends, we can be absolutely sure that the value of the variable N is greater than
zero. The loop cannot end until this condition is satisfied. This fact is part of the meaning of
the while loop. More generally, if a while loop uses the test “while (hcondition i)”, and if
there are no break statements in the loop, then after the loop ends, we can be sure that the
hcondition i is false. We can then use this fact to draw further deductions about what happens
as the execution of the program continues. (With a loop, by the way, we also have to worry
about the question of whether the loop will ever end. This is something that has to be verified
separately.)

8.2.2 Preconditions and Postconditions

A fact that can be proven to be true after a given program segment has been executed is called
a postcondition of that program segment. Postconditions are known facts upon which we can
build further deductions about the behavior of the program. A postcondition of a program as
a whole is simply a fact that can be proven to be true after the program has finished executing.
A program can be proven to be correct by showing that the postconditions of the program meet
the program’s specification.
Consider the following program segment, where all the variables are of type double:
disc = B*B - 4*A*C;
x = (-B + Math.sqrt(disc)) / (2*A);
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 408

The quadratic formula (from high-school mathematics) assures us that the value assigned to x
is a solution of the equation A*x2 + B*x + C = 0, provided that the value of disc is greater
than or equal to zero and the value of A is not zero. If we can guarantee that B*B-4*A*C >= 0
and that A != 0, then the fact that x is a solution of the equation becomes a postcondition
of the program segment. We say that the condition, B*B-4*A*C >= 0 is a precondition of
the program segment. The condition that A != 0 is another precondition. A precondition is
defined to be a condition that must be true at a given point in the execution of a program in
order for the program to continue correctly. A precondition is something that you want to be
true. It’s something that you have to check or force to be true, if you want your program to be
correct.
We’ve encountered preconditions and postconditions once before, in Subsection 4.7.1. That
section introduced preconditions and postconditions as a way of specifying the contract of
a subroutine. As the terms are being used here, a precondition of a subroutine is just a
precondition of the code that makes up the definition of the subroutine, and the postcondition
of a subroutine is a postcondition of the same code. In this section, we have generalized these
terms to make them more useful in talking about program correctness in general.
Let’s see how this works by considering a longer program segment:
do {
System.out.println("Enter A, B, and C.");
System.out.println("A must be non-zero and B*B-4*A*C must be >= 0.");
System.out.print("A = ");
A = TextIO.getlnDouble();
System.out.print("B = ");
B = TextIO.getlnDouble();
System.out.print("C = ");
C = TextIO.getlnDouble();
if (A == 0 || B*B - 4*A*C < 0)
System.out.println("Your input is illegal. Try again.");
} while (A == 0 || B*B - 4*A*C < 0);
disc = B*B - 4*A*C;
x = (-B + Math.sqrt(disc)) / (2*A);
After the loop ends, we can be sure that B*B-4*A*C >= 0 and that A != 0. The preconditions
for the last two lines are fulfilled, so the postcondition that x is a solution of the equation
A*x2 + B*x + C = 0 is also valid. This program segment correctly and provably computes a
solution to the equation. (Actually, because of problems with representing real numbers on
computers, this is not 100% true. The algorithm is correct, but the program is not a perfect
implementation of the algorithm. See the discussion in Subsection 8.1.3.)
Here is another variation, in which the precondition is checked by an if statement. In the
first part of the if statement, where a solution is computed and printed, we know that the
preconditions are fulfilled. In the other parts, we know that one of the preconditions fails to
hold. In any case, the program is correct.
System.out.println("Enter your values for A, B, and C.");
System.out.print("A = ");
A = TextIO.getlnDouble();
System.out.print("B = ");
B = TextIO.getlnDouble();
System.out.print("C = ");
C = TextIO.getlnDouble();
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 409

if (A != 0 && B*B - 4*A*C >= 0) {

disc = B*B - 4*A*C;
x = (-B + Math.sqrt(disc)) / (2*A);
System.out.println("A solution of A*X*X + B*X + C = 0 is " + x);
}
else if (A == 0) {
System.out.println("The value of A cannot be zero.");
}
else {
System.out.println("Since B*B - 4*A*C is less than zero, the");
System.out.println("equation A*X*X + B*X + C = 0 has no solution.");
}
Whenever you write a program, it’s a good idea to watch out for preconditions and think
about how your program handles them. Often, a precondition can offer a clue about how to
write the program.
For example, every array reference, such as A[i], has a precondition: The index must
be within the range of legal indices for the array. For A[i], the precondition is that 0 <= i
< A.length. The computer will check this condition when it evaluates A[i], and if the condition
is not satisfied, the program will be terminated. In order to avoid this, you need to make sure
that the index has a legal value. (There is actually another precondition, namely that A is not
null, but let’s leave that aside for the moment.) Consider the following code, which searches
for the number x in the array A and sets the value of i to be the index of the array element
that contains x:
i = 0;
while (A[i] != x) {
i++;
}
As this program segment stands, it has a precondition, namely that x is actually in the array.
If this precondition is satisfied, then the loop will end when A[i] == x. That is, the value of
i when the loop ends will be the position of x in the array. However, if x is not in the array,
then the value of i will just keep increasing until it is equal to A.length. At that time, the
reference to A[i] is illegal and the program will be terminated. To avoid this, we can add a
test to make sure that the precondition for referring to A[i] is satisfied:
i = 0;
while (i < A.length && A[i] != x) {
i++;
}
Now, the loop will definitely end. After it ends, i will satisfy either i == A.length or
A[i] == x. An if statement can be used after the loop to test which of these conditions
caused the loop to end:
i = 0;
while (i < A.length && A[i] != x) {
i++;
}
if (i == A.length)
System.out.println("x is not in the array");
else
System.out.println("x is in position " + i);
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 410

8.2.3 Invariants
Let’s look at how loops work in more detail. Consider a subroutine for finding the sum of the
elements in an array of int:
static int arraySum( int[] A ) {
int total = 0;
int i = 0;
while ( i < A.length ) {
total = total + A[i];
i = i + 1;
}
return total;
}
(Note, by the way, that the requirements that A is not null is a precondition of the subroutine.
If it is violated, the code in the subroutine will throw a NullPointerException.)
How can we be sure that this subroutine works? We need to prove that when the return
statement is executed, the value of total is the sum of all the elements in A. One way to think
about this problem is in terms of loop invariants.
A loop invariant is, roughly, a statement that remains true as the loop is executed. More
precisely, we can show that a statement is an invariant for a loop if the following holds: As
long as the statement is true before the code inside the loop is executed, then it will also
be true after the code inside the loop has been executed. That is, a loop invariant is both a
precondition and a postcondition of the body of the loop.
A loop invariant for the loop in the above subroutine is, “total is equal to the sum of the
first i elements of A.” Suppose this is true at the beginning of the while loop. That is, before
the statement “total = total + A[i]” is executed, total is the sum of the first i elements of
the array (namely A[0] through A[i-1]). After A[i] is added to total, total is now the sum
of the first i+1 elements of the array. At this point, the loop invariant is not true. However, as
soon as the next statement, “i = i + 1” is executed, replacing i with i+1, the loop invariant
becomes true again. We have checked that if the loop invariant is true at the start of the body
of the loop, then is also true at the end.
Note that a loop invariant is not necessarily true at every point during the execution of
a loop. Executing one of the statements in the loop can make it false temporarily, as long as
later statements in the loop make it true again.
So, have we proved that the subroutine arraySum() is correct? Not quite. There are still a
few things to check. First of all, we need to make sure that the loop invariant is true before the
very first time the loop is executed. At that point, i is zero, and total is also equal to zero,
which is the correct sum of zero elements. So the loop invariant is true before the loop. Once
we know that, we know that it remains true after each execution of the loop (because it’s an
invariant), and in particular, we know that it will still be true after the loop ends.
But for that to do us any good, we need to check that the loop actually does end! In each
execution of the loop, the value of i goes up by one. That means that eventually it has to
reach A.length. At that point, the condition in the while loop is false, and the loop ends.
After the loop ends, we know that i equals A.length, and we know that the loop invariant
is true. At that point, since i is A.length, the loop invariant says, “total is the sum of the
first A.length” elements of A.” But that includes all of the elements of A. So, the loop invariant
gives us exactly what we wanted to show: When total is returned by the subroutine, it is equal
to the sum of all the elements of the array!
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 411

This might seem to you to be a lot of work to prove something that’s obvious. But if you
try to explain why it’s obvious that arraySum() works, you’ll probably find yourself using the
logic behind loop invariants, even if you don’t use the term.
Let’s look more quickly at a similar example. Consider a subroutine that finds the maximum
value in an array of int, where we assume that the array has length at least one:
static int maxInArray( int[] A ) {
int max = A[0];
int i = 1;
while ( i < A.length ) {
if ( A[i] > max )
max = A[i];
i = i + 1;
}
return max;
}
In this case, we have a loop invariant that says, “max is the largest value among the first i
elements of A.” This statement is true before the loop starts, when i is 1 and max is A[0].
Suppose it is true at the start of the loop, before the if statement. After the if statement, max
is greater than or equal to A[i], because that is a postcondition of the if statement, and it is
greater than or equal to A[0] through A[i-1], because of the truth of the loop invariant. Put
those two facts together, and you get that max is the largest value among the first i+1 elements
of A. When i is replaced by i+1 in the next statement, the loop invariant becomes true again.
After the loop ends, i is A.length, and the loop invariant tells us exactly what we need to
know: max is the largest value in the whole array.
Loop invariants are not just useful for proving that programs are correct. Thinking in terms
of loop invariants can be useful when you are trying to develop an algorithm. As an example,
let’s look at the insertion sort algorithm that was discussed in Subsection 7.5.3. Suppose that
we want to sort an array A. That is, at the end of the algorithm, we want it to be true that
A[0] <= A[1] <= ... <= A[A.length-1]
The question is, what step-by-step procedure can we use to make this statement true? Well,
can we come up with a loop invariant that, at the end, will become the statement that we want
to be true? If we want all of the elements to be sorted at the end, how about a loop invariant
that says that some of the elements are sorted—say, that the first i elements are sorted. This
leads to an outline for the algorithm:
i = 0;
while (i < A.length ) {
// Loop invariant: A[0] <= A[1] <= ... <= A[i-1]
.
. // Code that adds A[i] to the sorted portion of the array
.
i = i + 1;
}
// At this point, i = A.length, and A[0] <= A[1] <= ... <= A[A.length-1]
The loop invariant is true before the while loop, and when the loop ends, the loop invariant
becomes precisely the statement that we want to be true at the end of the algorithm. We know
what we have to do to complete the algorithm: Develop code for the inside of the loop that
will preserve the truth of the loop invariant. If we can do that, the loop invariant will assure
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 412

us that the algorithm that we have developed is correct. The algorithm for adding A[i] to the
sorted portion of the array will require its own loop, with its own loop invariant. I’ll leave you
to think about that.
∗ ∗ ∗
There is another kind of invariant that is useful for thinking about programs: class
invariants. A class invariant is, roughly, a statement that is always true about the state
of a class, or about objects created from that class. For example, suppose we have a PairOfDice
class in which the values shown on the dice are stored in instance variables die1 and die2.
(See Section 5.2 for a variety of such classes.) We might like to have a class invariant that says,
“the values of die1 and die2 are in the range 1 through 6.” (This would be a statement about
any object created from the PairOfDice class, not about the class as such.) After all, this is a
statement that should always be true about any pair of dice.
But in order to be a class invariant, the statement has to be guaranteed true at all times.
If die1 and die2 are public instance variables, then no such guarantee is possible, since there
is no way to control what values a program that uses the class might assign to them. So,
we are led to make die1 and die2 private. Then we just have to make sure that all of the
code in the class definition respects the class invariant. That is, first of all, when a PairOfDice
object is constructed, the variables die1 and die2 must be initialized to be in the range 1 to 6.
Furthermore, every method in the class must preserve the truth of the class invariant. In this
case, that means that any method that assigns a value to die1 or die2 must ensure that the
value is in the range 1 to 6. For example, a setter method would have to check that a legal
value is being assigned.
In general, we can say that a class invariant is a postcondition of every constructor and is
both a precondition and a postcondition of every method in the class. When you are writing
a class, a class invariant is something that you want to be true at all times. When you write a
method, you need to make sure that the code in that method respects the invariant: Assuming
that the class invariant is true when the method in called, you need to ensure that it will still
be true after the code in the method is executed. This kind of thinking can be a very useful
tool for class design.
As another example, consider a dynamic array class, like the one in Subsection 7.2.4. That
class uses an ordinary array to store values and a counter to keep track of how many items have
been added to the dyanmic array:
private int[] items = new int[8];
private int itemCount = 0;
Class invariants include the facts that “itemCount is the number of items,” that
“0 <= itemCount < items.length,” and that “the items are in the array elements items[0]
through items[itemCount-1].” Keeping these invariants in mind can be helpful when writing
the class. When writing a method for adding an item, the first invariant reminds you to incre-
ment itemCount in order to ensure that the invariant remains true. The second invariant tells
you where the new item has to be stored. And the third invariant tells you that if increment-
ing itemCount makes it equal to items.length, then you will need to do something to avoid
violating the invariant. (Since itemCount has to be incremented, the invariant means that you
will have to make the array bigger.)
In future chapters, I will occasionally point out how it can be useful to think in terms of
preconditions, postconditions, and invariants.
I should note that reasoning about invariants becomes much more complicated in parallel
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 413

programs, when several threads that are running at the same time and are accessing the same
data. This will be an issue when we encounter threads in Chapter 12.

8.2.4 Robust Handling of Input

One place where correctness and robustness are important—and especially difficult—is in the
processing of input data, whether that data is typed in by the user, read from a file, or received
over a network. Files and networking will be covered in Chapter 11, which will make essential
use of material that will be covered in the next section of this chapter. For now, let’s look at
an example of processing user input.
Examples in this textbook use my TextIO class for reading input from the user. This class
has built-in error handling. For example, the function TextIO.getDouble() is guaranteed to
return a legal value of type double. If the user types an illegal value, then TextIO will ask
the user to re-enter their response; your program never sees the illegal value. However, this
approach can be clumsy and unsatisfactory, especially when the user is entering complex data.
In the following example, I’ll do my own error-checking.
Sometimes, it’s useful to be able to look ahead at what’s coming up in the input without
actually reading it. For example, a program might need to know whether the next item in
the input is a number or a word. For this purpose, the TextIO class includes the function
TextIO.peek(). This function returns a char which is the next character in the user’s input,
but it does not actually read that character. If the next thing in the input is an end-of-line,
then TextIO.peek() returns the new-line character, ’\n’.
Often, what we really need to know is the next non-blank character in the user’s input.
Before we can test this, we need to skip past any spaces (and tabs). Here is a function that does
this. It uses TextIO.peek() to look ahead, and it reads characters until the next character in the
input is either an end-of-line or some non-blank character. (The function TextIO.getAnyChar()
reads and returns the next character in the user’s input, even if that character is a space. By
contrast, the more common TextIO.getChar() would skip any blanks and then read and return
the next non-blank character. We can’t use TextIO.getChar() here since the object is to skip
the blanks without reading the next non-blank character.)
/**
* Reads past any blanks and tabs in the input.
* Postcondition: The next character in the input is an
* end-of-line or a non-blank character.
*/
static void skipBlanks() {
char ch;
ch = TextIO.peek();
while (ch == ’ ’ || ch == ’\t’) {
// Next character is a space or tab; read it
// and look at the character that follows it.
ch = TextIO.getAnyChar();
ch = TextIO.peek();
}
} // end skipBlanks()
(In fact, this operation is so common that it is built into TextIO. The method
TextIO.skipBlanks() does essentially the same thing as the skipBlanks() method presented
here.)
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 414

An example in Subsection 3.5.3 allowed the user to enter length measurements such as “3
miles” or “1ft”. It would then convert the measurement into inches, feet, yards, and miles.
But people commonly use combined measurements such as “3 feet 7 inches”. Let’s improve the
program so that it allows inputs of this form.
More specifically, the user will input lines containing one or more measurements such as “1
foot” or “3 miles 20 yards 2 feet”. The legal units of measure are inch, foot, yard, and mile.
The program will also recognize plurals (inches, feet, yards, miles) and abbreviations (in, ft,
yd, mi). Let’s write a subroutine that will read one line of input of this form and compute
the equivalent number of inches. The main program uses the number of inches to compute the
equivalent number of feet, yards, and miles. If there is any error in the input, the subroutine
will print an error message and return the value -1. The subroutine assumes that the input
line is not empty. The main program tests for this before calling the subroutine and uses an
empty line as a signal for ending the program.
Ignoring the possibility of illegal inputs, a pseudocode algorithm for the subroutine is
inches = 0 // This will be the total number of inches
while there is more input on the line:
read the numerical measurement
read the units of measure
add the measurement to inches
return inches
We can test whether there is more input on the line by checking whether the next non-blank
character is the end-of-line character. But this test has a precondition: We have to make sure
that the next character in the input is in fact either an end-of-line or is a non-blank. To ensure
that, we need to skip over any blank characters. So, the algorithm becomes
inches = 0
skipBlanks()
while TextIO.peek() is not ’\n’:
read the numerical measurement
read the unit of measure
add the measurement to inches
skipBlanks()
return inches
Note the call to skipBlanks() at the end of the while loop. The call to skipBlanks() ensures
that the precondition for the test is again true. More generally, if the test in a while loop has a
precondition, then you have to make sure that this precondition holds at the end of the while
loop, before the computer jumps back to re-evaluate the test, as well as before the start of the
loop.
What about error checking? Before reading the numerical measurement, we have to make
sure that there is really a number there to read. Before reading the unit of measure, we have
to test that there is something there to read. (The number might have been the last thing on
the line. An input such as “3”, without a unit of measure, is not acceptable.) Also, we have to
check that the unit of measure is one of the valid units: inches, feet, yards, or miles. Here is
an algorithm that includes error-checking:
inches = 0
skipBlanks()
while TextIO.peek() is not ’\n’:
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 415

if the next character is not a digit:

report an error and return -1
Let measurement = TextIO.getDouble();
skipBlanks() // Precondition for the next test!!
if the next character is end-of-line:
report an error and return -1
Let units = TextIO.getWord()
if the units are inches:
add measurement to inches
else if the units are feet:
add 12*measurement to inches
else if the units are yards:
add 36*measurement to inches
else if the units are miles:
add 12*5280*measurement to inches
else
report an error and return -1
skipBlanks()
return inches
As you can see, error-testing adds significantly to the complexity of the algorithm. Yet
this is still a fairly simple example, and it doesn’t even handle all the possible errors. For
example, if the user enters a numerical measurement such as 1e400 that is outside the legal
range of values of type double, then the program will fall back on the default error-handling
in TextIO. Something even more interesting happens if the measurement is “1e308 miles”. The
number 1e308 is legal, but the corresponding number of inches is outside the legal range of
values for type double. As mentioned in the previous section, the computer will get the value
Double.POSITIVE INFINITY when it does the computation. You might want to run the program
and try this out.
Here is the subroutine written out in Java:
/**
* Reads the user’s input measurement from one line of input.
* Precondition: The input line is not empty.
* Postcondition: If the user’s input is legal, the measurement
* is converted to inches and returned. If the
* input is not legal, the value -1 is returned.
* The end-of-line is NOT read by this routine.
*/
static double readMeasurement() {
double inches; // Total number of inches in user’s measurement.
double measurement; // One measurement,
// such as the 12 in "12 miles"
String units; // The units specified for the measurement,
// such as "miles"
char ch; // Used to peek at next character in the user’s input.
inches = 0; // No inches have yet been read.
skipBlanks();
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 416

ch = TextIO.peek();
/* As long as there is more input on the line, read a measurement and
add the equivalent number of inches to the variable, inches. If an
error is detected during the loop, end the subroutine immediately
by returning -1. */
while (ch != ’\n’) {
/* Get the next measurement and the units. Before reading
anything, make sure that a legal value is there to read. */
if ( ! Character.isDigit(ch) ) {
System.out.println(
"Error: Expected to find a number, but found " + ch);
return -1;
}
measurement = TextIO.getDouble();
skipBlanks();
if (TextIO.peek() == ’\n’) {
System.out.println(
"Error: Missing unit of measure at end of line.");
return -1;
}
units = TextIO.getWord();
units = units.toLowerCase();
/* Convert the measurement to inches and add it to the total. */
if (units.equals("inch")
|| units.equals("inches") || units.equals("in")) {
inches += measurement;
}
else if (units.equals("foot")
|| units.equals("feet") || units.equals("ft")) {
inches += measurement * 12;
}
else if (units.equals("yard")
|| units.equals("yards") || units.equals("yd")) {
inches += measurement * 36;
}
else if (units.equals("mile")
|| units.equals("miles") || units.equals("mi")) {
inches += measurement * 12 * 5280;
}
else {
System.out.println("Error: \"" + units
+ "\" is not a legal unit of measure.");
return -1;
}
/* Look ahead to see whether the next thing on the line is
the end-of-line. */
skipBlanks();
ch = TextIO.peek();
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 417

} // end while
return inches;
} // end readMeasurement()

The source code for the complete program can be found in the file LengthConverter2.java.

8.3 Exceptions and try..catch

Getting a program to work under ideal circumstances is usually a lot easier than making
the program robust. A robust program can survive unusual or “exceptional” circumstances
without crashing. One approach to writing robust programs is to anticipate the problems that
might arise and to include tests in the program for each possible problem. For example, a
program will crash if it tries to use an array element A[i], when i is not within the declared
range of indices for the array A. A robust program must anticipate the possibility of a bad index
and guard against it. One way to do this is to write the program in a way that ensures (as a
postcondition of the code that precedes the array reference) that the index is in the legal range.
Another way is to test whether the index value is legal before using it in the array. This could
be done with an if statement:
if (i < 0 || i >= A.length) {
... // Do something to handle the out-of-range index, i
}
else {
... // Process the array element, A[i]
}
There are some problems with this approach. It is difficult and sometimes impossible to
anticipate all the possible things that might go wrong. It’s not always clear what to do when
an error is detected. Furthermore, trying to anticipate all the possible problems can turn what
would otherwise be a straightforward algorithm into a messy tangle of if statements.

8.3.1 Exceptions and Exception Classes

We have already seen in Section 3.7 that Java provides a neater, more structured alternative
technique for dealing with errors that can occur while a program is running. The technique is
referred to as exception handling . The word “exception” is meant to be more general than
“error.” It includes any circumstance that arises as the program is executed which is meant to
be treated as an exception to the normal flow of control of the program. An exception might
be an error, or it might just be a special case that you would rather not have clutter up your
elegant algorithm.
When an exception occurs during the execution of a program, we say that the exception
is thrown. When this happens, the normal flow of the program is thrown off-track, and the
program is in danger of crashing. However, the crash can be avoided if the exception is caught
and handled in some way. An exception can be thrown in one part of a program and caught
in a different part. An exception that is not caught will generally cause the program to crash.
(More exactly, the thread that throws the exception will crash. In a multithreaded program,
it is possible for other threads to continue even after one crashes. We will cover threads in
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 418

Chapter 12. In particular, GUI programs are multithreaded, and parts of the program might
continue to function even while other parts are non-functional because of exceptions.)
By the way, since Java programs are executed by a Java interpreter, having a program
crash simply means that it terminates abnormally and prematurely. It doesn’t mean that
the Java interpreter will crash. In effect, the interpreter catches any exceptions that are not
caught by the program. The interpreter responds by terminating the program. In many other
programming languages, a crashed program will sometimes crash the entire system and freeze
the computer until it is restarted. With Java, such system crashes should be impossible—which
means that when they happen, you have the satisfaction of blaming the system rather than
your own program.
Exceptions were introduced in Section 3.7, along with the try..catch statement, which is
used to catch and handle exceptions. However, that section did not cover the complete syntax
of try..catch or the full complexity of exceptions. In this section, we cover these topics in full
detail.
∗ ∗ ∗
When an exception occurs, the thing that is actually “thrown” is an object. This object
can carry information (in its instance variables) from the point where the exception occurs to
the point where it is caught and handled. This information always includes the subroutine
call stack , which is a list of the subroutines that were being executed when the exception was
thrown. (Since one subroutine can call another, several subroutines can be active at the same
time.) Typically, an exception object also includes an error message describing what happened
to cause the exception, and it can contain other data as well. All exception objects must belong
to a subclass of the standard class java.lang.Throwable. In general, each different type of
exception is represented by its own subclass of Throwable, and these subclasses are arranged in
a fairly complex class hierarchy that shows the relationship among various types of exception.
Throwable has two direct subclasses, Error and Exception. These two subclasses in turn have
many other predefined subclasses. In addition, a programmer can create new exception classes
to represent new types of exception.
Most of the subclasses of the class Error represent serious errors within the Java virtual
machine that should ordinarily cause program termination because there is no reasonable way
to handle them. In general, you should not try to catch and handle such errors. An example is
a ClassFormatError, which occurs when the Java virtual machine finds some kind of illegal data
in a file that is supposed to contain a compiled Java class. If that class was being loaded as
part of the program, then there is really no way for the program to proceed.
On the other hand, subclasses of the class Exception represent exceptions that are meant
to be caught. In many cases, these are exceptions that might naturally be called “errors,” but
they are errors in the program or in input data that a programmer can anticipate and possibly
respond to in some reasonable way. (However, you should avoid the temptation of saying, “Well,
I’ll just put a thing here to catch all the errors that might occur, so my program won’t crash.”
If you don’t have a reasonable way to respond to the error, it’s best just to let the program
crash, because trying to go on will probably only lead to worse things down the road—in the
worst case, a program that gives an incorrect answer without giving you any indication that
the answer might be wrong!)
The class Exception has its own subclass, RuntimeException. This class groups together
many common exceptions, including all those that have been covered in previous sections. For
example, IllegalArgumentException and NullPointerException are subclasses of RuntimeException.
A RuntimeException generally indicates a bug in the program, which the programmer should
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 419

fix. RuntimeExceptions and Errors share the property that a program can simply ignore
the possibility that they might occur. (“Ignoring” here means that you are content to
let your program crash if the exception occurs.) For example, a program does this
every time it uses an array reference like A[i] without making arrangements to catch
a possible ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException. For all other exception classes besides Error,
RuntimeException, and their subclasses, exception-handling is “mandatory” in a sense that
I’ll discuss below.
The following diagram is a class hierarchy showing the class Throwable and just a few of
its subclasses. Classes that require mandatory exception-handling are shown in red:

Throwable

Error Exception

RuntimeException InterruptedException IOException

EOFException SocketException

ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException

IllegalArgumentException
The class Throwable and
some of its subclasses.
NumberFormatException

The class Throwable includes several instance methods that can be used with any exception
object. If e is of type Throwable (or one of its subclasses), then e.getMessage() is a function
that returns a String that describes the exception. The function e.toString(), which is used by
the system whenever it needs a string representation of the object, returns a String that contains
the name of the class to which the exception belongs as well as the same string that would be
returned by e.getMessage(). And the method e.printStackTrace() writes a stack trace to
standard output that tells which subroutines were active when the exception occurred. A stack
trace can be very useful when you are trying to determine the cause of the problem. Information
in the stack trace can tell you exactly where in the program the exception occurred. (Note that
if an exception is not caught by the program, then the default response to the exception prints
the stack trace to standard output.)

8.3.2 The try Statement

To catch exceptions in a Java program, you need a try statement. We have been using such
statements since Section 3.7, but the full syntax of the try statement is more complicated than
what was presented there. The try statements that we have used so far had a syntax similar
to the following example:
try {
double determinant = M[0][0]*M[1][1] - M[0][1]*M[1][0];
System.out.println("The determinant of M is " + determinant);
}
catch ( ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException e ) {
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 420

System.out.println("M is the wrong size to have a determinant.");

e.printStackTrace();
}
Here, the computer tries to execute the block of statements following the word “try”. If no
exception occurs during the execution of this block, then the “catch” part of the statement
is simply ignored. However, if an exception of type ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException occurs,
then the computer jumps immediately to the catch clause of the try statement. This block
of statements is said to be an exception handler for ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException. By
handling the exception in this way, you prevent it from crashing the program. Before the body
of the catch clause is executed, the object that represents the exception is assigned to the
variable e, which is used in this example to print a stack trace.
However, the full syntax of the try statement has many options. It will take a while to go
through them. For one thing, a try..catch statement can have more than one catch clause.
This makes it possible to catch several different types of exception with one try statement.
In the above example, in addition to the possible ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException, there is a
possible NullPointerException which will occur if the value of M is null. We can handle both
possible exceptions by adding a second catch clause to the try statement:
try {
double determinant = M[0][0]*M[1][1] - M[0][1]*M[1][0];
System.out.println("The determinant of M is " + determinant);
}
catch ( ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException e ) {
System.out.println("M is the wrong size to have a determinant.");
}
catch ( NullPointerException e ) {
System.out.print("Programming error! M doesn’t exist." + );
}
Here, the computer tries to execute the statements in the try clause. If no error occurs, both
of the catch clauses are skipped. If an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException occurs, the computer
executes the body of the first catch clause and skips the second one. If a NullPointerException
occurs, it jumps to the second catch clause and executes that.
Note that both ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException and NullPointerException are subclasses of
RuntimeException. It’s possible to catch all RuntimeExceptions with a single catch clause. For
example:
try {
double determinant = M[0][0]*M[1][1] - M[0][1]*M[1][0];
System.out.println("The determinant of M is " + determinant);
}
catch ( RuntimeException err ) {
System.out.println("Sorry, an error has occurred.");
System.out.println("The error was: " + err);
}
The catch clause in this try statement will catch any exception belonging to class RuntimeEx-
ception or to any of its subclasses. This shows why exception classes are organized into a class
hierarchy. It allows you the option of casting your net narrowly to catch only a specific type
of exception. Or you can cast your net widely to catch a wide class of exceptions. Because
of subclassing, when there are multiple catch clauses in a try statement, it is possible that a
given exception might match several of those catch clauses. For example, an exception of type
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 421

NullPointerException would match catch clauses for NullPointerException, RuntimeException,

Exception, or Throwable. In this case, only the first catch clause that matches the exception
is executed.
Of course, catching RuntimeException would catch many more types of exception than the
two that we are interested in. It is possible to combine several specific exception types in a
single catch clause. For example,
try {
double determinant = M[0][0]*M[1][1] - M[0][1]*M[1][0];
System.out.println("The determinant of M is " + determinant);
}
catch ( NullPointerException | ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException err ) {
System.out.println("Sorry, an error has occurred.");
System.out.println("The error was: " + err);
}
Here, the two exception types are combined with a ”|”, the vertical line character that is also
used in the boolean or operator. This example will catch errors of type NullPointerException or
ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException, and no other types.
The example I’ve been using here is not realistic, because you are not very likely to use
exception-handling to guard against null pointers and bad array indices. This is a case where
careful programming is better than exception handling: Just be sure that your program assigns
a reasonable, non-null value to the array M. You would certainly resent it if the designers of
Java forced you to set up a try..catch statement every time you wanted to use an array!
This is why handling of potential RuntimeExceptions is not mandatory. There are just too
many things that might go wrong! (This also shows that exception-handling does not solve
the problem of program robustness. It just gives you a tool that will in many cases let you
approach the problem in a more organized way.)
∗ ∗ ∗
I have still not completely specified the syntax of the try statement. The next variation
is the possibility of a finally clause at the end of a try statement. With this addition, the
syntax of the try statement can be described as:
try {
hstatements i
}
hoptional-catch-clauses i
hoptional-finally-clause i
Note that the catch clauses are also listed as optional. The try statement can include zero or
more catch clauses and, optionally, a finally clause. The try statement must include one
or the other. That is, a try statement can have either a finally clause, or one or more catch
clauses, or both. The syntax for a catch clause is
catch ( hexception-class-names i hvariable-name i ) {
hstatements i
}
where hexception-class-namesi can be a single exception class or several classes separated by ”|”.
The syntax for a finally clause is
finally {
hstatements i
}
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 422

The semantics of the finally clause is that the block of statements in the finally clause is
guaranteed to be executed as the last step in the execution of the try statement, whether or not
any exception occurs and whether or not any exception that does occur is caught and handled.
The finally clause is meant for doing essential cleanup that under no circumstances should
be omitted. One example of this type of cleanup is closing a network connection. Although
you don’t yet know enough about networking to look at the actual programming in this case,
we can consider some pseudocode:
try {
open a network connection
communicate over the connection
}
catch ( IOException e ) {
report the error
}
finally {
if the connection was successfully opened
close the connection
}
The finally clause ensures that the network connection will definitely be closed, whether or not
an error occurs during the communication. The pseudocode in this example follows a general
pattern that can be used to robustly obtain a resource, use the resource, and then release the
resource.
∗ ∗ ∗
The pattern of obtaining a resource, then using the resource, and then releasing the resource
is very common. Note that the resource can only be released if no error occurred while obtaining
it. And, if it was successfully obtained, then it should be closed whether or not an error occurs
while using it. This pattern is so common that it leads to one last option in the try statement
syntax. With this option, you only need code to obtain the resource, and you don’t need to
worry about releasing it. That will happen automatically at the end of the try statement.
In order for this to work, the resource must be represented by an object that implements
an interface named AutoCloseable, which defines a single method named close(), with no
parameters. Standard Java classes that represent things like files and network connections
already implement AutoClosable. So does the Scanner class, which was introduced in
Subsection 2.4.6. In that section, I showed how to use a Scanner to read from System.in.
Although I didn’t do it in that section, it’s considered good form to close a Scanner after using
it. Here is an example that uses the pattern in a try statement to make sure that the Scanner
is closed automatically:
try( Scanner in = new Scanner(System.in) ) {
// Use the Scanner to read from standard input
}
catch (Exception e) {
// ... some error occurred while using the Scanner
}
The statement that allocates the Scanner goes in parentheses after the word “try”. The
statement must have the form of a variable declaration that includes an initialization of the
variable. The variable is local to the try statement. (You can actually declare several variables
in the parentheses, separated by semicolons.) In this example, we can be sure that in.close()
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 423

will definitely be called by the system at the end of the try statement, as long as the Scanner
was successfully initialized.
This is all getting quite complicated, and I won’t continue the discussion here. The sample
program TryStatementDemo.java demonstrates a try statement with all its options, and it
includes a lot of comments to help you understand what can happen when you run the program.

8.3.3 Throwing Exceptions

There are times when it makes sense for a program to deliberately throw an exception. This
is the case when the program discovers some sort of exceptional or error condition, but there
is no reasonable way to handle the error at the point where the problem is discovered. The
program can throw an exception in the hope that some other part of the program will catch
and handle the exception. This can be done with a throw statement. You have already seen
an example of this in Subsection 4.3.8. In this section, we cover the throw statement more
fully. The syntax of the throw statement is:
throw hexception-object i ;
The hexception-objecti must be an object belonging to one of the subclasses of Throwable.
Usually, it will in fact belong to one of the subclasses of Exception. In most cases, it will be a
newly constructed object created with the new operator. For example:
throw new ArithmeticException("Division by zero");
The parameter in the constructor becomes the error message in the exception object; if e
refers to the object, the error message can be retrieved by calling e.getMessage(). (You
might find this example a bit odd, because you might expect the system itself to throw an
ArithmeticException when an attempt is made to divide by zero. So why should a programmer
bother to throw the exception? Recall that if the numbers that are being divided are of type
int, then division by zero will indeed throw an ArithmeticException. However, no arithmetic
operations with floating-point numbers will ever produce an exception. Instead, the special
value Double.NaN is used to represent the result of an illegal operation. In some situations, you
might prefer to throw an ArithmeticException when a real number is divided by zero.)
An exception can be thrown either by the system or by a throw statement. The exception
is processed in exactly the same way in either case. Suppose that the exception is thrown
inside a try statement. If that try statement has a catch clause that handles that type of
exception, then the computer jumps to the catch clause and executes it. The exception has
been handled . After handling the exception, the computer executes the finally clause of
the try statement, if there is one. It then continues normally with the rest of the program,
which follows the try statement. If the exception is not immediately caught and handled, the
processing of the exception will continue.
When an exception is thrown during the execution of a subroutine and the exception is
not handled in the same subroutine, then that subroutine is terminated (after the execution
of any pending finally clauses). Then the routine that called that subroutine gets a chance
to handle the exception. That is, if the subroutine was called inside a try statement that has
an appropriate catch clause, then that catch clause will be executed and the program will
continue on normally from there. Again, if the second routine does not handle the exception,
then it also is terminated and the routine that called it (if any) gets the next shot at the
exception. The exception will crash the program only if it passes up through the entire chain
of subroutine calls without being handled. This is called “unwinding the call stack.”
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 424

A subroutine that might generate an exception can announce this fact by adding a clause
“throws hexception-class-namei” to the header of the routine. For example:
/**
* Returns the larger of the two roots of the quadratic equation
* A*x*x + B*x + C = 0, provided it has any roots. If A == 0 or
* if the discriminant, B*B - 4*A*C, is negative, then an exception
* of type IllegalArgumentException is thrown.
*/
static public double root( double A, double B, double C )
throws IllegalArgumentException {
if (A == 0) {
throw new IllegalArgumentException("A can’t be zero.");
}
else {
double disc = B*B - 4*A*C;
if (disc < 0)
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Discriminant < zero.");
return (-B + Math.sqrt(disc)) / (2*A);
}
}
As discussed in the previous section, the computation in this subroutine has the precon-
ditions that A != 0 and B*B-4*A*C >= 0. The subroutine throws an exception of type Ille-
galArgumentException when either of these preconditions is violated. When an illegal condition
is found in a subroutine, throwing an exception is often a reasonable response. If the program
that called the subroutine knows some good way to handle the error, it can catch the exception.
If not, the program will crash—and the programmer will know that the program needs to be
fixed.
A throws clause in a subroutine heading can declare several different types of exception,
separated by commas. For example:
void processArray(int[] A) throws NullPointerException,
ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException { ...

8.3.4 Mandatory Exception Handling

In the preceding example, declaring that the subroutine root() can throw an IllegalArgumentEx-
ception is just a courtesy to potential readers of this routine. This is because handling of Il-
legalArgumentExceptions is not “mandatory.” A routine can throw an IllegalArgumentException
without announcing the possibility. And a program that calls that routine is free either to catch
or to ignore the exception, just as a programmer can choose either to catch or to ignore an
exception of type NullPointerException.
For those exception classes that require mandatory handling, the situation is different. If a
subroutine can throw such an exception, that fact must be announced in a throws clause in
the routine definition. Failing to do so is a syntax error that will be reported by the compiler.
Exceptions that require mandatory handling are called checked exceptions. The compiler
will check that such exceptions are handled by the program.
Suppose that some statement in the body of a subroutine can generate a checked exception,
one that requires mandatory handling. The statement could be a throw statement, which throws
the exception directly, or it could be a call to a subroutine that can throw the exception. In
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 425

either case, the exception must be handled. This can be done in one of two ways: The first way
is to place the statement in a try statement that has a catch clause that handles the exception;
in this case, the exception is handled within the subroutine, so that no caller of the subroutine
can ever see the exception. The second way is to declare that the subroutine can throw the
exception. This is done by adding a “throws” clause to the subroutine heading, which alerts
any callers to the possibility that the exception might be generated when the subroutine is
executed. The caller will, in turn, be forced either to handle the exception in a try statement
or to declare the exception in a throws clause in its own header.
Exception-handling is mandatory for any exception class that is not a subclass of either
Error or RuntimeException. These checked exceptions generally represent conditions that are
outside the control of the programmer. For example, they might represent bad input or an
illegal action taken by the user. There is no way to avoid such errors, so a robust program
has to be prepared to handle them. The design of Java makes it impossible for programmers
to ignore the possibility of such errors.
Among the checked exceptions are several that can occur when using Java’s input/output
routines. This means that you can’t even use these routines unless you understand something
about exception-handling. Chapter 11 deals with input/output and uses checked exceptions
extensively.

8.3.5 Programming with Exceptions

Exceptions can be used to help write robust programs. They provide an organized and
structured approach to robustness. Without exceptions, a program can become cluttered with
if statements that test for various possible error conditions. With exceptions, it becomes
possible to write a clean implementation of an algorithm that will handle all the normal cases.
The exceptional cases can be handled elsewhere, in a catch clause of a try statement.
When a program encounters an exceptional condition and has no way of handling it
immediately, the program can throw an exception. In some cases, it makes sense to throw
an exception belonging to one of Java’s predefined classes, such as IllegalArgumentException or
IOException. However, if there is no standard class that adequately represents the exceptional
condition, the programmer can define a new exception class. The new class must extend the
standard class Throwable or one of its subclasses. In general, if the programmer does not want
to require mandatory exception handling, the new class will extend RuntimeException (or one
of its subclasses). To create a new checked exception class, which does require mandatory
handling, the programmer can extend one of the other subclasses of Exception or can extend
Exception itself.
Here, for example, is a class that extends Exception, and therefore requires mandatory
exception handling when it is used:
public class ParseError extends Exception {
public ParseError(String message) {
// Create a ParseError object containing
// the given message as its error message.
super(message);
}
}
The class contains only a constructor that makes it possible to create a ParseError object
containing a given error message. (The statement “super(message)” calls a constructor in the
superclass, Exception. See Subsection 5.6.3.) Of course the class inherits the getMessage() and
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 426

printStackTrace() routines from its superclass. If e refers to an object of type ParseError,

then the function call e.getMessage() will retrieve the error message that was specified in the
constructor. But the main point of the ParseError class is simply to exist. When an object of
type ParseError is thrown, it indicates that a certain type of error has occurred. (Parsing , by
the way, refers to figuring out the syntax of a string. A ParseError would indicate, presumably,
that some string that is being processed by the program does not have the expected form.)
A throw statement can be used in a program to throw an error of type ParseError. The
constructor for the ParseError object must specify an error message. For example:
throw new ParseError("Encountered an illegal negative number.");
or
throw new ParseError("The word ’" + word
+ "’ is not a valid file name.");
Since ParseError is defined as a subclass of Exception, it is a checked exception. If the throw
statement does not occur in a try statement that catches the error, then the subroutine that
contains the throw must declare that it can throw a ParseError by adding the clause “throws
ParseError” to the subroutine heading. For example,
void getUserData() throws ParseError {
. . .
}
This would not be required if ParseError were defined as a subclass of RuntimeException instead
of Exception, since in that case ParseErrors would not be checked exceptions.
A routine that wants to handle ParseErrors can use a try statement with a catch clause
that catches ParseErrors. For example:
try {
getUserData();
processUserData();
}
catch (ParseError pe) {
. . . // Handle the error
}
Note that since ParseError is a subclass of Exception, a catch clause of the form “catch
(Exception e)” would also catch ParseErrors, along with any other object of type Exception.
Sometimes, it’s useful to store extra data in an exception object. For example,
class ShipDestroyed extends RuntimeException {
Ship ship; // Which ship was destroyed.
int where x, where y; // Location where ship was destroyed.
ShipDestroyed(String message, Ship s, int x, int y) {
// Constructor creates a ShipDestroyed object
// carrying an error message plus the information
// that the ship s was destroyed at location (x,y)
// on the screen.
super(message);
ship = s;
where x = x;
where y = y;
}
}
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 427

Here, a ShipDestroyed object contains an error message and some information about a ship that
was destroyed. This could be used, for example, in a statement:
if ( userShip.isHit() )
throw new ShipDestroyed("You’ve been hit!", userShip, xPos, yPos);
Note that the condition represented by a ShipDestroyed object might not even be considered
an error. It could be just an expected interruption to the normal flow of a game. Exceptions
can sometimes be used to handle such interruptions neatly.
∗ ∗ ∗
The ability to throw exceptions is particularly useful in writing general-purpose methods
and classes that are meant to be used in more than one program. In this case, the person writing
the method or class often has no reasonable way of handling the error, since that person has no
way of knowing exactly how the method or class will be used. In such circumstances, a novice
programmer is often tempted to print an error message and forge ahead, but this is almost
never satisfactory since it can lead to unpredictable results down the line. Printing an error
message and terminating the program is almost as bad, since it gives the program no chance
to handle the error.
The program that calls the method or uses the class needs to know that the error has
occurred. In languages that do not support exceptions, the only alternative is to return some
special value or to set the value of some global variable to indicate that an error has occurred.
For example, the readMeasurement() function in Subsection 8.2.2 returns the value -1 if the
user’s input is illegal. However, this only does any good if the main program bothers to test
the return value. It is very easy to be lazy about checking for special return values every time
a subroutine is called. And in this case, using -1 as a signal that an error has occurred makes
it impossible to allow negative measurements. Exceptions are a cleaner way for a subroutine to
react when it encounters an error.
It is easy to modify the readMeasurement() function to use exceptions instead of a special
return value to signal an error. My modified subroutine throws a ParseError when the user’s
input is illegal, where ParseError is the subclass of Exception that was defined above. (Arguably,
it might be reasonable to avoid defining a new class by using the standard exception class
IllegalArgumentException instead.) The changes from the original version are shown in italic:
/**
* Reads the user’s input measurement from one line of input.
* Precondition: The input line is not empty.
* Postcondition: If the user’s input is legal, the measurement
* is converted to inches and returned.
* @throws ParseError if the user’s input is not legal.
*/
static double readMeasurement() throws ParseError {
double inches; // Total number of inches in user’s measurement.
double measurement; // One measurement,
// such as the 12 in "12 miles."
String units; // The units specified for the measurement,
// such as "miles."
char ch; // Used to peek at next character in the user’s input.
inches = 0; // No inches have yet been read.
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 428

skipBlanks();
ch = TextIO.peek();
/* As long as there is more input on the line, read a measurement and
add the equivalent number of inches to the variable, inches. If an
error is detected during the loop, end the subroutine immediately
by throwing a ParseError. */
while (ch != ’\n’) {
/* Get the next measurement and the units. Before reading
anything, make sure that a legal value is there to read. */
if ( ! Character.isDigit(ch) ) {
throw new ParseError("Expected to find a number, but found " + ch);
}
measurement = TextIO.getDouble();
skipBlanks();
if (TextIO.peek() == ’\n’) {
throw new ParseError("Missing unit of measure at end of line.");
}
units = TextIO.getWord();
units = units.toLowerCase();
/* Convert the measurement to inches and add it to the total. */
if (units.equals("inch")
|| units.equals("inches") || units.equals("in")) {
inches += measurement;
}
else if (units.equals("foot")
|| units.equals("feet") || units.equals("ft")) {
inches += measurement * 12;
}
else if (units.equals("yard")
|| units.equals("yards") || units.equals("yd")) {
inches += measurement * 36;
}
else if (units.equals("mile")
|| units.equals("miles") || units.equals("mi")) {
inches += measurement * 12 * 5280;
}
else {
throw new ParseError("\"" + units
+ "\" is not a legal unit of measure.");
}
/* Look ahead to see whether the next thing on the line is
the end-of-line. */
skipBlanks();
ch = TextIO.peek();
} // end while
return inches;
} // end readMeasurement()
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 429

In the main program, this subroutine is called in a try statement of the form
try {
inches = readMeasurement();
}
catch (ParseError e) {
. . . // Handle the error.
}
The complete program can be found in the file LengthConverter3.java. From the user’s
point of view, this program has exactly the same behavior as the program LengthConverter2
from the previous section. Internally, however, the programs are significantly different, since
LengthConverter3 uses exception handling.

8.4 Assertions and Annotations

In this short section, we look briefly at two features of Java that are not covered or used
elsewhere in this textbook, assertions and annotations. They are included here for completeness,
but they are mostly meant for more advanced programming. (Annotations, in particular, don’t
really belong in this chapter, but I could not find a better place to put my short introduction
to the topic.)

8.4.1 Assertions
Recall that a precondition is a condition that must be true at a certain point in a program, for
the execution of the program to continue correctly from that point. In the case where there is
a chance that the precondition might not be satisfied—for example, if it depends on input from
the user—then it’s a good idea to insert an if statement to test it. But then the question arises,
What should be done if the precondition does not hold? One option is to throw an exception.
This will terminate the program, unless the exception is caught and handled elsewhere in the
program.
In many cases, of course, instead of using an if statement to test whether a precondition
holds, a programmer tries to write the program in a way that will guarantee that the
precondition holds. In that case, the test should not be necessary, and the if statement can
be avoided. The problem is that programmers are not perfect. In spite of the programmer’s
intention, the program might contain a bug that screws up the precondition. So maybe it’s a
good idea to check the precondition after all—at least during the debugging phase of program
development.
Similarly, a postcondition is a condition that is true at a certain point in the program as
a consequence of the code that has been executed before that point. Assuming that the code
is correctly written, a postcondition is guaranteed to be true, but here again testing whether a
desired postcondition is actually true is a way of checking for a bug that might have screwed
up the postcondition. This is something that might be desirable during debugging.
And the same thing applies to loop invariants and class invariants. These are things that
should be true at certain points in a program. If they are not true at those points, it means
that the program contains a bug.
The programming languages C and C++ have always had a facility for adding what are
called assertions to a program. These assertions take the form “assert(hconditioni)”,
where hconditioni is a boolean-valued expression. This condition expresses a precondition or
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 430

postcondition that should hold at that point in the program. When the computer encounters
an assertion during the execution of the program, it evaluates the condition. If the condition is
false, the program is terminated. Otherwise, the program continues normally. This allows the
programmer’s belief that the condition is true to be tested; if it is not true, that indicates that
the part of the program that preceded the assertion contained a bug. One nice thing about
assertions in C and C++ is that they can be “turned off” at compile time. That is, if the
program is compiled in one way, then the assertions are included in the compiled code. If the
program is compiled in another way, the assertions are not included. During debugging, the
first type of compilation is used, with assertions turned on. The release version of the program
is compiled with assertions turned off. The release version will be more efficient, because the
computer won’t have to evaluate all the assertions.
Although early versions of Java did not have assertions, an assertion facility similar to the
one in C/C++ has been available in Java since version 1.4. As with the C/C++ version, Java
assertions can be turned on during debugging and turned off during normal execution. In Java,
however, assertions are turned on and off at run time rather than at compile time. An assertion
in the Java source code is always included in the compiled class file. When the program is
run in the normal way, these assertions are ignored; since the condition in the assertion is not
evaluated in this case, there is little or no performance penalty for having the assertions in
the program. When the program is being debugged, it can be run with assertions enabled, as
discussed below, and then the assertions can be a great help in locating and identifying bugs.
∗ ∗ ∗
An assertion statement in Java takes one of the following two forms:
assert hcondition i ;
or
assert hcondition i : herror-message i ;
where hconditioni is a boolean-valued expression and herror-messagei is a string or an
expression of type String. The word “assert” is a reserved word in Java, which cannot be
used as an identifier. An assertion statement can be used anyplace in Java where a statement
is legal.
If a program is run with assertions disabled, an assertion statement is equivalent to an
empty statement and has no effect. When assertions are enabled and an assertion statement is
encountered in the program, the hconditioni in the assertion is evaluated. If the value is true,
the program proceeds normally. If the value of the condition is false, then an exception of
type java.lang.AssertionError is thrown, and the program will crash (unless the error is
caught by a try statement). If the assert statement includes an herror-messagei, then the
error message string becomes the message in the AssertionError.
So, the statement “assert hcondition i : herror-message i;" is similar to
if ( hcondition i == false )
throw new AssertionError( herror-message i );
except that the if statement is executed whenever the program is run, and the assert
statement is executed only when the program is run with assertions enabled.
The question is, when to use assertions instead of exceptions? The general rule is to use
assertions to test conditions that should definitely be true, if the program is written correctly.
Assertions are useful for testing a program to see whether or not it is correct and for finding
the errors in an incorrect program. After testing and debugging, when the program is used in
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 431

the normal way, the assertions in the program will be ignored. However, if a problem turns
up later, the assertions are still there in the program to be used to help locate the error. If
someone writes to you to say that your program doesn’t work when he does such-and-such, you
can run the program with assertions enabled, do such-and-such, and hope that the assertions
in the program will help you locate the point in the program where it goes wrong.
Consider, for example, the root() method from Subsection 8.3.3 that calculates a root of
a quadratic equation. If you believe that your program will always call this method with legal
arguments, then it would make sense to write the method using assertions instead of exceptions:
/**
* Returns the larger of the two roots of the quadratic equation
* A*x*x + B*x + C = 0.
* Precondition: A != 0 and B*B - 4*A*C >= 0.
*/
static public double root( double A, double B, double C ) {
assert A != 0 : "Leading coefficient of quadratic equation cannot be zero.";
double disc = B*B - 4*A*C;
assert disc >= 0 : "Discriminant of quadratic equation cannot be negative.";
return (-B + Math.sqrt(disc)) / (2*A);
}
The assertions are not checked when the program is run in the normal way. If you are correct in
your belief that the method is never called with illegal arguments, then checking the conditions
in the assertions would be unnecessary. If your belief is not correct, the problem should turn
up during testing or debugging, when the program is run with the assertions enabled.
If the root() method is part of a software library that you expect other people to use, then
the situation is less clear. Oracle’s Java documentation advises that assertions should not be
used for checking the contract of public methods: If the caller of a method violates the contract
by passing illegal parameters, then an exception should be thrown. This will enforce the contract
whether or not assertions are enabled. (However, while it’s true that Java programmers expect
the contract of a method to be enforced with exceptions, there are reasonable arguments for
using assertions instead, in some cases.) One might say that assertions are for you, to help you
in debugging your code, while exceptions are for people who use your code, to alert them that
they are misusing it.
On the other hand, it never hurts to use an assertion to check a postcondition or an invariant.
These are conditions that are definitely expected to be true in any bug-free program, so an
assertion is the natural way to check the condition while debugging, without imposing an
efficiency penalty when the program is executed normally. If the postcondition or invariant
is false, there is a bug, and that is something that needs to be found during the testing and
debugging phase of programming.
∗ ∗ ∗
To have any effect, assertions must be enabled when the program is run. How to do this
depends on what programming environment you are using. (See Section 2.6 for a discussion of
programming environments.) In the usual command line environment, assertions are enabled by
adding the option -enableassertions to the java command that is used to run the program.
For example, if the class that contains the main program is RootFinder, then the command
java -enableassertions RootFinder
will run the program with assertions enabled. The -enableassertions option can be
abbreviated to -ea, so the command can alternatively be written as
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 432

java -ea RootFinder

In fact, it is possible to enable assertions in just part of a program. An option of the form
“-ea:hclass-name i” enables only the assertions in the specified class. Note that there are no
spaces between the -ea, the “:”, and the name of the class. To enable all the assertions in a
package and in its subpackages, you can use an option of the form “-ea:hpackage-name i...”.
To enable assertions in the “default package” (that is, classes that are not specified to belong to
a package, like almost all the classes in this book), use “-ea:...”. For example, to run a Java
program named “MegaPaint” with assertions enabled for every class in the packages named
“paintutils” and “drawing”, you would use the command:
java -ea:paintutils... -ea:drawing... MegaPaint
If you are using the Eclipse integrated development environment, you can specify the -ea
option by creating a run configuration. Right-click the name of the main program class in the
Package Explorer pane, and select “Run As” from the pop-up menu and then “Run. . . ” from
the submenu. This will open a dialog box where you can manage run configurations. The name
of the project and of the main class will be already be filled in. Click the “Arguments” tab, and
enter -ea in the box under “VM Arguments”. The contents of this box are added to the java
command that is used to run the program. You can enter other options in this box, including
more complicated enableassertions options such as -ea:paintutils.... When you click the
“Run” button, the options will be applied. Furthermore, they will be applied whenever you run
the program, unless you change the run configuration or add a new configuration. Note that it
is possible to make two run configurations for the same class, one with assertions enabled and
one with assertions disabled.

8.4.2 Annotations
The term “annotation” commonly refers to notes added to or written alongside a main text, to
help you understand or appreciate the text. An annotation might be a note that you make to
yourself in the margin of a book. It might be a footnote added to an old novel by an editor to
explain the historical context of some event. The annotation is metadata or “metatext,” that
is, text written about the main text rather than as part of the main text itself.
Comments on a program are actually a kind of annotation. Since they are ignored by the
compiler, they have no effect on the meaning of the program. They are there to explain that
meaning to a human reader. It is possible, of course, for another computer program (not the
compiler) to process comments. That’s what is done in the case of Javadoc comments, which
are processed by a program that uses them to create API documentation. But comments are
only one type of metadata that might be added to programs.
In Java 5.0, a new feature called annotations was added to the Java language to make
it easier to create new kinds of metadata for Java programs. This has made it possible for
programmers to devise new ways of annotating programs, and to write programs that can read
and use their annotations.
Java annotations have no direct effect on the program that they annotate. But they do have
many potential uses. Some annotations are used to make the programmer’s intent more explicit.
Such annotations might be checked by a compiler to make sure that the code is consistent with
the programmer’s intention. For example, @Override is a standard annotation that can be
used to annotate method definitions. It means that the method is intended to override (that
is replace) a method with the same signature that was defined in some superclass. A compiler
can check that the superclass method actually exists; if not, it can inform the programmer. An
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 433

annotation used in this way is an aid to writing correct programs, since the programmer can
be warned about a potential error in advance, instead of having to hunt it down later as a bug.
To annotate a method definition with the @Override annotation, simply place it in front of
the definition. Syntactically, annotations are modifiers that are used in much the same way as
built-in modifiers like “public” and “final.” For example,
@Override public void WindowClosed(WindowEvent evt) { ... }
If there is no "WindowClosed(WindowEvent)" method in any superclass, then the compiler can
issue an error. In fact, this example is based on a hard-to-find bug that I once introduced
when trying to override a method named “windowClosed” with a method that I called
“WindowClosed” (with an upper case “W”). If the @Override annotation had existed at
that time—and if I had used it—the compiler could have rejected my code and saved me the
trouble of tracking down the bug.
(Annotations are a fairly advanced feature, and I might not have mentioned them in this
textbook, except that some notations, such as @Override, can show up in code generated by
Eclipse and other integrated development environments.)
There are two other standard annotations. One is @Deprecated, which can be used to mark
deprecated classes, methods, and variables. (A deprecated item is one that is considered to be
obsolete, but is still part of the Java language for backwards compatibility for old code.) Use of
this annotation would allow a compiler to generate warnings when the deprecated item is used.
The other standard annotation is @SurpressWarnings, which can be used by a compiler
to turn off warning messages that would ordinarily be generated when a class or method is
compiled. @SuppressWarnings is an example of an annotation that has a parameter. The
parameter tells what class of warnings are to be suppressed. For example, when a class or
method is annotated with
@SuppressWarnings("deprecation")
then no warnings about the use of deprecated items will be emitted when the class or method
is compiled. There are other types of warning that can be suppressed; unfortunately the list of
warnings and their names is not standardized and will vary from one compiler to another.
Note, by the way, that the syntax for annotation parameters—especially for an annotation
that accepts multiple parameters—is not the same as the syntax for method parameters. I
won’t cover the annotation syntax here.
Programmers can define new annotations for use in their code. Such annotations are ignored
by standard compilers and programming tools, but it’s possible to write programs that can
understand the annotations and check for their presence in source code. It is even possible to
create annotations that will be retained at run-time and become part of the running program.
In that case, a program can check for annotations in the actual compiled code that is being
executed, and take actions that depend on the presence of the annotation or the values of its
parameters.
Annotations can help programmers to write correct programs. To use an example from the
Java documentation, they can help with the creation of “boilerplate” code—that is, code that
has a very standardized format and that can be generated mechanically. Often, boilerplate code
is generated based on other code. Doing that by hand is a tedious and error-prone process.
A simple example might be code to save certain aspects of a program’s state to a file and to
restore it later. The code for reading and writing the values of all the relevant state variables is
highly repetitious. Instead of writing that code by hand, a programmer could use an annotation
to mark the variables that are part of the state that is to be saved. A program could then be
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 434

used to check for the annotations and generate the save-and-restore code. In fact, it would even
be possible to do without that code altogether, if the program checks for the presence of the
annotation at run time to decide which variables to save and restore.

8.5 Analysis of Algorithms

This chapter has concentrated mostly on correctness of programs. In practice, another
issue is also important: efficiency . When analyzing a program in terms of efficiency, we
want to look at questions such as, “How long does it take for the program to run?” and “Is
there another approach that will get the answer more quickly?” Efficiency will always be less
important than correctness; if you don’t care whether a program works correctly, you can make
it run very quickly indeed, but no one will think it’s much of an achievement! On the other
hand, a program that gives a correct answer after ten thousand years isn’t very useful either,
so efficiency is often an important issue.
The term “efficiency” can refer to efficient use of almost any resource, including time,
computer memory, disk space, or network bandwidth. In this section, however, we will deal
exclusively with time efficiency, and the major question that we want to ask about a program
is, how long does it take to perform its task?
It really makes little sense to classify an individual program as being “efficient” or
“inefficient.” It makes more sense to compare two (correct) programs that perform the same
task and ask which one of the two is “more efficient,” that is, which one performs the task
more quickly. However, even here there are difficulties. The running time of a program is
not well-defined. The run time can be different depending on the number and speed of the
processors in the computer on which it is run and, in the case of Java, on the design of the
Java Virtual Machine which is used to interpret the program. It can depend on details of the
compiler which is used to translate the program from high-level language to machine language.
Furthermore, the run time of a program depends on the size of the problem which the program
has to solve. It takes a sorting program longer to sort 10000 items than it takes it to sort 100
items. When the run times of two programs are compared, it often happens that Program A
solves small problems faster than Program B, while Program B solves large problems faster
than Program A, so that it is simply not the case that one program is faster than the other in
all cases.
In spite of these difficulties, there is a field of computer science dedicated to analyzing
the efficiency of programs. The field is known as Analysis of Algorithms. The focus
is on algorithms, rather than on programs as such, to avoid having to deal with multiple
implementations of the same algorithm written in different languages, compiled with different
compilers, and running on different computers. Analysis of Algorithms is a mathematical field
that abstracts away from these down-and-dirty details. Still, even though it is a theoretical
field, every working programmer should be aware of some of its techniques and results. This
section is a very brief introduction to some of those techniques and results. Because this is not
a mathematics book, the treatment will be rather informal.
One of the main techniques of analysis of algorithms is asymptotic analysis. The term
“asymptotic” here means basically “the tendency in the long run, as the size of the input is
increased.” An asymptotic analysis of an algorithm’s run time looks at the question of how
the run time depends on the size of the problem. The analysis is asymptotic because it only
considers what happens to the run time as the size of the problem increases without limit; it
is not concerned with what happens for problems of small size or, in fact, for problems of any
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 435

fixed finite size. Only what happens in the long run, as the problem size increases without
limit, is important. Showing that Algorithm A is asymptotically faster than Algorithm B
doesn’t necessarily mean that Algorithm A will run faster than Algorithm B for problems of
size 10 or size 1000 or even size 1000000—it only means that if you keep increasing the problem
size, you will eventually come to a point where Algorithm A is faster than Algorithm B. An
asymptotic analysis is only a first approximation, but in practice it often gives important and
useful information.
∗ ∗ ∗
Central to asymptotic analysis is Big-Oh notation. Using this notation, we might say,
for example, that an algorithm has a running time that is O(n2 ) or O(n) or O(log(n)). These
notations are read “Big-Oh of n squared,” “Big-Oh of n,” and “Big-Oh of log n” (where log is a
logarithm function). More generally, we can refer to O(f(n)) (“Big-Oh of f of n”), where f(n) is
some function that assigns a positive real number to every positive integer n. The “n” in this
notation refers to the size of the problem. Before you can even begin an asymptotic analysis,
you need some way to measure problem size. Usually, this is not a big issue. For example, if
the problem is to sort a list of items, then the problem size can be taken to be the number of
items in the list. When the input to an algorithm is an integer, as in the case of an algorithm
that checks whether a given positive integer is prime, the usual measure of the size of a problem
is the number of bits in the input integer rather than the integer itself. More generally, the
number of bits in the input to a problem is often a good measure of the size of the problem.
To say that the running time of an algorithm is O(f(n)) means that for large values of
the problem size, n, the running time of the algorithm is no bigger than some constant times
f(n). (More rigorously, there is a number C and a positive integer M such that whenever n
is greater than M, the run time is less than or equal to C*f(n).) The constant takes into
account details such as the speed of the computer on which the algorithm is run; if you use
a slower computer, you might have to use a bigger constant in the formula, but changing the
constant won’t change the basic fact that the run time is O(f(n)). The constant also makes
it unnecessary to say whether we are measuring time in seconds, years, CPU cycles, or any
other unit of measure; a change from one unit of measure to another is just multiplication by
a constant. Note also that O(f(n)) doesn’t depend at all on what happens for small problem
sizes, only on what happens in the long run as the problem size increases without limit.
To look at a simple example, consider the problem of adding up all the numbers in an array.
The problem size, n, is the length of the array. Using A as the name of the array, the algorithm
can be expressed in Java as:
total = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++)
total = total + A[i];
This algorithm performs the same operation, total = total + A[i], n times. The total
time spent on this operation is a*n, where a is the time it takes to perform the operation once.
Now, this is not the only thing that is done in the algorithm. The value of i is incremented
and is compared to n each time through the loop. This adds an additional time of b*n to the
run time, for some constant b. Furthermore, i and total both have to be initialized to zero;
this adds some constant amount c to the running time. The exact running time would then be
(a+b)*n+c, where the constants a, b, and c depend on factors such as how the code is compiled
and what computer it is run on. Using the fact that c is less than or equal to c*n for any
positive integer n, we can say that the run time is less than or equal to (a+b+c)*n. That is,
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 436

the run time is less than or equal to a constant times n. By definition, this means that the run
time for this algorithm is O(n).
If this explanation is too mathematical for you, we can just note that for large values of
n, the c in the formula (a+b)*n+c is insignificant compared to the other term, (a+b)*n. We
say that c is a “lower order term.” When doing asymptotic analysis, lower order terms can
be discarded. A rough, but correct, asymptotic analysis of the algorithm would go something
like this: Each iteration of the for loop takes a certain constant amount of time. There are
n iterations of the loop, so the total run time is a constant times n, plus lower order terms
(to account for the initialization). Disregarding lower order terms, we see that the run time is
O(n).
∗ ∗ ∗
Note that to say that an algorithm has run time O(f(n)) is to say that its run time is no
bigger than some constant times f(n) (for large values of n). O(f(n)) puts an upper limit on
the run time. However, the run time could be smaller, even much smaller. For example, if the
run time is O(n), it would also be correct to say that the run time is O(n2 ) or even O(n10 ). If
the run time is less than a constant times n, then it is certainly less than the same constant
times n2 or n10 .
Of course, sometimes it’s useful to have a lower limit on the run time. That is, we want
to be able to say that the run time is greater than or equal to some constant times f(n) (for
large values of n). The notation for this is Ω(f(n)), read “Omega of f of n” or “Big Omega of f
of n.” “Omega” is the name of a letter in the Greek alphabet, and Ω is the upper case version
of that letter. (To be technical, saying that the run time of an algorithm is Ω(f(n)) means that
there is a positive number C and a positive integer M such that whenever n is greater than
M, the run time is greater than or equal to C*f(n).) O(f(n)) tells you something about the
maximum amount of time that you might have to wait for an algorithm to finish; Ω(f(n)) tells
you something about the minimum time.
The algorithm for adding up the numbers in an array has a run time that is Ω(n) as well as
O(n). When an algorithm has a run time that is both Ω(f(n)) and O(f(n)), its run time is said
to be Θ(f(n)), read “Theta of f of n” or “Big Theta of f of n.” (Theta is another letter from
the Greek alphabet.) To say that the run time of an algorithm is Θ(f(n)) means that for large
values of n, the run time is between a*f(n) and b*f(n), where a and b are constants (with b
greater than a, and both greater than 0).
Let’s look at another example. Consider the algorithm that can be expressed in Java in the
following method:
/**
* Sorts the n array elements A[0], A[1], ..., A[n-1] into increasing order.
*/
public static void simpleBubbleSort( int[] A, int n ) {
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
// Do n passes through the array...
for (int j = 0; j < n-1; j++) {
if ( A[j] > A[j+1] ) {
// A[j] and A[j+1] are out of order, so swap them
int temp = A[j];
A[j] = A[j+1];
A[j+1] = temp;
}
}
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 437

}
}
Here, the parameter n represents the problem size. The outer for loop in the method is executed
n times. Each time the outer for loop is executed, the inner for loop is executed n-1 times, so
the if statement is executed n*(n-1) times. This is n2 -n, but since lower order terms are not
significant in an asymptotic analysis, it’s good enough to say that the if statement is executed
about n2 times. In particular, the test A[j] > A[j+1] is executed about n2 times, and this fact
by itself is enough to say that the run time of the algorithm is Ω(n2 ), that is, the run time is
at least some constant times n2 . Furthermore, if we look at other operations—the assignment
statements, incrementing i and j, etc.—none of them are executed more than n2 times, so the
run time is also O(n2 ), that is, the run time is no more than some constant times n2 . Since it
is both Ω(n2 ) and O(n2 ), the run time of the simpleBubbleSort algorithm is Θ(n2 ).
You should be aware that some people use the notation O(f(n)) as if it meant Θ(f(n)). That
is, when they say that the run time of an algorithm is O(f(n)), they mean to say that the run
time is about equal to a constant times f(n). For that, they should use Θ(f(n)). Properly
speaking, O(f(n)) means that the run time is less than a constant times f(n), possibly much
less.
∗ ∗ ∗
So far, my analysis has ignored an important detail. We have looked at how run time
depends on the problem size, but in fact the run time usually depends not just on the size of
the problem but on the specific data that has to be processed. For example, the run time of a
sorting algorithm can depend on the initial order of the items that are to be sorted, and not
just on the number of items.
To account for this dependency, we can consider either the worst case run time analysis
or the average case run time analysis of an algorithm. For a worst case run time analysis, we
consider all possible problems of size n and look at the longest possible run time for all such
problems. For an average case analysis, we consider all possible problems of size n and look at
the average of the run times for all such problems. Usually, the average case analysis assumes
that all problems of size n are equally likely to be encountered, although this is not always
realistic—or even possible in the case where there is an infinite number of different problems of
a given size.
In many cases, the average and the worst case run times are the same to within a constant
multiple. This means that as far as asymptotic analysis is concerned, they are the same. That
is, if the average case run time is O(f(n)) or Θ(f(n)), then so is the worst case. However, later in
the book, we will encounter a few cases where the average and worst case asymptotic analyses
differ.
It is also possible to talk about best case run time analysis, which looks at the shortest
possible run time for all inputs of a given size. However, a best case analysis is only occasionally
useful.
∗ ∗ ∗
So, what do you really have to know about analysis of algorithms to read the rest of this
book? We will not do any rigorous mathematical analysis, but you should be able to follow
informal discussion of simple cases such as the examples that we have looked at in this section.
Most important, though, you should have a feeling for exactly what it means to say that the
running time of an algorithm is O(f(n)) or Θ(f(n)) for some common functions f(n). The main
point is that these notations do not tell you anything about the actual numerical value of the
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 438

running time of the algorithm for any particular case. They do not tell you anything at all
about the running time for small values of n. What they do tell you is something about the
rate of growth of the running time as the size of the problem increases.
Suppose you compare two algorithms that solve the same problem. The run time of one
algorithm is Θ(n2 ), while the run time of the second algorithm is Θ(n3 ). What does this tell
you? If you want to know which algorithm will be faster for some particular problem of size,
say, 100, nothing is certain. As far as you can tell just from the asymptotic analysis, either
algorithm could be faster for that particular case—or in any particular case. But what you can
say for sure is that if you look at larger and larger problems, you will come to a point where the
Θ(n2 ) algorithm is faster than the Θ(n3 ) algorithm. Furthermore, as you continue to increase
the problem size, the relative advantage of the Θ(n2 ) algorithm will continue to grow. There
will be values of n for which the Θ(n2 ) algorithm is a thousand times faster, a million times
faster, a billion times faster, and so on. This is because for any positive constants a and b, the
function a*n3 grows faster than the function b*n2 as n gets larger. (Mathematically, the limit
of the ratio of a*n3 to b*n2 is infinite as n approaches infinity.)
This means that for “large” problems, a Θ(n2 ) algorithm will definitely be faster than a
Θ(n3 ) algorithm. You just don’t know—based on the asymptotic analysis alone—exactly how
large “large” has to be. In practice, in fact, it is likely that the Θ(n2 ) algorithm will be faster
even for fairly small values of n, and absent other information you would generally prefer a
Θ(n2 ) algorithm to a Θ(n3 ) algorithm.
So, to understand and apply asymptotic analysis, it is essential to have some idea of the
rates of growth of some common functions. For the power functions n, n2 , n3 , n4 , . . . , the larger
the exponent, the greater the rate of growth of the function. Exponential functions such as 2n
and 10n , where the n is in the exponent, have a growth rate that is faster than that of any power
function. In fact, exponential functions grow so quickly that an algorithm whose run time grows
exponentially is almost certainly impractical even for relatively modest values of n, because the
running time is just too long. Another function that often turns up in asymptotic analysis is
the logarithm function, log(n). There are actually many different logarithm functions, but the
one that is usually used in computer science is the so-called logarithm to the base two, which is
defined by the fact that log(2x ) = x for any number x. (Usually, this function is written log2 (n),
but I will leave out the subscript 2, since I will only use the base-two logarithm in this book.)
The logarithm function grows very slowly. The growth rate of log(n) is much smaller than the
growth rate of n. The growth rate of n*log(n) is a little larger than the growth rate of n, but
much smaller than the growth rate of n2 . The following table should help you understand the
differences among the rates of growth of various functions:

n log(n) n*log(n) n2 n / log(n)

16 4 64 256 4.0
64 6 384 4096 10.7
256 8 2048 65536 32.0
1024 10 10240 1048576 102.4
1000000 20 19931568 1000000000000 50173.1
1000000000 30 29897352854 1000000000000000000 33447777.3

The reason that log(n) shows up so often is because of its association with multiplying and
dividing by two: Suppose you start with the number n and divide it by 2, then divide by 2
again, and so on, until you get a number that is less than or equal to 1. Then the number of
divisions is equal (to the nearest integer) to log(n).
CHAPTER 8. CORRECTNESS, ROBUSTNESS, EFFICIENCY 439

As an example, consider the binary search algorithm from Subsection 7.5.1. This algorithm
searches for an item in a sorted array. The problem size, n, can be taken to be the length of
the array. Each step in the binary search algorithm divides the number of items still under
consideration by 2, and the algorithm stops when the number of items under consideration is
less than or equal to 1 (or sooner). It follows that the number of steps for an array of length n
is at most log(n). This means that the worst-case run time for binary search is Θ(log(n)). (The
average case run time is also Θ(log(n)).) By comparison, the linear search algorithm, which
was also presented in Subsection 7.5.1 has a run time that is Θ(n). The Θ notation gives us
a quantitative way to express and to understand the fact that binary search is “much faster”
than linear search.
In binary search, each step of the algorithm divides the problem size by 2. It often happens
that some operation in an algorithm (not necessarily a single step) divides the problem size
by 2. Whenever that happens, the logarithm function is likely to show up in an asymptotic
analysis of the run time of the algorithm.
Analysis of Algorithms is a large, fascinating field. We will only use a few of the most basic
ideas from this field, but even those can be very helpful for understanding the differences among
algorithms.
Exercises 440

Exercises for Chapter 8

1. Write a program that uses the following subroutine, from Subsection 8.3.3, to solve (solution)
equations specified by the user.
/**
* Returns the larger of the two roots of the quadratic equation
* A*x*x + B*x + C = 0, provided it has any roots. If A == 0 or
* if the discriminant, B*B - 4*A*C, is negative, then an exception
* of type IllegalArgumentException is thrown.
*/
static public double root( double A, double B, double C )
throws IllegalArgumentException {
if (A == 0) {
throw new IllegalArgumentException("A can’t be zero.");
}
else {
double disc = B*B - 4*A*C;
if (disc < 0)
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Discriminant < zero.");
return (-B + Math.sqrt(disc)) / (2*A);
}
}
Your program should allow the user to specify values for A, B, and C. It should call the
subroutine to compute a solution of the equation. If no error occurs, it should print the
root. However, if an error occurs, your program should catch that error and print an error
message. After processing one equation, the program should ask whether the user wants
to enter another equation. The program should continue until the user answers no.

2. As discussed in Section 8.1, values of type int are limited to 32 bits. Integers that are too (solution)
large to be represented in 32 bits cannot be stored in an int variable. Java has a standard
class, java.math.BigInteger, that addresses this problem. An object of type BigInteger
is an integer that can be arbitrarily large. (The maximum size is limited only by the
amount of memory available to the Java Virtual Machine.) Since BigIntegers are objects,
they must be manipulated using instance methods from the BigInteger class. For example,
you can’t add two BigIntegers with the + operator. Instead, if N and M are variables that
refer to BigIntegers, you can compute the sum of N and M with the function call N.add(M).
The value returned by this function is a new BigInteger object that is equal to the sum of
N and M.
The BigInteger class has a constructor new BigInteger(str), where str is a string.
The string must represent an integer, such as “3” or “39849823783783283733”. If the string
does not represent a legal integer, then the constructor throws a NumberFormatException.
There are many instance methods in the BigInteger class. Here are a few that you will
find useful for this exercise. Assume that N and M are variables of type BigInteger.
• N.add(M) — a function that returns a BigInteger representing the sum of N and M.
• N.multiply(M) — a function that returns a BigInteger representing the result of
multiplying N times M.
Exercises 441

• N.divide(M) — a function that returns a BigInteger representing the result of

dividing N by M, discarding the remainder.
• N.signum() — a function that returns an ordinary int. The returned value represents
the sign of the integer N. The returned value is 1 if N is greater than zero. It is -1 if
N is less than zero. And it is 0 if N is zero.
• N.equals(M) — a function that returns a boolean value that is true if N and M have
the same integer value.
• N.toString() — a function that returns a String representing the value of N.
• N.testBit(k) — a function that returns a boolean value. The parameter k is
an integer. The return value is true if the k-th bit in N is 1, and it is false
if the k-th bit is 0. Bits are numbered from right to left, starting with 0.
Testing “if (N.testBit(0))” is an easy way to check whether N is even or odd.
N.testBit(0) is true if and only if N is an odd number.
For this exercise, you should write a program that prints 3N+1 sequences with starting
values specified by the user. In this version of the program, you should use BigIntegers
to represent the terms in the sequence. You can read the user’s input into a String with
the TextIO.getln() function or with the nextLine() function of a Scanner. Use the
input value to create the BigInteger object that represents the starting point of the 3N+1
sequence. Don’t forget to catch and handle the NumberFormatException that will occur if
the user’s input is not a legal integer! The program should not end when that happens;
it should just output an error message. You should also check that the input number is
greater than zero.
If the user’s input is legal, print out the 3N+1 sequence. Count the number of terms
in the sequence, and print the count at the end of the sequence. Exit the program when
the user inputs an empty line.

3. A Roman numeral represents an integer using letters. Examples are XVII to represent 17, (solution)
MCMLIII for 1953, and MMMCCCIII for 3303. By contrast, ordinary numbers such as
17 or 1953 are called Arabic numerals. The following table shows the Arabic equivalent
of all the single-letter Roman numerals:
M 1000 X 10
D 500 V 5
C 100 I 1
L 50
When letters are strung together, the values of the letters are just added up, with the
following exception. When a letter of smaller value is followed by a letter of larger value,
the smaller value is subtracted from the larger value. For example, IV represents 5 - 1, or
4. And MCMXCV is interpreted as M + CM + XC + V, or 1000 + (1000 - 100) + (100 -
10) + 5, which is 1995. In standard Roman numerals, no more than three consecutive
copies of the same letter are used. Following these rules, every number between 1 and
3999 can be represented as a Roman numeral made up of the following one- and two-letter
combinations:
M 1000 X 10
CM 900 IX 9
D 500 V 5
CD 400 IV 4
Exercises 442

C 100 I 1
XC 90
L 50
XL 40
Write a class to represent Roman numerals. The class should have two constructors.
One constructs a Roman numeral from a string such as “XVII” or “MCMXCV”. It
should throw a NumberFormatException if the string is not a legal Roman numeral.
The other constructor constructs a Roman numeral from an int. It should throw a
NumberFormatException if the int is outside the range 1 to 3999.
In addition, the class should have two instance methods. The method toString()
returns the string that represents the Roman numeral. The method toInt() returns the
value of the Roman numeral as an int.
At some point in your class, you will have to convert an int into the string that
represents the corresponding Roman numeral. One way to approach this is to gradually
“move” value from the Arabic numeral to the Roman numeral. Here is the beginning of a
routine that will do this, where number is the int that is to be converted:
String roman = "";
int N = number;
while (N >= 1000) {
// Move 1000 from N to roman.
roman += "M";
N -= 1000;
}
while (N >= 900) {
// Move 900 from N to roman.
roman += "CM";
N -= 900;
}
.
. // Continue with other values from the above table.
.
(You can save yourself a lot of typing in this routine if you use arrays in a clever way to
represent the data in the above table.)
Once you’ve written your class, use it in a main program that will read both Arabic
numerals and Roman numerals entered by the user. If the user enters an Arabic numeral,
print the corresponding Roman numeral. If the user enters a Roman numeral, print the
corresponding Arabic numeral. (You can tell the difference by using TextIO.peek() to
peek at the first character in the user’s input (see Subsection 8.2.2). If the first character
is a digit, then the user’s input is an Arabic numeral. Otherwise, it’s a Roman numeral.)
The program should end when the user inputs an empty line.

4. The source code file Expr.java defines a class, Expr, that can be used to represent (solution)
mathematical expressions involving the variable x. The expression can use the operators
+, -, *, /, and ^ (where ^ represents the operation of raising a number to a power). It
can use mathematical functions such as sin, cos, abs, and ln. See the source code file
for full details. The Expr class uses some advanced techniques which have not yet been
covered in this textbook. However, the interface is easy to understand. It contains only a
constructor and two public methods.
Exercises 443

The constructor new Expr(def) creates an Expr object defined by a given expres-
sion. The parameter, def, is a string that contains the definition. For example,
new Expr("x^2") or new Expr("sin(x)+3*x"). If the parameter in the constructor call
does not represent a legal expression, then the constructor throws an IllegalArgumentEx-
ception. The message in the exception describes the error.
If func is a variable of type Expr and num is of type double, then func.value(num)
is a function that returns the value of the expression when the number num is substituted
for the variable x in the expression. For example, if Expr represents the expression 3*x+1,
then func.value(5) is 3*5+1, or 16. If the expression is undefined for the specified value
of x, then the special value Double.NaN is returned; no exception is thrown.
Finally, func.toString() returns the definition of the expression. This is just the
string that was used in the constructor that created the expression object.
For this exercise, you should write a program that lets the user enter an expression. If
the expression contains an error, print an error message. Otherwise, let the user enter some
numerical values for the variable x. Print the value of the expression for each number that
the user enters. However, if the expression is undefined for the specified value of x, print
a message to that effect. You can use the boolean-valued function Double.isNaN(val)
to check whether a number, val, is Double.NaN.
The user should be able to enter as many values of x as desired. After that, the user
should be able to enter a new expression.

5. This exercise uses the class Expr, which was described in Exercise 8.4 and which is defined (solution)
in the source code file Expr.java. For this exercise, you should write a GUI program that
can graph a function, f(x), whose definition is entered by the user. The program should
have a text-input box where the user can enter an expression involving the variable x, such
as x^2 or sin(x-3)/x. This expression is the definition of the function. When the user
clicks an “Enter” button or presses return, the program should use the contents of the
text input box to construct an object of type Expr. If an error is found in the definition,
then the program should display an error message. Otherwise, it should display a graph of
the function. (Recall: If you make a button into the default button for the window, then
pressing return will be equivalent to clicking the button (see the end of Subsection 6.4.2).)
The program will need a Canvas for displaying the graph. To keep things simple,
the canvas should represent a fixed region in the xy-plane, defined by -5 <= x <= 5
and -5 <= y <= 5. To draw the graph, compute a large number of points and connect
them with line segments. (This method does not handle discontinuous functions properly;
doing so is very hard, so you shouldn’t try to do it for this exercise.) My program
divides the interval -5 <= x <= 5 into 300 subintervals and uses the 301 endpoints of
these subintervals for drawing the graph. Note that the function might be undefined at
one of these x-values. In that case, you have to skip that point.
A point on the graph has the form (x,y) where y is obtained by evaluating the user’s
expression at the given value of x. You will have to convert x and y values in the range
from -5 to 5 to the pixel coordinates that you need for drawing on the canvas. The formulas
for the conversion are:
double a = ( (x + 5)/10 * width );
double b = ( (5 - y)/10 * height );
where a and b are the horizontal and vertical pixel coordinates on the canvas. The values
of width and height give the size of the canvas.
Quiz 444

Quiz on Chapter 8
(answers)

1. Why do programming languages require that variables be declared before they are used?
What does this have to do with correctness and robustness?

2. What is a precondition? Give an example.

3. Explain how preconditions can be used as an aid in writing correct programs.

4. Find a useful loop invariant for the while loop in the binary search algorithm (Subsec-
tion 7.5.1).

5. Java has a predefined class called Throwable. What does this class represent? Why does
it exist?

6. Write a method that prints out a 3N+1 sequence starting from a given integer, N. The
starting value should be a parameter to the method. If the parameter is less than or equal
to zero, throw an IllegalArgumentException. If the number in the sequence becomes too
large to be represented as a value of type int, throw an ArithmeticException.

7. Rewrite the method from the previous question, using assert statements instead of
exceptions to check for errors. What is the difference between the two versions of the
method when the program is run?

8. Some classes of exceptions are checked exceptions that require mandatory exception
handling. Explain what this means.

9. Consider a subroutine processData() that has the header

static void processData() throws IOException
Write a try..catch statement that calls this subroutine and prints an error message if
an IOException occurs.

10. Why should a subroutine throw an exception when it encounters an error? Why not just
terminate the program?

11. Suppose that you have a choice of two algorithms that perform the same task. One has
average-case run time that is Θ(n2 ) while the run time of the second algorithm has an
average-case run time that is Θ(n*log(n)). Suppose that you need to process an input
of size n = 100. Which algorithm would you choose? Can you be certain that you are
choosing the fastest algorithm for the input that you intend to process?

12. Analyze the run time of the following algorithm. That is, find a function f(n) such that
the run time of the algorithm is O(f(n)) or, better, Θ(f(n)). Assume that A is an array of
integers, and use the length of the array as the input size, n.
int total = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < A.length; i++) {
if (A[i] > 0)
total = total + A[i];
}
Chapter 9

Linked Data Structures and

Recursion

In this chapter, we look at two advanced programming techniques, recursion and linked data
structures, and some of their applications. Both of these techniques are related to the seemingly
paradoxical idea of defining something in terms of itself. This turns out to be a remarkably
powerful idea.
A subroutine is said to be recursive if it calls itself, either directly or indirectly. What this
means is that the subroutine is used in its own definition. Recursion can often be used to solve
complex problems by reducing them to simpler problems of the same type.
A reference to one object can be stored in an instance variable of another object. The
objects are then said to be “linked.” Complex data structures can be built by linking objects
together. An especially interesting case occurs when an object contains a link to another object
that belongs to the same class. In that case, the class is used in its own definition. Several
important types of data structures are built using classes of this kind.

9.1 Recursion
At one time or another, you’ve probably been told that you can’t define something in
terms of itself. Nevertheless, if it’s done right, defining something at least partially in terms of
itself can be a very powerful technique. A recursive definition is one that uses the concept
or thing that is being defined as part of the definition. For example: An “ancestor” is either
a parent or an ancestor of a parent. A “sentence” can be, among other things, two sentences
joined by a conjunction such as “and.” A “directory” is a part of a disk drive that can hold files
and directories. In mathematics, a “set” is a collection of elements, which can themselves be
sets. A “statement” in Java can be a while statement, which is made up of the word “while”,
a boolean-valued condition, and a statement.
Recursive definitions can describe very complex situations with just a few words. A
definition of the term “ancestor” without using recursion might go something like “a parent,
or a grandparent, or a great-grandparent, or a great-great-grandparent, and so on.” But saying
“and so on” is not very rigorous. (I’ve often thought that recursion is really just a rigorous
way of saying “and so on.”) You run into the same problem if you try to define a “directory”
as “a file that is a list of files, where some of the files can be lists of files, where some of those
files can be lists of files, and so on.” Trying to describe what a Java statement can look like,
without using recursion in the definition, would be difficult and probably pretty comical.

445
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 446

Recursion can be used as a programming technique. A recursive subroutine (or recursive

method ) is one that calls itself, either directly or indirectly. To say that a subroutine calls itself
directly means that its definition contains a subroutine call statement that calls the subroutine
that is being defined. To say that a subroutine calls itself indirectly means that it calls a second
subroutine which in turn calls the first subroutine (either directly or indirectly). A recursive
subroutine can define a complex task in just a few lines of code. In the rest of this section, we’ll
look at a variety of examples, and we’ll see other examples in the rest of the book.

9.1.1 Recursive Binary Search

Let’s start with an example that you’ve seen before: the binary search algorithm from
Subsection 7.5.1. Binary search is used to find a specified value in a sorted list of items (or,
if it does not occur in the list, to determine that fact). The idea is to test the element in the
middle of the list. If that element is equal to the specified value, you are done. If the specified
value is less than the middle element of the list, then you should search for the value in the first
half of the list. Otherwise, you should search for the value in the second half of the list. The
method used to search for the value in the first or second half of the list is binary search. That
is, you look at the middle element in the half of the list that is still under consideration, and
either you’ve found the value you are looking for, or you have to apply binary search to one
half of the remaining elements. And so on! This is a recursive description, and we can write a
recursive subroutine to implement it.
Before we can do that, though, there are two considerations that we need to take into
account. Each of these illustrates an important general fact about recursive subroutines. First
of all, the binary search algorithm begins by looking at the “middle element of the list.” But
what if the list is empty? If there are no elements in the list, then it is impossible to look
at the middle element. In the terminology of Subsection 8.2.2, having a non-empty list is a
“precondition” for looking at the middle element, and this is a clue that we have to modify
the algorithm to take this precondition into account. What should we do if we find ourselves
searching for a specified value in an empty list? The answer is easy: If the list is empty, we can
be sure that the value does not occur in the list, so we can give the answer without any further
work. An empty list is a base case for the binary search algorithm. A base case for a recursive
algorithm is a case that is handled directly, rather than by applying the algorithm recursively.
The binary search algorithm actually has another type of base case: If we find the element we
are looking for in the middle of the list, we are done. There is no need for further recursion.
The second consideration has to do with the parameters to the subroutine. The problem is
phrased in terms of searching for a value in a list. In the original, non-recursive binary search
subroutine, the list was given as an array. However, in the recursive approach, we have to be
able to apply the subroutine recursively to just a part of the original list. Where the original
subroutine was designed to search an entire array, the recursive subroutine must be able to
search part of an array. The parameters to the subroutine must tell it what part of the array
to search. This illustrates a general fact that in order to solve a problem recursively, it is often
necessary to generalize the problem slightly.
Here is a recursive binary search algorithm that searches for a given value in part of an
array of integers:
/**
* Search in the array A in positions numbered loIndex to hiIndex,
* inclusive, for the specified value. If the value is found, return
* the index in the array where it occurs. If the value is not found,
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 447

* return -1. Precondition: The array must be sorted into increasing

* order.
*/
static int binarySearch(int[] A, int loIndex, int hiIndex, int value) {
if (loIndex > hiIndex) {
// The starting position comes after the final index,
// so there are actually no elements in the specified
// range. The value does not occur in this empty list!
return -1;
}
else {
// Look at the middle position in the list. If the
// value occurs at that position, return that position.
// Otherwise, search recursively in either the first
// half or the second half of the list.
int middle = (loIndex + hiIndex) / 2;
if (value == A[middle])
return middle;
else if (value < A[middle])
return binarySearch(A, loIndex, middle - 1, value);
else // value must be > A[middle]
return binarySearch(A, middle + 1, hiIndex, value);
}
} // end binarySearch()
In this routine, the parameters loIndex and hiIndex specify the part of the array that is
to be searched. To search an entire array, it is only necessary to call binarySearch(A, 0,
A.length - 1, value). In the two base cases—when there are no elements in the specified
range of indices and when the value is found in the middle of the range—the subroutine can
return an answer immediately, without using recursion. In the other cases, it uses a recursive
call to compute the answer and returns that answer.
Most people find it difficult at first to convince themselves that recursion actually works.
The key is to note two things that must be true for recursion to work properly: There must
be one or more base cases, which can be handled without using recursion. And when recursion
is applied during the solution of a problem, it must be applied to a problem that is in some
sense smaller—that is, closer to the base cases—than the original problem. The idea is that
if you can solve small problems and if you can reduce big problems to smaller problems, then
you can solve problems of any size. Ultimately, of course, the big problems have to be reduced,
possibly in many, many steps, to the very smallest problems (the base cases). Doing so might
involve an immense amount of detailed bookkeeping. But the computer does that bookkeeping,
not you! As a programmer, you lay out the big picture: the base cases and the reduction of
big problems to smaller problems. The computer takes care of the details involved in reducing
a big problem, in many steps, all the way down to base cases. Trying to think through this
reduction in detail is likely to drive you crazy, and will probably make you think that recursion
is hard. Whereas in fact, recursion is an elegant and powerful method that is often the simplest
approach to solving a complex problem.
A common error in writing recursive subroutines is to violate one of the two rules: There
must be one or more base cases, and when the subroutine is applied recursively, it must be
applied to a problem that is smaller than the original problem. If these rules are violated, the
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 448

result can be an infinite recursion, where the subroutine keeps calling itself over and over,
without ever reaching a base case. Infinite recursion is similar to an infinite loop. However,
since each recursive call to the subroutine uses up some of the computer’s memory, a program
that is stuck in an infinite recursion will run out of memory and crash before long. In Java, the
program will crash with an exception of type StackOverflowError.

9.1.2 Towers of Hanoi

We have been studying an algorithm, binary search, that can easily be implemented with a
while loop, instead of with recursion. Next, we turn to a problem that is easy to solve with
recursion but difficult to solve without it. This is a standard example known as “The Towers
of Hanoi.” The problem involves a stack of various-sized disks, piled up on a base in order of
decreasing size. The object is to move the stack from one base to another, subject to two rules:
Only one disk can be moved at a time, and no disk can ever be placed on top of a smaller
disk. There is a third base that can be used as a “spare.” The starting situation for a stack
of ten disks is shown in the top half of the following picture. The situation after a number of
moves have been made is shown in the bottom half of the picture. (These illustrations are from
a sample program from Chapter 12, TowersOfHanoiGUI.java, which displays an animation of
the step-by-step solution of the problem; however, that program uses some techniques that you
haven’t learned yet.)

The problem is to move ten disks from Stack 0 to Stack 1, subject to the rules given above.
Stack 2 can be used as a spare location. Can we reduce this to smaller problems of the same
type, possibly generalizing the problem a bit to make this possible? It seems natural to consider
the size of the problem to be the number of disks to be moved. If there are N disks in Stack 0,
we know that we will eventually have to move the bottom disk from Stack 0 to Stack 1. But
before we can do that, according to the rules, the first N-1 disks must be on Stack 2. Once
we’ve moved the N-th disk to Stack 1, we must move the other N-1 disks from Stack 2 to Stack 1
to complete the solution. But moving N-1 disks is the same type of problem as moving N disks,
except that it’s a smaller version of the problem. This is exactly what we need to do recursion!
The problem has to be generalized a bit, because the smaller problems involve moving disks
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 449

from Stack 0 to Stack 2 or from Stack 2 to Stack 1, instead of from Stack 0 to Stack 1. In the
recursive subroutine that solves the problem, the stacks that serve as the source and destination
of the disks have to be specified. It’s also convenient to specify the stack that is to be used as
a spare, even though we could figure that out from the other two parameters. The base case is
when there is only one disk to be moved. The solution in this case is trivial: Just move the disk
in one step. Here is a version of the subroutine that will print out step-by-step instructions for
solving the problem:
/**
* Solve the problem of moving the number of disks specified
* by the first parameter from the stack specified by the
* second parameter to the stack specified by the third
* parameter. The stack specified by the fourth parameter
* is available for use as a spare. Stacks are specified by
* number: 0, 1, or 2.
*/
static void towersOfHanoi(int disks, int from, int to, int spare) {
if (disks == 1) {
// There is only one disk to be moved. Just move it.
System.out.printf("Move disk 1 from stack %d to stack %d%n",
from, to);
}
else {
// Move all but one disk to the spare stack, then
// move the bottom disk, then put all the other
// disks on top of it.
towersOfHanoi(disks-1, from, spare, to);
System.out.printf("Move disk %d from stack %d to stack %d%n",
disks, from, to);
towersOfHanoi(disks-1, spare, to, from);
}
}
This subroutine just expresses the natural recursive solution. The recursion works because
each recursive call involves a smaller number of disks, and the problem is trivial to solve
in the base case, when there is only one disk. To solve the “top level” problem of moving
N disks from Stack 0 to Stack 1, the subroutine should be called with the command
TowersOfHanoi(N,0,1,2). The subroutine is used in the sample program TowersOfHanoi.java.
Here, for example, is the output from the program when it is run with the number of disks set
equal to 4:
Move disk 1 from stack 0 to stack 2
Move disk 2 from stack 0 to stack 1
Move disk 1 from stack 2 to stack 1
Move disk 3 from stack 0 to stack 2
Move disk 1 from stack 1 to stack 0
Move disk 2 from stack 1 to stack 2
Move disk 1 from stack 0 to stack 2
Move disk 4 from stack 0 to stack 1
Move disk 1 from stack 2 to stack 1
Move disk 2 from stack 2 to stack 0
Move disk 1 from stack 1 to stack 0
Move disk 3 from stack 2 to stack 1
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 450

Move disk 1 from stack 0 to stack 2

Move disk 2 from stack 0 to stack 1
Move disk 1 from stack 2 to stack 1
The output of this program shows you a mass of detail that you don’t really want to think
about! The difficulty of following the details contrasts sharply with the simplicity and elegance
of the recursive solution. Of course, you really want to leave the details to the computer. (You
might think about what happens when the precondition that the number of disks is positive is
violated. The result is an example of infinite recursion.)
There is, by the way, a story that explains the name of this problem. According to this
story, on the first day of creation, a group of monks in an isolated tower near Hanoi were given
a stack of 64 disks and were assigned the task of moving one disk every day, according to the
rules of the Towers of Hanoi problem. On the day that they complete their task of moving all
the disks from one stack to another, the universe will come to an end. But don’t worry. The
number of steps required to solve the problem for N disks is 2N - 1, and 264 - 1 days is over
50,000,000,000,000 years. We have a long way to go.
(In the terminology of Section 8.5, the Towers of Hanoi algorithm has a run time that is
Θ(2n ), where n is the number of disks that have to be moved. Since the exponential function
2n grows so quickly, the Towers of Hanoi problem can be solved in practice only for a small
number of disks.)
∗ ∗ ∗
By the way, in addition to the graphical Towers of Hanoi program, mentioned above, there
are two more demo programs that you might want to look at. Each program provides a visual
demonstration of a recursive algorithm. In Maze.java, recursion is used to solve a maze. In
LittlePentominos.java, it is used to solve a well-known kind of puzzle. (LittlePentominos.java
also requires the file MosaicCanvas.java.) It would be useful to run the programs and watch
them for a while, but the source code uses some techniques that won’t be covered until
Chapter 12.
The Maze program first creates a random maze. It then tries to solve the maze by finding
a path through the maze from the upper left corner to the lower right corner. This problem
is actually very similar to a “blob-counting” problem that is considered later in this section.
The recursive maze-solving routine starts from a given square, and it visits each neighboring
square and calls itself recursively from there. The recursion ends if the routine finds itself at the
lower right corner of the maze. When it can’t find a solution from a square, it “backs up” out
of that square and tries somewhere else. This common technique is referred to as recursive
backtracking .
The LittlePentominos program is an implementation of a classic puzzle. A pentomino is
a connected figure made up of five equal-sized squares. There are exactly twelve figures that
can be made in this way, not counting all the possible rotations and reflections of the basic
figures. The problem is to place the twelve pentominos on an 8-by-8 board in which four of
the squares have already been marked as filled. The recursive solution looks at a board that
has already been partially filled with pentominos. The subroutine looks at each remaining
piece in turn. It tries to place that piece in the next available place on the board. If the
piece fits, it calls itself recursively to try to fill in the rest of the solution. If that fails,
then the subroutine goes on to the next piece—another example of recursive backtracking.
A generalized version of the pentominos program with many more features can be found at
https://math.hws.edu/eck/js/pentominos/pentominos.html.
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 451

9.1.3 A Recursive Sorting Algorithm

Turning next to an application that is perhaps more practical, we’ll look at a recursive algorithm
for sorting an array. The selection sort and insertion sort algorithms, which were covered in
Section 7.5, are fairly simple, but they are rather slow when applied to large arrays. Faster
sorting algorithms are available. One of these is Quicksort, a recursive algorithm which turns
out to be the fastest sorting algorithm in most situations.
The Quicksort algorithm is based on a simple but clever idea: Given a list of items, select
any item from the list. This item is called the pivot. (In practice, I’ll just use the first item in
the list.) Move all the items that are smaller than the pivot to the beginning of the list, and
move all the items that are larger than the pivot to the end of the list. Now, put the pivot
between the two groups of items. This puts the pivot in the position that it will occupy in the
final, completely sorted array. It will not have to be moved again. We’ll refer to this procedure
as QuicksortStep.

QuicksortStep is not recursive. It is used as a subroutine by Quicksort. The speed of

Quicksort depends on having a fast implementation of QuicksortStep. Since it’s not the main
point of this discussion, I present one without much comment.
/**
* Apply QuicksortStep to the list of items in locations lo through hi
* in the array A. The value returned by this routine is the final
* position of the pivot item in the array.
*/
static int quicksortStep(int[] A, int lo, int hi) {
int pivot = A[lo]; // Get the pivot value.
// The numbers hi and lo mark the endpoints of a range
// of numbers that have not yet been tested. Decrease hi
// and increase lo until they become equal, moving numbers
// bigger than pivot so that they lie above hi and moving
// numbers less than the pivot so that they lie below lo.
// When we begin, A[lo] is an available space, since its
// value has been moved into the local variable, pivot.
while (hi > lo) {
// Loop invariant (See Subsection Subsection 8.2.3): A[i] <= pivot
// for i < lo, and A[i] >= pivot for i > hi.
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 452

while (hi > lo && A[hi] >= pivot) {

// Move hi down past numbers greater than pivot.
// These numbers do not have to be moved.
hi--;
}
if (hi == lo)
break;
// The number A[hi] is less than pivot. Move it into
// the available space at A[lo], leaving an available
// space at A[hi].
A[lo] = A[hi];
lo++;
while (hi > lo && A[lo] <= pivot) {
// Move lo up past numbers less than pivot.
// These numbers do not have to be moved.
lo++;
}
if (hi == lo)
break;
// The number A[lo] is greater than pivot. Move it into
// the available space at A[hi], leaving an available
// space at A[lo].
A[hi] = A[lo];
hi--;
} // end while
// At this point, lo has become equal to hi, and there is
// an available space at that position. This position lies
// between numbers less than pivot and numbers greater than
// pivot. Put pivot in this space and return its location.
A[lo] = pivot;
return lo;
} // end QuicksortStep
With this subroutine in hand, Quicksort is easy. The Quicksort algorithm for sorting a list
consists of applying QuicksortStep to the list, then applying Quicksort recursively to the items
that lie to the left of the new position of the pivot and to the items that lie to the right of that
position. Of course, we need base cases. If the list has only one item, or no items, then the list
is already as sorted as it can ever be, so Quicksort doesn’t have to do anything in these cases.
/**
* Apply quicksort to put the array elements between
* position lo and position hi into increasing order.
*/
static void quicksort(int[] A, int lo, int hi) {
if (hi <= lo) {
// The list has length one or zero. Nothing needs
// to be done, so just return from the subroutine.
return;
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 453

}
else {
// Apply quicksortStep and get the new pivot position.
// Then apply quicksort to sort the items that
// precede the pivot and the items that follow it.
int pivotPosition = quicksortStep(A, lo, hi);
quicksort(A, lo, pivotPosition - 1);
quicksort(A, pivotPosition + 1, hi);
}
}
As usual, we had to generalize the problem. The original problem was to sort an array, but
the recursive algorithm is set up to sort a specified part of an array. To sort an entire array, A,
using the quickSort() subroutine, you would call quicksort(A, 0, A.length - 1).
Quicksort is an interesting example from the point of view of the analysis of algorithms
(Section 8.5), because its average case run time differs greatly from its worst case run time.
Here is a very informal analysis, starting with the average case: Note that an application of
quicksortStep divides a problem into two sub-problems. On the average, the subproblems will
be of approximately the same size. A problem of size n is divided into two problems that are
roughly of size n/2; these are then divided into four problems that are roughly of size n/4;
and so on. Since the problem size is divided by 2 on each level, there will be approximately
log(n) levels of subdivision. The amount of processing on each level is proportional to n. (On
the top level, each element in the array is looked at and possibly moved. On the second level,
where there are two subproblems, every element but one in the array is part of one of those
two subproblems and must be looked at and possibly moved, so there is a total of about n
steps in both subproblems combined. Similarly, on the third level, there are four subproblems
and a total of about n steps in the four subproblems on that level. . . .) With a total of n steps
on each level and approximately log(n) levels in the average case, the average case run time
for Quicksort is Θ(n*log(n)). This analysis assumes that quicksortStep divides a problem into
two approximately equal parts. However, in the worst case, each application of quicksortStep
divides a problem of size n into a problem of size 0 and a problem of size n-1. This happens
when the pivot element ends up at the beginning or end of the array. In this worst case, there
are n levels of subproblems, and the worst-case run time is Θ(n2 ). The worst case is very
rare—it depends on the items in the array being arranged in a very special way, so the average
performance of Quicksort can be very good even though it is not so good in certain rare cases.
(One of these “rare” cases is when the original array is already sorted or almost sorted, which
is really not all that rare in practice. Applying the Quicksort algorithm as given above to a
large sorted array will take a long time. One way to avoid that—with high probablility—is to
pick the pivot for QuickSort step at random, rather than always using the first item.)
There are sorting algorithms that have both an average case and a worst case run time of
Θ(n*log(n)). One example that is fairly easy to understand is MergeSort, which you can look
up if you are interested.

9.1.4 Blob Counting

Next, we will look at counting the number of squares in a group of connected squares. I call a
group of connected squares a “blob,” and the sample program that we will consider is Blobs.java.
The program displays a grid of small white, gray, and red squares. Here is a screenshot from
the program, showing the grid of squares along with some controls:
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 454

The gray or red squares are considered to be “filled” and the white squares are “empty.”
For the purposes of this example, we define a “blob” to consist of a filled square and all the
filled squares that can be reached from it by moving up, down, left, and right through other
filled squares. If the user clicks on any filled square in the program, the computer will count
the squares in the blob that contains the clicked square, and it will change the color of those
squares to red. In the picture, one of the blobs is shown in red. The program has several
controls. There is a “New Blobs” button; clicking this button will create a new random pattern
in the grid. A pop-up menu specifies the approximate percentage of squares that will be filled
in the new pattern. The more filled squares, the larger the blobs. And a button labeled “Count
the Blobs” will tell you how many different blobs there are in the pattern.
Recursion is used in this program to count the number of squares in a blob. Without
recursion, this would be a very difficult thing to implement. Recursion makes it relatively easy,
but it still requires a new technique, which is also useful in a number of other applications.
The data for the grid of squares is stored in a two dimensional array of boolean values,
boolean[][] filled;
The value of filled[r][c] is true if the square in row r and in column c of the grid is
filled. The number of rows in the grid is stored in an instance variable named rows, and the
number of columns is stored in columns. The program uses a recursive instance method named
getBlobSize(r,c) to count the number of squares in a blob. The parameters r and c tell
which blob to count, namely the blob that includes the square in a row r and column c. If
there is no filled square at position (r,c), then the answer is zero. Otherwise, getBlobSize()
has to count all the filled squares that can be reached from the square at position (r,c). The
idea is to use getBlobSize() recursively to get the number of filled squares that can be reached
from each of the neighboring positions: (r+1,c), (r-1,c), (r,c+1), and (r,c-1). Add up
these numbers, and add one to count the square at (r,c) itself, and you get the total number
of filled squares that can be reached from (r,c). Here is an implementation of this algorithm,
as stated. Unfortunately, it has a serious flaw: It leads to an infinite recursion!
int getBlobSize(int r, int c) { // BUGGY, INCORRECT VERSION!!
// This INCORRECT method tries to count all the filled
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 455

// squares that can be reached from position (r,c) in the grid.

if (r < 0 || r >= rows || c < 0 || c >= columns) {
// This position is not in the grid, so there is
// no blob at this position. Return a blob size of zero.
return 0;
}
if (filled[r][c] == false) {
// This square is not part of a blob, so return zero.
return 0;
}
int size = 1; // Count the square at this position, then count the
// the blobs that are connected to this square
// horizontally or vertically.
size += getBlobSize(r-1,c);
size += getBlobSize(r+1,c);
size += getBlobSize(r,c-1);
size += getBlobSize(r,c+1);
return size;
} // end INCORRECT getBlobSize()
Unfortunately, this routine will count the same square more than once. In fact, if there are
at least two squares in the blob, then it will try to count each square infinitely often! Think of
yourself standing at position (r,c) and trying to follow these instructions. The first instruction
tells you to move up one row. You do that, and then you apply the same procedure. As one
of the steps in that procedure, you have to move down one row and apply the same procedure
yet again. But that puts you back at position (r,c)! From there, you move up one row, and
from there you move down one row. . . . Back and forth forever! We have to make sure that a
square is only counted and processed once, so we don’t end up going around in circles. The
solution is to leave a trail of breadcrumbs—or on the computer a trail of boolean values—to
mark the squares that you’ve already visited. Once a square is marked as visited, it won’t be
processed again. The remaining, unvisited squares are reduced in number, so definite progress
has been made in reducing the size of the problem. Infinite recursion is avoided!
A second boolean array, visited[r][c], is used to keep track of which squares have already
been visited and processed. It is assumed that all the values in this array are set to false before
getBlobSize() is called. As getBlobSize() encounters unvisited squares, it marks them as
visited by setting the corresponding entry in the visited array to true. When getBlobSize()
encounters a square that it has already visited, it doesn’t count it or process it further. The
technique of “marking” items as they are encountered is one that is used over and over in the
programming of recursive algorithms. Here is the corrected version of getBlobSize(), with
changes shown in italic:
/**
* Counts the squares in the blob at position (r,c) in the
* grid. Squares are only counted if they are filled and
* unvisited. If this routine is called for a position that
* has been visited, the return value will be zero.
*/
int getBlobSize(int r, int c) {
if (r < 0 || r >= rows || c < 0 || c >= columns) {
// This position is not in the grid, so there is
// no blob at this position. Return a blob size of zero.
return 0;
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 456

}
if (filled[r][c] == false || visited[r][c] == true) {
// This square is not part of a blob, or else it has
// already been counted, so return zero.
return 0;
}
visited[r][c] = true; // Mark the square as visited so that
// we won’t count it again during the
// following recursive calls.
int size = 1; // Count the square at this position, then count the
// the blobs that are connected to this square
// horizontally or vertically.
size += getBlobSize(r-1,c);
size += getBlobSize(r+1,c);
size += getBlobSize(r,c-1);
size += getBlobSize(r,c+1);
return size;
} // end getBlobSize()
In the program, this method is used to determine the size of a blob when the user clicks
on a square. After getBlobSize() has performed its task, all the squares in the blob are still
marked as visited. The method that draws the grid of squares shows visited squares in red,
which makes the blob visible.
The getBlobSize() method is also used for the other task that can be done by the program:
counting all the blobs. This is done by the following method, which includes comments to
explain how it works:
/**
* When the user clicks the "Count the Blobs" button, find the
* number of blobs in the grid and report the number in the
* message label.
*/
void countBlobs() {
int count = 0; // Number of blobs.
/* First clear out the visited array. The getBlobSize() method
will mark every filled square that it finds by setting the
corresponding element of the array to true. Once a square
has been marked as visited, it will stay marked until all the
blobs have been counted. This will prevent the same blob from
being counted more than once. */
for (int r = 0; r < rows; r++)
for (int c = 0; c < columns; c++)
visited[r][c] = false;
/* For each position in the grid, call getBlobSize() to get the
size of the blob at that position. If the size is not zero,
count a blob. Note that if we come to a position that was part
of a previously counted blob, getBlobSize() will return 0 and
the blob will not be counted again. */
for (int r = 0; r < rows; r++)
for (int c = 0; c < columns; c++) {
if (getBlobSize(r,c) > 0)
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 457

count++;
}
draw(); // Redraw the entire grid of squares.
// Note that all the filled squares will be red,
// since they have all now been visited.
message.setText("The number of blobs is " + count);
} // end countBlobs()

9.2 Linked Data Structures

Every useful object contains instance variables. When the type of an instance variable is
given by a class or interface name, the variable can hold a reference to another object. Such
a reference is also called a pointer, and we say that the variable points to the object. (Of
course, any variable that can contain a reference to an object can also contain the special value
null, which points to nowhere.) When one object contains an instance variable that points to
another object, we think of the objects as being “linked” by the pointer. Data structures of
great complexity can be constructed by linking objects together.

9.2.1 Recursive Linking

Something interesting happens when an object contains an instance variable that can refer
to another object of the same type. In that case, the definition of the object’s class is
recursive. Such recursion arises naturally in many cases. For example, consider a class designed
to represent employees at a company. Suppose that every employee except the boss has a
supervisor, who is another employee of the company. Then the Employee class would naturally
contain an instance variable of type Employee that points to the employee’s supervisor:
/**
* An object of type Employee holds data about one employee.
*/
public class Employee {
String name; // Name of the employee.
Employee supervisor; // The employee’s supervisor.
.
. // (Other instance variables and methods.)
.
} // end class Employee
If emp is a variable of type Employee, then emp.supervisor is another variable of type
Employee. If emp refers to the boss, then the value of emp.supervisor should be null to
indicate the fact that the boss has no supervisor. If we wanted to print out the name of the
employee’s supervisor, for example, we could use the following Java statement:
if ( emp.supervisor == null) {
System.out.println( emp.name + " is the boss and has no supervisor!" );
}
else {
System.out.print( "The supervisor of " + emp.name + " is " );
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 458

System.out.println( emp.supervisor.name );
}
Now, suppose that we want to know how many levels of supervisors there are between a
given employee and the boss. We just have to follow the chain of command through a series of
supervisor links, and count how many steps it takes to get to the boss:
if ( emp.supervisor == null ) {
System.out.println( emp.name + " is the boss!" );
}
else {
Employee runner; // For "running" up the chain of command.
runner = emp.supervisor;
if ( runner.supervisor == null) {
System.out.println( emp.name + " reports directly to the boss." );
}
else {
int count = 0;
while ( runner.supervisor != null ) {
count++; // Count the supervisor on this level.
runner = runner.supervisor; // Move up to the next level.
}
System.out.println( "There are " + count
+ " supervisors between " + emp.name
+ " and the boss." );
}
}
As the while loop is executed, runner points in turn to the original employee (emp), then
to emp’s supervisor, then to the supervisor of emp’s supervisor, and so on. The count
variable is incremented each time runner “visits” a new employee. The loop ends when
runner.supervisor is null, which indicates that runner has reached the boss. At that point,
count has counted the number of steps between emp and the boss.
In this example, the supervisor variable is quite natural and useful. In fact, data structures
that are built by linking objects together are so useful that they are a major topic of study
in computer science. We’ll be looking at a few typical examples. In this section and the
next, we’ll be looking at linked lists. A linked list consists of a chain of objects of the same
type, linked together by pointers from one object to the next. This is much like the chain of
supervisors between emp and the boss in the above example. It’s also possible to have more
complex situations, in which one object can contain links to several other objects. We’ll look
at an example of this in Section 9.4.
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 459

null

When an object contains a reference to an object of the

same type, then several objects can be linked together
into a list. Each object refers to the next object.

null
null

Things get even more interesting

when an object contains two
references to objects of the null
same type. In that case,
more complicated data
structures can be
null null null
constructed. null
null null

9.2.2 Linked Lists

For most of the examples in the rest of this section, linked lists will be constructed out of objects
belonging to the class Node which is defined as follows:
class Node {
String item;
Node next;
}
The term node is often used to refer to one of the objects in a linked data structure. Objects
of type Node can be chained together as shown in the top part of the above illustration. Each
node holds a String and a pointer to the next node in the list (if any). The last node in such a
list can always be identified by the fact that the instance variable next in the last node holds
the value null instead of a pointer to another node. The purpose of the chain of nodes is to
represent a list of strings. The first string in the list is stored in the first node, the second string
is stored in the second node, and so on. The pointers and the node objects are used to build
the structure, but the data that we want to represent is the list of strings. Of course, we could
just as easily represent a list of integers or a list of Colors or a list of any other type of data by
changing the type of the item that is stored in each node.
Although the Nodes in this example are very simple, we can use them to illustrate the
common operations on linked lists. Typical operations include deleting nodes from the list,
inserting new nodes into the list, and searching for a specified String among the items in the
list. We will look at subroutines to perform all of these operations, among others.
For a linked list to be used in a program, that program needs a variable that refers to the
first node in the list. It only needs a pointer to the first node since all the other nodes in the list
can be accessed by starting at the first node and following links along the list from one node to
the next. In my examples, I will always use a variable named head, of type Node, that points
to the first node in the linked list. When the list is empty, the value of head is null.
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 460

For a list to be useful, there must be a variable

that points to the first node in the list. Here,
the variable named "head" serves this purpose.
head:

"fred" "jane" "joe" "mary"

null

9.2.3 Basic Linked List Processing

It is very common to want to process all the items in a linked list in some way. The common
pattern is to start at the head of the list, then move from each node to the next by following
the pointer in the node, stopping when the null that marks the end of the list is reached. If
head is a variable of type Node that points to the first node in the list, then the general form
of the code for processing all the items in a linked list is:
Node runner; // A pointer that will be used to traverse the list.
runner = head; // Start with runner pointing to the head of the list.
while ( runner != null ) { // Continue until null is encountered.
process( runner.item ); // Do something with the item in the current node.
runner = runner.next; // Move on to the next node in the list.
}
Our only access to the list is through the variable head, so we start by getting a copy of the
value in head with the assignment statement runner = head. We need a copy of head because
we are going to change the value of runner. We can’t change the value of head, or we would
lose our only access to the list! The variable runner will point to each node of the list in turn.
When runner points to one of the nodes in the list, runner.next is a pointer to the next node
in the list, so the assignment statement runner = runner.next moves the pointer along the
list from each node to the next. We know that we’ve reached the end of the list when runner
becomes equal to null. Note that our list-processing code works even for an empty list, since
for an empty list the value of head is null and the body of the while loop is not executed at
all. As an example, we can print all the strings in a list of Strings by saying:
Node runner = head;
while ( runner != null ) {
System.out.println( runner.item );
runner = runner.next;
}
The while loop can, by the way, be rewritten as a for loop. Remember that even though the
loop control variable in a for loop is often numerical, that is not a requirement. Here is a for
loop that is equivalent to the above while loop:
for ( Node runner = head; runner != null; runner = runner.next ) {
System.out.println( runner.item );
}
Similarly, we can traverse a list of integers to add up all the numbers in the list. A linked
list of integers can be constructed using the class
public class IntNode {
int item; // One of the integers in the list.
IntNode next; // Pointer to the next node in the list.
}
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 461

If head is a variable of type IntNode that points to a linked list of integers, we can find the sum
of the integers in the list using:
int sum = 0;
IntNode runner = head;
while ( runner != null ) {
sum = sum + runner.item; // Add current item to the sum.
runner = runner.next;
}
System.out.println("The sum of the list of items is " + sum);
It is also possible to use recursion to process a linked list. Recursion is rarely the natural
way to process a list, since it’s so easy to use a loop to traverse the list. However, understanding
how to apply recursion to lists can help with understanding the recursive processing of more
complex data structures. A non-empty linked list can be thought of as consisting of two parts:
the head of the list, which is just the first node in the list, and the tail of the list, which
consists of the remainder of the list after the head. Note that the tail is itself a linked list and
that it is shorter than the original list (by one node). This is a natural setup for recursion,
where the problem of processing a list can be divided into processing the head and recursively
processing the tail. The base case occurs in the case of an empty list (or sometimes in the case
of a list of length one). For example, here is a recursive algorithm for adding up the numbers
in a linked list of integers:
if the list is empty then
return 0 (since there are no numbers to be added up)
otherwise
let listsum = the number in the head node
let tailsum be the sum of the numbers in the tail list (recursively)
add tailsum to listsum
return listsum
One remaining question is, how do we get the tail of a non-empty linked list? If head is a
variable that points to the head node of the list, then head.next is a variable that points to
the second node of the list—and that node is in fact the first node of the tail. So, we can view
head.next as a pointer to the tail of the list. One special case is when the original list consists
of a single node. In that case, the tail of the list is empty, and head.next is null. Since an
empty list is represented by a null pointer, head.next represents the tail of the list even in this
special case. This allows us to write a recursive list-summing function in Java as
/**
* Compute the sum of all the integers in a linked list of integers.
* @param head a pointer to the first node in the linked list
*/
public static int addItemsInList( IntNode head ) {
if ( head == null ) {
// Base case: The list is empty, so the sum is zero.
return 0;
}
else {
// Recursive case: The list is non-empty. Find the sum of
// the tail list, and add that to the item in the head node.
// (Note that this case could be written simply as
// return head.item + addItemsInList( head.next );)
int listsum = head.item;
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 462

int tailsum = addItemsInList( head.next );

listsum = listsum + tailsum;
return listsum;
}
}
I will finish by presenting a list-processing problem that is easy to solve with recursion, but
quite tricky to solve without it. The problem is to print out all the strings in a linked list of
strings in the reverse of the order in which they occur in the list. Note that when we do this,
the item in the head of a list is printed out after all the items in the tail of the list. This leads
to the following recursive routine. You should convince yourself that it works, and you should
think about trying to do the same thing without using recursion:
public static void printReversed( Node head ) {
if ( head == null ) {
// Base case: The list is empty, and there is nothing to print.
return;
}
else {
// Recursive case: The list is non-empty.
printReversed( head.next ); // Print strings from tail, in reverse order.
System.out.println( head.item ); // Then print string from head node.
}
}

∗ ∗ ∗
In the rest of this section, we’ll look at a few more advanced operations on a linked list of
strings. The subroutines that we consider are instance methods in a class that I wrote named
StringList. An object of type StringList represents a linked list of strings. The class has a private
instance variable named head of type Node that points to the first node in the list, or is null
if the list is empty. Instance methods in class StringList access head as a global variable. The
source code for StringList is in the file StringList.java, and it is used in a sample program named
ListDemo.java, so you can take a look at the code in context if you want.
One of the methods in the StringList class searches the list, looking for a specified string.
If the string that we are looking for is searchItem, then we have to compare searchItem to
each item in the list. This is an example of basic list traversal and processing. However, in this
case, we can stop processing if we find the item that we are looking for.
/**
* Searches the list for a specified item.
* @param searchItem the item that is to be searched for
* @return true if searchItem is one of the items in the list or false if
* searchItem does not occur in the list.
*/
public boolean find(String searchItem) {
Node runner; // A pointer for traversing the list.
runner = head; // Start by looking at the head of the list.
// (head is an instance variable! )
while ( runner != null ) {
// Go through the list looking at the string in each
// node. If the string is the one we are looking for,
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 463

// return true, since the string has been found in the list.
if ( runner.item.equals(searchItem) )
return true;
runner = runner.next; // Move on to the next node.
}
// At this point, we have looked at all the items in the list
// without finding searchItem. Return false to indicate that
// the item does not exist in the list.
return false;
} // end find()
It is possible that the list is empty, that is, that the value of head is null. We should be
careful that this case is handled properly. In the above code, if head is null, then the body
of the while loop is never executed at all, so no nodes are processed and the return value is
false. This is exactly what we want when the list is empty, since the searchItem can’t occur
in an empty list.

9.2.4 Inserting into a Linked List

The problem of inserting a new item into a linked list is more difficult, at least in the case
where the item is inserted into the middle of the list. (In fact, it’s probably the most difficult
operation on linked data structures that you’ll encounter in this chapter.) In the StringList
class, the items in the nodes of the linked list are kept in increasing order. When a new item
is inserted into the list, it must be inserted at the correct position according to this ordering.
This means that, usually, we will have to insert the new item somewhere in the middle of the
list, between two existing nodes. To do this, it’s convenient to have two variables of type Node,
which refer to the existing nodes that will lie on either side of the new node. In the following
illustration, these variables are previous and runner. Another variable, newNode, refers to the
new node. In order to do the insertion, the link from previous to runner must be “broken,”
and new links from previous to newNode and from newNode to runner must be added:

runner:

previous:

"fred" UVWXYU UVZYU "mary" ...

...

newNode: "larry"

JKMNOPQKT a new node

into the middle of a list.

Once we have previous and runner pointing to the right nodes, the command
“previous.next = newNode;” can be used to make previous.next point to the new node.
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 464

And the command “newNode.next = runner” will set newNode.next to point to the correct
place. However, before we can use these commands, we need to set up runner and previous
as shown in the illustration. The idea is to start at the first node of the list, and then move
along the list past all the items that are less than the new item. While doing this, we have to
be aware of the danger of “falling off the end of the list.” That is, we can’t continue if runner
reaches the end of the list and becomes null. If insertItem is the item that is to be inserted,
and if we assume that it does, in fact, belong somewhere in the middle of the list, then the
following code would correctly position previous and runner:
Node runner, previous;
previous = head; // Start at the beginning of the list.
runner = head.next;
while ( runner != null && runner.item.compareTo(insertItem) < 0 ) {
previous = runner; // "previous = previous.next" would also work
runner = runner.next;
}
(This uses the compareTo() instance method from the String class to test whether the item in
the node is less than the item that is being inserted. See Subsection 2.3.3.)
This is fine, except that the assumption that the new node is inserted into the middle of
the list is not always valid. It might be that insertItem is less than the first item of the list.
In that case, the new node must be inserted at the head of the list. This can be done with the
instructions
newNode.next = head; // Make newNode.next point to the old head.
head = newNode; // Make newNode the new head of the list.
It is also possible that the list is empty. In that case, newNode will become the first and only
node in the list. This can be accomplished simply by setting head = newNode. The following
insert() method from the StringList class covers all of these possibilities:
/**
* Insert a specified item into the list, keeping the list in order.
* @param insertItem the item that is to be inserted.
*/
public void insert(String insertItem) {
Node newNode; // A Node to contain the new item.
newNode = new Node();
newNode.item = insertItem; // (N.B. newNode.next is null.)
if ( head == null ) {
// The new item is the first (and only) one in the list.
// Set head to point to it.
head = newNode;
}
else if ( head.item.compareTo(insertItem) >= 0 ) {
// The new item is less than the first item in the list,
// so it has to be inserted at the head of the list.
newNode.next = head;
head = newNode;
}
else {
// The new item belongs somewhere after the first item
// in the list. Search for its proper position and insert it.
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 465

Node runner; // A node for traversing the list.

Node previous; // Always points to the node preceding runner.
runner = head.next; // Start by looking at the SECOND position.
previous = head;
while ( runner != null && runner.item.compareTo(insertItem) < 0 ) {
// Move previous and runner along the list until runner
// falls off the end or hits a list element that is
// greater than or equal to insertItem. When this
// loop ends, previous indicates the position where
// insertItem must be inserted.
previous = runner;
runner = runner.next;
}
newNode.next = runner; // Insert newNode after previous.
previous.next = newNode;
}
} // end insert()
If you were paying close attention to the above discussion, you might have noticed that
there is one special case which is not mentioned. What happens if the new node has to be
inserted at the end of the list? This will happen if all the items in the list are less than the new
item. In fact, this case is already handled correctly by the subroutine, in the last part of the
if statement. If insertItem is greater than all the items in the list, then the while loop will
end when runner has traversed the entire list and become null. However, when that happens,
previous will be left pointing to the last node in the list. Setting previous.next = newNode
adds newNode onto the end of the list. Since runner is null, the command newNode.next =
runner sets newNode.next to null, which is exactly what is needed to mark the end of the list.

9.2.5 Deleting from a Linked List

The delete operation is similar to insert, although a little simpler. There are still special cases
to consider. When the first node in the list is to be deleted, then the value of head has to be
changed to point to what was previously the second node in the list. Since head.next refers to
the second node in the list, this can be done by setting head = head.next. (Once again, you
should check that this works when head.next is null, that is, when there is no second node in
the list. In that case, the list becomes empty.)
If the node that is being deleted is in the middle of the list, then we can set up previous and
runner with runner pointing to the node that is to be deleted and with previous pointing to the
node that precedes that node in the list. Once that is done, the command “previous.next =
runner.next;” will delete the node. The deleted node will be garbage collected. I encourage
you to draw a picture for yourself to illustrate this operation. Here is the complete code for the
delete() method:
/**
* Delete a specified item from the list, if that item is present.
* If multiple copies of the item are present in the list, only
* the one that comes first in the list is deleted.
* @param deleteItem the item to be deleted
* @return true if the item was found and deleted, or false if the item
* was not in the list.
*/
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 466

public boolean delete(String deleteItem) {

if ( head == null ) {
// The list is empty, so it certainly doesn’t contain deleteString.
return false;
}
else if ( head.item.equals(deleteItem) ) {
// The string is the first item of the list. Remove it.
head = head.next;
return true;
}
else {
// The string, if it occurs at all, is somewhere beyond the
// first element of the list. Search the list.
Node runner; // A node for traversing the list.
Node previous; // Always points to the node preceding runner.
runner = head.next; // Start by looking at the SECOND list node.
previous = head;
while ( runner != null && runner.item.compareTo(deleteItem) < 0 ) {
// Move previous and runner along the list until runner
// falls off the end or hits a list element that is
// greater than or equal to deleteItem. When this
// loop ends, runner indicates the position where
// deleteItem must be, if it is in the list.
previous = runner;
runner = runner.next;
}
if ( runner != null && runner.item.equals(deleteItem) ) {
// Runner points to the node that is to be deleted.
// Remove it by changing the pointer in the previous node.
previous.next = runner.next;
return true;
}
else {
// The item does not exist in the list.
return false;
}
}
} // end delete()

9.3 Stacks, Queues, and ADTs

A linked list is a particular type of data structure, made up of objects linked together by
pointers. In the previous section, we used a linked list to store an ordered list of Strings, and
we implemented insert, delete, and find operations on that list. However, we could easily
have stored the list of Strings in an array or ArrayList, instead of in a linked list. We could still
have implemented the same operations on the list. The implementations of these operations
would be different, but their interfaces and logical behavior would still be the same.
The term abstract data type, or ADT , refers to a set of possible values and a set of
operations on those values, without any specification of how the values are to be represented
or how the operations are to be implemented. An “ordered list of strings” can be defined as an
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 467

abstract data type. Any sequence of Strings that is arranged in increasing order is a possible
value of this data type. The operations on the data type include inserting a new string, deleting
a string, and finding a string in the list. There are often several different ways to implement the
same abstract data type. For example, the “ordered list of strings” ADT can be implemented
as a linked list or as an array. A program that only depends on the abstract definition of
the ADT can use either implementation, interchangeably. In particular, the implementation
of the ADT can be changed without affecting the program as a whole. This can make the
program easier to debug and maintain, so ADTs are an important tool in software engineering.
Abstraction is an important general concept in computer science. We have seen other examples:
control abstraction in Subsection 3.1.4 and procedural abstraction in Section 4.1. Here, we are
considering data abstraction.
In this section, we’ll look at two common abstract data types, stacks and queues. Both
stacks and queues are often implemented as linked lists, but that is not the only possible
implementation. You should think of the rest of this section partly as a discussion of stacks
and queues and partly as a case study in ADTs.

9.3.1 Stacks
A stack consists of a sequence of items, which should be thought of as piled one on top of
the other like a physical stack of boxes or cafeteria trays. Only the top item on the stack is
accessible at any given time. It can be removed from the stack with an operation called pop.
An item lower down on the stack can only be removed after all the items on top of it have been
popped off the stack. A new item can be added to the top of the stack with an operation called
push. We can make a stack of any type of items. If, for example, the items are values of type
int, then the push and pop operations can be implemented as instance methods
• void push(int newItem) — Add newItem to top of stack.
• int pop() — Remove the top int from the stack and return it.
It is an error to try to pop an item from an empty stack, so it is important to be able to tell
whether a stack is empty. We need another stack operation to do the test, implemented as an
instance method
• boolean isEmpty() — Returns true if the stack is empty.
This defines “stack of ints” as an abstract data type. This ADT can be implemented in several
ways, but however it is implemented, its behavior must correspond to the abstract mental image
of a stack.
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 468

In a stack, all operations take place at the

"top" of the stack. The "push" operation
adds an item to the top of the stack.
The "pop" operation removes the item on
the top of the stack and returns it.

12 83
25 25 25
123 123 123
5 5 5
17 17 17

Original stack. After pop(). After push(83).

In the linked list implementation of a stack, the top of the stack is actually the node at the
head of the list. It is easy to add and remove nodes at the front of a linked list—much easier
than inserting and deleting nodes in the middle of the list. Here is a class that implements the
“stack of ints” ADT using a linked list. (It uses a static nested class to represent the nodes of
the linked list, but that is part of the private implementation of the ADT.)
public class StackOfInts {
/**
* An object of type Node holds one of the items in the linked list
* that represents the stack.
*/
private static class Node {
int item;
Node next;
}
private Node top; // Pointer to the Node that is at the top of
// of the stack. If top == null, then the
// stack is empty.
/**
* Add N to the top of the stack.
*/
public void push( int N ) {
Node newTop; // A Node to hold the new item.
newTop = new Node();
newTop.item = N; // Store N in the new Node.
newTop.next = top; // The new Node points to the old top.
top = newTop; // The new item is now on top.
}
/**
* Remove the top item from the stack, and return it.
* Throws an IllegalStateException if the stack is empty when
* this method is called.
*/
public int pop() {
if ( top == null )
throw new IllegalStateException("Can’t pop from an empty stack.");
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 469

int topItem = top.item; // The item that is being popped.

top = top.next; // The previous second item is now on top.
return topItem;
}
/**
* Returns true if the stack is empty. Returns false
* if there are one or more items on the stack.
*/
public boolean isEmpty() {
return (top == null);
}
} // end class StackOfInts
You should make sure that you understand how the push and pop operations operate on the
linked list. Drawing some pictures might help. Note that the linked list is part of the private
implementation of the StackOfInts class. A program that uses this class doesn’t even need to
know that a linked list is being used.
(As an aside, the nested Node class in StackOfInts could have been record class (Section 7.4),
since nodes don’t need to be modified after they are created. The implementation of push()
would have to be changed to use the record class constructor. See StackOfInt.java, which uses
this approach.)
Now, it’s pretty easy to implement a stack as an array instead of as a linked list. Since the
number of items on the stack varies with time, a counter is needed to keep track of how many
spaces in the array are actually in use. If this counter is called top, then the items on the stack
are stored in positions 0, 1, . . . , top-1 in the array. The item in position 0 is on the bottom
of the stack, and the item in position top-1 is on the top of the stack. Pushing an item onto
the stack is easy: Put the item in position top and add 1 to the value of top. If we don’t want
to put a limit on the number of items that the stack can hold, we can use the dynamic array
techniques from Subsection 7.2.4. Note that the typical picture of the array would show the
stack “upside down,” with the bottom of the stack at the top of the array. This doesn’t matter.
The array is just an implementation of the abstract idea of a stack, and as long as the stack
operations work the way they are supposed to, we are OK. Here is a second implementation of
the StackOfInts class, using a dynamic array:
import java.util.Arrays; // For the Arrays.copyOf() method.
public class StackOfInts { // (alternate version, using an array)
private int[] items = new int[10]; // Holds the items on the stack.
private int top = 0; // The number of items currently on the stack.
/**
* Add N to the top of the stack.
*/
public void push( int N ) {
if (top == items.length) {
// The array is full, so make a new, larger array and
// copy the current stack items into it.
items = Arrays.copyOf( items, 2*items.length );
}
items[top] = N; // Put N in next available spot.
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 470

top++; // Number of items goes up by one.

}
/**
* Remove the top item from the stack, and return it.
* Throws an IllegalStateException if the stack is empty when
* this method is called.
*/
public int pop() {
if ( top == 0 )
throw new IllegalStateException("Can’t pop from an empty stack.");
int topItem = items[top - 1]; // Top item in the stack.
top--; // Number of items on the stack goes down by one.
return topItem;
}
/**
* Returns true if the stack is empty. Returns false
* if there are one or more items on the stack.
*/
public boolean isEmpty() {
return (top == 0);
}
} // end class StackOfInts
Once again, the implementation of the stack (as an array) is private to the class. The two
versions of the StackOfInts class can be used interchangeably, since their public interfaces are
identical—including the fact that an attempt to pop from an empty stack will result in an
IllegalStateException.
∗ ∗ ∗
It’s interesting to look at the run time analysis of stack operations. (See Section 8.5). We
can measure the size of the problem by the number of items that are on the stack. For the
linked list implementation of a stack, the worst case run time both for the push and for the pop
operation is Θ(1). This just means that the run time is less than some constant, independent
of the number of items on the stack. This is easy to see if you look at the code. The operations
are implemented with a few simple assignment statements, and the number of items on the
stack has no effect.
For the array implementation, on the other hand, a special case occurs in the push operation
when the array is full. In that case, a new array is created and all the stack items are copied
into the new array. This takes an amount of time that is proportional to the number of items
on the stack. So, although the run time for push is usually Θ(1), the worst case run time is
Θ(n), where n is the number of items on the stack. (However, the worst case occurs only rarely,
and there is a natural sense in which the average case run time for the array implementation is
still Θ(1).)

9.3.2 Queues
Queues are similar to stacks in that a queue consists of a sequence of items, and there are
restrictions about how items can be added to and removed from the list. However, a queue has
two ends, called the front and the back of the queue. Items are always added to the queue at the
back and removed from the queue at the front. The operations of adding and removing items
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 471

are called enqueue and dequeue in this book. (These names are not completely standardized,
in the way that “push” and “pop” are. For example, the operations are sometimes called “put”
and “take.”) An item that is added to the back of the queue will remain on the queue until all
the items in front of it have been removed. This should sound familiar. A queue is like a “line”
or “queue” of customers waiting for service. Customers are serviced in the order in which they
arrive on the queue.
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item at the "front" and returns it.

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A queue can hold items of any type. For a queue of ints, the enqueue and dequeue operations
can be implemented as instance methods in a “QueueOfInts” class. We also need an instance
method for checking whether the queue is empty:
• void enqueue(int N) — Add N to the back of the queue.
• int dequeue() — Remove the item at the front and return it.
• boolean isEmpty() — Return true if the queue is empty.
A queue can be implemented as a linked list or as an array. An efficient array implementation
is trickier than the array implementation of a stack, so I won’t give it here. In the linked list
implementation, the first item of the list is at the front of the queue. Dequeueing an item from
the front of the queue is just like popping an item off a stack. The back of the queue is at the
end of the list. Enqueueing an item involves setting a pointer in the last node of the current
list to point to a new node that contains the item. To do this, we’ll need a command like
“tail.next = newNode;”, where tail is a pointer to the last node in the list. If head is a
pointer to the first node of the list, it would always be possible to get a pointer to the last node
of the list by saying:
Node tail; // This will point to the last node in the list.
tail = head; // Start at the first node.
while (tail.next != null) {
tail = tail.next; // Move to next node.
}
// At this point, tail.next is null, so tail points to
// the last node in the list.
However, it would be very inefficient to do this over and over every time an item is enqueued.
For the sake of efficiency, we’ll use another instance variable to store a pointer to the last node.
This complicates the class somewhat; we have to be careful to update the value of this variable
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 472

whenever a new node is added to the end of the list. Given all this, writing the QueueOfInts
class is not all that difficult:
public class QueueOfInts {
/**
* An object of type Node holds one of the items
* in the linked list that represents the queue.
*/
private static class Node {
int item;
Node next;
}
private Node head = null; // Points to first Node in the queue.
// The queue is empty when head is null.
private Node tail = null; // Points to last Node in the queue
// when the queue is not empty.
/**
* Add N to the back of the queue.
*/
public void enqueue( int N ) {
Node newTail = new Node(); // A Node to hold the new item.
newTail.item = N;
if (head == null) {
// The queue was empty. The new Node becomes
// the only node in the list. Since it is both
// the first and last node, both head and tail
// point to it.
head = newTail;
tail = newTail;
}
else {
// The new node becomes the new tail of the list.
// (The head of the list is unaffected.)
tail.next = newTail;
tail = newTail;
}
}
/**
* Remove and return the front item in the queue.
* Throws an IllegalStateException if the queue is empty.
*/
public int dequeue() {
if ( head == null)
throw new IllegalStateException("Can’t dequeue from an empty queue.");
int firstItem = head.item;
head = head.next; // The previous second item is now first.
// If we have just removed the last item,
// then head is null.
if (head == null) {
// The queue has become empty. The Node that was
// deleted was the tail as well as the head of the
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 473

// list, so now there is no tail. (Actually, the

// class would work fine without this step.)
tail = null;
}
return firstItem;
}
/**
* Return true if the queue is empty.
*/
boolean isEmpty() {
return (head == null);
}
} // end class QueueOfInts
To help you follow what is being done here with the tail pointer, it might help to think in
terms of a class invariant (Subsection 8.2.3): “If the queue is non-empty, then tail points to
the last node in the queue.” This invariant must be true at the beginning and at the end of each
method call. For example, applying this to the enqueue() method, in the case of a non-empty
list, the invariant tells us that a new node can be added to the back of the list simply by saying
“tail.next = newNode. It also tells us how the value of tail must be set before returning
from the method: it must be set to point to the node that was just added to the queue.
Queues are typically used in a computer (as in real life) when only one item can be processed
at a time, but several items can be waiting for processing. For example:
• In a Java program that has multiple threads, the threads that want processing time on
the CPU are kept in a queue. When a new thread is started, it is added to the back of the
queue. A thread is removed from the front of the queue, it is given some processing time,
and then—if it has not terminated—is sent to the back of the queue to wait for another
turn.
• Events such as keystrokes and mouse clicks are stored in a queue called the “event queue.”
A program removes events from the event queue and processes them. It’s possible for
several more events to occur while one event is being processed, but since the events are
stored in a queue, they will always be processed in the order in which they occurred.
• A web server is a program that receives requests from web browsers for “pages.” It is easy
for new requests to arrive while the web server is still fulfilling a previous request. Requests
that arrive while the web server is busy are placed into a queue to await processing. Using
a queue ensures that requests will be processed in the order in which they were received.
Queues are said to implement a FIFO policy: First In, First Out. Or, as it is more
commonly expressed, first come, first served. Stacks, on the other hand implement a LIFO
policy: Last In, First Out. The item that comes out of the stack is the last one that was put
in. Just like queues, stacks can be used to hold items that are waiting for processing (although
in applications where queues are typically used, a stack would be considered “unfair”).
∗ ∗ ∗
To get a better handle on the difference between stacks and queues, consider the sample
program DepthBreadth.java. I suggest that you try out the program. The program shows
a grid of squares. Initially, all the squares are white. When you click on a white square,
that square is “marked” by turning it red. The program than starts marking squares that are
connected, horizontally or vertically, to squares that have already been marked. This process
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 474

will eventually process every square in the grid. To understand how the program works, think
of yourself in the place of the program. When the user clicks a square, you are handed an index
card. The location of the square—its row and column—is written on the card. You put the
card in a pile, which then contains just that one card. Then, you repeat the following: If the
pile is empty, you are done. Otherwise, remove an index card from the pile. The index card
specifies a square. Look at each horizontal and vertical neighbor of that square. If the neighbor
has not already been encountered, write its location on a new index card and put the card in
the pile. You are done when there are no more index cards waiting in the pile to be processed.
In the program, while a square is in the pile, waiting to be processed, it is colored red;
that is, red squares have been encountered but not yet processed. When a square is taken from
the pile and processed, its color changes to gray. Once a square has been colored gray, the
program will never consider it again, since all of its neighbors have already been accounted for.
Eventually, all the squares have been processed, all the squares are gray, and the procedure
ends. In the index card analogy, the pile of cards has been emptied.
The program can use your choice of three methods: Stack, Queue, and Random. In each
case, the same general procedure is used. The only difference is how the “pile of index cards” is
managed. For a stack, cards are added and removed at the top of the pile. For a queue, cards
are added to the bottom of the pile and removed from the top. In the random case, the card to
be processed is picked at random from among all the cards in the pile. The order of processing
is very different in these three cases. Here are three pictures from the program, using the three
different processing methods. In each case, the process was started by selecting a square near
the middle of the grid. A stack is used for the picture on the left, a queue for the picture in
the middle, and random selection for the picture on the right:

The patterns that are produced are very different. When using a stack, the program explores
out as far as possible before it starts backtracking to look at previously encountered squares.
With a queue, squares are processed roughly in the order of their distance from the starting
point. When random selection is used, the result is an irregular blob, but it is a connected blob
since a square can only be encountered if it is next to a previously encountered square.
You should experiment with the program to see how it all works. Try to understand how
stacks and queues are being used. Try starting from one of the corner squares. While the
process is going on, you can click on other white squares, and they will be added to the list of
encountered squares. When you do this with a stack, you should notice that the square you
click is processed immediately, and all the red squares that were already waiting for processing
have to wait. On the other hand, if you do this with a queue, the square that you click will
wait its turn until all the squares that were already in the pile have been processed. Again, the
source code for the program is DepthBreadth.java.
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 475

∗ ∗ ∗
Queues seem very natural because they occur so often in real life, but there are times when
stacks are appropriate and even essential. For example, consider what happens when a routine
calls a subroutine. The first routine is suspended while the subroutine is executed, and it will
continue only when the subroutine returns. Now, suppose that the subroutine calls a second
subroutine, and the second subroutine calls a third, and so on. Each subroutine is suspended
while the subsequent subroutines are executed. The computer has to keep track of all the
subroutines that are suspended. It does this with a stack.
When a subroutine is called, an activation record is created for that subroutine. The
activation record contains information relevant to the execution of the subroutine, such as
its local variables, parameters, and return address (the the point in the program where the
computer should return to when the subroutine ends). The activation record for the subroutine
is placed on a stack. It will be removed from the stack and destroyed when the subroutine
returns. If the subroutine calls another subroutine, the activation record of the second
subroutine is pushed onto the stack, on top of the activation record of the first subroutine. The
stack can continue to grow as more subroutines are called, and it shrinks as those subroutines
return.
In the case of a recursive subroutine, which calls itself, there can be several activation records
on the stack for the same subroutine. This is how the computer keeps track of many recursive
calls at the same time: It has a different activation record for each call.

9.3.3 Postfix Expressions

As another example, stacks can be used to evaluate postfix expressions. An ordinary
mathematical expression such as 2+(15-12)*17 is called an infix expression. In an infix
expression, an operator comes in between its two operands, as in “2 + 2”. In a postfix
expression, an operator comes after its two operands, as in “2 2 +”. The infix expression
“2+(15-12)*17” would be written in postfix form as “2 15 12 - 17 * +”. The “-” operator
in this expression applies to the two operands that precede it, namely “15” and “12”. The “*”
operator applies to the two operands that precede it, namely “15 12 -” and “17”. And the
“+” operator applies to “2” and “15 12 - 17 *”. These are the same computations that are
done in the original infix expression.
Now, suppose that we want to process the expression “2 15 12 - 17 * +”, from left to
right and find its value. The first item we encounter is the 2, but what can we do with it?
At this point, we don’t know what operator, if any, will be applied to the 2 or what the other
operand might be. We have to remember the 2 for later processing. We do this by pushing
it onto a stack. Moving on to the next item, we see a 15, which is pushed onto the stack on
top of the 2. Then the 12 is added to the stack. Now, we come to the operator, “-”. This
operation applies to the two operands that preceded it in the expression. We have saved those
two operands on the stack. So, to process the “-” operator, we pop two numbers from the
stack, 12 and 15, and compute 15 - 12 to get the answer 3. This 3 must be remembered to be
used in later processing, so we push it onto the stack, on top of the 2 that is still waiting there.
The next item in the expression is a 17, which is processed by pushing it onto the stack, on top
of the 3. To process the next item, “*”, we pop two numbers from the stack. The numbers are
17 and the 3 that represents the value of “15 12 -”. These numbers are multiplied, and the
result, 51, is pushed onto the stack. The next item in the expression is a “+” operator, which is
processed by popping 51 and 2 from the stack, adding them, and pushing the result, 53, onto
the stack. Finally, we’ve come to the end of the expression. The number on the stack is the
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 476

value of the entire expression, so all we have to do is pop the answer from the stack, and we
are done! The value of the expression is 53.
Although it’s easier for people to work with infix expressions, postfix expressions have some
advantages. For one thing, postfix expressions don’t require parentheses or precedence rules.
The order in which operators are applied is determined entirely by the order in which they
occur in the expression. This allows the algorithm for evaluating postfix expressions to be
fairly straightforward:
Start with an empty stack
for each item in the expression:
if the item is a number:
Push the number onto the stack
else if the item is an operator:
Pop the operands from the stack // Can generate an error
Apply the operator to the operands
Push the result onto the stack
else
There is an error in the expression
Pop a number from the stack // Can generate an error
if the stack is not empty:
There is an error in the expression
else:
The last number that was popped is the value of the expression
Errors in an expression can be detected easily. For example, in the expression “2 3 + *”,
there are not enough operands for the “*” operation. This will be detected in the algorithm
when an attempt is made to pop the second operand for “*” from the stack, since the stack
will be empty. The opposite problem occurs in “2 3 4 +”. There are not enough operators for
all the numbers. This will be detected when the 2 is left still sitting in the stack at the end of
the algorithm.
This algorithm is demonstrated in the sample program PostfixEval.java. This program lets
you type in postfix expressions made up of non-negative real numbers and the operators “+”,
“-”, “*”, “/”, and ”^”. The “^” represents exponentiation. That is, “2 3 ^” is evaluated as
23 . The program prints out a message as it processes each item in the expression. The stack
class that is used in the program is defined in the file StackOfDouble.java. The StackOfDouble
class is identical to the first StackOfInts class, given above, except that it has been modified to
store values of type double instead of values of type int.
The only interesting aspect of this program is the method that implements the postfix
evaluation algorithm. It is a direct implementation of the pseudocode algorithm given above:
/**
* Read one line of input and process it as a postfix expression.
* If the input is not a legal postfix expression, then an error
* message is displayed. Otherwise, the value of the expression
* is displayed. It is assumed that the first character on
* the input line is a non-blank.
*/
private static void readAndEvaluate() {
StackOfDouble stack; // For evaluating the expression.
stack = new StackOfDouble(); // Make a new, empty stack.
System.out.println();
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 477

while (TextIO.peek() != ’\n’) {

if ( Character.isDigit(TextIO.peek()) ) {
// The next item in input is a number. Read it and
// save it on the stack.
double num = TextIO.getDouble();
stack.push(num);
System.out.println(" Pushed constant " + num);
}
else {
// Since the next item is not a number, the only thing
// it can legally be is an operator. Get the operator
// and perform the operation.
char op; // The operator, which must be +, -, *, /, or ^.
double x,y; // The operands, from the stack, for the operation.
double answer; // The result, to be pushed onto the stack.
op = TextIO.getChar();
if (op != ’+’ && op != ’-’ && op != ’*’ && op != ’/’ && op != ’^’) {
// The character is not one of the acceptable operations.
System.out.println("\nIllegal operator found in input: " + op);
return;
}
if (stack.isEmpty()) {
System.out.println(" Stack is empty while trying to evaluate " + op);
System.out.println("\nNot enough numbers in expression!");
return;
}
y = stack.pop();
if (stack.isEmpty()) {
System.out.println(" Stack is empty while trying to evaluate " + op);
System.out.println("\nNot enough numbers in expression!");
return;
}
x = stack.pop();
switch (op) {
case ’+’ -> answer = x + y;
case ’-’ -> answer = x - y;
case ’*’ -> answer = x * y;
case ’/’ -> answer = x / y;
default -> answer = Math.pow(x,y); // (op must be ’^’.)
}
stack.push(answer);
System.out.println(" Evaluated " + op + " and pushed " + answer);
}
TextIO.skipBlanks();
} // end while
// If we get to this point, the input has been read successfully.
// If the expression was legal, then the value of the expression is
// on the stack, and it is the only thing on the stack.
if (stack.isEmpty()) { // Impossible if the input is really non-empty.
System.out.println("No expression provided.");
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 478

return;
}
double value = stack.pop(); // Value of the expression.
System.out.println(" Popped " + value + " at end of expression.");
if (stack.isEmpty() == false) {
System.out.println(" Stack is not empty.");
System.out.println("\nNot enough operators for all the numbers!");
return;
}
System.out.println("\nValue = " + value);

} // end readAndEvaluate()
Postfix expressions are often used internally by computers. In fact, the Java virtual machine
is a “stack machine” which uses the stack-based approach to expression evaluation that we have
been discussing. The algorithm can easily be extended to handle variables, as well as constants.
When a variable is encountered in the expression, the value of the variable is pushed onto the
stack. It also works for operators with more or fewer than two operands. As many operands as
are needed are popped from the stack and the result is pushed back onto the stack. For example,
the unary minus operator, which is used in the expression “-x”, has a single operand. We
will continue to look at expressions and expression evaluation in the next two sections.

9.4 Binary Trees

We have seen in the two previous sections how objects can be linked into lists. When an
object contains two pointers to objects of the same type, structures can be created that are
much more complicated than linked lists. In this section, we’ll look at one of the most basic and
useful structures of this type: binary trees. Each of the objects in a binary tree contains two
pointers, typically called left and right. In addition to these pointers, of course, the nodes
can contain other types of data. For example, a binary tree of integers would be made up of
objects of the following type:
class TreeNode {
int item; // The data in this node.
TreeNode left; // Pointer to the left subtree.
TreeNode right; // Pointer to the right subtree.
}
The left and right pointers in a TreeNode can be null or can point to other objects of
type TreeNode. A node that points to another node is said to be the parent of that node, and
the node it points to is called a child . In a binary tree, a child is either a “left child” or a “right
child,” and a node can have a right child even if it has no left child. In the picture below, for
example, node 3 is the parent of node 6, and nodes 4 and 5 are children of node 2. Not every
linked structure made up of tree nodes is a binary tree. A binary tree must have the following
properties: There is exactly one node in the tree which has no parent; this node is called the
root of the tree. Every other node in the tree has exactly one parent. Finally, there can be no
loops in a binary tree. That is, it is not possible to follow a chain of pointers starting at some
node and arriving back at the same node.
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 479

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ˆ‰Š‹ ŒŽ‰

A node that has no children is called a leaf . A leaf node can be recognized by the fact that
both the left and right pointers in the node are null. In the standard picture of a binary tree,
the root node is shown at the top and the leaf nodes at the bottom—which doesn’t show much
respect for the analogy to real trees. But at least you can see the branching, tree-like structure
that gives a binary tree its name.

9.4.1 Tree Traversal

Consider any node in a binary tree. Look at that node together with all its descendants (that
is, its children, the children of its children, and so on). This set of nodes forms a binary tree,
which is called a subtree of the original tree. For example, in the picture, nodes 2, 4, and 5
form a subtree. This subtree is called the left subtree of the root. Similarly, nodes 3 and 6
make up the right subtree of the root. We can consider any non-empty binary tree to be made
up of a root node, a left subtree, and a right subtree. Either or both of the subtrees can be
empty. This is a recursive definition, matching the recursive definition of the TreeNode class.
So it should not be a surprise that recursive subroutines are often used to process trees.
Consider the problem of counting the nodes in a binary tree. As an exercise, you might try
to come up with a non-recursive algorithm to do the counting, but you shouldn’t expect to find
one easily. The heart of the problem is keeping track of which nodes remain to be counted. It’s
not so easy to do this, and in fact it’s not even possible without an auxiliary data structure
such as a stack or queue. With recursion, however, the algorithm is almost trivial. Either the
tree is empty or it consists of a root and two subtrees. If the tree is empty, the number of nodes
is zero. (This is the base case of the recursion.) Otherwise, use recursion to count the nodes in
each subtree. Add the results from the subtrees together, and add one to count the root. This
gives the total number of nodes in the tree. Written out in Java:
/**
* Count the nodes in the binary tree to which root points, and
* return the answer. If root is null, the answer is zero.
*/
static int countNodes( TreeNode root ) {
if ( root == null ) { // Base case: empty tree.
return 0; // An empty tree contains no nodes.
}
else { // Recursive case: root node plus two subtrees.
int count = 1; // Start by counting the root.
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 480

count += countNodes(root.left); // Add the number of nodes

// in the left subtree.
count += countNodes(root.right); // Add the number of nodes
// in the right subtree.
return count; // Return the total.
}
} // end countNodes()
Or, consider the problem of printing the items in a binary tree. If the tree is empty, there
is nothing to do. If the tree is non-empty, then it consists of a root and two subtrees. Print the
item in the root and use recursion to print the items in the subtrees. Here is a subroutine that
prints all the items on one line of output:
/**
* Print all the items in the tree to which root points.
* The item in the root is printed first, followed by the
* items in the left subtree and then the items in the
* right subtree.
*/
static void preorderPrint( TreeNode root ) {
if ( root != null ) { // (Otherwise, there’s nothing to print.)
System.out.print( root.item + " " ); // Print the root item.
preorderPrint( root.left ); // Print items in left subtree.
preorderPrint( root.right ); // Print items in right subtree.
}
} // end preorderPrint()
This routine is called “preorderPrint” because it uses a preorder traversal of the tree.
In a preorder traversal, the root node of the tree is processed first, then the left subtree is
traversed, then the right subtree. In a postorder traversal , the left subtree is traversed, then
the right subtree, and then the root node is processed. And in an inorder traversal , the left
subtree is traversed first, then the root node is processed, then the right subtree is traversed.
Subroutines that use postorder and inorder traversal to print the contents of a tree differ from
preorderPrint() only in the placement of the statement that outputs the root item:
/**
* Print all the items in the tree to which root points.
* The items in the left subtree are printed first, followed
* by the items in the right subtree and then the item
* in the root node.
*/
static void postorderPrint( TreeNode root ) {
if ( root != null ) { // (Otherwise, there’s nothing to print.)
postorderPrint( root.left ); // Print items in left subtree.
postorderPrint( root.right ); // Print items in right subtree.
System.out.print( root.item + " " ); // Print the root item.
}
} // end postorderPrint()

/**
* Print all the items in the tree to which root points.
* The items in the left subtree are printed first, followed
* by the item in the root node and then the items
* in the right subtree.
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 481

*/
static void inorderPrint( TreeNode root ) {
if ( root != null ) { // (Otherwise, there’s nothing to print.)
inorderPrint( root.left ); // Print items in left subtree.
System.out.print( root.item + " " ); // Print the root item.
inorderPrint( root.right ); // Print items in right subtree.
}
} // end inorderPrint()
Each of these subroutines can be applied to the binary tree shown in the illustration at the
beginning of this section. The order in which the items are printed differs in each case:
preorderPrint outputs: 1 2 4 5 3 6
postorderPrint outputs: 4 5 2 6 3 1
inorderPrint outputs: 4 2 5 1 3 6
In preorderPrint, for example, the item at the root of the tree, 1, is output before anything
else. But the preorder printing also applies to each of the subtrees of the root. The root item
of the left subtree, 2, is printed before the other items in that subtree, 4 and 5. As for the right
subtree of the root, 3 is output before 6. A preorder traversal applies at all levels in the tree.
The other two traversal orders can be analyzed similarly.

9.4.2 Binary Sort Trees

One of the examples in Section 9.2 was a linked list of strings, in which the strings were kept
in increasing order. While a linked list works well for a small number of strings, it becomes
inefficient for a large number of items. When inserting an item into the list, searching for that
item’s position requires looking at, on average, half the items in the list. Finding an item in the
list requires a similar amount of time. If the strings are stored in a sorted array instead of in a
linked list, then searching becomes more efficient because binary search can be used. However,
inserting a new item into the array is still inefficient since it means moving, on average, half of
the items in the array to make a space for the new item. A binary tree can be used to store an
ordered list in a way that makes both searching and insertion efficient. A binary tree used in
this way is called a binary sort tree or BST .
A binary sort tree is a binary tree with the following property: For every node in the tree,
the item in that node is greater than or equal to every item in the left subtree of that node, and
it is less than or equal to all the items in the right subtree of that node. Here for example is
a binary sort tree containing items of type String. (In this picture, I haven’t bothered to draw
all the pointer variables. Non-null pointers are shown as arrows.)
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 482

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alice fred tom

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Binary sort trees have this useful property: An inorder traversal of the tree will process the
items in increasing order. In fact, this is really just another way of expressing the definition.
For example, if an inorder traversal is used to print the items in the tree shown above, then the
items will be in alphabetical order. The definition of an inorder traversal guarantees that all
the items in the left subtree of “judy” are printed before “judy”, and all the items in the right
subtree of “judy” are printed after “judy”. But the binary sort tree property guarantees that
the items in the left subtree of “judy” are precisely those that precede “judy” in alphabetical
order, and all the items in the right subtree follow “judy” in alphabetical order. So, we know
that “judy” is output in its proper alphabetical position. But the same argument applies to
the subtrees. “Bill” will be output after “alice” and before “fred” and its descendants. “Fred”
will be output after “dave” and before “jane” and “joe”. And so on.
Suppose that we want to search for a given item in a binary search tree. Compare that item
to the root item of the tree. If they are equal, we’re done. If the item we are looking for is
less than the root item, then we need to search the left subtree of the root—the right subtree
can be eliminated because it only contains items that are greater than or equal to the root.
Similarly, if the item we are looking for is greater than the item in the root, then we only need
to look in the right subtree. In either case, the same procedure can then be applied to search
the subtree. Inserting a new item is similar: Start by searching the tree for the position where
the new item belongs. When that position is found, create a new node and attach it to the tree
at that position.
Searching and inserting are efficient operations on a binary search tree, provided that the
tree is close to being balanced . A binary tree is balanced if for each node, the left subtree of
that node contains approximately the same number of nodes as the right subtree. In a perfectly
balanced tree, the two numbers differ by at most one. Not all binary trees are balanced, but if
the tree is created by inserting items in a random order, there is a high probability that the tree
is approximately balanced. (If the order of insertion is not random, however, it’s quite possible
for the tree to be very unbalanced.) During a search of any binary sort tree, every comparison
eliminates one of two subtrees from further consideration. If the tree is balanced, that means
cutting the number of items still under consideration in half. This is exactly the same as the
binary search algorithm, and the result is a similarly efficient algorithm.
In terms of asymptotic analysis (Section 8.5), searching, inserting, and deleting in a binary
search tree have average case run time Θ(log(n)). The problem size, n, is the number of items
in the tree, and the average is taken over all the different orders in which the items could have
been inserted into the tree. As long as the actual insertion order is random, the actual run
time can be expected to be close to the average. However, the worst case run time for binary
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 483

search tree operations is Θ(n), which is much worse than Θ(log(n)). The worst case occurs
for particular insertion orders. For example, if the items are inserted into the tree in order of
increasing size, then every item that is inserted moves always to the right as it moves down
the tree. The result is a “tree” that looks more like a linked list, since it consists of a linear
string of nodes strung together by their right child pointers. Operations on such a tree have
the same performance as operations on a linked list. Now, there are data structures that are
similar to simple binary sort trees, except that insertion and deletion of nodes are implemented
in a way that will always keep the tree balanced, or almost balanced. For these data structures,
searching, inserting, and deleting have both average case and worst case run times that are
Θ(log(n)). Here, however, we will look at only the simple versions of inserting and searching.
The sample program SortTreeDemo.java is a demonstration of binary sort trees. The
program includes subroutines that implement inorder traversal, searching, and insertion. We’ll
look at the latter two subroutines below. The main() routine tests the subroutines by letting
you type in strings to be inserted into the tree.
In SortTreeDemo, nodes in the binary tree are represented using the following static nested
class, which includes a simple constructor to make creating nodes easier:
/**
* An object of type TreeNode represents one node in a binary tree of strings.
*/
private static class TreeNode {
String item; // The data in this node.
TreeNode left; // Pointer to left subtree.
TreeNode right; // Pointer to right subtree.
TreeNode(String str) {
// Constructor. Make a node containing str.
// Note that left and right pointers are null.
item = str;
}
} // end class TreeNode
A static member variable of type TreeNode points to the binary sort tree that is used by the
program:
private static TreeNode root; // Pointer to the root node in the tree.
// When the tree is empty, root is null.
A recursive subroutine named treeContains is used to search for a given item in the tree. This
routine implements the search algorithm for binary trees that was outlined above:
/**
* Return true if item is one of the items in the binary
* sort tree to which root points. Return false if not.
*/
static boolean treeContains( TreeNode root, String item ) {
if ( root == null ) {
// Tree is empty, so it certainly doesn’t contain item.
return false;
}
else if ( item.equals(root.item) ) {
// Yes, the item has been found in the root node.
return true;
}
else if ( item.compareTo(root.item) < 0 ) {
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 484

// If the item occurs, it must be in the left subtree.

return treeContains( root.left, item );
}
else {
// If the item occurs, it must be in the right subtree.
return treeContains( root.right, item );
}
} // end treeContains()
When this routine is called in the main() routine, the first parameter is the static member
variable root, which points to the root of the entire binary sort tree.
It’s worth noting that recursion is not really essential in this case. A simple, non-recursive
algorithm for searching a binary sort tree follows the rule: Start at the root and move down
the tree until you find the item or reach a null pointer. Since the search follows a single path
down the tree, it can be implemented as a while loop. Here is a non-recursive version of the
search routine:
private static boolean treeContainsNR( TreeNode root, String item ) {
TreeNode runner; // For "running" down the tree.
runner = root; // Start at the root node.
while (true) {
if (runner == null) {
// We’ve fallen off the tree without finding item.
return false;
}
else if ( item.equals(runner.item) ) {
// We’ve found the item.
return true;
}
else if ( item.compareTo(runner.item) < 0 ) {
// If the item occurs, it must be in the left subtree.
// So, advance the runner down one level to the left.
runner = runner.left;
}
else {
// If the item occurs, it must be in the right subtree.
// So, advance the runner down one level to the right.
runner = runner.right;
}
} // end while
} // end treeContainsNR();
The subroutine for inserting a new item into the tree turns out to be more similar to the
non-recursive search routine than to the recursive. The insertion routine has to handle the case
where the tree is empty. In that case, the value of root must be changed to point to a node
that contains the new item:
root = new TreeNode( newItem );
But this means, effectively, that the root can’t be passed as a parameter to the subroutine,
because it is impossible for a subroutine to change the value stored in an actual parameter.
(I should note that this is something that is possible in other languages.) Recursion uses
parameters in an essential way. There are ugly ways to work around the problem, but the
easiest thing is just to use a non-recursive insertion routine that accesses the static member
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 485

variable root directly. One difference between inserting an item and searching for an item is
that we have to be careful not to fall off the tree. That is, we have to stop searching just before
runner becomes null. When we get to an empty spot in the tree, that’s where we have to
insert the new node:
/**
* Add the item to the binary sort tree to which the global variable
* "root" refers. (Note that root can’t be passed as a parameter to
* this routine because the value of root might change, and a change
* in the value of a formal parameter does not change the actual parameter.)
*/
private static void treeInsert(String newItem) {
if ( root == null ) {
// The tree is empty. Set root to point to a new node containing
// the new item. This becomes the only node in the tree.
root = new TreeNode( newItem );
return;
}
TreeNode runner; // Runs down the tree to find a place for newItem.
runner = root; // Start at the root.
while (true) {
if ( newItem.compareTo(runner.item) < 0 ) {
// Since the new item is less than the item in runner,
// it belongs in the left subtree of runner. If there
// is an open space at runner.left, add a new node there.
// Otherwise, advance runner down one level to the left.
if ( runner.left == null ) {
runner.left = new TreeNode( newItem );
return; // New item has been added to the tree.
}
else
runner = runner.left;
}
else {
// Since the new item is greater than or equal to the item in
// runner, it belongs in the right subtree of runner. If there
// is an open space at runner.right, add a new node there.
// Otherwise, advance runner down one level to the right.
if ( runner.right == null ) {
runner.right = new TreeNode( newItem );
return; // New item has been added to the tree.
}
else
runner = runner.right;
}
} // end while
} // end treeInsert()

9.4.3 Expression Trees

Another application of trees is to store mathematical expressions such as 15*(x+y) or
sqrt(42)+7 in a convenient form. Let’s stick for the moment to expressions made up of
numbers and the operators +, -, *, and /. Consider the expression 3*((7+1)/4)+(17-5).
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 486

This expression is made up of two subexpressions, 3*((7+1)/4) and (17-5), combined with
the operator “+”. When the expression is represented as a binary tree, the root node holds the
operator +, while the subtrees of the root node represent the subexpressions 3*((7+1)/4) and
(17-5). Every node in the tree holds either a number or an operator. A node that holds a
number is a leaf node of the tree. A node that holds an operator has two subtrees representing
the operands to which the operator applies. The tree is shown in the illustration below. I will
refer to a tree of this type as an expression tree.
Given an expression tree, it’s easy to find the value of the expression that it represents. Each
node in the tree has an associated value. If the node is a leaf node, then its value is simply the
number that the node contains. If the node contains an operator, then the associated value is
computed by first finding the values of its child nodes and then applying the operator to those
values. The process is shown by the upward-directed arrows in the illustration. The value
computed for the root node is the value of the expression as a whole. There are other uses for
expression trees. For example, a postorder traversal of the tree will output the postfix form of
the expression.
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An expression tree contains two types of nodes: nodes that contain numbers and nodes that
contain operators. Furthermore, we might want to add other types of nodes to make the trees
more useful, such as nodes that contain variables. If we want to work with expression trees in
Java, how can we deal with this variety of nodes? One way—which will be frowned upon by
object-oriented purists—is to include an instance variable in each node object to record which
type of node it is:
enum NodeType { NUMBER, OPERATOR } // Possible kinds of node.
class ExpNode { // A node in an expression tree.
NodeType kind; // Which type of node is this?
double number; // The value in a node of type NUMBER.
char op; // The operator in a node of type OPERATOR.
ExpNode left; // Pointers to subtrees,
ExpNode right; // in a node of type OPERATOR.
ExpNode( double val ) {
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 487

// Constructor for making a node of type NUMBER.

kind = NodeType.NUMBER;
number = val;
}
ExpNode( char op, ExpNode left, ExpNode right ) {
// Constructor for making a node of type OPERATOR.
kind = NodeType.OPERATOR;
this.op = op;
this.left = left;
this.right = right;
}
} // end class ExpNode
Given this definition, the following recursive subroutine will find the value of an expression tree:
static double getValue( ExpNode node ) {
// Return the value of the expression represented by
// the tree to which node refers. Node must be non-null.
if ( node.kind == NodeType.NUMBER ) {
// The value of a NUMBER node is the number it holds.
return node.number;
}
else { // The kind must be OPERATOR.
// Get the values of the operands and combine them
// using the operator.
double leftVal = getValue( node.left );
double rightVal = getValue( node.right );
switch ( node.op ) {
case ’+’: return leftVal + rightVal;
case ’-’: return leftVal - rightVal;
case ’*’: return leftVal * rightVal;
case ’/’: return leftVal / rightVal;
default: return Double.NaN; // Bad operator.
}
}
} // end getValue()
Although this approach works, a more object-oriented approach is to note that since there
are two types of nodes, there should be two classes to represent them, perhaps named ConstNode
and BinOpNode. To represent the general idea of a node in an expression tree, we need another
class, ExpNode. Both ConstNode and BinOpNode will be subclasses of ExpNode. Since any
actual node will be either a ConstNode or a BinOpNode, ExpNode should be an abstract class.
(See Subsection 5.5.5.) Since one of the things we want to do with nodes is find their values,
each class should have an instance method for finding the value:
abstract class ExpNode {
// Represents a node of any type in an expression tree.
abstract double value(); // Return the value of this node.
} // end class ExpNode

class ConstNode extends ExpNode {

// Represents a node that holds a number.
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 488

double number; // The number in the node.

ConstNode( double val ) {
// Constructor. Create a node to hold val.
number = val;
}
double value() {
// The value is just the number that the node holds.
return number;
}
} // end class ConstNode

class BinOpNode extends ExpNode {

// Represents a node that holds an operator.
char op; // The operator.
ExpNode left; // The left operand.
ExpNode right; // The right operand.
BinOpNode( char op, ExpNode left, ExpNode right ) {
// Constructor. Create a node to hold the given data.
this.op = op;
this.left = left;
this.right = right;
}
double value() {
// To get the value, compute the value of the left and
// right operands, and combine them with the operator.
double leftVal = left.value();
double rightVal = right.value();
switch ( op ) {
case ’+’: return leftVal + rightVal;
case ’-’: return leftVal - rightVal;
case ’*’: return leftVal * rightVal;
case ’/’: return leftVal / rightVal;
default: return Double.NaN; // Bad operator.
}
}
} // end class BinOpNode
Note that the left and right operands of a BinOpNode are of type ExpNode, not BinOpNode.
This allows the operand to be either a ConstNode or another BinOpNode—or any other type of
ExpNode that we might eventually create. Since every ExpNode has a value() method, we can
call left.value() to compute the value of the left operand. If left is in fact a ConstNode,
this will call the value() method in the ConstNode class. If it is in fact a BinOpNode, then
left.value() will call the value() method in the BinOpNode class. Each node knows how to
compute its own value.
Although it might seem more complicated at first, the object-oriented approach has some
real advantages. For one thing, it doesn’t waste memory. In the original ExpNode class, only
some of the instance variables in each node were actually used, and we needed an extra instance
variable to keep track of the type of node. More important, though, is the fact that new types
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 489

of nodes can be added more cleanly, since it can be done by creating a new subclass of ExpNode
rather than by modifying an existing class.
We’ll return to the topic of expression trees in the next section, where we’ll see how to
create an expression tree to represent a given expression.

9.5 A Simple Recursive Descent Parser

I have always been fascinated by language—both natural languages like English and the
artificial languages that are used by computers. There are many difficult questions about how
languages can convey information, how they are structured, and how they can be processed.
Natural and artificial languages are similar enough that the study of programming languages,
which are pretty well understood, can give some insight into the much more complex and difficult
natural languages. And programming languages raise more than enough interesting issues to
make them worth studying in their own right. How can it be, after all, that computers can be
made to “understand” even the relatively simple languages that are used to write programs?
Computers can only directly use instructions expressed in very simple machine language. Higher
level languages must be translated into machine language. But the translation is done by a
compiler, which is just a program. How could such a translation program be written?

9.5.1 Backus-Naur Form

Natural and artificial languages are similar in that they have a structure known as grammar
or syntax. Syntax can be expressed by a set of rules that describe what it means to be a legal
sentence or program. For programming languages, syntax rules are often expressed in BNF
(Backus-Naur Form), a system that was developed by computer scientists John Backus and
Peter Naur in the late 1950s. Interestingly, an equivalent system was developed independently
at about the same time by linguist Noam Chomsky to describe the grammar of natural language.
BNF cannot express all possible syntax rules. For example, it can’t express the fact that a
variable must be defined before it is used. Furthermore, it says nothing about the meaning or
semantics of the language. The problem of specifying the semantics of a language—even of an
artificial programming language—is one that is still far from being completely solved. However,
BNF does express the basic structure of the language, and it plays a central role in the design
of compilers.
A variety of different notations are used for BNF. The one that I will use here is fairly
common. Although other notations are used, they express the same concepts.
In English, terms such as “noun”, “transitive verb,” and “prepositional phrase” are
syntactic categories that describe building blocks of sentences. Similarly, “statement”,
“number,” and “while loop” are syntactic categories that describe building blocks of Java
programs. In BNF, a syntactic category is written as a word enclosed between “<” and ”>”. For
example: <noun>, <verb-phrase>, or <while-loop>. A rule in BNF specifies the structure
of an item in a given syntactic category, in terms of other syntactic categories and/or basic
symbols of the language. For example, one BNF rule for the English language might be
<sentence> ::= <noun-phrase> <verb-phrase>
The symbol “::=” is read “can be”, so this rule says that a <sentence> can be a <noun-phrase>
followed by a <verb-phrase>. (The term is “can be” rather than “is” because there might be
other rules that specify other possible forms for a sentence.) This rule can be thought of as a
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 490

recipe for a sentence: If you want to make a sentence, make a noun-phrase and follow it by a
verb-phrase. Noun-phrase and verb-phrase must, in turn, be defined by other BNF rules.
In BNF, a choice between alternatives is represented by the symbol “|”, which is read “or”.
For example, the rule
<verb-phrase> ::= <intransitive-verb> |
( <transitive-verb> <noun-phrase> )
says that a <verb-phrase> can be an <intransitive-verb>, or a <transitive-verb> followed
by a <noun-phrase>. Note also that parentheses can be used for grouping. To express the fact
that an item is optional, it can be enclosed between “[” and “]”. An optional item that can
be repeated any number of times is enclosed between “[” and “]...”. And a symbol that is
an actual part of the language that is being described is enclosed in quotes. For example,
<noun-phrase> ::= <common-noun> [ "that" <verb-phrase> ] |
<common-noun> [ <prepositional-phrase> ]...
says that a <noun-phrase> can be a <common-noun>, optionally followed by the literal word
“that” and a <verb-phrase>, or it can be a <common-noun> followed by zero or more
<prepositional-phrase>’s. Obviously, we can describe very complex structures in this way.
The real power comes from the fact that BNF rules can be recursive. In fact, the two
preceding rules, taken together, are recursive. A <noun-phrase> is defined partly in terms
of <verb-phrase>, while <verb-phrase> is defined partly in terms of <noun-phrase>. For
example, a <noun-phrase> might be “the rat that ate the cheese”, since “ate the cheese” is a
<verb-phrase>. But then we can, recursively, make the more complex <noun-phrase> “the cat
that caught the rat that ate the cheese” out of the <common-noun> “the cat”, the word “that”
and the <verb-phrase> “caught the rat that ate the cheese”. Building from there, we can make
the <noun-phrase> “the dog that chased the cat that caught the rat that ate the cheese”. The
recursive structure of language is one of the most fundamental properties of language, and the
ability of BNF to express this recursive structure is what makes it so useful.
BNF can be used to describe the syntax of a programming language such as Java in a formal
and precise way. For example, a <while-loop> can be defined as
<while-loop> ::= "while" "(" <condition> ")" <statement>
This says that a <while-loop> consists of the word “while”, followed by a left parenthesis,
followed by a <condition>, followed by a right parenthesis, followed by a <statement>. Of
course, it still remains to define what is meant by a condition and by a statement. Since a
statement can be, among other things, a while loop, we can already see the recursive structure
of the Java language. The exact specification of an if statement, which is hard to express
clearly in words, can be given as
<if-statement> ::=
"if" "(" <condition> ")" <statement>
[ "else" "if" "(" <condition> ")" <statement> ]...
[ "else" <statement> ]
This rule makes it clear that the “else” part is optional and that there can be, optionally, one
or more “else if” parts.

9.5.2 Recursive Descent Parsing

In the rest of this section, I will show how a BNF grammar for a language can be used as a guide
for constructing a parser. A parser is a program that determines the grammatical structure of a
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 491

phrase in the language. This is the first step in determining the meaning of the phrase—which
for a programming language means translating it into machine language. Although we will look
at only a simple example, I hope it will be enough to convince you that compilers can in fact
be written and understood by mortals and to give you some idea of how that can be done.
The parsing method that we will use is called recursive descent parsing . It is not the
only possible parsing method, or the most efficient, but it is the one most suited for writing
compilers by hand (rather than with the help of so called “parser generator” programs). In a
recursive descent parser, every rule of the BNF grammar is the model for a subroutine. Not
every BNF grammar is suitable for recursive descent parsing. The grammar must satisfy a
certain property. Essentially, while parsing a phrase, it must be possible to tell what syntactic
category is coming up next just by looking at the next item in the input. Many grammars are
designed with this property in mind.
∗ ∗ ∗
When we try to parse a phrase that contains a syntax error, we need some way to respond
to the error. A convenient way of doing this is to throw an exception. I’ll use an exception
class called ParseError, defined as follows:
/**
* An object of type ParseError represents a syntax error found in
* the user’s input.
*/
private static class ParseError extends Exception {
ParseError(String message) {
super(message);
}
} // end nested class ParseError
Another general point is that our BNF rules don’t say anything about spaces between items,
but in reality we want to be able to insert spaces between items at will. To allow for this, I’ll
always call the routine TextIO.skipBlanks() before trying to look ahead to see what’s coming
up next in input. TextIO.skipBlanks() skips past any whitespace, such as spaces and tabs, in
the input, and stops when the next character in the input is either a non-blank character or the
end-of-line character. (For a discussion of robust handling of TextIO input, see Subsection 8.2.4.)
Let’s start with a very simple example. A “fully parenthesized expression” can be specified
in BNF by the rules
<expression> ::= <number> |
"(" <expression> <operator> <expression> ")"
<operator> ::= "+" | "-" | "*" | "/"
where <number> refers to any non-negative real number. An example of a fully parenthesized
expression is “(((34-17)*8)+(2*7))”. Since every operator corresponds to a pair of
parentheses, there is no ambiguity about the order in which the operators are to be applied.
Suppose we want a program that will read and evaluate such expressions. We’ll read the
expressions from standard input, using TextIO. To apply recursive descent parsing, we need a
subroutine for each rule in the grammar. Corresponding to the rule for <operator>, we get a
subroutine that reads an operator. The operator can be a choice of any of four things. Any
other input will be an error.
/**
* If the next character in input is one of the legal operators,
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 492

* read it and return it. Otherwise, throw a ParseError.

*/
static char getOperator() throws ParseError {
TextIO.skipBlanks();
char op = TextIO.peek(); // look ahead at the next char, without reading it
if ( op == ’+’ || op == ’-’ || op == ’*’ || op == ’/’ ) {
TextIO.getAnyChar(); // read the operator, to remove it from the input
return op;
}
else if (op == ’\n’)
throw new ParseError("Missing operator at end of line.");
else
throw new ParseError("Missing operator. Found \"" +
op + "\" instead of +, -, *, or /.");
} // end getOperator()
I’ve tried to give a reasonable error message, depending on whether the next character is an
end-of-line or something else. I use TextIO.peek() to look ahead at the next character before I
read it, and I call TextIO.skipBlanks() before testing TextIO.peek() in order to ignore any
blanks that separate items. I will follow this same pattern in every case.
When we come to the subroutine for <expression>, things are a little more interesting. The
rule says that an expression can be either a number or an expression enclosed in parentheses.
We can tell which it is by looking ahead at the next character. If the character is a digit,
we have to read a number. If the character is a “(“, we have to read the “(“, followed by an
expression, followed by an operator, followed by another expression, followed by a “)”. If the
next character is anything else, there is an error. Note that we need recursion to read the
nested expressions. The routine doesn’t just read the expression. It also computes and returns
its value. This requires semantical information that is not specified in the BNF rule.
/**
* Read an expression from the current line of input and return its value.
* @throws ParseError if the input contains a syntax error
*/
private static double expressionValue() throws ParseError {
TextIO.skipBlanks();
if ( Character.isDigit(TextIO.peek()) ) {
// The next item in input is a number, so the expression
// must consist of just that number. Read and return
// the number.
return TextIO.getDouble();
}
else if ( TextIO.peek() == ’(’ ) {
// The expression must be of the form
// "(" <expression> <operator> <expression> ")"
// Read all these items, perform the operation, and
// return the result.
TextIO.getAnyChar(); // Read the "("
double leftVal = expressionValue(); // Read and evaluate first operand.
char op = getOperator(); // Read the operator.
double rightVal = expressionValue(); // Read and evaluate second operand.
TextIO.skipBlanks();
if ( TextIO.peek() != ’)’ ) {
// According to the rule, there must be a ")" here.
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 493

// Since it’s missing, throw a ParseError.

throw new ParseError("Missing right parenthesis.");
}
TextIO.getAnyChar(); // Read the ")"
switch (op) { // Apply the operator and return the result.
case ’+’: return leftVal + rightVal;
case ’-’: return leftVal - rightVal;
case ’*’: return leftVal * rightVal;
case ’/’: return leftVal / rightVal;
default: return 0; // Can’t occur since op is one of the above.
// (But Java syntax requires a return value.)
}
}
else { // No other character can legally start an expression.
throw new ParseError("Encountered unexpected character, \"" +
TextIO.peek() + "\" in input.");
}
} // end expressionValue()
I hope that you can see how this routine corresponds to the BNF rule. Where the rule
uses “|” to give a choice between alternatives, there is an if statement in the routine to
determine which choice to take. Where the rule contains a sequence of items, “(“ <expression>
<operator> <expression> “)”, there is a sequence of statements in the subroutine to read each
item in turn.
When expressionValue() is called to evaluate the expression (((34-17)*8)+(2*7)), it
sees the “(“ at the beginning of the input, so the else part of the if statement is executed.
The “(“ is read. Then the first recursive call to expressionValue() reads and evaluates the
subexpression ((34-17)*8), the call to getOperator() reads the “+” operator, and the second
recursive call to expressionValue() reads and evaluates the second subexpression (2*7).
Finally, the “)” at the end of the expression is read. Of course, reading the first subexpression,
((34-17)*8), involves further recursive calls to the expressionValue() routine, but it’s better
not to think too deeply about that! Rely on the recursion to handle the details.
You’ll find a complete program that uses these routines in the file SimpleParser1.java.
∗ ∗ ∗
Fully parenthesized expressions aren’t very natural for people to use. But with ordinary
expressions, we have to worry about the question of operator precedence, which tells us, for
example, that the “*” in the expression “5+3*7” is applied before the “+”. The complex
expression “3*6+8*(7+1)/4-24” should be seen as made up of three “terms”, 3*6, 8*(7+1)/4,
and 24, combined with “+” and “-” operators. A term, on the other hand, can be made up
of several factors combined with “*” and “/” operators. For example, 8*(7+1)/4 contains the
factors 8, (7+1) and 4. This example also shows that a factor can be either a number or an
expression in parentheses. To complicate things a bit more, we allow for leading minus signs in
expressions, as in “-(3+4)” or “-7”. (Since a <number> is a positive number, this is the only
way we can get negative numbers. It’s done this way to avoid “3 * -7”, for example.) This
structure can be expressed by the BNF rules
<expression> ::= [ "-" ] <term> [ ( "+" | "-" ) <term> ]...
<term> ::= <factor> [ ( "*" | "/" ) <factor> ]...
<factor> ::= <number> | "(" <expression> ")"
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 494

The first rule uses the “[ ]...” notation, which says that the items that it encloses can occur
zero, one, two, or more times. The rule means that an <expression> can begin, optionally,
with a “-”. Then there must be a <term> which can optionally be followed by one of the
operators “+” or “-” and another <term>, optionally followed by another operator and <term>,
and so on. In a subroutine that reads and evaluates expressions, this repetition is handled by
a while loop. An if statement is used at the beginning of the loop to test whether a leading
minus sign is present:
/**
* Read an expression from the current line of input and return its value.
* @throws ParseError if the input contains a syntax error
*/
private static double expressionValue() throws ParseError {
TextIO.skipBlanks();
boolean negative; // True if there is a leading minus sign.
negative = false;
if (TextIO.peek() == ’-’) {
TextIO.getAnyChar(); // Read the minus sign.
negative = true;
}
double val; // Value of the expression.
val = termValue(); // Read and evaluate the first term.
if (negative)
val = -val; // Apply the leading minus sign to the first term.
TextIO.skipBlanks();
while ( TextIO.peek() == ’+’ || TextIO.peek() == ’-’ ) {
// Read the next term and add it to or subtract it from
// the value of previous terms in the expression.
char op = TextIO.getAnyChar(); // Read the operator.
double nextVal = termValue(); // Read and evaluate the next term.
if (op == ’+’)
val += nextVal;
else
val -= nextVal;
TextIO.skipBlanks();
}
return val;
} // end expressionValue()
The subroutine for <term> is very similar to this, and the subroutine for <factor> is
similar to the example given above for fully parenthesized expressions. A complete program
that reads and evaluates expressions based on the above BNF rules can be found in the file
SimpleParser2.java.

9.5.3 Building an Expression Tree

Now, so far, we’ve only evaluated expressions. What does that have to do with translating
programs into machine language? Well, instead of actually evaluating the expression, it would
be almost as easy to generate the machine language instructions that are needed to evaluate
the expression. If we are working with a “stack machine,” these instructions would be stack
operations such as “push a number” or “apply a + operation”. The program SimpleParser3.java
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 495

can both evaluate the expression and print a list of stack machine operations for evaluating the
expression.
It’s quite a jump from this program to a recursive descent parser that can read a program
written in Java and generate the equivalent machine language code—but the conceptual leap
is not huge.
The SimpleParser3 program doesn’t actually generate the stack operations directly as it
parses an expression. Instead, it builds an expression tree, as discussed in Subsection 9.4.3, to
represent the expression. The expression tree is then used to find the value and to generate
the stack operations. The tree is made up of nodes belonging to classes ConstNode and
BinOpNode that are similar to those given in Subsection 9.4.3. Another subclass of ExpNote,
UnaryMinusNode, has been introduced to represent the unary minus operation. I’ve added a
method, printStackCommands(), to each class. This method is responsible for printing out
the stack operations that are necessary to evaluate an expression. Here for example is the new
BinOpNode class from SimpleParser3.java:
private static class BinOpNode extends ExpNode {
char op; // The operator.
ExpNode left; // The expression for its left operand.
ExpNode right; // The expression for its right operand.
BinOpNode(char op, ExpNode left, ExpNode right) {
// Construct a BinOpNode containing the specified data.
assert op == ’+’ || op == ’-’ || op == ’*’ || op == ’/’;
assert left != null && right != null;
// (for assert statements, see Subsection 8.4.1)
this.op = op;
this.left = left;
this.right = right;
}
double value() {
// The value is obtained by evaluating the left and right
// operands and combining the values with the operator.
double x = left.value();
double y = right.value();
switch (op) {
case ’+’:
return x + y;
case ’-’:
return x - y;
case ’*’:
return x * y;
case ’/’:
return x / y;
default:
return Double.NaN; // Bad operator! Should not be possible.
}
}
void printStackCommands() {
// To evaluate the expression on a stack machine, first do
// whatever is necessary to evaluate the left operand, leaving
// the answer on the stack. Then do the same thing for the
// second operand. Then apply the operator (which means popping
// the operands, applying the operator, and pushing the result).
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 496

left.printStackCommands();
right.printStackCommands();
System.out.println(" Operator " + op);
}
}
It’s also interesting to look at the new parsing subroutines. Instead of computing a value,
each subroutine builds an expression tree. For example, the subroutine corresponding to the
rule for <expression> becomes
static ExpNode expressionTree() throws ParseError {
// Read an expression from the current line of input and
// return an expression tree representing the expression.
// (The return value is a pointer to the root of the tree.)
TextIO.skipBlanks();
boolean negative; // True if there is a leading minus sign.
negative = false;
if (TextIO.peek() == ’-’) {
TextIO.getAnyChar();
negative = true;
}
ExpNode exp; // The expression tree for the expression.
exp = termTree(); // Start with a tree for first term.
if (negative) {
// Build the tree that corresponds to applying a
// unary minus operator to the term we’ve
// just read.
exp = new UnaryMinusNode(exp);
}
TextIO.skipBlanks();
while ( TextIO.peek() == ’+’ || TextIO.peek() == ’-’ ) {
// Read the next term and combine it with the
// previous terms into a bigger expression tree.
char op = TextIO.getAnyChar();
ExpNode nextTerm = termTree();
// Create a tree that applies the binary operator
// to the previous tree and the term we just read.
exp = new BinOpNode(op, exp, nextTerm);
TextIO.skipBlanks();
}
return exp;
} // end expressionTree()

In some real compilers, the parser creates a tree to represent the program that is being
parsed. This tree is called a parse tree or abstract syntax tree. Parse trees are somewhat
different in form from expression trees, but the purpose is the same. Once you have the tree,
there are a number of things you can do with it. For one thing, it can be used to generate
machine language code. But there are also techniques for examining the tree and detecting
certain types of programming errors, such as an attempt to reference a local variable before
it has been assigned a value. (The Java compiler, of course, will reject the program if it
contains such an error.) It’s also possible to manipulate the tree to optimize the program.
CHAPTER 9. LINKED DATA STRUCTURES AND RECURSION 497

In optimization, the tree is transformed to make the program more efficient before the code is
generated.
And so we are back where we started in Chapter 1, looking at programming languages,
compilers, and machine language. But looking at them, I hope, with a lot more understanding
and a much wider perspective.
Exercises 498

Exercises for Chapter 9

1. In many textbooks, the first examples of recursion are the mathematical functions factorial (solution)
and fibonacci. These functions are defined for non-negative integers using the following
recursive formulas:
factorial(0) = 1
factorial(N) = N*factorial(N-1) for N > 0
fibonacci(0) = 1
fibonacci(1) = 1
fibonacci(N) = fibonacci(N-1) + fibonacci(N-2) for N > 1
Write recursive functions to compute factorial(N) and fibonacci(N) for a given non-
negative integer N, and write a main() routine to test your functions. Consider using the
BigInteger class (see Exercise 8.2)
(In fact, factorial and fibonacci are really not very good examples of recursion, since
the most natural way to compute them is to use simple for loops. Furthermore, fibonacci
is a particularly bad example, since the natural recursive approach to computing this
function is extremely inefficient.)

2. Exercise 7.6 asked you to read a file, make an alphabetical list of all the words that occur (solution)
in the file, and write the list to another file. In that exercise, you were asked to use an
ArrayList<String> to store the words. Write a new version of the same program that stores
the words in a binary sort tree instead of in an arraylist. You can use the binary sort tree
routines from SortTreeDemo.java, which was discussed in Subsection 9.4.2.

3. Suppose that linked lists of integers are made from objects belonging to the class (solution)
class ListNode {
int item; // An item in the list.
ListNode next; // Pointer to the next node in the list.
}
Write a subroutine that will make a copy of a list, with the order of the items of the list
reversed. The subroutine should have a parameter of type ListNode, and it should return
a value of type ListNode. The original list should not be modified.
You should also write a main() routine to test your subroutine.

4. Subsection 9.4.1 explains how to use recursion to print out the items in a binary tree in (solution)
various orders. That section also notes that a non-recursive subroutine can be used to
print the items, provided that a stack or queue is used as an auxiliary data structure.
Assuming that a queue is used, here is an algorithm for such a subroutine:
Add the root node to an empty queue
while the queue is not empty:
Get a node from the queue
Print the item in the node
if node.left is not null:
add it to the queue
if node.right is not null:
add it to the queue
Exercises 499

Write a subroutine that implements this algorithm, and write a program to test the
subroutine. Note that you will need a queue of TreeNodes, so you will need to write
a class to represent such queues.
(Note that the order in which items are printed by this algorithm is different from all
three of the orders considered in Subsection 9.4.1.

5. In Subsection 9.4.2, I say that “if the [binary sort] tree is created by inserting items in a (solution)
random order, there is a high probability that the tree is approximately balanced.” For
this exercise, you will do an experiment to test whether that is true.
The depth of a node in a binary tree is the length of the path from the root of the tree
to that node. That is, the root has depth 0, its children have depth 1, its grandchildren
have depth 2, and so on. In a balanced tree, all the leaves in the tree are about the same
depth. For example, in a perfectly balanced tree with 1023 nodes, all the leaves are at
depth 9. In an approximately balanced tree with 1023 nodes, the average depth of all the
leaves should be not too much bigger than 9.
On the other hand, even if the tree is approximately balanced, there might be a few
leaves that have much larger depth than the average, so we might also want to look at the
maximum depth among all the leaves in a tree.
For this exercise, you should create a random binary sort tree with 1023 nodes. The
items in the tree can be real numbers, and you can create the tree by generating 1023
random real numbers and inserting them into the tree, using the usual treeInsert()
method for binary sort trees. Once you have the tree, you should compute and output the
average depth of all the leaves in the tree and the maximum depth of all the leaves. To
do this, you will need three recursive subroutines: one to count the leaves, one to find the
sum of the depths of all the leaves, and one to find the maximum depth. The latter two
subroutines should have an int-valued parameter, depth, that tells how deep in the tree
you’ve gone. When you call this routine from the main program, the depth parameter is
0; when you call the routine recursively, the parameter increases by 1.

6. The parsing programs in Section 9.5 work with expressions made up of numbers and (solution)
operators. We can make things a little more interesting by allowing the variable “x” to
occur. This would allow expression such as “3*(x-1)*(x+1)”, for example. Make a new
version of the sample program SimpleParser3.java that can work with such expressions.
In your program, the main() routine can’t simply print the value of the expression, since
the value of the expression now depends on the value of x. Instead, it should print the
value of the expression for x=0, x=1, x=2, and x=3.
The original program will have to be modified in several other ways. Currently, the
program uses classes ConstNode, BinOpNode, and UnaryMinusNode to represent nodes
in an expression tree. Since expressions can now include x, you will need a new class,
VariableNode, to represent an occurrence of x in the expression.
In the original program, each of the node classes has an instance method,
“double value()”, which returns the value of the node. But in your program, the
value can depend on x, so you should replace this method with one of the form
“double value(double xValue)”, where the parameter xValue is the value of x.
Finally, the parsing subroutines in your program will have to take into account the
fact that expressions can contain x. There is just one small change in the BNF rules for
the expressions: A <factor> is allowed to be the variable x:
<factor> ::= <number> | <x-variable> | "(" <expression> ")"
Exercises 500

where <x-variable> can be either a lower case or an upper case “X”. This change in the
BNF requires a change in the factorTree() subroutine.

7. This exercise builds on the previous exercise, Exercise 9.6. To understand it, you should (solution)
have some background in Calculus. The derivative of an expression that involves the
variable x can be defined by a few recursive rules:
• The derivative of a constant is 0.
• The derivative of x is 1.
• If A is an expression, let dA be the derivative of A. Then the derivative of -A is -dA.
• If A and B are expressions, let dA be the derivative of A and let dB be the derivative
of B. Then the derivative of A+B is dA+dB.
• The derivative of A-B is dA-dB.
• The derivative of A*B is A*dB + B*dA.
• The derivative of A/B is (B*dA - A*dB) / (B*B).
For this exercise, you should modify your program from the previous exercise so that
it can compute the derivative of an expression. You can do this by adding a derivative-
computing method to each of the node classes. First, add another abstract method to the
ExpNode class:
abstract ExpNode derivative();
Then implement this method in each of the four subclasses of ExpNode. All the information
that you need is in the rules given above. In your main program, instead of printing the
stack operations for the original expression, you should print out the stack operations
that define the derivative. Note that the formula that you get for the derivative can be
much more complicated than it needs to be. For example, the derivative of 3*x+1 will be
computed as (3*1+0*x)+0. This is correct, even though it’s kind of ugly, and it would be
nice for it to be simplified. However, simplifying expressions is not easy.
As an alternative to printing out stack operations, you might want to print the
derivative as a fully parenthesized expression. You can do this by adding a printInfix()
routine to each node class. It would be nice to leave out unnecessary parentheses, but
again, the problem of deciding which parentheses can be left out without altering the
meaning of the expression is a fairly difficult one, which I don’t advise you to attempt.
(There is one curious thing that happens here: If you apply the rules, as given, to an
expression tree, the result is no longer a tree, since the same subexpression can occur at
multiple points in the derivative. For example, if you build a node to represent B*B by
saying “new BinOpNode(’*’,B,B)”, then the left and right children of the new node are
actually the same node! This is not allowed in a tree. However, the difference is harmless
in this case since, like a tree, the structure that you get has no loops in it. Loops, on the
other hand, would be a disaster in most of the recursive tree-processing subroutines that
we have written, since it would lead to infinite recursion. The type of structure that is
built by the derivative functions is technically referred to as a directed acyclic graph.)
Quiz 501

Quiz on Chapter 9
(answers)

1. Explain what is meant by a recursive subroutine.

2. Consider the following subroutine:

static void printStuff(int level) {
if (level == 0) {
System.out.print("*");
}
else {
System.out.print("[");
printStuff(level - 1);
System.out.print(",");
printStuff(level - 1);
System.out.print("]");
}
}
Show the output that would be produced by the subroutine calls printStuff(0),
printStuff(1), printStuff(2), and printStuff(3).

3. Suppose that a linked list is formed from objects that belong to the class
class ListNode {
int item; // An item in the list.
ListNode next; // Pointer to next item in the list.
}
Write a subroutine that will count the number of zeros that occur in a given linked list
of ints. The subroutine should have a parameter of type ListNode and should return a
value of type int.

4. Let ListNode be defined as in the previous problem. Suppose that head is a variable of
type ListNode that points to the first node in a linked list. Write a code segment that
will add the number 42 in a new node at the end of the list. Assume that the list is not
empty. (There is no “tail pointer” for the list.)

5. List nodes can be used to build linked data structures that do not have the form of linked
lists. Consider the list node class shown on the left and the code shown on the right:
class ListNode { ListNode one = new ListNode(10);
int item; ListNode two = new ListNode(20);
ListNode next; ListNode three = new ListNode(30);
Listnode(int i) { ListNode four = new ListNode(40);
item = i; one.next = two;
next = null; two.next = three;
} three.next = four;
} four.next = two;
Draw the data structure that is constructed by the code. What happens if you try to print
the items in the data structure using the usual code for traversing a linked list:
Quiz 502

ListNode runner = one;

while (runner != null) {
System.out.println(runner.item);
runner = runner.next();
}

6. What are the three operations on a stack?

7. What is the basic difference between a stack and a queue?

8. What is an activation record ? What role does a stack of activation records play in a
computer?

9. Suppose that a binary tree of integers is formed from objects belonging to the class
class TreeNode {
int item; // One item in the tree.
TreeNode left; // Pointer to the left subtree.
TreeNode right; // Pointer to the right subtree.
}
Write a recursive subroutine that will find the sum of all the nodes in the tree. Your
subroutine should have a parameter of type TreeNode, and it should return a value of
type int.

10. Let TreeNode be the same class as in the previous problem. Write a recursive subroutine
that makes a copy of a binary tree. The subroutine has a parameter that points to the
root of the tree that is to be copied. The return type is TreeNode, and the return value
should be a pointer to the root of the copy. The copy should consist of newly created
nodes, and it should have exactly the same structure as the original tree.

11. What is a postorder traversal of a binary tree?

12. Suppose that a binary sort tree of integers is initially empty and that the following integers
are inserted into the tree in the order shown:
5 7 1 3 4 2 6
Draw the binary sort tree that results. Then list the integers in the order that is produced
by a post-order traversal of the tree.

13. Suppose that a <multilist> is defined by the BNF rule

<multilist> ::= <word> | "(" [ <multilist> ]... ")"
where a <word> can be any sequence of letters. Give five different <multilist>’s that
can be generated by this rule. (This rule, by the way, is almost the entire syntax of
the programming language LISP! LISP is known for its simple syntax and its elegant and
powerful semantics.)

14. Explain what is meant by parsing a computer program.

Chapter 10

Generic Programming and

Collection Classes

How to avoid reinventing the wheel? Many data structures and algorithms, such as
those from Chapter 9, have been studied, programmed, and re-programmed by generations of
computer science students. This is a valuable learning experience. Unfortunately, they have
also been programmed and re-programmed by generations of working computer professionals,
taking up time that could be devoted to new, more creative work. A programmer who needs
a list or a binary tree shouldn’t have to re-code these data structures from scratch. They are
well-understood and have been programmed thousands of times before. The problem is how to
make pre-written, robust data structures available to programmers. In this chapter, we’ll look
at Java’s attempt to address this problem.
You have already seen part of the solution in Section 7.3. That section introduced
parameterized types and the ArrayList class. Parameterized types make it possible for the
same class to work with many different kinds of data. This idea—that the same code can be
used for a variety of data types—is called generic programming .

10.1 Generic Programming

Generic programming refers to writing code that will work for many types of data. We
encountered the alternative to generic programming in Subsection 7.2.4, where we looked at
dynamic arrays of integers. The source code presented there for working with dynamic arrays
of integers works only for data of type int. But the source code for dynamic arrays of double,
String, Color, or any other type would be almost identical, except for the substitution of one
type name for another. It seems silly to write essentially the same code over and over. Java’s
approach to this problem is parameterized types. As we saw in Section 7.3, the parameterized
class ArrayList implements dynamic arrays. Since it is parameterized, there are types such as
ArrayList<String> to represent dynamic arrays of String, ArrayList<Color> for dynamic arrays of
colors, and more generally ArrayList<T> for any object type T. ArrayList is just one class, but
the source code works for many different types. This is generic programming.
The ArrayList class is just one of many standard classes that are used for generic
programming in Java. We will spend the next three sections looking at some of these classes
and how they are used, and we’ll see that there are also generic methods and generic interfaces.
The classes and interfaces discussed in these sections are defined in the package java.util,
and you will need import statements at the beginning of your programs to get access to them.

503
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 504

In Section 10.5, we will see that it is possible to define new generic classes, interfaces, and
methods. Until then, we will stick to using Java’s predefined generics. And in Section 10.6, we
will look at streams, a relatively new feature of Java that makes extensive use of generics.
It is no easy task to design a library for generic programming. Java’s solution has many
nice features but is certainly not the only possible approach. It is almost certainly not the
best, and has a few features that in my opinion can only be called bizarre, but in the context
of the overall design of Java, it might be close to optimal. To get some perspective on generic
programming in general, it might be useful to look very briefly at some other approaches to
generic programming.

10.1.1 Generic Programming in Smalltalk

Smalltalk was one of the very first object-oriented programming languages. It is still used today,
although its use is not very common. It never achieved anything like the popularity of Java or
C++, but it is the source of many ideas used in these languages. In Smalltalk, essentially all
programming is generic, because of two basic properties of the language.
First of all, variables in Smalltalk are typeless. A data value has a type, such as integer or
string, but variables do not have types. Any variable can hold data of any type. Parameters
are also typeless, so a subroutine can be applied to parameter values of any type. Similarly,
a data structure can hold data values of any type. For example, once you’ve defined a binary
tree data structure in SmallTalk, you can use it for binary trees of integers or strings or dates
or data of any other type. There is simply no need to write new code for each data type.
Secondly, all data values are objects, and all operations on objects are defined by methods
in a class. This is true even for types that are “primitive” in Java, such as integers. When the
“+” operator is used to add two integers, the operation is performed by calling a method in the
integer class. When you define a new class, you can define a “+” operator, and you will then
be able to add objects belonging to that class by saying “a + b” just as if you were adding
numbers. Now, suppose that you write a subroutine that uses the “+” operator to add up the
items in a list. The subroutine can be applied to a list of integers, but it can also be applied,
automatically, to any other data type for which “+” is defined. Similarly, a subroutine that
uses the “<" operator to sort a list can be applied to lists containing any type of data for which
“<” is defined. There is no need to write a different sorting subroutine for each type of data.
Put these two features together and you have a language where data structures and
algorithms will work for any type of data for which they make sense, that is, for which the
appropriate operations are defined. This is real generic programming. This might sound pretty
good, and you might be asking yourself why all programming languages don’t work this way.
This type of freedom makes it easier to write programs, but unfortunately it makes it harder
to write programs that are correct and robust (see Chapter 8). Once you have a data structure
that can contain data of any type, it becomes hard to ensure that it only holds the type of
data that you want it to hold. If you have a subroutine that can sort any type of data, it’s
hard to ensure that it will only be applied to data for which the “<” operator is defined. More
particularly, there is no way for a compiler to ensure these things. The problem will only show
up at run time when an attempt is made to apply some operation to a data type for which it
is not defined, and the program will crash.
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 505

10.1.2 Generic Programming in C++

Unlike Smalltalk, C++ is a very strongly typed language. Every variable has a type, and can
only hold data values of that type. This means that the kind of generic programming that is
used in Smalltalk is impossible in C++. Nevertheless, C++ has a powerful and flexible system
of generic programming. It is made possible by a language feature known as templates. In
C++, instead of writing a different sorting subroutine for each type of data, you can write a
single subroutine template. The template is not a subroutine; it’s more like a factory for making
subroutines. We can look at an example, since the syntax of C++ is very similar to Java’s:
template<class ItemType>
void sort( ItemType A[], int count ) {
// Sort items in the array, A, into increasing order.
// The items in positions 0, 1, 2, ..., (count-1) are sorted.
// The algorithm that is used here is selection sort.
for (int i = count-1; i > 0; i--) {
int position of max = 0;
for (int j = 1; j <= i ; j++)
if ( A[j] > A[position of max] )
position of max = j;
ItemType temp = A[i];
A[i] = A[position of max];
A[position of max] = temp;
}
}
This piece of code defines a subroutine template. If you remove the first line, “template<class
ItemType>”, and substitute the word “int” for the word “ItemType” in the rest of the template,
you get a subroutine for sorting arrays of ints. (Even though it says “class ItemType”, you
can actually substitute any type for ItemType, including the primitive types.) If you substitute
“string” for “ItemType”, you get a subroutine for sorting arrays of strings. This is pretty much
what the compiler does with the template. If your program says “sort(list,10)” where list
is an array of ints, the compiler uses the template to generate a subroutine for sorting arrays
of ints. If you say “sort(cards,10)” where cards is an array of objects of type Card, then the
compiler generates a subroutine for sorting arrays of Cards. At least, it tries to. The template
uses the “>” operator to compare values. If this operator is defined for values of type Card, then
the compiler will successfully use the template to generate a subroutine for sorting cards. If “>”
is not defined for Cards, then the compiler will fail—but this will happen at compile time, not,
as in Smalltalk, at run time where it would make the program crash. (By the way, in C++,
it is possible to write definitions of operators like > for any type, so that it is possible that >
might work for values of type Card.)
In addition to subroutine templates, C++ also has templates for making classes. If you write
a template for a binary tree class, you can use it to generate classes for binary trees of ints,
binary trees of strings, binary trees of dates, and so on—all from one template. Modern C++
comes with a large number of pre-written templates called the Standard Template Library
or STL. The STL is quite complex. Many people would say that it’s much too complex. But it
is also one of the most interesting features of C++.
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 506

10.1.3 Generic Programming in Java

Java’s generic programming features have gone through several stages of development. Early
versions of Java did not have parameterized types, but they did have classes to represent
common data structures. Those classes were designed to work with Objects; that is, they could
hold objects of any type, and there was no way to restrict the types of objects that could be
stored in a given data structure. For example, ArrayList was not originally a parameterized type,
so that any ArrayList could hold any type of object. This means that if list was an ArrayList,
then list.get(i) would return a value of type Object. If the programmer was actually using
the list to store Strings, the value returned by list.get(i) would have to be type-cast to treat
it as a string:
String item = (String)list.get(i);
This is still a kind of generic programming, since one class can work for any kind of object, but
it was closer in spirit to Smalltalk than it was to C++, since there is no way to do type checks
at compile time. Unfortunately, as in Smalltalk, the result is a category of errors that show up
only at run time, rather than at compile time. If a programmer assumes that all the items in a
data structure are strings and tries to process those items as strings, a run-time error will occur
if other types of data have inadvertently been added to the data structure. In Java, the error
will most likely occur when the program retrieves an Object from the data structure and tries
to type-cast it to type String. If the object is not actually of type String, the illegal type-cast
will throw an error of type ClassCastException.
Java 5.0 introduced parameterized types, which made it possible to create generic data
structures that can be type-checked at compile time rather than at run time. For example, if
list is of type ArrayList<String>, then the compiler will only allow objects of type String to
be added to list. Furthermore, the return type of list.get(i) is String, so type-casting is
not necessary. Java’s parameterized classes are similar to template classes in C++ (although
the implementation is very different), and their introduction moves Java’s generic programming
model closer to C++ and farther from Smalltalk. In this chapter, I will use the parameterized
types exclusively, but you should remember that their use is not mandatory. It is still legal to
use a parameterized class as a non-parameterized type, such as a plain ArrayList. In that case,
any type of object can be stored in the data structure. (But if that is what you really want to
do, it would be preferable to use the type ArrayList<Object>.)
Note that there is a significant difference between parameterized classes in Java and template
classes in C++. A template class in C++ is not really a class at all—it’s a kind of factory
for generating classes. Every time the template is used with a new type, a new compiled
class is created. With a Java parameterized class, there is only one compiled class file.
For example, there is only one compiled class file, ArrayList.class, for the parameterized
class ArrayList. The parameterized types ArrayList<String> and ArrayList<Integer> both use
the same compiled class file, as does the plain ArrayList type. The type parameter—String
or Integer —just tells the compiler to limit the type of object that can be stored in the
data structure. The type parameter has no effect at run time and is not even known at
run time. The type information is said to be “erased” at run time. This type erasure
introduces a certain amount of weirdness. For example, you can’t test “if (list instanceof
ArrayList<String>)” because the instanceof operator is evaluated at run time, and at run
time only the plain ArrayList exists. Similarly, you can’t type-cast to the type ArrayList<String>.
Even worse, you can’t create an array that has base type ArrayList<String> by using the new
operator, as in “new ArrayList<String>[N]”. This is because the new operator is evaluated
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 507

at run time, and at run time there is no such thing as “ArrayList<String>”; only the non-
parameterized type ArrayList exists at run time. (However, although you can’t have an array
of ArrayList<String>, you can have an ArrayList of ArrayList<String>—with the type written as
ArrayList<ArrayList<String>>—which is just as good or better.)
Fortunately, most programmers don’t have to deal with such problems, since they turn
up only in fairly advanced programming. Most people who use parameterized types will not
encounter the problems, and they will get the benefits of type-safe generic programming with
little difficulty.
It’s worth noting that if the type parameter in a parameterized type can be deduced by the
compiler, then the name of the type parameter can be omitted. For example, the word “String”
is optional in the constructor in the following statement, because the ArrayList that is created
must be an ArrayList<String> to match the type of the variable:
ArrayList<String> words = new ArrayList<>();

10.1.4 The Java Collection Framework

As I’ve said, Java comes with a number of parameterized types that implement common data
structures. This collection of data structure classes and interfaces is referred to as the Java
Collection Framework , or JCF . We will spend the next few sections learning about the
JCF.
The generic data structures in the Java Collection Framework can be divided into two
categories: collections and maps. A collection is more or less what it sounds like: a
collection of objects. A map associates objects in one set with objects in another set in the way
that a dictionary associates definitions with words or a phone book associates phone numbers
with names. A map is similar to what I called an “association list” in Subsection 7.5.2. In
Java, collections and maps are represented by the parameterized interfaces Collection<T> and
Map<T,S>. Here, “T” and “S” stand for any type except for the primitive types. Map<T,S> is
an example of a parameterized type that has two type parameters, T and S; we will not deal
further with this possibility until we look at maps more closely in Section 10.3. In this section
and the next, we look at collections only.
There are two types of collections: lists and sets. A list is a collection in which the objects
are arranged in a linear sequence. A list has a first item, a second item, and so on. For any
item in the list, except the last, there is an item that directly follows it. For collections that
are “sets,” the defining property is that no object can occur more than once in a set; the
elements of a set are not necessarily thought of as being in any particular order. The ideas of
lists and sets are represented as parameterized interfaces List<T> and Set<T>. These are sub-
interfaces of Collection<T>. That is, any object that implements the interface List<T> or Set<T>
automatically implements Collection<T> as well. The interface Collection<T> specifies general
operations that can be applied to any collection at all. List<T> and Set<T> add additional
operations that are appropriate for lists and sets respectively.
Of course, any actual object that is a collection, list, or set must belong to a concrete class
that implements the corresponding interface. For example, the class ArrayList<T> implements
the interface List<T> and therefore also implements Collection<T>. This means that all the
methods that are defined in the list and collection interfaces can be used with an ArrayList.
We will look at various classes that implement the list and set interfaces in the next section.
But before we do that, we’ll look briefly at some of the general operations that are available
for all collections.
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 508

∗ ∗ ∗
The interface Collection<T> specifies methods for performing some basic operations on any
collection of objects. Since “collection” is a very general concept, operations that can be applied
to all collections are also very general. They are generic operations in the sense that they can
be applied to various types of collections containing various types of objects. Suppose that
coll is an object that implements the interface Collection<T> (for some specific non-primitive
type T ). Then the following operations, which are specified in the interface Collection<T>, are
defined for coll:
• coll.size() — returns an int that gives the number of objects in the collection.
• coll.isEmpty() — returns a boolean value which is true if the size of the collection is 0.
• coll.clear() — removes all objects from the collection.
• coll.add(tobject) — adds tobject to the collection. The parameter must be of type T ;
if not, a syntax error occurs at compile time. (Remember that if T is a class, this includes
objects belonging to a subclass of T, and if T is an interface, it includes any object that
implements T.) The add() method returns a boolean value which tells you whether the
operation actually modified the collection. For example, adding an object to a Set has no
effect if that object was already in the set.
• coll.contains(object) — returns a boolean value that is true if object is in the
collection. Note that object is not required to be of type T, since it makes sense to
check whether object is in the collection, no matter what type object has. (For testing
equality, null is considered to be equal to itself. The criterion for testing non-null objects
for equality can differ from one kind of collection to another; see Subsection 10.1.6, below.)
• coll.remove(object) — removes object from the collection, if it occurs in the collection,
and returns a boolean value that tells you whether the object was found. Again, object
is not required to be of type T. The test for equality is the same test that is used by
contains().
• coll.containsAll(coll2) — returns a boolean value that is true if every object in
coll2 is also in coll. The parameter can be any collection.
• coll.addAll(coll2) — adds all the objects in coll2 to coll. The parameter, coll2,
can be any collection of type Collection<T>. However, it can also be more general. For
example, if T is a class and S is a sub-class of T, then coll2 can be of type Collection<S>.
This makes sense because any object of type S is automatically of type T and so can
legally be added to coll.
• coll.removeAll(coll2) — removes every object from coll that also occurs in the
collection coll2. coll2 can be any collection.
• coll.retainAll(coll2) — removes every object from coll that does not occur in
the collection coll2. It “retains” only the objects that do occur in coll2. coll2 can be
any collection.
• coll.toArray() — returns an array of type Object[ ] that contains all the items in
the collection. Note that the return type is Object[ ], not T[ ]! However, there is
another version of this method that takes an array of type T[ ] as a parameter: the
method coll.toArray(tarray) returns an array of type T[ ] containing all the items
in the collection. If the array parameter tarray is large enough to hold the entire
collection, then the items are stored in tarray and tarray is also the return value of
the collection. If tarray is not large enough, then a new array is created to hold the
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 509

items; in that case tarray serves only to specify the type of the array. For example,
coll.toArray(new String[0]) can be used if coll is a collection of Strings and will
return a new array of type String[ ].
Since these methods are part of the Collection<T> interface, they must be defined for every
object that implements that interface. There is a problem with this, however. For example,
the size of some collections cannot be changed after they are created. Methods that add or
remove objects don’t make sense for these collections. While it is still legal to call the methods,
an exception will be thrown when the call is evaluated at run time. The type of the exception
is UnsupportedOperationException. Furthermore, since Collection<T> is only an interface, not a
concrete class, the actual implementation of the method is left to the classes that implement
the interface. This means that the semantics of the methods, as described above, are not
guaranteed to be valid for all collection objects; they are valid, however, for classes in the Java
Collection Framework.
There is also the question of efficiency. Even when an operation is defined for several types of
collections, it might not be equally efficient in all cases. Even a method as simple as size() can
vary greatly in efficiency. For some collections, computing the size() might involve counting
the items in the collection. The number of steps in this process is equal to the number of items.
Other collections might have instance variables to keep track of the size, so evaluating size()
just means returning the value of a variable. In this case, the computation takes only one step,
no matter how many items there are. When working with collections, it’s good to have some
idea of how efficient operations are and to choose a collection for which the operations that you
need can be implemented most efficiently. We’ll see specific examples of this in the next two
sections.

10.1.5 Iterators and for-each Loops

The interface Collection<T> defines a few basic generic algorithms, but suppose you want to
write your own generic algorithms. Suppose, for example, you want to do something as simple
as printing out every item in a collection. To do this in a generic way, you need some way of
going through an arbitrary collection, accessing each item in turn. We have seen how to do
this for specific data structures: For an array, you can use a for loop to iterate through all
the array indices. For a linked list, you can use a while loop in which you advance a pointer
along the list. For a binary tree, you can use a recursive subroutine to do an inorder traversal.
Collections can be represented in any of these forms and many others besides. With such a
variety of traversal mechanisms, how can we even hope to come up with a single generic method
that will work for collections that are stored in wildly different forms? This problem is solved
by iterators. An iterator is an object that can be used to traverse a collection. Different
types of collections have iterators that are implemented in different ways, but all iterators are
used in the same way. An algorithm that uses an iterator to traverse a collection is generic,
because the same technique can be applied to any type of collection. Iterators can seem rather
strange to someone who is encountering generic programming for the first time, but you should
understand that they solve a difficult problem in an elegant way.
The interface Collection<T> defines a method that can be used to obtain an iterator for any
collection. If coll is a collection, then coll.iterator() returns an iterator that can be used
to traverse the collection. You should think of the iterator as a kind of generalized pointer that
starts at the beginning of the collection and can move along the collection from one item to the
next. Iterators are defined by a parameterized interface named Iterator<T>. If coll implements
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 510

the interface Collection<T> for some specific type T, then coll.iterator() returns an iterator
of type Iterator<T>, with the same type T as its type parameter. The interface Iterator<T>
defines just three methods. If iter refers to an object that implements Iterator<T>, then we
have:
• iter.next() — returns the next item, and advances the iterator. The return value is of
type T. This method lets you look at one of the items in the collection. Note that there is
no way to look at an item without advancing the iterator past that item. If this method
is called when no items remain, it will throw a NoSuchElementException.
• iter.hasNext() — returns a boolean value telling you whether there are more items to
be processed. In general, you should test this before calling iter.next().
• iter.remove() — if you call this after calling iter.next(), it will remove the item
that you just saw from the collection. Note that this method has no parameter. It
removes the item that was most recently returned by iter.next(). This might produce
an UnsupportedOperationException, if the collection does not support removal of items.
Using iterators, we can write code for printing all the items in any collection. Suppose,
for example, that coll is of type Collection<String>. In that case, the value returned by
coll.iterator() is of type Iterator<String>, and we can say:
Iterator<String> iter; // Declare the iterator variable.
iter = coll.iterator(); // Get an iterator for the collection.
while ( iter.hasNext() ) {
String item = iter.next(); // Get the next item.
System.out.println(item);
}
The same general form will work for other types of processing. For example, the following
code will remove all null values from any collection of type Collection<Color> (as long as that
collection supports removal of values):
Iterator<Color> iter = coll.iterator():
while ( iter.hasNext() ) {
Color item = iter.next();
if (item == null)
iter.remove();
}
(Note, by the way, that when Collection<T>, Iterator<T>, or any other parameterized type is
used in actual code, they are always used with actual types such as String or Color in place of
the “formal type parameter” T. An iterator of type Iterator<String> is used to iterate through
a collection of Strings; an iterator of type Iterator<Color> is used to iterate through a collection
of Color ; and so on.)
An iterator is often used to apply the same operation to all the elements in a collection. In
many cases, it’s possible to avoid the use of iterators for this purpose by using a for-each loop.
The for-each loop was discussed in Subsection 7.1.1 for use with arrays and in Subsection 7.3.3
for use with ArrayLists. But in fact, a for-each loop can be used to iterate through any
collection. For a collection coll of type Collection<T>, a for-each loop takes the form:
for ( T x : coll ) { // "for each object x, of type T, in coll"
// process x
}
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 511

Here, x is the loop control variable. Each object in coll will be assigned to x in turn, and the
body of the loop will be executed for each object. Since objects in coll are of type T, x is
declared to be of type T. For example, if namelist is of type Collection<String>, we can print
out all the names in the collection with:
for ( String name : namelist ) {
System.out.println( name );
}
This for-each loop could, of course, be written as a while loop using an iterator, but the for-each
loop is much easier to follow.

10.1.6 Equality and Comparison

There are several methods in the Collection interface that test objects for equality. For example,
the methods coll.contains(object) and coll.remove(object) look for an item in the
collection that is equal to object. However, equality is not such a simple matter. The obvious
technique for testing equality—using the == operator—does not usually give a reasonable answer
when applied to objects. The == operator tests whether two objects are identical in the sense
that they share the same location in memory. Usually, however, we want to consider two objects
to be equal if they represent the same value, which is a very different thing. Two values of
type String should be considered equal if they contain the same sequence of characters. The
question of whether those characters are stored in the same location in memory is irrelevant.
Two values of type Date should be considered equal if they represent the same time.
We have seen that the Object class defines the boolean-valued method equals(Object) for
testing whether one object is equal to another. This method is used by many, but not by all,
collection classes for deciding whether two objects are to be considered the same. In the Object
class, obj1.equals(obj2) is defined to be the same as obj1 == obj2. However, for many
sub-classes of Object, this definition is not reasonable, and it should be overridden. The String
class, for example, overrides equals() so that for a String str, the value of str.equals(obj)
is true when obj is also a String and obj contains the same sequence of characters as str.
If you write your own class, you might want to define an equals() method in that class to
get the correct behavior when objects are tested for equality. For example, a Card class that
will work correctly when used in collections could be defined as:
public class Card { // Class to represent playing cards.
private int suit; // Number from 0 to 3 that codes for the suit --
// spades, diamonds, clubs or hearts.
private int value; // Number from 1 to 13 that represents the value.
public boolean equals(Object obj) {
try {
Card other = (Card)obj; // Type-cast obj to a Card.
if (suit == other.suit && value == other.value) {
// The other card has the same suit and value as
// this card, so they should be considered equal.
return true;
}
else {
return false;
}
}
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 512

catch (Exception e) {
// This will catch the NullPointerException that occurs if obj
// is null and the ClassCastException that occurs if obj is
// not of type Card. In these cases, obj is not equal to
// this Card, so return false.
return false;
}
}
.
. // other methods and constructors
.
}
Without the equals() method in this class, methods such as contains() and remove() from
the interface Collection<Card> will not work as expected.
A similar concern arises when items in a collection are sorted. Sorting refers to arranging
a sequence of items in ascending order, according to some criterion. The problem is that there
is no natural notion of ascending order for arbitrary objects. Before objects can be sorted,
some method must be defined for comparing them. Objects that are meant to be compared
should implement the interface java.lang.Comparable. In fact, Comparable is defined as a
parameterized interface, Comparable<T>, which represents the ability to be compared to an
object of type T. The interface Comparable<T> defines one method:
public int compareTo( T obj )
The value returned by obj1.compareTo(obj2) should be negative if and only if obj1 comes
before obj2, when the objects are arranged in ascending order. It should be positive if and only
if obj1 comes after obj2. A return value of zero means that the objects are considered to be
the same for the purposes of this comparison. This does not necessarily mean that the objects
are equal in the sense that obj1.equals(obj2) is true. But in general, classes that implement
Comparable should try to define .equals() and compareTo() so that obj1.equals(obj2)
and obj1.compareTo(obj2) == 0 always have the same value. (Some classes in the JCF use
compareTo() rather than equals() to test objects for equality.)
The String class implements the interface Comparable<String> and defines compareTo in a
reasonable way. In this case, the return value of compareTo is zero if and only if the two strings
that are being compared are equal. If you define your own class and want to be able to sort
objects belonging to that class, you should do the same. For example:
/**
* Represents a full name consisting of a first name and a last name.
*/
public class FullName implements Comparable<FullName> {
private String firstName, lastName; // Non-null first and last names.
public FullName(String first, String last) { // Constructor.
if (first == null || last == null)
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Names must be non-null.");
firstName = first;
lastName = last;
}
public boolean equals(Object obj) {
try {
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 513

FullName other = (FullName)obj; // Type-cast obj to type FullName

return firstName.equals(other.firstName)
&& lastName.equals(other.lastName);
}
catch (Exception e) {
return false; // if obj is null or is not of type FullName
}
}
public int compareTo( FullName other ) {
int compareLast = lastName.compareTo(other.lastName);
if ( compareLast < 0 ) {
// If lastName comes before the last name of
// the other object, then this FullName comes
// before the other FullName. Return a negative
// value to indicate this.
return -1;
}
else if ( compareLast > 0 ) {
// If lastName comes after the last name of
// the other object, then this FullName comes
// after the other FullName. Return a positive
// value to indicate this.
return 1;
}
else {
// Last names are the same, so base the comparison on
// the first names, using compareTo from class String.
return firstName.compareTo(other.firstName);
}
}
.
. // other methods
.
}
I find it a little odd that the class here is declared as “class FullName implements
Comparable<FullName>”, with “FullName” repeated as a type parameter in the name of the
interface. However, it does make sense. It means that we are going to compare objects that
belong to the class FullName to other objects of the same type. Even though this is the only
reasonable thing to do, that fact is not obvious to the Java compiler—and the type parameter
in Comparable<FullName> is there for the compiler.
(We have previously encountered FullName as a record class, in Subsection 7.4.1. Remember
that record classes can implement interfaces, so we could define a FullName record class to
implement Comparable<FullName>. In the record class, the equals() method would already be
defined appropriately.)
There is another way to allow for comparison of objects in Java, and that is to provide
a separate object that is capable of making the comparison. The object must implement the
interface Comparator<T>, where T is the type of the objects that are to be compared. The
interface Comparator<T> defines the method:
public int compare( T obj1, T obj2 )
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 514

This method compares two objects of type T and returns a value that is negative, or positive,
or zero, depending on whether obj1 comes before obj2, or comes after obj2, or is considered
to be the same as obj2 for the purposes of this comparison. Comparators are useful for
comparing objects that do not implement the Comparable interface and for defining several
different orderings on the same collection of objects. Since Comparator is a functional interface,
comparators are often defined by lambda expressions (see Section 4.5).
Note that it can often make sense to use a Comparator for which obj1.equals(obj2) does
not always have the same value as compare(obj1,obj2) == 0. For example, when sorting
addresses by zip code, you would use a Comparator that looks at the zip code field in the
addresses that it compares.
In the next two sections, we’ll see how Comparable and Comparator are used in the context
of collections and maps.

10.1.7 Generics and Wrapper Classes

As noted in Section 7.3 about ArrayLists, Java’s generic programming does not apply to the
primitive types. This is because generic data structures can only hold objects, and values
of primitive type are not objects. However, the “wrapper classes” that were introduced in
Subsection 7.3.2 make it possible to get around this restriction to a great extent.
Recall that each primitive type has an associated wrapper class: class Integer for type int,
class Boolean for type boolean, class Character for type char, and so on.
An object of type Integer contains a value of type int. The object serves as a “wrapper”
for the primitive type value, which allows it to be used in contexts where objects are required,
such as in generic data structures. For example, a list of Integers can be stored in a variable of
type ArrayList<Integer>, and interfaces such as Collection<Integer> and Set<Integer> are defined.
Furthermore, class Integer defines equals(), compareTo(), and toString() methods that do
what you would expect (that is, that compare and write out the corresponding primitive type
values in the usual way). Similar remarks apply for all the wrapper classes.
Recall also that Java does automatic conversions between a primitive type and the
corresponding wrapper type. (These conversions, which are called autoboxing and unboxing,
were also introduced in Subsection 7.3.3.) This means that once you have created a generic data
structure to hold objects belonging to one of the wrapper classes, you can use the data structure
pretty much as if it actually contained primitive type values. For example, if numbers is a
variable of type Collection<Integer>, it is legal to call numbers.add(17) or numbers.remove(42).
You can’t literally add the primitive type value 17 to numbers, but Java will automatically
convert the 17 to the corresponding wrapper object, Integer.valueOf(17), and the wrapper
object will be added to the collection. (The creation of the object does add some time and
memory overhead to the operation, and you should keep that in mind in situations where
efficiency is important. An array of int is more efficient than an ArrayList<Integer>.)

10.2 Lists and Sets

In the previous section, we looked at the general properties of collection classes in Java.
In this section, we look at some specific collection classes and how to use them. These classes
can be divided into two main categories: lists and sets. A list consists of a sequence of items
arranged in a linear order. A list has a definite order, but is not necessarily sorted. A set is a
collection that has no duplicate entries. The elements of a set might or might not be arranged
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 515

into some definite order. I will also briefly discuss a third category of collection known as a
“priority queue.”

10.2.1 ArrayList and LinkedList

There are two obvious ways to represent a list: as a dynamic array and as a linked list. We’ve
encountered these already in Section 7.3 and Section 9.2. Both of these options are available
in generic form as the collection classes java.util.ArrayList and java.util.LinkedList.
These classes are part of the Java Collection Framework. Each implements the interface List<T>,
and therefore the interface Collection<T>. An object of type ArrayList<T> represents an ordered
sequence of objects of type T, stored in an array that will grow in size whenever necessary as
new items are added. An object of type LinkedList<T> also represents an ordered sequence of
objects of type T, but the objects are stored in nodes that are linked together with pointers.
Both list classes support the basic list operations that are defined in the interface List<T>,
and an abstract data type is defined by its operations, not by its representation. So why two
classes? Why not a single List class with a single representation? The problem is that there is
no single representation of lists for which all list operations are efficient. For some operations,
linked lists are more efficient than arrays. For others, arrays are more efficient. In a particular
application of lists, it’s likely that only a few operations will be used frequently. You want
to choose the representation for which the frequently used operations will be as efficient as
possible.
Broadly speaking, the LinkedList class is more efficient in applications where items will often
be added or removed at the beginning of the list or in the middle of the list. In an array, these
operations require moving a large number of items up or down one position in the array, to
make a space for a new item or to fill in the hole left by the removal of an item. In terms of
asymptotic analysis (Section 8.5), adding an element at the beginning or in the middle of an
array has run time Θ(n), where n is the number of items in the array. In a linked list, nodes can
be added or removed at any position by changing a few pointer values, an operation that has
run time Θ(1). That is, the operation takes only some constant amount of time, independent
of how many items are in the list.
On the other hand, the ArrayList class is more efficient when random access to items is
required. Random access means accessing the k-th item in the list, for any integer k. Random
access is used when you get or change the value stored at a specified position in the list. This is
trivial for an array, with run time Θ(1). But for a linked list it means starting at the beginning
of the list and moving from node to node along the list for k steps, an operation that has run
time Θ(k).
Operations that can be done efficiently for both types of lists include sorting and adding an
item at the end of the list.
All lists implement the methods from interface Collection<T> that were discussed in
Subsection 10.1.4. These methods include size(), isEmpty(), add(T), remove(Object), and
clear(). The add(T) method adds the object at the end of the list. The remove(Object)
method involves first finding the object, which uses linear search and is not very efficient for
any list since it involves going through the items in the list from beginning to end until the
object is found. The interface List<T> adds some methods for accessing list items according to
their numerical positions in the list. Suppose that list is an object of type List<T>. Then we
have the methods:
• list.get(index) — returns the object of type T that is at position index in the list,
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 516

where index is an integer. Items are numbered 0, 1, 2, . . . , list.size()-1. The

parameter must be in this range, or an IndexOutOfBoundsException is thrown.
• list.set(index,obj) — stores the object obj at position number index in the list,
replacing the object that was there previously. The object obj must be of type T. This
does not change the number of elements in the list or move any of the other elements.
• list.add(index,obj) — inserts an object obj into the list at position number index,
where obj must be of type T. The number of items in the list increases by one, and items
that come after position index move down one position to make room for the new item.
The value of index must be in the range 0 to list.size(), inclusive. If index is equal
to list.size(), then obj is added at the end of the list.
• list.remove(index) — removes the object at position number index, and returns that
object as the return value of the method. Items after this position move up one space in
the list to fill the hole, and the size of the list decreases by one. The value of index must
be in the range 0 to list.size()-1.
• list.indexOf(obj) — returns an int that gives the position of obj in the list, if it occurs.
If it does not occur, the return value is -1. The object obj can be of any type, not just
of type T. If obj occurs more than once in the list, the index of the first occurrence is
returned.
These methods are defined both in class ArrayList<T> and in class LinkedList<T>, although
some of them—such as get and set—are only efficient for ArrayLists. The class LinkedList<T>
adds a few additional methods, which are not defined for an ArrayList. If linkedlist is an
object of type LinkedList<T>, then we have
• linkedlist.getFirst() — returns the object of type T that is the first item in the list.
The list is not modified. If the list is empty when the method is called, an exception of
type NoSuchElementException is thrown (the same is true for the next three methods as
well).
• linkedlist.getLast() — returns the object of type T that is the last item in the list.
The list is not modified.
• linkedlist.removeFirst() — removes the first item from the list, and returns that
object of type T as its return value. The functions linkedlist.remove() and
linkedlist.pop() are also defined, with the same meaning as removeFirst().
• linkedlist.removeLast() — removes the last item from the list, and returns that object
of type T as its return value.
• linkedlist.addFirst(obj) — adds the obj, which must be of type T, to the beginning
of the list. The function linkedlist.push(obj) has the same meaning.
• linkedlist.addLast(obj) — adds the object obj, which must be of type T, to the end
of the list. This is exactly the same as linkedlist.add(obj) but is defined to keep the
naming consistent.
There is some redundancy here, apparently to make it easy to use a LinkedList as if it were
a stack or a queue. (See Section 9.3.) For example, we can use a LinkedList as a stack by
using the methods named push() and pop(), or as a queue by using add() and remove() to
implement the enqueue and dequeue operations.
If list is an object of type List<T>, then the method list.iterator(), defined in the
interface Collection<T>, returns an Iterator that can be used to traverse the list from beginning
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 517

to end. However, for Lists, there is a special type of Iterator, called a ListIterator, which offers
additional capabilities. ListIterator<T> is an interface that extends the interface Iterator<T>.
The method list.listIterator() returns an object of type ListIterator<T>.
A ListIterator has the usual Iterator methods, hasNext(), next(), and remove(), but it
also has methods hasPrevious(), previous(), add(obj), and set(obj) that make it possible
to move backwards in the list, to add an item at the current position of the iterator, and to
replace one of the items in the list. To understand how these work, it’s best to think of an
iterator as pointing to a position between two list elements, or at the beginning or end of the
list. In this diagram, the items in a list are represented by squares, and arrows indicate the
possible positions of an iterator:

If iter is of type ListIterator<T>, then iter.next() moves the iterator one space to the
right along the list and returns the item that the iterator passes as it moves. The method
iter.previous() moves the iterator one space to the left along the list and returns the item
that it passes. The method iter.remove() removes an item from the list; the item that is
removed is the item that the iterator passed most recently in a call to either iter.next()
or iter.previous(). The method iter.set(obj) works similarly; it replaces the item that
would be removed by iter.remove(). There is also a method iter.add(obj) that adds the
specified object to the list at the current position of the iterator (where obj must be of type
T ). This can be between two existing items or at the beginning of the list or at the end of the
list.
(By the way, the lists that are used in class LinkedList<T> are doubly linked lists.
That is, each node in the list contains two pointers—one to the next node in the list and
one to the previous node. This makes it possible to efficiently implement both the next()
and previous() methods of a ListIterator. Also, to make the addLast() and getLast()
methods of a LinkedList efficient, the class LinkedList<T> includes a “tail pointer” that points
to the last node in the list.)
As an example of using a ListIterator, suppose that we want to maintain a list of items
that is always sorted into increasing order. When adding an item to the list, we can use a
ListIterator to find the position in the list where the item should be added. Once the position
has been found, we use the same list iterator to place the item in that position. The idea is to
start at the beginning of the list and to move the iterator forward past all the items that are
smaller than the item that is being inserted. At that point, the iterator’s add() method can
be used to insert the item. To be more definite, suppose that stringList is a variable of type
List<String>. Assume that the strings that are already in the list are stored in ascending order
and that newItem is a string that we would like to insert into the list. The following code will
place newItem in the list in its correct position, so that the modified list is still in ascending
order:
ListIterator<String> iter = stringList.listIterator();
// Move the iterator so that it points to the position where
// newItem should be inserted into the list. If newItem is
// bigger than all the items in the list, then the while loop
// will end when iter.hasNext() becomes false, that is, when
// the iterator has reached the end of the list.
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 518

while (iter.hasNext()) {
String item = iter.next();
if (newItem.compareTo(item) <= 0) {
// newItem should come BEFORE item in the list.
// Move the iterator back one space so that
// it points to the correct insertion point,
// and end the loop.
iter.previous();
break;
}
}
iter.add(newItem);
Here, stringList might be of type ArrayList<String> or of type LinkedList<String>. The
algorithm that is used to insert newItem into the list will be about equally efficient for both types
of lists, and it will even work for other classes that implement the interface List<String>. You
would probably find it easier to design an insertion algorithm that uses array-like indexing with
the methods get(index) and add(index,obj). However, that algorithm would be horribly
inefficient for LinkedLists because random access is so inefficient for linked lists. (By the way,
the insertion algorithm works when the list is empty, and it works when the new item has to
be inserted at the beginning or at the end of the list. It might be useful for you to think about
why this is true.)

10.2.2 Sorting
Sorting a list is a fairly common operation, and there should really be a sorting method in
the List interface. There is not, presumably because it only makes sense to sort lists of certain
types of objects. However, methods for sorting lists are available as static methods in the class
java.util.Collections. This class contains a variety of static utility methods for working
with collections. The methods are generic; that is, they will work for collections of objects of
various types. (You have already seen similar methods for arrays in the Arrays class.) Suppose
that list is of type List<T>. The command
Collections.sort(list);
can be used to sort the list into ascending order. The items in the list should implement the
interface Comparable<T> (see Subsection 10.1.6). The method Collections.sort() will work,
for example, for lists of String and for lists of any of the wrapper classes such as Integer and
Double. There is also a sorting method that takes a Comparator as its second argument:
Collections.sort(list,comparator);
In this method, the comparator will be used to compare the items in the list. As mentioned
in the previous section, a Comparator is an object that defines a compare() method that can
be used to compare two objects. We’ll see an example of using a Comparator in Section 10.4.
The sorting method that is used by Collections.sort() is the so-called “merge sort”
algorithm, which has both worst-case and average-case run times that are Θ(n*log(n)) for
a list of size n. Although the average run time for MergeSort is a little slower than that of
QuickSort, its worst-case performance is much better than QuickSort’s. (QuickSort was covered
in Subsection 9.1.3.) MergeSort also has a nice property called “stability” that we will encounter
at the end of Subsection 10.4.3.
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 519

The Collections class has at least two other useful methods for modifying lists.
Collections.shuffle(list) will rearrange the elements of the list into a random order.
Collections.reverse(list) will reverse the order of the elements, so that the last element is
moved to the beginning of the list, the next-to-last element to the second position, and so on.
Since an efficient sorting method is provided for Lists, there is no need to write one yourself.

10.2.3 TreeSet and HashSet

A set is a collection of objects in which no object occurs more than once. Sets implement all
the methods in the interface Collection<T>, but do so in a way that ensures that no element
occurs twice in the set. For example, if set is an object of type Set<T>, then set.add(obj)
will have no effect on the set if obj is already an element of the set. Java has two classes that
implement the interface Set<T>: java.util.TreeSet and java.util.HashSet.
In addition to being a Set, a TreeSet has the property that the elements of the set are
arranged into ascending sorted order. That is, an Iterator (or a for-each loop) for a TreeSet
will always visit the elements of the set in ascending order.
A TreeSet cannot hold arbitrary objects, since there must be a way to determine the sorted
order of the objects it contains. Ordinarily, this means that the objects in a set of type
TreeSet<T> should implement the interface Comparable<T> and that obj1.compareTo(obj2)
should be defined in a reasonable way for any two objects obj1 and obj2 in the set.
Alternatively, an object of type Comparator<T> can be provided as a parameter to the
constructor when the TreeSet is created. In that case, the compare() method of the Comparator
will be used to compare objects that are added to the set.
A TreeSet does not use the equals() method to test whether two objects are the same.
Instead, it uses the compareTo() or compare() method. This can be a problem. Recall from
Subsection 10.1.6 that the compare() method of a Comparator might consider two objects to be
the same for the purpose of the comparison even though the objects are not equal. (This is less
likely, but still possible for a properly defined compareTo() method.) For a TreeSet that uses
the Comparator, this means that only one of those objects can be in the set. For example, if the
TreeSet contains mailing addresses and if the compare() method for addresses just compares
their zip codes, then the set can contain only one address in each zip code. Clearly, this is
not right! But that only means that you have to be aware of the semantics of TreeSets, and
you need to make sure that the compare() or compareTo() is defined in a reasonable way for
objects that you put into a TreeSet. This will be true, by the way, for Strings, Integers, and
many other built-in types, since the compareTo() method for these types considers two objects
to be the same only if they are actually equal.
In the implementation of a TreeSet, the elements are stored in something similar to a binary
sort tree. (See Subsection 9.4.2.) However, the data structure that is used is balanced in the
sense that the left and right subtrees of any node in the tree are at about the same size. This
ensures that all the basic operations—inserting, deleting, and searching—are efficient, with
worst-case run time Θ(log(n)), where n is the number of items in the set.
The fact that a TreeSet sorts its elements and removes duplicates makes it very useful in
some applications. Exercise 7.6 asked you to write a program that would read a file and output
an alphabetical list of all the words that occurred in the file, with duplicates removed. The
words were to be stored in an ArrayList, so it was up to you to make sure that the list was
sorted and contained no duplicates. The same task can be programmed much more easily
using a TreeSet instead of a list. A TreeSet automatically eliminates duplicates, and an iterator
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 520

for the set will automatically visit the items in the set in sorted order. An algorithm for the
program, using a TreeSet, would be:
TreeSet<String> words = new TreeSet<String>();
while there is more data in the input file:
Let word = the next word from the file
Convert word to lower case
words.add(word) // Adds the word only if not already present.
for ( String w : words ) // for each String w in words
Output w // words are output in sorted order
If you would like to see a complete, working program, you can find it in the file WordListWith-
TreeSet.java.
As another example, suppose that coll is any Collection of Strings. (This would also
work for any other type for which compareTo() is properly defined.) We can use a TreeSet to
sort the items of coll and remove the duplicates simply by saying:
TreeSet<String> set = new TreeSet<String>();
set.addAll(coll);
The second statement adds all the elements of the collection to the set. Since it’s a Set,
duplicates are ignored. Since it’s a TreeSet, the elements of the set are sorted. If you would like
to have the data in some other type of data structure, it’s easy to copy the data from the set.
For example, to place the answer in an ArrayList, you could say:
TreeSet<String> set = new TreeSet<String>();
set.addAll(coll);
ArrayList<String> list = new ArrayList<String>();
list.addAll(set);
Now, in fact, every one of Java’s collection classes has a constructor that takes a Collection
as an argument. All the items in that Collection are added to the new collection when it is
created. So, if coll is of type Collection<String>, then “new TreeSet<String>(coll)” creates
a TreeSet that contains the same elements as coll, but with duplicates removed and in sorted
order. This means that we can abbreviate the four lines in the above example to the single
command:
ArrayList<String> list = new ArrayList<>( new TreeSet<>(coll) );
This makes a sorted list of the elements of coll with no duplicates. This is a nice example of
the power of generic programming. (Note that the type parameter, String, is optional in the
two constructors in this example, since it can be deduced by the compiler.)
∗ ∗ ∗
A HashSet stores its elements in a hash table, a type of data structure that I will discuss
in the next section. The operations of finding, adding, and removing elements are implemented
very efficiently in hash tables, even more so than for TreeSets. The elements of a HashSet are
not stored in any particular order, and so do not need to implement the Comparable interface.
(They do, however, need to define a proper “hash code,” as we’ll see in the next section.)
The equals() method is used to determine whether two objects in a HashSet are to be
considered the same. An Iterator for a HashSet will visit its elements in what seems to be a
completely arbitrary order, and it’s even possible for the order to change when a new element
is added. Use a HashSet instead of a TreeSet when the elements it contains are not comparable,
or when the order is not important, or when the small advantage in efficiency is important.
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 521

∗ ∗ ∗
A note about the mathematics of sets: In mathematical set theory, the items in a set are
called members or elements of that set. Important operations include adding an element
to a set, removing an element from a set, and testing whether a given entity is an element of
a set. Operations that can be performed on two sets include union, intersection, and set
difference. All these operations are defined in Java for objects of type Set, but with different
names. Suppose that A and B are Sets. Then:
• A.add(x) adds the element x to the set A.
• A.remove(x) removes the element x from the set A.
• A.contains(x) tests whether x is an element of the set A.
• A.addAll(B) computes the union of A and B.
• A.retainAll(B) computes the intersection of A and B.
• A.removeAll(B) computes the set difference, A - B.
There are of course, differences between mathematical sets and sets in Java. Most important,
perhaps, sets in Java must be finite, while in mathematics, most of the fun in set theory comes
from working with infinity. In mathematics, a set can contain arbitrary elements, while in Java,
a set of type Set<T> can only contain elements of type T. The operation A.addAll(B) acts by
modifying the value of A, while in mathematics the operation A union B computes a new set,
without changing the value of A or B. See Exercise 10.2 for an example of mathematical set
operations in Java.

10.2.4 Priority Queues

A priority queue is an abstract data type that represents a collection of items, where each
item has an assigned “priority” that allows any two items to be compared. Operations on a
priority queue include add, which adds an item to the collection, and remove, which removes
and returns an item from the collection that has the minimum priority among items currently
in the collection. (Maximum priority would also be possible, but in Java’s version, the remove
operation removes a minimum priority item.)
A simple implementation of priority queue could be achieved by using a linked list to store
the items in the queue in order of increasing priority. In that case, remove would simply remove
and return the first item in the list. However, add would have to insert the new item into its
correct position in the list, an operation with average run time Θ(n), where n is the number of
items in the list. In fact, priority queues can be implemented so that both add and remove have
run time Θ(log(n)), which is much more efficient. (The efficient implementation uses something
called a “heap,” which is not to be confused with the heap where objects are created. I will
not discuss the implementation here.)
The parameterized class PriorityQueue<T> implements a priority queue of objects of type T.
This class implements the interface Collection<T>. So, if pq is a PriorityQueue, then it has all
the methods defined in that interface. But the essential priority queue operations are
• pq.add(obj) — adds obj to the priority queue, where obj must be an object of type T
• pq.remove() — removes and returns an item of minimal priority. The return value is an
object of type T. Throws an exception if the queue is empty.
• pq.isEmpty() — tests whether the priority queue is empty.
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 522

You’ve probably noticed that I haven’t yet mentioned how the priority of items in the
priority queue are determined. The situation is much like sorting: We need to be able to
compare any two items in the queue. As with sorting, there are two solutions. If the items
implement the Comparable interface, then they can be compared using the compareTo() method
from that interface. Alternatively, a Comparator object can be provided as a parameter to the
PriorityQueue constructor. In that case, the Comparator’s compare() method will be used to
compare items.
Classes such as String, Integer, and Date that implement Comparable can be used in a priority
queue. For example, a PriorityQueue<String> can be used to sort strings into lexicographic order:
Just add all the strings to the priority queue, then remove them one-by-one. Since items are
removed from the queue in order of priority, they will be removed in lexicographic order. Earlier,
I showed how to use a TreeSet to sort and remove duplicates from a collection. A PriorityQueue
can be used in a similar way to sort a collection without removing duplicates. For example, if
coll is of type Collection<String>, then the following code segment will print all the items from
coll in order, including duplicates:
PriorityQueue<String> pq = new PriorityQueue<>();
pq.addAll( coll );
while ( ! pq.isEmpty() ) {
System.out.println( pq.remove() );
}
Note, by the way, that we can’t use an iterator or a for-each loop to print the items in this
example, since iterators and for-each loops do not traverse a priority queue in ascending order.
The sample program WordListWithPriorityQueue.java makes a sorted list of words from
a file without removing duplicates, using a priority queue to hold the words. It is a minor
modification of WordListWithTreeSet.java.
Although priority queues can be used for sorting, they have other natural applications. For
example, consider the problem of scheduling “jobs” to be executed on a computer, where each
job is assigned a priority and jobs with lower priority should always be executed before jobs
with higher priority. Jobs can be placed into a priority queue as they are created. When the
computer removes jobs from the queue for execution, they will be removed in order of increasing
priority.

10.3 Maps
An array of N elements can be thought of as a way of associating some item with each of
the integers 0, 1, . . . , N-1. If i is one of these integers, it’s possible to get the item associated
with i, and it’s possible to put a new item in the i-th position. These “get” and “put”
operations define what it means to be an array.
A map is a kind of generalized array. Like an array, a map is defined by “get” and “put”
operations. But in a map, these operations are defined not for integers 0, 1, . . . , N-1, but for
arbitrary objects of some specified type T. Associated to these objects of type T are objects of
some possibly different type S.
In fact, some programming languages use the term associative array instead of “map”
and use the same notation for associative arrays as for regular arrays. In those languages,
for example, you might see the notation A["fred"] used to indicate the item associated to the
string “fred” in an associative array A. Java does not use array notation for maps, unfortunately,
but the idea is the same: A map is like an array, but the indices for a map are objects, not
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 523

integers. In a map, an object that serves as an “index” is called a key . The object that is
associated with a key is called a value. Note that a key can have at most one associated value,
but the same value can be associated to several different keys. A map can be considered to be
a set of “associations,” where each association is a key/value pair.

10.3.1 The Map Interface

In Java, maps are defined by the interface java.util.Map, which includes put and get methods
as well as other general methods for working with maps. The map interface, Map<K,V>, is
parameterized by two types. The first type parameter, K, specifies the type of objects that
are possible keys in the map; the second type parameter, V, specifies the type of objects that
are possible values in the map. For example, a map of type Map<Date,Color> would associate
values of type Color to keys of type Date. For a map of type Map<String,String>, both the keys
and the values are of type String.
Suppose that map is a variable of type Map<K,V> for some specific types K and V. Then the
following are some of the methods that are defined for map:
• map.get(key) — returns the object of type V that is associated by the map to the key.
If the map does not associate any value with key, then the return value is null. Note that
it’s also possible for the return value to be null when the map explicitly associates the
value null with the key. Referring to “map.get(key)” is similar to referring to “A[key]”
for an array A. (But note that there is nothing like an IndexOutOfBoundsException for
maps.)
• map.put(key,value) — Associates the specified value with the specified key, where key
must be of type K and value must be of type V. If the map already associated some
other value with the key, then the new value replaces the old one. This is similar to the
command “A[key] = value” for an array.
• map.putAll(map2) — if map2 is another map of type Map<K,V>, this copies all the
associations from map2 into map.
• map.remove(key) — if map associates a value to the specified key, that association is
removed from the map.
• map.containsKey(key) — returns a boolean value that is true if the map associates some
value to the specified key.
• map.containsValue(value) — returns a boolean value that is true if the map associates
the specified value to some key.
• map.size() — returns an int that gives the number of key/value associations in the map.
• map.isEmpty() — returns a boolean value that is true if the map is empty, that is if it
contains no associations.
• map.clear() — removes all associations from the map, leaving it empty.
The put and get methods are certainly the most commonly used of the methods in the Map
interface. In many applications, these are the only methods that are needed, and in such cases
a map is really no more difficult to use than a standard array.
Java includes two classes that implement the interface Map<K,V>: TreeMap<K,V> and
HashMap<K,V>. In a TreeMap, the key/value associations are stored in a sorted tree, in which
they are sorted according to their keys. For this to work, it must be possible to compare the keys
to one another. This means either that the keys must implement the interface Comparable<K>,
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 524

or that a Comparator must be provided for comparing keys. (The Comparator can be provided
as a parameter to the TreeMap constructor.) Note that in a TreeMap, as in a TreeSet, the
compareTo() (or compare()) method is used to decide whether two keys are to be considered
the same. This can have undesirable consequences if the comparison method does not agree
with the usual notion of equality, and you should keep this in mind when using TreeMaps.
A HashMap does not store associations in any particular order, so the keys that can be used
in a HashMap do not have to be comparable. However, the key class should have reasonable
definitions for the equals() method and for a hashCode() method that is discussed later in
this section; most of Java’s standard classes define these methods correctly. Most operations are
a little faster on HashMaps than they are on TreeMaps. In general, you should use a HashMap
unless you have some particular need for the ordering property of a TreeMap. In particular, if
you are only using the put and get operations, you can safely use a HashMap.
Let’s consider an example where maps would be useful. In Subsection 7.5.2, I presented
a simple PhoneDirectory class that associated phone numbers with names. That class defined
operations addEntry(name,number) and getNumber(name), where both name and number are
given as Strings. In fact, the phone directory is acting just like a map, with the addEntry
method playing the role of the put operation and getNumber playing the role of get. In a real
programming application, there would be no need to define a new class; we could simply use a
map of type Map<String,String>. A directory could be defined as
Map<String,String> directory = new TreeMap<>();
(using TreeMap so that the entries are kept in sorted order by name). Then
directory.put(name,number) would record a phone number in the directory and
directory.get(name) would retrieve the phone number associated with a given name.

10.3.2 Views, SubSets, and SubMaps

A Map is not a Collection, and maps do not implement all the operations defined on collections.
In particular, there are no iterators for maps. Sometimes, though, it’s useful to be able to
iterate through all the associations in a map. Java makes this possible in a roundabout but
clever way. If map is a variable of type Map<K,V>, then the method
map.keySet()
returns the set of all objects that occur as keys for associations in the map. The value returned
by this method is an object that implements the interface Set<K>. The elements of this set
are the map’s keys. The obvious way to implement the keySet() method would be to create
a new set object, add all the keys from the map, and return that set. But that’s not how it’s
done. The value returned by map.keySet() is not an independent object. It is what is called a
view of the actual objects that are stored in the map. This “view” of the map implements the
Set<K> interface, but it does it in such a way that the methods defined in the interface refer
directly to keys in the map. For example, if you remove a key from the view, that key—along
with its associated value—is actually removed from the map. It’s not legal to add an object
to the view, since it doesn’t make sense to add a key to a map without specifying the value
that should be associated to the key. Since map.keySet() does not create a new set, it’s very
efficient, even for very large maps.
One of the things that you can do with a Set is get an Iterator for it and use the iterator to
visit each of the elements of the set in turn. We can use an iterator for the key set of a map to
traverse the map. For example, if map is of type Map<String,Double>, we could write:
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 525

Set<String> keys = map.keySet(); // The set of keys in the map.

Iterator<String> keyIter = keys.iterator();
System.out.println("The map contains the following associations:");
while (keyIter.hasNext()) {
String key = keyIter.next(); // Get the next key.
Double value = map.get(key); // Get the value for that key.
System.out.println( " (" + key + "," + value + ")" );
}
Or we could do the same thing more easily, avoiding the explicit use of an iterator, with a
for-each loop:
System.out.println("The map contains the following associations:");
for ( String key : map.keySet() ) { // "for each key in the map’s key set"
Double value = map.get(key);
System.out.println( " (" + key + "," + value + ")" );
}
If the map is a TreeMap, then the key set of the map is a sorted set, and the iterator will visit
the keys in ascending order. For a HashMap, the keys are visited in an arbitrary, unpredictable
order.
The Map interface defines two other views. If map is a variable of type Map<K,V>, then the
method:
map.values()
returns an object of type Collection<V> that contains all the values from the associations that
are stored in the map. The return value is a Collection rather than a Set because it can contain
duplicate elements (since a map can associate the same value to any number of keys). The
method:
map.entrySet()
returns a set that contains all the associations from the map. The elements in the set are
objects of type Map.Entry<K,V>. Map.Entry<K,V> is defined as a static nested interface inside
the interface Map<K,V>, so its full name contains a period. However, the name can be used
in the same way as any other type name. (The return type of the method map.entrySet()
is written as Set<Map.Entry<K,V>>. The type parameter in this case is itself a parameterized
type. Although this might look confusing, it’s just Java’s way of saying that the elements of the
set are of type Map.Entry<K,V>.) The information in the set returned by map.entrySet() is
actually no different from the information in the map itself, but the set provides a different view
of this information, with different operations. Each Map.Entry object contains one key/value
pair, and defines methods getKey() and getValue() for retrieving the key and the value. There
is also a method, setValue(value), for setting the value; calling this method for a Map.Entry
object will modify the map itself, just as if the map’s put method were called. As an example,
we can use the entry set of a map to print all the key/value pairs in the map. This is more
efficient than using the key set to print the same information, as I did in the above example,
since we don’t have to use the get() method to look up the value associated with each key.
Suppose again that map is of type Map<String,Double>. Then we can write:
Set<Map.Entry<String,Double>> entries = map.entrySet();
Iterator<Map.Entry<String,Double>> entryIter = entries.iterator();
System.out.println("The map contains the following associations:");
while (entryIter.hasNext()) {
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 526

Map.Entry<String,Double> entry = entryIter.next();

String key = entry.getKey(); // Get the key from the entry.
Double value = entry.getValue(); // Get the value.
System.out.println( " (" + key + "," + value + ")" );
}
or, using a for-each loop to avoid some of the ugly type names:
System.out.println("The map contains the following associations:");
for ( Map.Entry<String,Double> entry : map.entrySet() ) {
System.out.println( " (" + entry.getKey() + "," + entry.getValue() + ")" );
}
This is certainly a place where it would be convenient to use var to declare the variables
(See Subsection 4.8.2). With var, the example using an iterator becomes:
var entries = map.entrySet();
var entryIter = entries.iterator();
System.out.println("The map contains the following associations:");
while (entryIter.hasNext()) { . . .

∗ ∗ ∗
Maps are not the only place in Java’s generic programming framework where views are
used. For example, the interface List<T> defines a sublist as a view of a part of a list. If list
implements the interface List<T>, then the method
list.subList( fromIndex, toIndex )
where fromIndex and toIndex are integers, returns a view of the part of the list consisting
of the list elements in positions between fromIndex and toIndex (including fromIndex but
excluding toIndex). This view lets you operate on the sublist using any of the operations
defined for lists, but the sublist is not an independent list. Changes made to the sublist are
actually made to the original list.
Similarly, it is possible to obtain views that represent certain subsets of a sorted set. If
set is of type TreeSet<T>, then set.subSet(fromElement,toElement) returns a Set<T> that
contains all the elements of set that are between fromElement and toElement (including
fromElement and excluding toElement). The parameters fromElement and toElement must
be objects of type T. For example, if words is a set of type TreeSet<String> in which all
the elements are strings of lower case letters, then words.subSet("m","n") contains all the
elements of words that begin with the letter ’m’. This subset is a view of part of the original
set. That is, creating the subset does not involve copying elements. And changes made to
the subset, such as adding or removing elements, are actually made to the original set. The
view set.headSet(toElement) consists of all elements from the set which are strictly less than
toElement, and set.tailSet(fromElement) is a view that contains all elements from the set
that are greater than or equal to fromElement.
The class TreeMap<K,V> defines three submap views. A submap is similar to a subset.
A submap is a Map that contains a subset of the keys from the original Map, along with
their associated values. If map is a variable of type TreeMap<K,V>, and if fromKey and toKey
are of type K, then map.subMap(fromKey,toKey) returns a view that contains all key/value
pairs from map whose keys are between fromKey and toKey (including fromKey and excluding
toKey). There are also views map.headMap(toKey) and map.tailMap(fromKey) which are
defined analogously to headSet and tailSet. Suppose, for example, that phoneBook is a map
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 527

of type TreeMap<String,String> in which the keys are names and the values are phone numbers.
We can print out all the entries from phoneBook where the name begins with “M” as follows:
Map<String,String> ems = phoneBook.subMap("M","N");
// This submap contains entries for which the key is greater
// than or equal to "M" and strictly less than "N".
if (ems.isEmpty()) {
System.out.println("No entries beginning with M.");
}
else {
System.out.println("Entries beginning with M:");
for ( var entry : ems.entrySet() ) {
// Note: type for entry is Map.Entry<String,String>
// but it’s easier to user var to declare the variable!
System.out.println( " " + entry.getKey() + ": " + entry.getValue() );
}
}
Subsets and submaps are probably best thought of as generalized search operations that
make it possible to find all the items in a range of values, rather than just to find a single
value. For example, suppose that a database of scheduled events is stored in a map of type
TreeMap<DateTime,Event> in which the a key gives the date and time of an event, and suppose
you want a listing of all events that are scheduled for some time on July 4, 2022. Just make
a submap containing all keys in the range from 12:00 AM, July 4, 2022 to 12:00 AM, July 5,
2022, and output all the entries from that submap. This type of search, which is known as a
subrange query , is quite common.

10.3.3 Hash Tables and Hash Codes

HashSets and HashMaps are implemented using a data structure known as a hash table.
You don’t need to understand hash tables to use HashSets or HashMaps, but any computer
programmer should be familiar with hash tables and how they work.
Hash tables are an elegant solution to the search problem. A hash table, like a HashMap,
stores key/value pairs. Given a key, you have to search the table for the corresponding key/value
pair. When a hash table is used to implement a set, there are no values, and the only question
is whether or not the key occurs in the set. You still have to search for the key to check whether
it is there or not.
In most search algorithms, in order to find the item you are interested in, you have to look
through a bunch of other items that don’t interest you. To find something in an unsorted list,
you have to go through the items one-by-one until you come to the one you are looking for.
In a binary sort tree, you have to start at the root and move down the tree until you find the
item you want. When you search for a key/value pair in a hash table, you can go directly to
the location that contains the item you want. You don’t have to look through any other items.
(This is not quite true, but if the hash table is working properly, it’s close.) The location of the
key/value pair is computed from the key: You just look at the key, and then you go directly to
the location where it is stored.
How can this work? If the keys were integers in the range 0 to 99, we could store the
key/value pairs in an array, A, of 100 elements. The key/value pair with key K would be stored
in A[K]. The key takes us directly to the location of the key/value pair. The problem is that
there are usually far too many different possible keys for us to be able to use an array with
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 528

one location for each possible key. For example, if the key can be any value of type int, then
we would need an array with over four billion locations—quite a waste of space if we are only
going to store, say, a few thousand items! If the key can be a string of any length, then the
number of possible keys is infinite, and using an array with one location for each possible key
is simply impossible.
Nevertheless, hash tables store their data in an array, and the array index where a key is
stored is based on the key. The index is not equal to the key, but it is computed from the key.
The array index for a key is called the hash code for that key. A function that computes a
hash code, given a key, is called a hash function. To find a key in a hash table, you just have
to compute the hash code of the key and go directly to the array location given by that hash
code. If the hash code is 17, look in array location number 17.
Now, since there are fewer array locations than there are possible keys, it’s possible that
we might try to store two or more keys in the same array location. This is called a collision.
A collision is not an error. We can’t reject a key just because another key happened to have
the same hash code. A hash table must be able to handle collisions in some reasonable way. In
the type of hash table that is used in Java, each array location actually holds a linked list of
key/value pairs (possibly an empty list). When two items have the same hash code, they are
in the same linked list. The structure of the hash table looks something like this:

0 item item
1
2 item
3
4
5 item item item
6
7
8 item
9 item
10
11
.. item item
.
..
.

In this diagram, there are two items with hash code 0, no items with hash code 1, one item
with hash code 2, and so on. In a properly designed hash table, most of the linked lists are of
length zero or one, and the average length of the lists is less than one. Although the hash code
of a key doesn’t necessarily take you directly to that key, there are probably no more than one
or two other items that you have to look through before finding the key you want. For this to
work properly, the number of items in the hash table should be somewhat less than the number
of locations in the array. In Java’s implementation, whenever the number of items exceeds 75%
of the array size, the array is replaced by a larger one and all the items in the old array are
inserted into the new one. (This is why adding one new item will sometimes cause the ordering
of all the items in the hash table to change completely.)
There is still the question of where hash codes come from. Every object in Java has a
hash code. The Object class defines the method hashCode(), which returns a value of type
int. When an object, obj, is stored in a hash table that has N locations, a hash code in the
range 0 to N-1 is needed. This hash code is computed as Math.abs(obj.hashCode()) % N,
the remainder when the absolute value of obj.hashCode() is divided by N. (The Math.abs
is necessary because obj.hashCode() can be a negative integer, and we need a non-negative
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 529

number to use as an array index.)

For hashing to work properly, two objects that are equal according to the equals() method
must have the same hash code. In the Object class, this condition is satisfied because both
equals() and hashCode() are based on the address of the memory location where the object
is stored. However, as noted in Subsection 10.1.6, many classes redefine the equals() method.
If a class redefines the equals() method, and if objects of that class will be used as keys in
hash tables, then the class must also redefine the hashCode() method. For example, in the
String class, the equals() method is redefined so that two objects of type String are considered
to be equal if they contain the same sequence of characters. The hashCode() method is also
redefined in the String class, so that the hash code of a string is computed from the characters
in that string rather than from its location in memory. For Java’s standard classes, you can
expect equals() and hashCode() to be correctly defined. However, you might need to define
these methods in classes that you write yourself.
Writing a good hash function is something of an art. In order to work well, the hash function
must spread the possible keys fairly evenly over the hash table. Otherwise, the items in a table
can be concentrated in a subset of the available locations, and the linked lists at those locations
can grow to a large size; that would destroy the efficiency that is the major reason for hash
tables to exist in the first place. However, I won’t cover techniques for creating good hash
functions in this book.

10.4 Programming with the Java Collection Framework

In this section, we’ll look at some programming examples that use classes from the Java
Collection Framework. The Collection Framework is easy to use, especially compared to the
difficulty of programming new data structures from scratch.

10.4.1 Symbol Tables

We begin with a straightforward but important application of maps. When a compiler reads
the source code of a program, it encounters definitions of variables, subroutines, and classes.
The names of these things can be used later in the program. The compiler has to remember the
definition of each name, so that it can recognize the name and apply the definition when the
name is encountered later in the program. This is a natural application for a Map. The name
can be used as a key in the map. The value associated to the key is the definition of the name,
encoded somehow as an object. A map that is used in this way is called a symbol table.
In a compiler, the values in a symbol table can be quite complicated, since the compiler has
to deal with names for various sorts of things, and it needs a different type of information for
each different type of name. We will keep things simple by looking at a symbol table in another
context. Suppose that we want a program that can evaluate expressions entered by the user,
and suppose that the expressions can contain variables, in addition to operators, numbers, and
parentheses. For this to make sense, we need some way of assigning values to variables. When
a variable is used in an expression, we need to retrieve the variable’s value. A symbol table can
be used to store the data that we need. The keys for the symbol table are variable names. The
value associated with a key is the value of that variable, which is of type double. The symbol
table will be an object of type Map<String,Double>. (Remember that primitive types such as
double can’t be used as type parameters; a wrapper class such as Double must be used instead.
See Subsection 10.1.7.)
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 530

To demonstrate the idea, we’ll use a rather simple-minded program in which the user types
commands such as:
let x = 3 + 12
print 2 + 2
print 10*x +17
let rate = 0.06
print 1000*(1+rate)
The program is an interpreter for a very simple language. The only two commands that
the program understands are “print” and “let”. When a “print” command is executed, the
computer evaluates the expression and displays the value. If the expression contains a variable,
the computer has to look up the value of that variable in the symbol table. A “let” command
is used to give a value to a variable. The computer has to store the value of the variable in
the symbol table. (Note: The “variables” I am talking about here are not variables in the Java
program. The Java program is executing a sort of program typed in by the user. I am talking
about variables in the user’s program. The user gets to make up variable names, so there is no
way for the Java program to know in advance what the variables will be.)
In Subsection 9.5.2, we saw how to write a program, SimpleParser2.java, that can evaluate
expressions that do not contain variables. Here, I will discuss another example program,
SimpleInterpreter.java, that is based on the older program. I will only talk about the parts
that are relevant to the symbol table.
The program uses a HashMap as the symbol table. A TreeMap could also be used, but since
the program does not need to access the variables in alphabetical order, we don’t need to have
the keys stored in sorted order. The symbol table in the program is represented by a variable
named symbolTable of type HashMap<String,Double>. At the beginning of the program, the
symbol table object is created with the command:
symbolTable = new HashMap<>();
This creates a map that initially contains no key/value associations. To execute a “let”
command, the program uses the symbol table’s put() method to associate a value with the
variable name. Suppose that the name of the variable is given by a String, varName, and the
value of the variable is stored in a variable, val, of type double. The following command would
then set the value associated with the variable in the symbol table:
symbolTable.put( varName, val );
In the program SimpleInterpreter.java, you’ll find this in the method named doLetCommand().
The actual value that is stored in the symbol table is an object of type Double. We can use the
double value val in the call to put because Java does an automatic conversion of type double
to Double when necessary.
Just for fun, I decided to pre-define two variables named “pi” and “e” whose values are
the usual mathematical constants π and e. In Java, the values of these constants are given by
Math.PI and Math.E. To make these variables available to the user of the program, they are
added to the symbol table with the commands:
symbolTable.put( "pi", Math.PI );
symbolTable.put( "e", Math.E );
When the program encounters a variable while evaluating an expression, the symbol table’s
get() method is used to retrieve its value. The function symbolTable.get(varName) returns
a value of type Double. It is possible that the return value is null; this will happen if no value
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 531

has ever been assigned to varName in the symbol table. It’s important to check this possibility.
It indicates that the user is trying to use a variable that the user has not defined. The program
considers this to be an error, so the processing looks something like this:
Double val = symbolTable.get(varName);
if (val == null) {
... // Throw an exception: Undefined variable.
}
// The value associated to varName is val.doubleValue()
You will find this code, more or less, in a method named primaryValue() in SimpleInter-
preter.java.
As you can see from this example, Maps are very useful and are really quite easy to use.

10.4.2 Sets Inside a Map

The objects in a collection or map can be of any type. They can even be collections. Here’s an
example where it’s natural to store sets as the value objects in a map.
Consider the problem of making an index for a book. An index consists of a list of terms
that appear in the book. Next to each term is a list of the pages on which that term appears.
To represent an index in a program, we need a data structure that can hold a list of terms,
along with a list of pages for each term. Adding new data should be easy and efficient. When
it’s time to print the index, it should be easy to access the terms in alphabetical order. There
are many ways this could be done, but I’d like to use Java’s generic data structures and let
them do as much of the work as possible.
We can think of an index as a Map that associates a list of page references to each term.
The terms are keys, and the value associated with a given key is the list of page references for
that term. A Map can be either a TreeMap or a HashMap, but only a TreeMap will make it
easy to access the terms in sorted order. The value associated with a term is a list of page
references. How can we represent such a value? If you think about it, you see that it’s not
really a list in the sense of Java’s generic classes. If you look in any index, you’ll see that a
list of page references has no duplicates, so it’s really a set rather than a list. Furthermore,
the page references for a given term are always printed in increasing order, so we want a sorted
set. This means that we should use a TreeSet to represent each list of page references. The
values that we really want to put in this set are of type int, but once again we have to deal
with the fact that generic data structures can only hold objects, so we must use the wrapper
class, Integer, for the objects in the set.
To summarize, an index will be represented by a TreeMap. The keys for the map will
be terms, which are of type String. The values in the map will be TreeSets that contain
Integers representing page numbers. The parameterized type that we should use for the sets is
TreeSet<Integer>. For the TreeMap that represents the index as a whole, the key type is String
and the value type is TreeSet<Integer>. This means that the index has type
TreeMap< String, TreeSet<Integer> >
This is just the usual TreeMap<K,V> with K=String and V=TreeSet<Integer>. A type name
as complicated as this one can look intimidating, but if you think about the data structure that
we want to represent, it makes sense.
To make an index, we need to start with an empty TreeMap. We then work through the
book, and we insert into the map every reference that we want to be in the index. We then
need to print out the data from the map. Let’s leave aside the question of how we find the
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 532

references to put in the index, and just look at how the TreeMap is used. It can be created with
the commands:
TreeMap<String,TreeSet<Integer>> index; // Declare the variable.
index = new TreeMap<>(); // Create the map object.
(Note that even for this complex type, the type parameters can be omitted from the
constructor.)
Now, suppose that we find a reference to some term (of type String ) on some pageNum (of
type int). We need to insert this information into the index. To do this, we should look up the
term in the index, using index.get(term). The return value is either null or is the set of page
references that we have previously found for the term. If the return value is null, then this is
the first page reference for the term, so we should add the term to the index, with a new set
that contains the page reference we’ve just found. If the return value is non-null, we already
have a set of page references, and we should just add the new page reference to the set. Here
is a subroutine that does this:
/**
* Add a page reference to the index.
*/
void addReference(String term, int pageNum) {
TreeSet<Integer> references; // The set of page references that we
// have so far for the term.
references = index.get(term);
if (references == null){
// This is the first reference that we have
// found for the term. Make a new set containing
// the page number and add it to the index, with
// the term as the key.
TreeSet<Integer> firstRef = new TreeSet<>();
firstRef.add( pageNum ); // pageNum is "autoboxed" to give an Integer!
index.put(term,firstRef);
}
else {
// references is the set of page references
// that we have found previously for the term.
// Add the new page number to that set. This
// set is already associated to term in the index.
references.add( pageNum );
}
}
The only other thing we need to do with the index is print it out. We want to iterate
through the index and print out each term, together with the set of page references for that
term. We could use an Iterator to iterate through the index, but it’s much easier to do it with
a for-each loop. The loop will iterate through the entry set of the map (see Subsection 10.3.2).
Each “entry” is a key/value pair from the map; the key is a term and the value is the associated
set of page references. Inside the for-each loop, we will have to print out a set of Integers, which
can also be done with a for-each loop. So, here we have an example of nested for-each loops.
(You might try to do the same thing entirely with iterators; doing so should give you some
appreciation for the for-each loop!) Here is a subroutine that will print the index:
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 533

/**
* Print each entry in the index.
*/
void printIndex() {
for ( Map.Entry<String,TreeSet<Integer>> entry : index.entrySet() ) {
String term = entry.getKey();
TreeSet<Integer> pageSet = entry.getValue();
System.out.print( term + ": " );
for ( int page : pageSet ) {
System.out.print( page + " " );
}
System.out.println();
}
}
The hardest thing here is the name of the type Map.Entry<String,TreeSet<Integer>>!
Remember that the entries in a map of type Map<K,V> have type Map.Entry<K,V>, so the type
parameters in Map.Entry<String,TreeSet<Integer>> are simply copied from the declaration
of index. Another thing to note is that I used a loop control variable, page, of type int to
iterate through the elements of pageSet, which is of type TreeSet<Integer>. You might have
expected page to be of type Integer, not int, and in fact Integer would have worked just as well
here. However, int does work, because of automatic type conversion: It’s legal to assign a value
of type Integer to a variable of type int. (To be honest, I was sort of surprised that this worked
when I first tried it!)
This is not a lot of code, considering the complexity of the operations. I have not written
a complete indexing program, but Exercise 10.6 presents a problem that is almost identical to
the indexing problem.
(By the way, the printIndex() method could have used var to declare all of its local
variables. This would have avoided the complex type names, but you would still need to be
aware of the types, since you have to know what methods, such as entry.getKey(), can be
used with the variables.)
∗ ∗ ∗
By the way, in this example, I would prefer to print each list of page references with the
integers separated by commas. In the printIndex() method given above, they are separated
by spaces. There is an extra space after the last page reference in the list, but it does no harm
since it’s invisible in the printout. An extra comma at the end of the list would be annoying.
The lists should be in a form such as “17,42,105” and not “17,42,105,”. The problem is, how
to leave that last comma out. Unfortunately, this is not so easy to do with a for-each loop. It
might be fun to look at a few ways to solve this problem. One alternative is to use an iterator:
Iterator<Integer> iter = pageSet.iterator();
int firstPage = iter.next(); // In this program, we know the set has
// at least one element.
System.out.print(firstPage);
while ( iter.hasNext() ) {
int nextPage = iter.next();
System.out.print("," + nextPage);
}
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 534

Another possibility is to use the fact that the TreeSet class defines a method first() that
returns the first item in the set, that is, the one that is smallest in terms of the ordering that
is used to compare items in the set. (It also defines the method last().) We can solve our
problem using this method and a for-each loop:
int firstPage = pageSet.first(); // Find out the first page number in the set.
for ( int page : pageSet ) {
if ( page != firstPage )
System.out.print(","); // Output comma only if this is not the first page.
System.out.print(page);
}
Finally, here is an elegant solution using a subset view of the tree. (See Subsection 10.3.2.)
Actually, this solution might be a bit extreme:
int firstPage = pageSet.first(); // Get first item, which we know exists.
System.out.print(firstPage); // Print first item, with no comma.
for ( int page : pageSet.tailSet( firstPage+1 ) ) // Process remaining items.
System.out.print( "," + page );

10.4.3 Using a Comparator

There is a potential problem with our solution to the indexing problem. If the terms in the index
can contain both upper case and lower case letters, then the terms will not be in alphabetical
order! The ordering on String is not alphabetical. It is based on the Unicode codes of the
characters in the string. The codes for all the upper case letters are less than the codes for
the lower case letters. So, for example, terms beginning with “Z” come before terms beginning
with “a”. If the terms are restricted to use lower case letters only (or upper case only), then
the ordering would be alphabetical. But suppose that we allow both upper and lower case, and
that we insist on alphabetical order. In that case, our index can’t use the usual ordering for
Strings. Fortunately, it’s possible to specify a different method to be used for comparing the
keys of a map. This is a typical use for a Comparator.
Recall that an object that implements the interface Comparator<T> defines a method for
comparing two objects of type T :
public int compare( T obj1, T obj2 )
This method should return an integer that is negative, zero, or positive, depending on whether
obj1 is less than, equal to, or greater than obj2. We want to compare two Strings ignoring
case. The String class already includes a method that does that, compareToIgnoreCase(). But
to use a non-default comparison in a TreeMap, we need an object of type Comparator<String>.
Since Comparator is a functional interface, an easy way to specify the comparator is to use a
lambda expression:
(a,b) -> a.compareToIgnoreCase(b)
To solve our indexing problem, we just need to pass this comparator as a parameter to the
TreeMap constructor:
index = new TreeMap<>( (a,b) -> a.compareToIgnoreCase(b) );
In fact, since the lambda expression is just calling a method that already exists in the String
class, it could actually be given as a method reference (see Subsection 4.5.4):
index = new TreeMap<>( String::compareToIgnoreCase );
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 535

This does work. However, there one technicality. Suppose, for example, that
the indexing program calls addReference("aardvark",56) and that it later calls
addReference("Aardvark",102). The words “aardvark” and “Aardvark” differ only in that
one of them begins with an upper case letter; when converted to lower case, they are the same.
When we insert them into the index, do they count as two different terms or as one term? The
answer depends on the way that a TreeMap tests objects for equality. In fact, TreeMaps and
TreeSets always use a Comparator object or a compareTo method to test for equality. They do
not use the equals() method for this purpose. The Comparator that is used for the TreeMap in
this example returns the value zero when it is used to compare “aardvark” and “Aardvark”, so
the TreeMap considers them to be the same. Page references to “aardvark” and “Aardvark” are
combined into a single list, and when the index is printed it will contain only the first version
of the word that was encountered by the program. This is probably acceptable behavior in this
example. If not, some other technique must be used to sort the terms into alphabetical order.

10.4.4 Word Counting

The final example in this section also deals with storing information about words. The problem
here is to make a list of all the words that occur in a file, along with the number of times that
each word occurs. The file will be selected by the user. The output of the program will consist
of two lists. Each list contains all the words from the file, along with the number of times that
the word occurred. One list is sorted alphabetically, and the other is sorted according to the
number of occurrences, with the most common words at the top and the least common at the
bottom. The problem here is a generalization of Exercise 7.6, which asked you to make an
alphabetical list of all the words in a file, without counting the number of occurrences.
My word counting program can be found in the file WordCount.java. As the program reads
an input file, it must keep track of how many times it encounters each word. We could simply
throw all the words, with duplicates, into a list and count them later. But that would require
a lot of extra storage space and would not be very efficient. A better method is to keep a
counter for each word. The first time the word is encountered, the counter is initialized to 1.
On subsequent encounters, the counter is incremented. To keep track of the data for one word,
the program uses a simple class that holds a word and the counter for that word. The class is
a static nested class:
/**
* Represents the data we need about a word: the word and
* the number of times it has been encountered.
*/
private static class WordData {
String word;
int count;
WordData(String w) {
// Constructor for creating a WordData object when
// we encounter a new word.
word = w;
count = 1; // The initial value of count is 1.
}
} // end class WordData
The program has to store all the WordData objects in some sort of data structure. We want
to be able to add new words efficiently. Given a word, we need to check whether a WordData
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 536

object already exists for that word, and if it does, we need to find that object so that we can
increment its counter. A Map can be used to implement these operations. Given a word, we
want to look up a WordData object in the Map. This means that the word is the key, and
the WordData object is the value. (It might seem strange that the key is also one of the
instance variables in the value object, but in fact this is a very common situation: The value
object contains all the information about some entity, and the key is one of those pieces of
information; the partial information in the key is used to retrieve the full information in the
value object.) After reading the file, we want to output the words in alphabetical order, so we
should use a TreeMap rather than a HashMap. This program converts all words to lower case
so that the default ordering on Strings will put the words in alphabetical order. The data is
stored in a variable named words of type TreeMap<String,WordData>. The variable is declared
and the map object is created with the statement:
TreeMap<String,WordData> words = new TreeMap<>();
When the program reads a word from a file, it calls words.get(word) to find out if that
word is already in the map. If the return value is null, then this is the first time the word
has been encountered, so a new WordData object is created and inserted into the map with the
command words.put(word, new WordData(word)). If words.get(word) is not null, then
its value is the WordData object for this word, and the program only has to increment the
counter in that object. The program uses a method readNextWord(), which was given in
Exercise 7.6, to read one word from the file. This method returns null when the end of the file
is encountered. Here is the complete code segment that reads the file and collects the data:
String word = readNextWord();
while (word != null) {
word = word.toLowerCase(); // convert word to lower case
WordData data = words.get(word);
if (data == null)
words.put( word, new WordData(word) );
else
data.count++;
word = readNextWord();
}
After reading the words and printing them out in alphabetical order, the program has
to sort the words by frequency and print them again. To do the sorting using a generic
algorithm, we can copy the WordData objects into a list and then use the generic method
Collections.sort(list,comparator), which specifies a comparator as its second parameter.
Since we want to sort the data into decreasing order by count, we want a comparator for two
WordData values a and b that puts a before b if a.count > b.count. You should check that
the following lambda expression defines a comparator that will work here:
(a,b) -> b.count - a.count
The WordData objects that we need are the values in the map, words. Recall that
words.values() returns a Collection that contains all the values from the map. The constructor
for the ArrayList class lets you specify a collection to be copied into the list when it is created.
So, we can use the following commands to create a list of type ArrayList<WordData> containing
the word data and then sort that list according to frequency:
ArrayList<WordData> wordsByFrequency = new ArrayList<>( words.values() );
Collections.sort( wordsByFrequency, (a,b) -> b.count - a.count );
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 537

You should notice that these two lines replace a lot of code! It requires some practice to think
in terms of generic data structures and algorithms, but the payoff is significant in terms of saved
time and effort.
The only remaining problem is to print the data. We have to print the data from all the
WordData objects twice, first in alphabetical order and then sorted according to frequency
count. The data is in alphabetical order in the TreeMap, or more precisely, in the values of
the TreeMap. We can use a for-each loop to print the data in the collection words.values(),
and the words will appear in alphabetical order. Another for-each loop can be used to print
the data in the list wordsByFrequency, and the words will be printed in order of decreasing
frequency. Here is the code that does it:
TextIO.putln("List of words in alphabetical order"
+ " (with counts in parentheses):\n");
for ( WordData data : words.values() )
TextIO.putln(" " + data.word + " (" + data.count + ")");
TextIO.putln("\n\nList of words by frequency of occurrence:\n");
for ( WordData data : wordsByFrequency )
TextIO.putln(" " + data.word + " (" + data.count + ")");
You can find the complete word-counting program in the file WordCount.java. Note that for
reading and writing files, it uses the file I/O capabilities of TextIO.java, which were discussed
in Subsection 2.4.4.
By the way, if you run the WordCount program on a reasonably large file and take a look
at the output, it will illustrate something about the Collections.sort() method. The second
list of words in the output is ordered by frequency, but if you look at a group of words that all
have the same frequency, you will see that the words in that group are in alphabetical order.
The method Collections.sort() was applied to sort the words by frequency, but before it was
applied, the words were already in alphabetical order. When Collections.sort() rearranged
the words, it did not change the ordering of words that have the same frequency, so they were
still in alphabetical order within the group of words with that frequency. This is because the
algorithm used by Collections.sort() is a stable sorting algorithm. A sorting algorithm is
said to be stable if it satisfies the following condition: When the algorithm is used to sort a list
according to some property of the items in the list, then the sort does not change the relative
order of items that have the same value of that property. That is, if item B comes after item A
in the list before the sort, and if both items have the same value for the property that is being
used as the basis for sorting, then item B will still come after item A after the sorting has
been done. Neither SelectionSort nor QuickSort are stable sorting algorithms. Insertion sort is
stable, but is not very fast. Merge sort, the sorting algorithm used by Collections.sort(),
is both stable and fast.
I hope that the programming examples in this section have convinced you of the usefulness
of the Java Collection Framework!

10.5 Writing Generic Classes and Methods

So far in this chapter, you have learned about using the generic classes and methods that
are part of the Java Collection Framework. Now, it’s time to learn how to write new generic
classes and methods from scratch. Generic programming produces highly general and reusable
code—it’s very useful for people who write reusable software libraries to know how to do generic
programming, since it enables them to write code that can be used in many different situations.
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 538

Not every programmer needs to write reusable software libraries, but every programmer should
know at least a little about how to do it. In fact, just to read the Javadoc documentation for
Java’s standard generic classes, you need to know some of the syntax that is introduced in this
section.
I will not cover every detail of generic programming in Java in this section, but the material
presented here should be sufficient to cover the most common cases.

10.5.1 Simple Generic Classes

Let’s start with an example that illustrates the motivation for generic programming. In
Subsection 10.2.1, I remarked that it would be easy to use a LinkedList to implement a queue.
(Queues were introduced in Subsection 9.3.2.) To ensure that the only operations that are
performed on the list are the queue operations enqueue, dequeue, and isEmpty, we can create
a new class that contains the linked list as a private instance variable. To implement queues of
strings, for example, we can define the class:
class QueueOfStrings {
private LinkedList<String> items = new LinkedList<>();
public void enqueue(String item) {
items.addLast(item);
}
public String dequeue() {
return items.removeFirst();
}
public boolean isEmpty() {
return (items.size() == 0);
}
}
This is a fine and useful class. But, if this is how we write queue classes, and if we want
queues of Integers or Doubles or Colors or any other type, then we will have to write a different
class for each type. The code for all of these classes will be almost identical, which seems like a
lot of redundant programming. To avoid the redundancy, we can write a generic Queue class
that can be used to define queues of any type of object.
The syntax for writing the generic class is straightforward: We replace the specific type
String with a type parameter such as T, and we add the type parameter to the name of the
class:
class Queue<T> {
private LinkedList<T> items = new LinkedList<>();
public void enqueue(T item) {
items.addLast(item);
}
public T dequeue() {
return items.removeFirst();
}
public boolean isEmpty() {
return (items.size() == 0);
}
}
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 539

Note that within the class, the type parameter T is used just like any regular type name.
It’s used to declare the return type for dequeue, as the type of the formal parameter item in
enqueue, and even as the actual type parameter in LinkedList<T>. Given this class definition,
we can use parameterized types such as Queue<String> and Queue<Integer> and Queue<Color>.
That is, the Queue class is used in exactly the same way as built-in generic classes like LinkedList
and HashSet.
Note that you don’t have to use “T” as the name of the type parameter in the definition of
the generic class. Type parameters are like formal parameters in subroutines. You can make up
any name you like in the definition of the class. The name in the definition will be replaced by
an actual type name when the class is used to declare variables or create objects. If you prefer
to use a more meaningful name for the type parameter, you might define the Queue class as:
class Queue<ItemType> {
private LinkedList<ItemType> items = new LinkedList<>();
public void enqueue(ItemType item) {
items.addLast(item);
}
public ItemType dequeue() {
return items.removeFirst();
}
public boolean isEmpty() {
return (items.size() == 0);
}
}
Changing the name from “T” to “ItemType” has absolutely no effect on the meaning of the
class definition or on the way that Queue is used.
Generic interfaces can be defined in a similar way. It’s also easy to define generic classes
and interfaces that have two or more type parameters, as is done with the standard interface
Map<K,V>. A typical example is the definition of a “Pair” that contains two objects, possibly
of different types. A simple version of such a class can be defined as:
public class Pair<T,S> {
public T first;
public S second;
public Pair( T a, S b ) { // Constructor.
first = a;
second = b;
}
}
This class can be used to declare variables and create objects such as:
Pair<String,Color> colorName = new Pair<>("Red", Color.RED);
Pair<Double,Double> coordinates = new Pair<>(17.3,42.8);
Note that in the definition of the constructor in this class, the name “Pair” does not have type
parameters. You might have expected “Pair<T,S>”. However, the name of the class is “Pair”,
not “Pair<T,S>”, and within the definition of the class, “T” and “S” are used as if they are the
names of specific, actual types. Note in any case that type parameters are never added to the
names of methods or constructors, only to the names of classes and interfaces.
Record classes can also be generic. For example, a generic record class version of Pair could
be defined simply as
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 540

public record Pair(T a, S b) { }

10.5.2 Simple Generic Methods

In addition to generic classes, Java also has generic methods. An example is the method
Collections.sort(), which can sort collections of objects of any type. To see how to write
generic methods, let’s start with a non-generic method for counting the number of times that
a given string occurs in an array of strings:
/**
* Returns the number of times that itemToCount occurs in list. Items in the
* list are tested for equality using itemToCount.equals(), except in the
* special case where itemToCount is null.
*/
public static int countOccurrences(String[] list, String itemToCount) {
int count = 0;
if (itemToCount == null) {
for ( String listItem : list )
if (listItem == null)
count++;
}
else {
for ( String listItem : list )
if (itemToCount.equals(listItem))
count++;
}
return count;
}
Once again, we have some code that works for type String, and we can imagine writing
almost identical code to work with other types of objects. By writing a generic method, we get
to write a single method definition that will work for objects of any non-primitive type. We
need to replace the specific type String in the definition of the method with the name of a type
parameter, such as T. However, if that’s the only change we make, the compiler will think that
“T” is the name of an actual type, and it will mark it as an undeclared identifier. We need
some way of telling the compiler that “T” is a type parameter. That’s what the “<T>” does in
the definition of the generic class “class Queue<T> { ...”. For a generic method, the “<T>”
goes just before the name of the return type of the method:
public static <T> int countOccurrences(T[] list, T itemToCount) {
int count = 0;
if (itemToCount == null) {
for ( T listItem : list )
if (listItem == null)
count++;
}
else {
for ( T listItem : list )
if (itemToCount.equals(listItem))
count++;
}
return count;
}
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 541

The “<T>” marks the method as being generic and specifies the name of the type parameter
that will be used in the definition. Of course, the name of the type parameter doesn’t have to
be “T”; it can be anything. (The “<T>” looks a little strange in that position, I know, but it
had to go somewhere and that’s just where the designers of Java decided to put it.)
Given the generic method definition, we can apply it to objects of any type. If wordList is
a variable of type String[ ] and word is a variable of type String, then
int ct = countOccurrences( wordList, word );
will count the number of times that word occurs in wordList. If palette is a variable of type
Color[ ] and color is a variable of type Color, then
int ct = countOccurrences( palette, color );
will count the number of times that color occurs in palette. If numbers is a variable of type
Integer[ ], then
int ct = countOccurrences( numbers, 17 );
will count the number of times that 17 occurs in numbers. This last example uses autoboxing;
the 17 is automatically converted to a value of type Integer. Note that, since generic
programming in Java applies only to objects, we cannot use countOccurrences to count
the number of occurrences of 17 in an array of type int[ ].
A generic method can have one or more type parameters, such as the “T” in
countOccurrences. Note that when a generic method is used, as in the function call
“countOccurrences(wordlist, word)”, there is no explicit mention of the type that is sub-
stituted for the type parameter. The compiler deduces the type from the types of the actual
parameters in the method call. Since wordlist is of type String[ ], the compiler can tell that
in “countOccurrences(wordlist, word)”, the type that replaces T is String. This contrasts
with the use of generic classes, as in “Queue<String>”, where the type parameter is specified
explicitly.
The countOccurrences method operates on an array. We could also write a similar method
to count occurrences of an object in any collection:
public static <T> int countOccurrences(Collection<T> collection, T itemToCount) {
int count = 0;
if (itemToCount == null) {
for ( T item : collection )
if (item == null)
count++;
}
else {
for ( T item : collection )
if (itemToCount.equals(item))
count++;
}
return count;
}
Since Collection<T> is itself a generic type, this method is very general. It can operate on
an ArrayList of Integers, a TreeSet of Strings, a LinkedList of Buttons, . . . .
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 542

10.5.3 Wildcard Types

There is a limitation on the sort of generic classes and methods that we have looked at so far:
The type parameter in our examples, usually named T, can be any type at all. This is OK
in many cases, but it means that the only things that you can do with T are things that can
be done with every type, and the only things that you can do with objects of type T are
things that you can do with every object. With the techniques that we have covered so far,
you can’t, for example, write a generic method that compares objects with the compareTo()
method, since that method is not defined for all objects. The compareTo() method is defined
in the Comparable interface. What we need is a way of specifying that a generic class or method
only applies to objects of type Comparable and not to arbitrary objects. With that restriction,
we should be free to use compareTo() in the definition of the generic class or method.
There are two different but related syntaxes for putting restrictions on the types that are
used in generic programming. One of these is bounded type parameters, which are used
as formal type parameters in generic class and method definitions; a bounded type parameter
would be used in place of the simple type parameter T in “class GenericClass<T> ...” or
in “public static <T> void genericMethod(...”. The second syntax is wildcard types,
which are used as type parameters in the declarations of variables and of formal parameters
in method definitions; a wildcard type could be used in place of the type parameter String
in the declaration statement “List<String> list;” or in the formal parameter list “void
concat(Collection<String> c)”. We will look at wildcard types first, and we will return to
the topic of bounded types later in this section.
Let’s start with a simple example in which a wildcard type is useful. Suppose that Shape
is a class that defines a method public void draw(), and suppose that Shape has subclasses
such as Rect and Oval. Suppose that we want a method that can draw all the shapes in a
collection of Shapes. We might try:
public static void drawAll(Collection<Shape> shapes) {
for ( Shape s : shapes )
s.draw();
}
This method works fine if we apply it to a variable of type Collection<Shape>, or Ar-
rayList<Shape>, or any other collection class with type parameter Shape. Suppose, however,
that you have a list of Rects stored in a variable named rectangles of type Collection<Rect>.
Since Rects are Shapes, you might expect to be able to call drawAll(rectangles). Unfortu-
nately, this will not work; a collection of Rects is not considered to be a collection of Shapes!
The variable rectangles cannot be assigned to the formal parameter shapes. The solution
is to replace the type parameter “Shape” in the declaration of shapes with the wildcard type
“? extends Shape”:
public static void drawAll(Collection<? extends Shape> shapes) {
for ( Shape s : shapes )
s.draw();
}
The wildcard type “? extends Shape” means roughly “any type that is either equal to Shape
or that is a subclass of Shape”. When the formal parameter, shapes, is declared to be of type
Collection<? extends Shape>, it becomes possible to call the drawAll method with an actual
parameter of type Collection<Rect> since Rect is a subclass of Shape and therefore matches the
wildcard. We could also pass actual parameters to drawAll of type ArrayList<Rect> or Set<Oval>
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 543

or List<Oval>. And we can still pass variables of type Collection<Shape> or ArrayList<Shape>,

since the class Shape itself matches “? extends Shape”. We have greatly increased the
usefulness of the method by using the wildcard type.
(Although it is not essential, you might be interested in knowing why Java does not allow
a collection of Rects to be used as a collection of Shapes, even though every Rect is considered
to be a Shape. Consider the rather silly but legal method that adds an oval to a list of shapes:
static void addOval(List<Shape> shapes, Oval oval) {
shapes.add(oval);
}
Suppose that rectangles is of type List<Rect>. It’s illegal to call addOval(rectangles,oval),
because of the rule that a list of Rects is not a list of Shapes. If we dropped that rule, then
addOval(rectangles,oval) would be legal, and it would add an Oval to a list of Rects. This
would be bad: Since Oval is not a subclass of Rect, an Oval is not a Rect, and a list of Rects
should never be able to contain an Oval. The method call addOval(rectangles,oval) does
not make sense and should be illegal.)
As another example, consider the method addAll() from the interface Collection<T>. In
my description of this method in Subsection 10.1.4, I say that for a collection, coll, of type
Collection<T>, coll.addAll(coll2) “adds all the objects in coll2 to coll. The parameter,
coll2, can be any collection of type Collection<T>. However, it can also be more general. For
example, if T is a class and S is a subclass of T, then coll2 can be of type Collection<S>. This
makes sense because any object of type S is automatically of type T and so can legally be
added to coll.” If you think for a moment, you’ll see that what I’m describing here, a little
awkwardly, is a use of wildcard types: We don’t want to require coll2 to be a collection of
objects of type T ; we want to allow collections of any subclass of T. To be more specific, let’s
look at how a similar addAll() method could be added to the generic Queue class that was
defined earlier in this section:
class Queue<T> {
private LinkedList<T> items = new LinkedList<T>();
public void enqueue(T item) {
items.addLast(item);
}
public T dequeue() {
return items.removeFirst();
}
public boolean isEmpty() {
return (items.size() == 0);
}
public void addAll(Collection<? extends T> collection) {
// Add all the items from the collection to the end of the queue
for ( T item : collection )
enqueue(item);
}
}
Here, T is a type parameter in the generic class definition. We are combining wildcard types
with generic classes. Inside the generic class definition, “T” is used as if it is a specific, though
unknown, type. The wildcard type “? extends T” means some type that is equal to or extends
that specific type. When we create a queue of type Queue<Shape>, “T” refers to “Shape”, and
the wildcard type “? extends T” in the class definition means “? extends Shape”. This
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 544

ensures that the addAll method of the queue can be applied to collections of Rects and Ovals
as well as to collections of Shapes.
The for-each loop in the definition of addAll iterates through the collection using a
variable, item, of type T. Now, collection can be of type Collection<S>, where S is a subclass
of T. Since item is of type T, not S, do we have a problem here? No, no problem. As long as
S is a subclass of T, a value of type S can be assigned to a variable of type T. The restriction
on the wildcard type makes everything work nicely.
The addAll method adds all the items from a collection to the queue. Suppose that we
wanted to do the opposite: Add all the items that are currently in the queue to a given collection.
An instance method defined as
public void addAllTo(Collection<T> collection)
would only work for collections whose base type is exactly the same as T. This is too restrictive.
We need some sort of wildcard. However, “? extends T” won’t work. Suppose we try it:
public void addAllTo(Collection<? extends T> collection) {
// Remove all items currently on the queue and add them to collection
while ( ! isEmpty() ) {
T item = dequeue(); // Remove an item from the queue.
collection.add( item ); // Add it to the collection. ILLEGAL!!
}
}
The problem is that we can’t add an item of type T to a collection that might only be able
to hold items belonging to some subclass, S, of T. The containment is going in the wrong
direction: An item of type T is not necessarily of type S. For example, if we have a queue of
type Queue<Shape>, it doesn’t make sense to add items from the queue to a collection of type
Collection<Rect>, since not every Shape is a Rect. On the other hand, if we have a Queue<Rect>,
it would make sense to add items from that queue to a Collection<Shape> or indeed to any
collection Collection<S> where S is a superclass of Rect.
To express this type of relationship, we need a new kind of type wildcard: “? super T”.
This wildcard means, roughly, “either T itself or any class that is a superclass of T.” For
example, Collection<? super Rect> would match the types Collection<Shape>, ArrayList<Object>,
and Set<Rect>. This is what we need for our addAllTo method. With this change, our complete
generic queue class becomes:
class Queue<T> {
private LinkedList<T> items = new LinkedList<T>();
public void enqueue(T item) {
items.addLast(item);
}
public T dequeue() {
return items.removeFirst();
}
public boolean isEmpty() {
return (items.size() == 0);
}
public void addAll(Collection<? extends T> collection) {
// Add all the items from the collection to the end of the queue
for ( T item : collection )
enqueue(item);
}
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 545

public void addAllTo(Collection<? super T> collection) {

// Remove all items currently on the queue and add them to collection
while ( ! isEmpty() ) {
T item = dequeue(); // Remove an item from the queue.
collection.add( item ); // Add it to the collection.
}
}
}
In a wildcard type such as “? extends T”, T can be an interface instead of a class. Note
that the term “extends” (not “implements”) is used in the wildcard type, even if T is an
interface. For example, we have seen that Runnable is an interface that defines the method
public void run(). Here is a method that runs all the objects in a collection of Runnables by
executing the run() method from each runnable object:
public static runAll( Collection<? extends Runnable> runnables ) {
for ( Runnable runnable : runnables ) {
runnable.run();
}
}

∗ ∗ ∗
Wildcard types are used only as type parameters in parameterized types, such as
Collection<? extends Runnable>. The place where a wildcard type is most likely to occur, by far,
is in a formal parameter list, where the wildcard type is used in the declaration of the type of
a formal parameter. However, they can also be used in a few other places. For example, they
can be used in the type specification in a variable declaration statement.
One final remark: The wildcard type “<?>” is equivalent to “<? extends Object>”. That
is, it matches any possible type. For example, the removeAll() method in the generic interface
Collection<T> is declared as
public boolean removeAll( Collection<?> c ) { ...
This just means that the removeAll method can be applied to any collection of any type of
object.

10.5.4 Bounded Types

Wildcard types don’t solve all of our problems. They allow us to generalize method definitions
so that they can work with collections of objects of various types, rather than just a single type.
However, they do not allow us to restrict the types that are allowed as formal type parameters
in a generic class or method definition. Bounded types exist for this purpose.
We start with a small, not very realistic example. Suppose that you would like to
create groups of GUI components using a generic class named ControlGroup. For example,
the parameterized type ControlGroup<Button> would represent a group of Buttons, while
ControlGroup<Slider> would represent a group of Sliders. The class will include methods that
can be called to apply certain operations to all components in the group at once. For example,
there will be an instance method of the form
public void disableAll() {
.
. // Call c.setDisable(true) for every control, c, in the group.
.
}
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 546

The problem is that the setDisable() method is defined in a Control object, but not for
objects of arbitrary type. It wouldn’t make sense to allow types such as ControlGroup<String>
or ControlGroup<Integer>, since Strings and Integers don’t have setDisable() methods. We
need some way to restrict the type parameter T in ControlGroup<T> so that only Control and
subclasses of Control are allowed as actual type parameters. We can do this by using the
bounded type “T extends Control” instead of a plain “T” in the definition of the class:
public class ControlGroup<T extends Control> {
private ArrayList<T> components; // For storing the components in this group.
public void disableAll( ) {
for ( Control c : components ) {
if (c != null)
c.setDisable(true);
}
}
public void enableAll( ) {
for ( Control c : components ) {
if (c != null)
c.setDisable(false);
}
}
public void add( T c ) { // Add a value c, of type T, to the group.
components.add(c);
}
.
. // Additional methods and constructors.
.
}
The restriction “extends Control” on T makes it illegal to create the parameterized types
ControlGroup<String> and ControlGroup<Integer>, since the actual type parameter that replaces
“T” is required to be either Control itself or a subclass of Control. With this restriction, we
know—and, more important, the compiler knows—that the objects in the group are of type
Control, so that the operation c.setDisable() is defined for any c in the group.
In general, a bounded type parameter “T extends SomeType” means roughly “a type, T,
that is either equal to SomeType or is a subclass of SomeType; the upshot is that any object of
type T is also of type SomeType, and any operation that is defined for objects of type SomeType
is defined for objects of type T. The type SomeType doesn’t have to be the name of a class. It
can be any name that represents an actual object type. For example, it can be an interface
or even a parameterized type.
Bounded types and wildcard types are clearly related. They are, however, used in very
different ways. A bounded type can be used only as a formal type parameter in the definition
of a generic method, class, or interface. A wildcard type is used most often to declare the type
of a formal parameter in a method and cannot be used as a formal type parameter. One other
difference, by the way, is that, in contrast to wildcard types, bounded type parameters can only
use “extends”, never “super”.
Bounded type parameters can be used when declaring generic methods. For example, as an
alternative to the generic ControlGroup class, one could write a free-standing generic static
method that can disable any collection of Controls as follows:
public static <T extends Control> void disableAll(Collection<T> comps) {
for ( Control c : comps )
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 547

if (c != null)
c.setDisable(true);
}
Using “<T extends Control>” as the formal type parameter means that the method can only
be called for collections whose base type is Control or some subclass of Control, such as
Button or Slider.
Note that we don’t really need a generic type parameter in this case. We can write an
equivalent method using a wildcard type:
public static void disableAll(Collection<? extends Control> comps) {
for ( Control c : comps )
if (c != null)
c.setDisable(true);
}
In this situation, the version that uses the wildcard type is to be preferred, since the
implementation is simpler. However, there are some situations where a generic method with a
bounded type parameter cannot be rewritten using a wildcard type. Note that a generic type
parameter gives a name, such as T, to the unknown type, while a wildcard type does not give
a name to the unknown type. The name makes it possible to refer to the unknown type in
the body of the method that is being defined. If a generic method definition uses the generic
type name more than once or uses it outside the formal parameter list of the method, then the
generic type parameter cannot be replaced with a wildcard type.
Let’s look at a generic method in which a bounded type parameter is essential. In
Subsection 10.2.1, I presented a code segment for inserting a string into a sorted list of strings,
in such a way that the modified list is still in sorted order. Here is the same code, but this time
in the form of a method definition (and without the comments):
static void sortedInsert(List<String> sortedList, String newItem) {
ListIterator<String> iter = sortedList.listIterator();
while (iter.hasNext()) {
String item = iter.next();
if (newItem.compareTo(item) <= 0) {
iter.previous();
break;
}
}
iter.add(newItem);
}
This method works fine for lists of strings, but it would be nice to have a generic method
that can be applied to lists of other types of objects. The problem, of course, is that the code
assumes that the compareTo() method is defined for objects in the list, so the method can
only work for lists of objects that implement the Comparable interface. We can’t simply use
a wildcard type to enforce this restriction. Suppose we try to do it, by replacing List<String>
with List<? extends Comparable>:
static void sortedInsert(List<? extends Comparable> sortedList, ???? newItem) {
ListIterator<????> iter = sortedList.listIterator();
...
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 548

We immediately run into a problem, because we have no name for the unknown type represented
by the wildcard. We need a name for that type because the type of newItem and of iter should
be the same as the type of the items in the list. The problem is solved if we write a generic
method with a bounded type parameter, since then we have a name for the unknown type, and
we can write a valid generic method:
static <T extends Comparable> void sortedInsert(List<T> sortedList, T newItem) {
ListIterator<T> iter = sortedList.listIterator();
while (iter.hasNext()) {
T item = iter.next();
if (newItem.compareTo(item) <= 0) {
iter.previous();
break;
}
}
iter.add(newItem);
}
There is still one technicality to cover in this example. Comparable is itself a parameterized
type, but I have used it here without a type parameter. This is legal but the compiler might give
you a warning about using a “raw type.” In fact, the objects in the list should implement the
parameterized interface Comparable<T>, since they are being compared to items of type T. This
just means that instead of using Comparable as the type bound, we should use Comparable<T>:
static <T extends Comparable<T>> void sortedInsert(List<T> sortedList, ...

10.6 Introduction the Stream API

Among its new features, Java 8 introduced a stream API , which represents a new way
of expressing operations on collections of data. A major motivation for the new approach was
to make it possible for the Java compiler to “parallelize” a computation, that is, to break it
into pieces that can be run simultaneously on several processors. Doing so can significantly
speed up the computation. Chapter 12 will discuss parallel programming in Java using threads.
Using threads directly can be difficult and error-prone. The stream API offers the possibility of
parallelizing some kinds of computation automatically and safely, and it is not surprising that
it has generated a lot of interest on those grounds.
The classes and interfaces that define the stream API are defined in package
java.util.stream. Stream is an interface in that package that represents streams and de-
fines the basic operations on streams.
A stream is simply a sequence of data values. A stream can be created from a Collection,
from an array, or from a variety of other data sources. The stream API provides a set of
operators that operate on streams. (The API is covered in this chapter because it makes
extensive use of generic programming and parameterized types.) To perform some computation
using the stream API means creating a stream to get the data from some source, and then
applying a sequence of stream operations that will produce the result that you want. Once a
stream has been used in this way, it cannot be reused. Of course, you can usually make another
stream from the same data source if you want to use it in another computation.
Expressing a computation as a sequence of stream operations requires a new kind of thinking,
and it takes some getting used to. Let’s start with an example. Suppose that stringList is a
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 549

large ArrayList<String>, where none of the elements are null, and you want to know the average
length of the strings in the list. This can be done easily with a for-each loop:
int lengthSum = 0;
for ( String str : stringList ) {
lengthSum = lengthSum + str.length();
}
double average = (double)lengthSum / stringList.size();
To do the same thing with the stream API, you could use:
int lengthSum = stringList.parallelStream()
.mapToInt( str -> str.length() )
.sum();
double average = (double)lengthSum / stringList.size();
In this version, stringList.parallelStream() creates a stream consisting of all the elements
of the list. The fact that it is a “parallelStream” makes it possible to parallelize the computation.
The method mapToInt() applies a map operation to the stream of strings. That is, it takes
each string from the stream and applies a function to it; in this case, the function computes the
length of the string, giving a value of type int. The result of the map operation is to produce
a new stream, this time a stream of integers, consisting of all the outputs from the function.
The final operation, sum(), adds up all the numbers in the stream of integers and returns the
result.
The net result is that we’ve added up the lengths of all the strings in the list. Because of
the potential for parallelization, the stream version might be substantially faster than the for
loop version. In practice, there is significant overhead involved in setting up and manipulating
streams, so the list would have to be fairly large before you would see any speedup. In fact, for
small lists, the stream version will almost certainly take longer than the for loop.
The stream API is complex, and I can only give a basic introduction to it here—but hopefully
enough to convey some of its spirit.

10.6.1 Generic Functional Interfaces

Many stream operators take parameters, which are often given as lambda expressions. The
mapToInt() operator in the above example takes a parameter representing a function from
String to int. The type for that parameter is given by a parameterized functional interface,
ToIntFunction<T>, from package java.util.function. This interface represents the general
idea of a function that takes an input of type T and outputs an int. If you were to look at the
definition of that interface, it would be something like
public interface ToIntFunction<T> {
public int applyAsInt( T x );
}
Stream<T> is also a parameterized interface. In the above example, stringList is of type
ArrayList<String>, and the stream that is created by stringList.parallelStream() is of
type Stream<String>. When the mapToInt() operator is applied to that stream, it expects
a parameter of type ToIntFunction<String>. The lambda expression “str -> str.length()”
maps a String to an int, so it represents a value of the correct type. Fortunately, you don’t
need to think about all of that to use the stream API: All you need to know is that to convert
a stream of strings to a stream of integers using mapToInt, you need to provide a function that
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 550

maps strings to ints. However, if you want to read the API documentation, you will have to
deal with parameter types similar to ToIntFunction.
The package java.util.function contains a large number of generic functional interfaces.
Many of them, like ToIntFunction, are parameterized types, and they are all generic in that they
represent very generic functions, with no set meaning. For example, the functional interface
DoubleUnaryOperator represents the general idea of a function from double to double. This
interface is essentially the same as my example FunctionR2R from Subsection 4.5.2 (except for
the name of the function that it defines, which is often irrelevant).
The interfaces in java.util.function are used to specify parameter types for many stream
operators as well as for other built-in functions in the Java API, and you can certainly use them
to specify parameter types for your own subroutines as well. I will discuss some of them here.
Most of the others are variations on the ones that I cover.
The general term predicate refers to a function whose return type is boolean. The
functional interface Predicate<T> defines a boolean-valued function test(t) with a parameter
of type T. This interface is used, for example, as the parameter type for the method
removeIf(p), which is defined for any Collection. For example, if strList is of type
LinkedList<String>, then you can remove all null values from the list simply by saying
strList.removeIf( s -> (s == null) );
The parameter is a Predicate<String> that tests whether its input, s, is null. The removeIf()
method removes all elements from the list for which the value of the predicate is true.
A predicate for testing int values could be represented by the type Predicate<Integer>, but
that introduces the overhead of autoboxing every int in a wrapper of type Integer. To avoid that
overhead, the package java.util.function has the functional interface IntPredicate, which
defines the boolean-valued function test(n), where n is of type int. Similarly, it defines
DoublePredicate and LongPredicate. This is typical of how the stream API deals with primitive
types. For example, it defines IntStream to represent a stream of ints as a more efficient
alternative to Stream<Integer>.
The functional interface Supplier<T> defines a function, get() with no parameters and a
return type of T. It represents a source of values of type T. There is a companion interface
Consumer<T> that defines the void function accept(t) with a parameter of type T. There are
also specialized versions for primitive types, including IntSupplier, IntConsumer, DoubleSupplier
and DoubleConsumer. I will give examples of using suppliers and consumers below.
Function<T,R> represents functions from values of type T to values of type R. This functional
interface defines the function apply(t), where t is of type T and the return type is R. The
interface UnaryOperator<T> is essentially Function<T,T>; that is, it represents a function whose
input and output types are the same. Note that DoubleUnaryOperator is a specialized version
of UnaryOperator<Double>, and of course there is also IntUnaryOperator.
Finally, I will mention BinaryOperator<T> and its specializations such as IntBinaryOperator.
The interface BinaryOperator<T> defines the function apply(t1,t2) where t1 and t2 are both
of type T and the return type is also T. Binary operators include things like addition of numbers
or concatenation of strings.

10.6.2 Making Streams

To use the stream API, you have to start by creating a stream. There are many ways to make
streams.
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 551

There are two basic types of streams, sequential streams and parallel streams. The
difference is that operations on parallel streams can, potentially, be parallelized while the values
in a sequential stream are always processed sequentially, in a single process, as they would be
by a for loop. (It might not be clear why sequential streams should exist, but some operations
cannot be safely parallelized.) It is possible to convert a stream from one type to the other
type. If stream is a Stream, then stream.parallel() represents the same stream of values, but
converted to a parallel stream (if it was not already parallel). Similarly, stream.sequential()
is a sequential stream with the same values as stream.
We have already seen that if c is any Collection, then c.parallelStream() is a stream
whose values are the values from the collection. As you might suspect, it is a parallel stream.
The method c.stream() creates a sequential stream of the same values. This works for
any collection, including lists and sets. You could also get the parallel stream by calling
c.stream().parallel().
An array does not have a stream() method, but you can create a stream from an array
using a static method in class Arrays from package java.util. If A is an array, then
Arrays.stream(A)
is a sequential stream containing the values from the array. (To get a parallel stream, use
Arrays.stream(A).parallel().) This works for arrays of objects and for arrays of the
primitive types int, double, and long. If A is of type T[ ], where T is an object type, then
the stream is of type Stream<T>. If A is an array of int, the result is an IntStream, and similarly
for double and long.
Suppose supplier is of type Supplier<T>. It should be possible to create a stream of values
of type T by calling supplier.get() over and over. That stream can in fact be created using
Stream.generate( supplier )
The stream is sequential and is effectively infinite. That is, it will continue to produce values
forever or until trying to do so produces an error. Similarly, IntStream.generate(s) will
create the stream of int values from an IntSupplier, and DoubleStream.generate(s) creates a
stream of doubles from a DoubleSupplier. For example,
DoubleStream.generate( () -> Math.random() )
creates an infinite stream of random numbers. In fact, you can get a similar stream of random
values from a variable, rand, of type Random (see Subsection 5.3.1): rand.doubles() is an
infinite stream of random numbers in the range 0 to 1. If you only want a finite number of
random numbers, use rand.doubles(count). The Random class has other methods for creating
streams of random doubles and ints. You will find other methods that create streams in various
standard classes.
The IntStream interface defines a method for creating a stream containing a given range of
integer values. The stream
IntStream.range( start, end )
is a sequential stream containing the values start, start+1, . . . , end-1. Note that end is not
included.
Some additional methods for making streams have been introduced in newer versions of
Java. For example, in Java 11, for a Scanner, input, the method input.tokens() creates a
stream consisting of all the strings that would be returned by calling input.next() over and
over. And for a String, str, that contains multiple lines of text, Java 11 added str.lines()
that creates a stream consisting of the lines from the string.
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 552

10.6.3 Operations on Streams

Some operations on a stream produce another stream. They are referred to as “intermediate
operations” because you will still have to do something with the resulting stream to produce a
final result. “Terminal operations” on the other hand apply to a stream and produce a result
that is not a stream. The general pattern for working with streams is to create a stream,
possibly apply a sequence of intermediate operations to it, and then apply a terminal operation
to produce the desired final result. In the example at the beginning of this section, mapToInt()
is an intermediate operation that converted the stream of strings into a stream of ints, and
sum() is a terminal operation that found the sum of the numbers in the stream of ints.
The two most basic intermediate operations are filter and map. A filter applies a Predicate
to a stream, and it creates a new stream consisting of the values from the original stream for
which the predicate is true. For example, if we had a boolean-valued function isPrime(n) that
tests whether an integer n is prime, then
IntSteam.range(2,1000).filter( n -> isPrime(n) )
would create a stream containing all the prime numbers in the range 2 to 1000. (I’m not saying
this is a good way to produce those numbers!)
A map applies a Function to each value in a stream, and creates a stream consisting of the
output values. For example, suppose that strList is an ArrayList<String> and we would like a
stream consisting of all the non-null strings in the list, converted to lower case:
strList.stream().filter( s -> (s != null) ).map( s -> s.toLowerCase() )
The specializations mapToInt(), mapToDouble(), and mapToLong() exist to map Streams into
IntStreams, DoubleStreams, and LongStreams.
Here are a few more intermediate operations on a stream, S, that can be useful: S.limit(n),
where n is an integer, creates a stream containing only the first n values from S. (If S has fewer
than n values, then S.limit(n) is the same as S.) S.distinct() creates a stream from the
values of S by omitting duplicate values, so that all the values in S.distinct() are different.
And S.sorted() creates a stream containing the same values as S, but in sorted order; to sort
items that do not have a natural ordering, you can provide a Comparator as a parameter to
sorted(). (Comparators are discussed in Subsection 10.1.6.) Note that S.limit(n) can be
especially useful for truncating what would otherwise be an infinite stream, such as a stream
generated from a Supplier.
∗ ∗ ∗
To actually get anything done with a stream, you need to apply a terminal operation at
the end. The operator forEach(c) applies a Consumer, c, to each element of the stream. The
result is not a stream, since consumers do not produce values. The effect of S.forEach(c) on
a stream S is simply to do something with each value in the stream. For example, we have a
whole new way to print all the strings in a list of strings:
stringList.stream().forEach( s -> System.out.println(s) );
For parallel streams, the consumer function is not guaranteed to be applied to the values from
the stream in the same order that they occur in the stream. If you want that guarantee, you
can use forEachOrdered(c) instead of forEach(c).
If we want to print out only some of the strings, say those that have length at least 5, and
if we want them in sorted order, we can apply some filters:
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 553

stringList.stream()
.filter( s -> (s.length() >= 5) )
.sorted()
.forEachOrdered( s -> System.out.println(s) )
Some terminal operations output a single value. For example, S.count() returns the
number of values in the stream S. And IntStreams, LongStreams, and DoubleStreams have the
terminal operation sum(), to compute the sum of all the values in the stream. Suppose, for
example, that you would like to test the random number generator by generating 10000 random
numbers and counting how many of them are less than 0.5:
long half = DoubleStream.generate( Math::random )
.limit(10000)
.filter( x -> (x < 0.5) )
.count();
Note that count() returns a long rather than an int. Also note that I’ve used the method refer-
ence Math::random here instead of the equivalent lambda expression “() -> Math.random()”
(see Subsection 4.5.4). If you are having trouble reading things like this, keep in mind that the
pattern is: Create a stream, apply some intermediate operations, apply a terminal operation.
Here, an infinite stream of random numbers is generated by calling Math.random() over and
over. The operation limit(10000) truncates that stream to 10000 values, so that in fact only
10000 values are generated. The filter() operation only lets through numbers x such that
x < 0.5 is true. And finally, count() returns the number of items in the resulting stream.
A Stream<T> also has terminal operations min(c) and max(c) to return the smallest and
largest values in the stream. The parameter, c, is of type Comparator<T>; it is used for
comparing the values. However, the return type of min() and max() is a little peculiar: The
return type is Optional<T>, which represents a value of type T that might or might not exist.
The problem is that an empty stream does not have a largest or smallest value, so the minimum
and maximum of an empty stream do not exist. An Optional has a get() method that returns
the value of the Optional, if there is one; it will throw an exception if the Optional is empty. For
example, if words is a Collection<String>, you can get the longest string in the collection with
String longest = words.parallelStream()
.max( (s1,s2) -> s1.length() - s2.length() )
.get();
But this will throw an exception if the collection is empty. (The boolean-valued method
isPresent() in an Optional can be used to test whether the value exists.)
Similarly, IntStream, LongStream, and DoubleStream provide terminal operations min() and
max() that return values of type OptionalInt, OptionalLong, and OptionalDouble. Each of these
classes also has an average() method that returns an OptionalDouble.
The terminal operators allMatch(p) and anyMatch(p) take a predicate as parameter and
compute a boolean value. The value of allMatch(p) is true if the predicate, p, is true for every
value in the stream to which it is applied. The value of anyMatch(p) is true if there is at least
one value in the stream for which p is true. Note that anyMatch() will stop processing, and
will return true as its output, if it finds a value that satisfies the predicate. And allMatch()
will stop processing if it finds a value that does not match the predicate.
Many terminal operations that compute a single value can be expressed in terms of a more
general operation, reduce. A reduce operation combines the values from a stream using a
BinaryOperator. For example, a sum is computed by a reduce operation in which the binary
operation is addition. The binary operator should be associative, which means that the order in
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 554

which the operator is applied doesn’t matter. There is no built-in terminal operator to compute
the product of the values in a stream, but we can do that directly with reduce. Suppose, for
example, that A is an array of double, and we want the product of all the non-zero elements
in A:
double multiply = Arrays.stream(A).filter( x -> (x != 0) )
.reduce( 1, (x,y) -> x*y );
The binary operator here maps a pair of numbers (x,y) to their product x*y. The first
parameter to reduce() is an “identity” for the binary operation. That is, it is a value such
that 1*x = x for any x. The maximum of a stream of double could be computed with reduce()
by using reduce(Double.NEGATIVE INFINITY, Math::max).
The last major terminal operation is collect(c), a very general operation which collects
all of the values in the stream into a data structure or a single summary result of some type.
The parameter, c is something called a collector. The collector will ordinarily be given by one
of the static functions in the Collectors class. This can get very complicated, and I will only
give a couple of examples. The function Collectors.toList() returns a Collector that can be
used with collect() to put all of the values from the stream into a List. For example, suppose
that A is an array of non-null Strings, and we want a list of all the strings in A that begin with
the substring “Fred”:
List<String> freds = Arrays.stream(A)
.filter( s -> s.startsWith("Fred") )
.collect( Collectors.toList() );
That’s actually pretty easy! Even more useful are collectors that group the items from a stream
according to some criterion. The collector Collectors.groupingBy(f) takes a parameter, f,
whose type is specified by the functional interface Function<T,S>, representing a function from
values of type T to values of type S. When used with collect(), Collectors.groupingBy(f)
operates on a stream of type Stream<T>, and it separates the items in the stream into groups,
based on the value of the function f when applied to the items. That is, all the items, x, in a
given group have the same value for f(x). The result is a Map<S,List<T>>. In this map, a key
is one of the function values, f(x), and the associated value for that key is a list containing all
the items from the stream to which f assigns that function value.
An example will clarify things. Suppose we have an array of people, where each person has
a first name and a last name. And suppose that we want to put the people into groups, where
each group consists of all the people with a given last name. A person can be represented by
an object of type Person that contains instance variables named firstname and lastname. Let’s
say that population is a variable of type Person[ ]. Then Arrays.stream(population) is a
stream of Persons, and we can group the people in the stream by last name with the following
code:
Map<String, List<Person>> families;
families = Arrays.stream(population)
.collect(Collectors.groupingBy( person -> person.lastname ));
Here, the lambda expression, person -> person.lastname, defines the grouping function. The
function takes a Person as input and outputs a String giving that person’s last name. In the
resulting Map, families, a key is one of the last names from the Persons in the array, and the
value associated with that last name is a List containing all the Persons with that last name.
We could print out the groups as follows:
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 555

for ( String lastName : families.keySet() ) {

System.out.println("People with last name " + lastName + ":");
for ( Person name : families.get(lastName) ) {
System.out.println(" " + name.firstname + " " + name.lastname);
}
System.out.println();
}
Although the explanation is a bit long-winded, the result should be reasonably easy to
understand.

10.6.4 An Experiment
Most of the examples of using streams that I have given so far are not very practical. In most
cases, a simple for loop would have been just as easy to write and probably more efficient. That’s
especially true since I’ve mostly used sequential streams, and most of the examples cannot
be efficiently parallelized. (A notable exception is the reduce operation, which is important
precisely because it parallelizes well.) Let’s look at an example where the stream API is applied
to a long computation that might get some real speedup with parallelization. The problem is to
compute a Riemann sum. This is something from Calculus, but you don’t need to understand
anything at all about what it means. Here is a traditional method for computing the desired
sum:
/**
* Use a basic for loop to compute a Riemann sum.
* @param f The function that is to be summed.
* @param a The left endpoint of the interval over which f is summed.
* @param b The right endpoint.
* @param n The number of subdivisions of the interval.
* @return The value computed for the Riemann sum.
*/
private static double riemannSumWithForLoop(
DoubleUnaryOperator f, double a, double b, int n) {
double sum = 0;
double dx = (b - a) / n;
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
sum = sum + f.applyAsDouble(a + i*dx);
}
return sum * dx;
}
The type for the first parameter is a functional interface, so we could call this method, for
example, with
reimannSumWithForLoop( x -> Math.sin(x), 0, Math.PI, 10000 )
How can we apply the stream API to this problem? To imitate the for loop, we can start by
generating the integers from 0 to n as a stream, using IntStream.range(0,n). This gives a
sequential stream. To enable parallelism, we have to convert it to a parallel stream by applying
the .parallel() operation. To compute the values that we want to sum up, we can apply a
map operation that maps the stream of ints to a stream of doubles by mapping the integer i
to f.applyAsDouble(a+i*dx). Finally, we can apply sum() as the terminal operation. Here is
a version of the Riemann sum method that uses a parallel stream:
CHAPTER 10. GENERIC PROGRAMMING AND COLLECTION CLASSES 556

private static double riemannSumWithParallelStream(

DoubleUnaryOperator f, double a, double b, int n) {
double dx = (b - a) / n;
double sum = IntStream.range(0,n)
.parallel()
.mapToDouble( i -> f.applyAsDouble(a + i*dx) )
.sum();
return sum * dx;
}
I also wrote a version riemannSumWithSequentialStream(), that leaves out the .parallel()
operator. All three versions can be found in the sample program RiemannSumStreamExper-
iment.java. The main routine in that program calls each of the three methods, using various
values for n. It times how long each method takes to compute the sum, and reports the result.
As might be expected, I found that the version that uses a sequential stream is uniformly
slower than the other versions. The sequential stream version does essentially the same thing
as the for loop version, but with the extra overhead involved with creating and manipulating
streams. The situation for parallel streams is more interesting, and the results depend on the
machine on which the program is executed. On one old machine with four processors, the for
loop version was faster for n = 100,000, but the parallel version was much faster for 1,000,000
items or more. On another machine, the parallel version was faster for 10,000 or more items.
Note that there is a limit to how much faster the parallel version can be. On a machine with K
processors, the parallel version cannot be more than K times faster than the sequential version,
and will probably in reality be somewhat slower than that. I encourage you to try out the
sample program on your own computer!
It is even conceivable (or at least this is a goal of the stream API) that you have a machine
on which Java can run parallel code on your graphics card, making use of the many processors
that it contains. If that happens, you might see a very large speedup.
Exercises 557

Exercises for Chapter 10

1. Rewrite the PhoneDirectory class from Subsection 7.5.2 so that it uses a TreeMap to store (solution)
directory entries, instead of an array. (Doing this was suggested in Subsection 10.3.1.)
You should also write a short program to test the class.

2. In mathematics, several operations are defined on sets. The union of two sets A and B is (solution)
a set that contains all the elements that are in A together with all the elements that are
in B. The intersection of A and B is the set that contains elements that are in both A
and B. The difference of A and B is the set that contains all the elements of A except
for those elements that are also in B.
Suppose that A and B are variables of type Set in Java. The mathematical operations
on A and B can be computed using methods from the Set interface. In particular:
A.addAll(B) computes the union of A and B; A.retainAll(B) computes the intersection
of A and B; and A.removeAll(B) computes the difference of A and B. (These operations
change the contents of the set A, while the mathematical operations create a new set
without changing A, but that difference is not relevant to this exercise.)
For this exercise, you should write a program that can be used as a “set calculator” for
simple operations on sets of non-negative integers. (Negative integers are not allowed.) For
input and output, a set of such integers will be written as a list of integers, separated by
commas and, optionally, spaces and enclosed in square brackets. For example: [1,2,3] or
[17, 42, 9, 53, 108]. The characters +, *, and - will be used for the union, intersection,
and difference operations. The user of the program will type in lines of input containing
two sets, separated by an operator. The program should perform the operation and print
the resulting set. Here are some examples:
Input Output
------------------------- -------------------
[1, 2, 3] + [3, 5, 7] [1, 2, 3, 5, 7]
[10,9,8,7] * [2,4,6,8] [8]
[ 5, 10, 15, 20 ] - [ 0, 10, 20 ] [5, 15]
To represent sets of non-negative integers, use sets of type TreeSet<Integer>. Read the
user’s input, create two TreeSets, and use the appropriate TreeSet method to perform the
requested operation on the two sets. Your program should be able to read and process
any number of lines of input. If a line contains a syntax error, your program should not
crash. It should report the error and move on to the next line of input. (Note: To print
out a Set, A, of Integers, you can just say System.out.print(A). I’ve chosen the syntax
for sets to be the same as that used by the system for outputting a set.)

3. The fact that Java has a HashMap class means that no Java programmer has to write (solution)
an implementation of hash tables from scratch—unless, of course, that programmer is a
computer science student.
For this exercise, you should write a hash table in which both the keys and the values
are of type String. (This is not an exercise in generic programming; do not try to write a
generic class.) Write an implementation of hash tables from scratch. Define the following
methods: get(key), put(key,value), remove(key), containsKey(key), and size().
Remember that every object, obj, has a method obj.hashCode() that can be used for
computing a hash code for the object, so at least you don’t have to define your own hash
Exercises 558

function. Do not use any of Java’s built-in generic types; create your own linked lists
using nodes as covered in Subsection 9.2.2. However, you are not required to increase the
size of the table when it becomes too full.
You should also write a short program to test your solution.

4. A predicate is a boolean-valued function with one parameter. Java has the parameterized (solution)
functional interface Predicate<T>, from package java.util.function, to represent
predicates. The definition of Predicate<T> could be:
public interface Predicate<T> {
public boolean test( T obj );
}
The idea is that an object that implements this interface knows how to “test” objects
of type T in some way. Java already has some methods that use predicates, such as the
removeIf(p) method that is defined for any Collection. (See Subsection 10.6.1). However,
this exercise asks you to write a few similar methods yourself. Define a class that contains
the following generic static methods for working with predicate objects. The name of the
class should be Predicates, in analogy with the standard class Collections that provides
various static methods for working with collections. You should not use the stream API
for this exercise.
public static <T> void remove(Collection<T> coll, Predicate<T> pred)
// Remove every object, obj, from coll for which pred.test(obj)
// is true. (This does the same thing as coll.removeIf(pred).)
public static <T> void retain(Collection<T> coll, Predicate<T> pred)
// Remove every object, obj, from coll for which
// pred.test(obj) is false. (That is, retain the
// objects for which the predicate is true.)
public static <T> List<T> collect(Collection<T> coll, Predicate<T> pred)
// Return a List that contains all the objects, obj,
// from the collection, coll, such that pred.test(obj)
// is true.
public static <T> int find(ArrayList<T> list, Predicate<T> pred)
// Return the index of the first item in list
// for which the predicate is true, if any.
// If there is no such item, return -1.

5. This is a short exercise in using the stream API. Suppose that the class Score is defined (solution)
as
/**
* Data for one student about a score on a test.
*/
private record ScoreInfo(
String lastName,
String firstName,
int score
) { };
Exercises 559

defined here as a record class for convenience (see Section 7.4). And suppose that
scoreData is an array of ScoreInfos containing information about the scores of students
on a test. Use the stream API to do each of the following tasks:
• print the number of students (without using scoreData.length)
• print the average score for all of the students
• print the number of students who got an A (score greater than or equal to 90)
• use the collect() stream operation to create a List<String> that contains the names
of students whose score was less than 70; the names should be in the form first name
followed by last name
• print the names from the List that was generated in the previous task
• print out the students’ names and scores, ordered by last name
• print out the students’ names and scores, ordered by score
You can put all of the code in main() routine and include ScoreInfo as a nested class. Do
not use any for loops or other control structures. Do everything using the stream API.
For testing your code, you can use this array:
private static ScoreInfo[] scoreData = new ScoreInfo[] {
new ScoreInfo("Smith","John",70),
new ScoreInfo("Doe","Mary",85),
new ScoreInfo("Page","Alice",82),
new ScoreInfo("Cooper","Jill",97),
new ScoreInfo("Flintstone","Fred",66),
new ScoreInfo("Rubble","Barney",80),
new ScoreInfo("Smith","Judy",48),
new ScoreInfo("Dean","James",90),
new ScoreInfo("Russ","Joe",55),
new ScoreInfo("Wolfe","Bill",73),
new ScoreInfo("Dart","Mary",54),
new ScoreInfo("Rogers","Chris",78),
new ScoreInfo("Toole","Pat",51),
new ScoreInfo("Khan","Omar",93),
new ScoreInfo("Smith","Ann",95)
};

6. An example in Subsection 10.4.2 concerns the problem of making an index for a book. (solution)
A related problem is making a concordance for a document. A concordance lists every
word that occurs in the document, and for each word it gives the line number of every
line in the document where the word occurs. All the subroutines for creating an index
that were presented in Subsection 10.4.2 can also be used to create a concordance. The
only real difference is that the integers in a concordance are line numbers rather than page
numbers.
Write a program that can create a concordance. The document should be read from
an input file, and the concordance data should be written to an output file. You can use
the indexing subroutines from Subsection 10.4.2, modified to write the data to TextIO
instead of to System.out. (You will need to make these subroutines static.) The input
and output files should be selected by the user when the program is run. The sample
program WordCount.java, from Subsection 10.4.4, can be used as a model of how to use
files. That program also has a useful subroutine that reads one word from input.
Exercises 560

As you read the file, you want to take each word that you encounter and add it to the
concordance along with the current line number. Keeping track of the line numbers is one
of the trickiest parts of the problem. In an input file, the end of each line in the file is
marked by the newline character, ’\n’. Every time you encounter this character, you have
to add one to the line number. WordCount.java ignores ends of lines. Because you need
to find and count the end-of-line characters, your program cannot process the input file in
exactly the same way as does WordCount.java. Also, you will need to detect the end of
the file. The function TextIO.peek(), which is used to look ahead at the next character
in the input, returns the value TextIO.EOF at end-of-file, after all the characters in the
file have been read.
Because it is so common, don’t include the word “the” in your concordance. Also, do
not include words that have length less than 3.

7. The sample program SimpleInterpreter.java from Subsection 10.4.1 can carry out com- (solution)
mands of the form “let variable = expression” or “print expression”. That program can
handle expressions that contain variables, numbers, operators, and parentheses. Extend
the program so that it can also handle the standard mathematical functions sin, cos,
tan, abs, sqrt, and log. For example, the program should be able to evaluate an expres-
sion such as sin(3*x-7)+log(sqrt(y)), assuming that the variables x and y have been
given values. Note that the name of a function must be followed by an expression that is
enclosed in parentheses.
In the original program, a symbol table holds a value for each variable that has been
defined. In your program, you should add another type of symbol to the table to represent
standard functions. You can use the following nested enumerated type and class for this
purpose:
private enum Functions { SIN, COS, TAN, ABS, SQRT, LOG }
/**
* An object of this class represents one of the standard functions.
*/
private static class StandardFunction {
/**
* Tells which function this is.
*/
Functions functionCode;
/**
* Constructor creates an object to represent one of
* the standard functions
* @param code which function is represented.
*/
StandardFunction(Functions code) {
functionCode = code;
}
/**
* Finds the value of this function for the specified
* parameter value, x.
*/
double evaluate(double x) {
// (This uses the "switch expression" syntax)
Exercises 561

return switch(functionCode) {
case SIN -> Math.sin(x);
case COS -> Math.cos(x);
case TAN -> Math.tan(x);
case ABS -> Math.abs(x);
case SQRT -> Math.sqrt(x);
default -> Math.log(x);
};
}
} // end class StandardFunction
Add a symbol to the symbol table to represent each function. The key is the name
of the function and the value is an object of type StandardFunction that represents the
function. For example:
symbolTable.put("sin", new StandardFunction(Function.SIN));
In SimpleInterpreter.java, the symbol table is a map of type HashMap<String,Double>. It’s
not legal to use a StandardFunction as the value in such a map, so you will have to change
the type of the map. The map has to hold two different types of objects. The easy way
to make this possible is to create a map of type HashMap<String,Object>. (A better way
is to create a general type to represent objects that can be values in the symbol table,
and to define two subclasses of that class, one to represent variables and one to represent
standard functions, but for this exercise, you should do it the easy way.)
In your parser, when you encounter a word, you have to be able to tell whether it’s a
variable or a standard function. Look up the word in the symbol table. If the associated
object is non-null and is of type Double, then the word is a variable. If it is of type
StandardFunction, then the word is a function. Remember that you can test the type of
an object using the instanceof operator. For example: if (obj instanceof Double).
Quiz 562

Quiz on Chapter 10
(answers)

1. What is meant by generic programming and what is the alternative?

2. Why can’t you make an object of type LinkedList<int>? What should you do instead?

3. What is an iterator and why are iterators necessary for generic programming?

4. Suppose that integers is a variable of type Collection<Integer>. Write a code segment

that uses an iterator to compute the sum of all the integer values in the collection. Write
a second code segment that does the same thing using a for-each loop.

5. Interfaces such as List, Set, and Map define abstract data types. Explain what this means.

6. What is the fundamental property that distinguishes Sets from other types of Collections?

7. What is the essential difference in functionality between a TreeMap and a HashMap?

8. Explain what is meant by a hash code.

9. Modify the following Date class so that it implements the interface Comparable<Date>.
The ordering on objects of type Date should be the natural, chronological ordering.
class Date {
int month; // Month number in range 1 to 12.
int day; // Day number in range 1 to 31.
int year; // Year number.
Date(int m, int d, int y) {
month = m;
day = d;
year = y;
}
}
Also, rewrite the resulting Date class as a record class. (See Section 7.4.)

10. Suppose that syllabus is a variable of type TreeMap<Date,String>, where Date is the class
from the preceding exercise. Write a code segment that will write out the value string for
every key that is in the month of December, 2021.

11. Write a generic class Stack<T> that can be used to represent stacks of objects of type T.
The class should include methods push(), pop(), and isEmpty(). Inside the class, use
an ArrayList to hold the items on the stack.

12. Write a generic method, using a generic type parameter <T>, that replaces every occurrence
in an ArrayList<T> of a specified item with a specified replacement item. The list and the
two items are parameters to the method. Both items are of type T. Take into account
the fact that the item that is being replaced might be null. For a non-null item, use
equals() to do the comparison.

13. Suppose that words is an array of Strings. Explain what is done by the following code:
Quiz 563

long n = Arrays.stream(words)
.filter( w -> (w != null) )
.map( w -> w.toLowerCase() )
.distinct()
.count();

14. Use the stream API to print all the even integers from 2 to 20. Start with
IntStream.range and apply a filter operation.

15. Write a generic method countIf(c,t) with type parameter <T>, where the first parameter,
c, is of type Collection<T>, and the second parameter, p, is of type Predicate<T>. The
method should return the number of items in the collection for which the predicate is true.
Give two versions, one using a loop and the other using the stream API.
Chapter 11

Input/Output Streams, Files, and

Networking

Computer programs are only useful if they interact with the rest of the world in some
way. This interaction is referred to as input/output, or I/O (pronounced “eye-oh”). Up
until now, this book has concentrated on just one type of interaction: interaction with the
user, through either a graphical user interface or a command-line interface. But the user is
only one possible source of information and only one possible destination for information. We
have already encountered one other type of input/output, since TextIO can read data from files
and write data to files. However, Java has an input/output framework that provides much
more power and flexibility than does TextIO, and that covers other kinds of I/O in addition
to files. Most important, aside from files, is that it supports communication over network
connections. In Java, the most common type of input/output involving files and networks is
based on I/O streams, which are objects that support I/O commands that are similar to
those that you have already used. In fact, standard output (System.out) and standard input
(System.in) are examples of I/O streams. (Note that I/O streams are not streams in the sense
of the stream API that was covered in Section 10.6.)
Working with files and networks requires familiarity with exceptions, which were covered in
Section 8.3. Many of the subroutines that are used can throw checked exceptions, which require
mandatory exception handling. This generally means calling the subroutine in a try..catch
statement that can deal with the exception if one occurs. Effective network communication
also requires the use of threads, which will be covered in Chapter 12. We will look at the basic
networking API in this chapter, but we will return to the topic of threads and networking in
Section 12.4.

11.1 I/O Streams, Readers, and Writers

Without the ability to interact with the rest of the world, a program would be useless.
The interaction of a program with the rest of the world is referred to as input/output or I/O.
Historically, one of the hardest parts of programming language design has been coming up with
good facilities for doing input and output. A computer can be connected to many different
types of input and output devices. If a programming language had to deal with each type of
device as a special case, the complexity would be overwhelming. One of the major achievements
in the history of programming has been to come up with good abstractions for representing I/O
devices. In Java, the main I/O abstractions are called I/O streams. Other I/O abstractions,

565
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 566

such as “files” and “channels” also exist, but in this section we will look only at streams. Every
stream represents either a source of input or a destination to which output can be sent.

11.1.1 Character and Byte Streams

When dealing with input/output, you have to keep in mind that there are two broad categories
of data: machine-formatted data and human-readable text. Machine-formatted data is
represented in binary form, the same way that data is represented inside the computer, that is,
as strings of zeros and ones. Human-readable data is in the form of characters. When you read
a number such as 3.141592654, you are reading a sequence of characters and interpreting them
as a number. The same number would be represented in the computer as a bit-string that you
would find unrecognizable.
To deal with the two broad categories of data representation, Java has two broad categories
of streams: byte streams for machine-formatted data and character streams for human-
readable data. There are several predefined classes that represent streams of each type.
An object that outputs data to a byte stream belongs to one of the subclasses of the
abstract class OutputStream. Objects that read data from a byte stream belong to subclasses
of the abstract class InputStream. If you write numbers to an OutputStream, you won’t be able
to read the resulting data yourself. But the data can be read back into the computer with
an InputStream. The writing and reading of the data will be very efficient, since there is no
translation involved: the bits that are used to represent the data inside the computer are simply
copied to and from the streams.
For reading and writing human-readable character data, the main classes are the abstract
classes Reader and Writer. All character stream classes are subclasses of one of these. If a
number is to be written to a Writer stream, the computer must translate it into a human-
readable sequence of characters that represents that number. Reading a number from a Reader
stream into a numeric variable also involves a translation, from a character sequence into the
appropriate bit string. (Even if the data you are working with consists of characters in the first
place, such as words from a text editor, there might still be some translation. Characters are
stored in the computer as 16-bit Unicode values. For people who use the English alphabets,
character data is generally stored in files in ASCII code, which uses only 8 bits per character.
The Reader and Writer classes take care of this translation, and can also handle non-western
alphabets and characters in non-alphabetic written languages such as Chinese.)
Byte streams can be useful for direct machine-to-machine communication, and they can
sometimes be useful for storing data in files, especially when large amounts of data need to be
stored efficiently, such as in large databases. However, binary data is fragile in the sense that
its meaning is not self-evident. When faced with a long series of zeros and ones, you have to
know what information it is meant to represent and how that information is encoded before
you will be able to interpret it. Of course, the same is true to some extent for character data,
since characters, like any other kind of data, have to be coded as binary numbers to be stored
or processed by a computer. But the binary encoding of character data has been standardized
and is well understood, and data expressed in character form can be made meaningful to human
readers. The current trend seems to be towards increased use of character data, represented in
a way that will make its meaning as self-evident as possible. We’ll look at one way this is done
in Section 11.5.
I should note that the original version of Java did not have character streams, and that for
ASCII-encoded character data, byte streams are largely interchangeable with character streams.
In fact, the standard input and output streams, System.in and System.out, are byte streams
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 567

rather than character streams. However, you should prefer Readers and Writers rather than
InputStreams and OutputStreams when working with character data, even when working with
the standard ASCII character set.
The standard I/O stream classes discussed in this section are defined in the package java.io,
along with several supporting classes. You must import the classes from this package if you
want to use them in your program. That means either importing individual classes or putting
the directive “import java.io.*;” at the beginning of your source file. I/O streams are used
for working with files and for doing communication over a network. They can also be used
for communication between two concurrently running threads, and there are stream classes for
reading and writing data stored in the computer’s memory.
(Note: The Java API provides additional support for I/O in the package java.nio and its
subpackages, but they are not covered in this textbook. In general, java.nio gives programmers
efficient access to more advanced I/O techniques.)
The beauty of the stream abstraction is that it is as easy to write data to a file or to send
data over a network as it is to print information on the screen.
∗ ∗ ∗
The basic I/O classes Reader, Writer, InputStream, and OutputStream provide only very
primitive I/O operations. For example, the InputStream class declares an abstract instance
method
public int read() throws IOException
for reading one byte of data, as a number in the range 0 to 255, from an input stream.
If the end of the input stream is encountered, the read() method will return the value -1
instead. If some error occurs during the input attempt, an exception of type IOException is
thrown. Since IOException is a checked exception, this means that you can’t use the read()
method except inside a try statement or in a subroutine that is itself declared with a “throws
IOException” clause. (Checked exceptions and mandatory exception handling were covered in
Subsection 8.3.3.)
The InputStream class also defines methods for reading multiple bytes of data in one step into
an array of bytes, which can be a lot more efficient that reading individual bytes. However,
InputStream provides no convenient methods for reading other types of data, such as int or
double, from a stream. This is not a problem because you will rarely use an object of type
InputStream itself. Instead, you’ll use subclasses of InputStream that add more convenient input
methods to InputStream’s rather primitive capabilities. Similarly, the OutputStream class defines
a primitive output method for writing one byte of data to an output stream. The method is
defined as:
public void write(int b) throws IOException
The parameter is of type int rather than byte, but the parameter value is type-cast to type
byte before it is written; this effectively discards all but the eight low order bits of b. Again,
in practice, you will almost always use higher-level output operations defined in some subclass
of OutputStream.
The Reader and Writer classes provide the analogous low-level read and write methods.
As in the byte stream classes, the parameter of the write(c) method in Writer and the return
value of the read() method in Reader are of type int, but in these character-oriented classes,
the I/O operations read and write characters rather than bytes. The return value of read()
is -1 if the end of the input stream has been reached. Otherwise, the return value must be
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 568

type-cast to type char to obtain the character that was read. In practice, you will ordinarily use
higher level I/O operations provided by sub-classes of Reader and Writer, as discussed below.

11.1.2 PrintWriter
One of the neat things about Java’s I/O package is that it lets you add capabilities to a stream
by “wrapping” it in another stream object that provides those capabilities. The wrapper object
is also a stream, so you can read from or write to it—but you can do so using fancier operations
than those available for basic streams.
For example, PrintWriter is a subclass of Writer that provides convenient methods for
outputting human-readable character representations of all of Java’s basic data types. If you
have an object belonging to the Writer class, or any of its subclasses, and you would like to use
PrintWriter methods to output data to that Writer, all you have to do is wrap the Writer in a
PrintWriter object. You do this by constructing a new PrintWriter object, using the Writer as
input to the constructor. For example, if charSink is of type Writer, then you could say
PrintWriter printableCharSink = new PrintWriter(charSink);
In fact, the parameter to the constructor can also be an OutputStream or a File, and the
constructor will build a PrintWriter that can write to that output destination. (Files are covered
in the next section.) When you output data to the PrintWriter printableCharSink, using the
high-level output methods in PrintWriter, that data will go to exactly the same place as data
written directly to charSink. You’ve just provided a better interface to the same output
destination. For example, this allows you to use PrintWriter methods to send data to a file or
over a network connection.
For the record, if out is a variable of type PrintWriter, then the following methods are
defined:
• out.print(x) — prints the value of x, represented in the form of a string of characters,
to the output stream; x can be an expression of any type, including both primitive types
and object types. An object is converted to string form using its toString() method. A
null value is represented by the string “null”.
• out.println() — outputs an end-of-line to the output stream.
• out.println(x) — outputs the value of x, followed by an end-of-line; this is equivalent
to out.print(x) followed by out.println().
• out.printf(formatString, x1, x2, ...) — does formatted output of x1, x2, ... to
the output stream. The first parameter is a string that specifies the format of the output.
There can be any number of additional parameters, of any type, but the types of the
parameters must match the formatting directives in the format string. Formatted output
for the standard output stream, System.out, was introduced in Subsection 2.4.1, and
out.printf has the same functionality.
• out.flush() — ensures that characters that have been written with the above methods
are actually sent to the output destination. In some cases, notably when writing to a file
or to the network, it might be necessary to call this method to force the output to actually
appear at the destination.
Note that none of these methods will ever throw an IOException. Instead, the PrintWriter
class includes the method
public boolean checkError()
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 569

which will return true if any error has been encountered while writing to the stream. The
PrintWriter class catches any IOExceptions internally, and sets the value of an internal error flag
if one occurs. The checkError() method can be used to check the error flag. This allows you
to use PrintWriter methods without worrying about catching exceptions. On the other hand, to
write a fully robust program, you should call checkError() to test for possible errors whenever
you use a PrintWriter.

11.1.3 Data Streams

When you use a PrintWriter to output data to a stream, the data is converted into the sequence
of characters that represents the data in human-readable form. Suppose you want to output
the data in byte-oriented, machine-formatted form. The java.io package includes a byte-
stream class, DataOutputStream, that can be used for writing data values to streams in internal,
binary-number format. DataOutputStream bears the same relationship to OutputStream that
PrintWriter bears to Writer. That is, whereas OutputStream only has methods for outputting
bytes, DataOutputStream has methods writeDouble(double x) for outputting values of type
double, writeInt(int x) for outputting values of type int, and so on. Furthermore, you can
wrap any OutputStream in a DataOutputStream so that you can use the higher level output
methods on it. For example, if byteSink is of type OutputStream, you could say
DataOutputStream dataSink = new DataOutputStream(byteSink);
to wrap byteSink in a DataOutputStream.
For input of machine-readable data, such as that created by writing to a DataOutputStream,
java.io provides the class DataInputStream. You can wrap any InputStream in a DataIn-
putStream object to provide it with the ability to read data of various types from the byte-
stream. The methods in the DataInputStream for reading binary data are called readDouble(),
readInt(), and so on. Data written by a DataOutputStream is guaranteed to be in a format
that can be read by a DataInputStream. This is true even if the data stream is created on one
type of computer and read on another type of computer. The cross-platform compatibility of
binary data is a major aspect of Java’s platform independence.
In some circumstances, you might need to read character data from an InputStream or write
character data to an OutputStream. This is not a problem, since characters, like all data, are
ultimately represented as binary numbers. However, for character data, it is convenient to use
Reader and Writer instead of InputStream and OutputStream. To make this possible, you can
wrap a byte stream in a character stream. If byteSource is a variable of type InputStream and
byteSink is of type OutputStream, then the statements
Reader charSource = new InputStreamReader( byteSource );
Writer charSink = new OutputStreamWriter( byteSink );
create character streams that can be used to read character data from and write character
data to the byte streams. In particular, the standard input stream System.in, which is of
type InputStream for historical reasons, can be wrapped in a Reader to make it easier to read
character data from standard input:
Reader charIn = new InputStreamReader( System.in );
As another application, the input and output streams that are associated with a network
connection are byte streams rather than character streams, but the byte streams can be wrapped
in character streams to make it easy to send and receive character data over the network. We
will encounter network I/O in Section 11.4.
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 570

There are various ways for characters to be encoded as binary data. A particular encoding is
known as a charset or character set. Charsets have standardized names such as “UTF-16,”
“UTF-8,” and “ISO-8859-1.” In UTF-16, characters are encoded as 16-bit UNICODE values;
this is the character set that is used internally by Java. UTF-8 is a way of encoding UNICODE
characters using 8 bits for common ASCII characters and longer codes for other characters.
ISO-8859-1, also known as “Latin-1,” is an 8-bit encoding that includes ASCII characters as
well as certain accented characters that are used in several European languages. Readers and
Writers use the default charset for the computer on which they are running, unless you specify
a different one. That can be done, for example, in a constructor such as
Writer charSink = new OutputStreamWriter( byteSink, "ISO-8859-1" );
Certainly, the existence of a variety of charset encodings has made text processing more
complicated—unfortunate for us English-speakers but essential for people who use non-Western
character sets. Ordinarily, you don’t have to worry about this, but it’s a good idea to be aware
that different charsets exist in case you run into textual data encoded in a non-default way.

11.1.4 Reading Text

Much I/O is done in the form of human-readable characters. In view of this, it is surprising
that Java does not provide a standard character input class that can read character data in
a manner that is reasonably symmetrical with the character output capabilities of PrintWriter.
The Scanner class, introduced briefly in Subsection 2.4.6 and covered in more detail below,
comes pretty close, but Scanner is not a subclass of any I/O stream class, which means that it
doesn’t fit neatly into the I/O stream framework. There is one basic case that is easily handled
by the standard class BufferedReader, which has a method
public String readLine() throws IOException
that reads one line of text from its input source. If the end of the stream has been reached, the
return value is null. When a line of text is read, the end-of-line marker is read from the input
stream, but it is not part of the string that is returned. Different input streams use different
characters as end-of-line markers, but the readLine method can deal with all the common cases.
(Traditionally, Unix computers, including Linux and MacOS, use a line feed character, ’\n’,
to mark an end of line; classic Macintosh used a carriage return character, ’\r’; and Windows
uses the two-character sequence “\r\n”. In general, modern computers can deal correctly with
all of these possibilities.)
BufferedReader also defines the instance method lines() which returns a value of type
Stream<String> that can be used with the stream API (Section 10.6). A convenient way to
process all the lines from a BufferedReader, reader, is to use the forEachOrdered() operator on
the stream of lines: reader.lines().forEachOrdered(action), where action is a consumer
of strings, usually given as a lambda expression.
Line-by-line processing is very common. Any Reader can be wrapped in a BufferedReader
to make it easy to read full lines of text. If reader is of type Reader, then a BufferedReader
wrapper can be created for reader with
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader( reader );
This can be combined with the InputStreamReader class that was mentioned above to read lines
of text from an InputStream. For example, we can apply this to System.in:
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 571

BufferedReader in; // BufferedReader for reading from standard input.

in = new BufferedReader( new InputStreamReader( System.in ) );
try {
String line = in.readLine();
while ( line != null ) {
processOneLineOfInput( line );
line = in.readLine();
}
}
catch (IOException e) {
}
This code segment reads and processes lines from standard input until an end-of-stream is
encountered. (An end-of-stream is possible even for interactive input. For example, on at least
some computers, typing a Control-D generates an end-of-stream on the standard input stream.)
The try..catch statement is necessary because the readLine method can throw an exception of
type IOException, which requires mandatory exception handling; an alternative to try..catch
would be to declare that the method that contains the code “throws IOException”. Also,
remember that BufferedReader, InputStreamReader, and IOException must be imported from the
package java.io.
Note that the main purpose of BufferedReader is not simply to make it easier to read lines
of text. Some I/O devices work most efficiently if data is read or written in large chunks,
instead of as individual bytes or characters. A BufferedReader reads a chunk of data, and stores
it in internal memory. The internal memory is known as a buffer . When you read from the
BufferedReader, it will take data from the buffer if possible, and it will only go back to its input
source for more data when the buffer is emptied. There is also a BufferedWriter class, and there
are buffered stream classes for byte streams as well.
∗ ∗ ∗
Previously in this book, we have used the non-standard class TextIO for input both from
users and from files. The advantage of TextIO is that it makes it fairly easy to read data values
of any of the primitive types. Disadvantages include the fact that TextIO can only read from
one input source at a time and that it does not follow the same pattern as Java’s built-in
input/output classes. (If you like the style of input used by TextIO, you might take a look at
my TextReader.java, which implements a similar style of input in a more object-oriented way.
TextReader was used in previous versions of this textbook but is not used in this version.)

11.1.5 The Scanner Class

Since its introduction, Java has been notable for its lack of built-in support for basic input, or
at least for its reliance on fairly advanced techniques for the support that it does offer. (This
is my opinion, at least.) The Scanner class was introduced to make it easier to read basic data
types from a character input source. It does not (again, in my opinion) solve the problem
completely, but it is a big improvement. The Scanner class is in the package java.util. It was
introduced in Subsection 2.4.6, but has not seen much use since then in this textbook. From
now on, however, most of my examples will use Scanner instead of TextIO.
Input routines are defined as instance methods in the Scanner class, so to use the class, you
need to create a Scanner object. The constructor specifies the source of the characters that
the Scanner will read. The scanner acts as a wrapper for the input source. The source can be
a Reader, an InputStream, a String, or a File, among other possibilities. If a String is used as
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 572

the input source, the Scanner will simply read the characters in the string from beginning to
end, in the same way that it would process the same sequence of characters from a stream. For
example, you can use a Scanner to read from standard input by saying:
Scanner standardInputScanner = new Scanner( System.in );
and if charSource is of type Reader, you can create a Scanner for reading from charSource
with:
Scanner scanner = new Scanner( charSource );
When processing input, a scanner usually works with tokens. A token is a meaningful
string of characters that cannot, for the purposes at hand, be further broken down into smaller
meaningful pieces. A token can, for example, be an individual word or a string of characters
that represents a value of type double. In the case of a scanner, tokens must be separated by
“delimiters.” By default, the delimiters are whitespace characters such as spaces, tabs, and end-
of-line markers. In normal processing, whitespace characters serve simply to separate tokens
and are discarded by the scanner. A scanner has instance methods for reading tokens of various
types. Suppose that scanner is an object of type Scanner. Then we have:
• scanner.next() — reads the next token from the input source and returns it as a String.
• scanner.nextInt(), scanner.nextDouble(), and so on — read the next token from the
input source and tries to convert it to a value of type int, double, and so on. There are
methods for reading values of any of the primitive types.
• scanner.nextLine() — reads an entire line from the input source, up to the next end-of-
line, and returns the line as a value of type String. The end-of-line marker is read but is
not part of the return value. Note that this method is not based on tokens. An entire line
is read and returned, including any whitespace characters in the line. The return value
can be the empty string.
All of these methods can generate exceptions. If an attempt is made to read past the
end of input, an exception of type NoSuchElementException is thrown. Methods such as
scanner.getInt() will throw an exception of type InputMismatchException if the next token
in the input does not represent a value of the requested type. The exceptions that can be
generated do not require mandatory exception handling.
The Scanner class has very nice look-ahead capabilities. You can query a scanner to
determine whether more tokens are available and whether the next token is of a given type. If
scanner is of type Scanner :
• scanner.hasNext() — returns a boolean value that is true if there is at least one more
token in the input source.
• scanner.hasNextInt(), scanner.hasNextDouble(), and so on — return a boolean value
that is true if there is at least one more token in the input source and that token represents
a value of the requested type.
• scanner.hasNextLine() — returns a boolean value that is true if there is at least one
more line in the input source.
Although the insistence on defining tokens only in terms of delimiters limits the usability
of scanners to some extent, they are easy to use and are suitable for many applications. With
so many input classes available—BufferedReader, TextIO, Scanner —you might have trouble
deciding which one to use! In general, I would recommend using a Scanner unless you have some
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 573

particular reason for preferring TextIO-style input. BufferedReader can be used as a lightweight
alternative when all that you want to do is read entire lines of text from the input source.
(It is possible to change the delimiter that is used by a Scanner, but the syntax uses
something called “regular expressions.” Unfortunately, the syntax for regular expressions is
rather complicated, and they are not covered in this book. However, as an example, suppose
you want tokens to be words that consist entirely of letters of the English alphabet. In that
case, delimiters should include all non-letter characters. If you want a Scanner, scnr, to use
that kind of delimiter, you can say: scnr.useDelimiter("[^a-zA-Z]+"). After that, tokens
returned by scnr.next() will consist entirely of letters. The string "[^a-zA-Z]+" is a regular
expression. Regular expressions are an important tool for a working programmer. If you have
a chance to learn about them, you should do so.)

11.1.6 Serialized Object I/O

The classes PrintWriter, Scanner, DataInputStream, and DataOutputStream allow you to easily
input and output all of Java’s primitive data types. But what happens when you want to read
and write objects? Traditionally, you would have to come up with some way of encoding
your object as a sequence of data values belonging to the primitive types, which can then be
output as bytes or characters. This is called serializing the object. On input, you have to
read the serialized data and somehow reconstitute a copy of the original object. For complex
objects, this can all be a major chore. However, you can get Java to do a lot of the work for
you by using the classes ObjectInputStream and ObjectOutputStream. These are subclasses of
InputStream and OutputStream that can be used for reading and writing serialized objects.
ObjectInputStream and ObjectOutputStream are wrapper classes that can be wrapped around
arbitrary InputStreams and OutputStreams. This makes it possible to do object input and output
on any byte stream. The methods for object I/O are readObject(), in ObjectInputStream,
and writeObject(Object obj), in ObjectOutputStream. Both of these methods can throw
IOExceptions. Note that readObject() returns a value of type Object, which generally has to
be type-cast to the actual type of the object that was read.
ObjectOutputStream also has methods writeInt(), writeDouble(), and so on, for
outputting primitive type values to the stream, and ObjectInputStream has corresponding
methods for reading primitive type values. These primitive type values can be interspersed
with objects in the data. In the file, the primitive types will be represented in their internal
binary format.
Object streams are byte streams. The objects are represented in binary, machine-readable
form. This is good for efficiency, but it does suffer from the fragility that is often seen in
binary data. They suffer from the additional problem that the binary format of Java objects is
very specific to Java, so the data in object streams is not easily available to programs written
in other programming languages. For these reasons, object streams are appropriate mostly
for short-term storage of objects and for transmitting objects over a network connection from
one Java program to another. For long-term storage and for communication with non-Java
programs, other approaches to object serialization are usually better. (See Section 11.5 for a
character-based approach. See Subsection 12.5.1 for an example that uses object streams for
network communication.)
ObjectInputStream and ObjectOutputStream only work with objects that implement an
interface named Serializable. Furthermore, all of the instance variables in the object must
be serializable. However, there is little work involved in making an object serializable, since the
Serializable interface does not declare any methods. It exists only as a marker for the compiler,
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 574

to tell it that the object is meant to be writable and readable. You only need to add the words
“implements Serializable” to your class definitions. Many of Java’s standard classes are
already declared to be serializable.
One warning about using ObjectOutputStreams: These streams are optimized to avoid
writing the same object more than once. When an object is encountered for a second time, only
a reference to the first occurrence is written. Unfortunately, if the object has been modified in
the meantime, the new data will not be written. That is, the modified value will not be written
correctly to the stream. Because of this, ObjectOutputStreams are meant mainly for use with
“immutable” objects that can’t be changed after they are created. (Strings are an example of
this.) However, if you do need to write mutable objects to an ObjectOutputStream, and if it
is possible that you will write the same object more than once, you can ensure that the full,
correct version of the object will be written by calling the stream’s reset() method before
writing the object to the stream.

11.2 Files
The data and programs in a computer’s main memory survive only as long as the power
is on. For more permanent storage, computers use files, which are collections of data stored
on a hard disk, on a USB memory stick, on a CD-ROM, or on some other type of storage
device. Files are organized into directories (also called folders). A directory can hold other
directories, as well as files. Both directories and files have names that are used to identify them.
Programs can read data from existing files. They can create new files and can write data
to files. In Java, such input and output can be done using I/O streams. Human-readable
character data can be read from a file using an object belonging to the class FileReader, which
is a subclass of Reader. Similarly, data can be written to a file in human-readable format through
an object of type FileWriter, a subclass of Writer. For files that store data in machine format,
the appropriate I/O classes are FileInputStream and FileOutputStream. In this section, I will
only discuss character-oriented file I/O using the FileReader and FileWriter classes. However,
FileInputStream and FileOutputStream are used in an exactly parallel fashion. All these classes
are defined in the java.io package.

11.2.1 Reading and Writing Files

The FileReader class has a constructor which takes the name of a file as a parameter and creates
an input stream that can be used for reading from that file. This constructor will throw an
exception of type FileNotFoundException if the file doesn’t exist. For example, suppose you have
a file named “data.txt”, and you want your program to read data from that file. You could
do the following to create an input stream for the file:
FileReader data; // (Declare the variable before the
// try statement, or else the variable
// is local to the try block and you won’t
// be able to use it later in the program.)
try {
data = new FileReader("data.txt"); // create the stream
}
catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
... // do something to handle the error---maybe, end the program
}
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 575

The FileNotFoundException class is a subclass of IOException, so it would be acceptable to

catch IOExceptions in the above try...catch statement. More generally, just about any error
that can occur during input/output operations can be caught by a catch clause that handles
IOException.
Once you have successfully created a FileReader, you can start reading data from it. But
since FileReaders have only the primitive input methods inherited from the basic Reader class,
you will probably want to wrap your FileReader in a Scanner, in a BufferedReader, or in some
other wrapper class. (See the previous section for a discussion of BufferedReader and Scanner.)
To create a BufferedReader for reading from a file named data.dat, you could say:
BufferedReader data;
try {
data = new BufferedReader( new FileReader("data.dat") );
}
catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
... // handle the exception
}
Wrapping a Reader in a BufferedReader lets you easily read lines of text from the file, and the
buffering can make the input more efficient.
To use a Scanner to read from the file, you can construct the scanner in a similar way.
However, it is more common to construct it more directly from an object of type File (to be
covered below):
Scanner in;
try {
in = new Scanner( new File("data.dat") );
}
catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
... // handle the exception
}
Working with output files is no more difficult than this. You simply create an object
belonging to the class FileWriter. You will probably want to wrap this output stream in an object
of type PrintWriter. For example, suppose you want to write data to a file named “result.dat”.
Since the constructor for FileWriter can throw an exception of type IOException, you should use
a try..catch statement:
PrintWriter result;
try {
result = new PrintWriter(new FileWriter("result.dat"));
}
catch (IOException e) {
... // handle the exception
}
However, as with Scanner, it is more common to use a constructor that takes a File as parameter;
this will automatically wrap the File in a FileWriter before creating the PrintWriter:
PrintWriter result;
try {
result = new PrintWriter(new File("result.dat"));
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 576

}
catch (IOException e) {
... // handle the exception
}
You can even use just a String as the parameter to the constructor, and it will be interpreted as
a file name (but you should remember that a String in the Scanner constructor does not name
a file; instead the scanner will read characters from the string itself).
If no file named result.dat exists, a new file will be created. If the file already exists, then
the current contents of the file will be erased and replaced with the data that your program
writes to the file. This will be done without any warning. To avoid overwriting a file that
already exists, you can check whether a file of the same name already exists before trying
to create the stream, as discussed later in this section. An IOException might occur in the
PrintWriter constructor if, for example, you are trying to create a file on a disk that is “write-
protected,” meaning that it cannot be modified.
When you are finished with a PrintWriter, you should call its flush() method, such as
“result.flush()”, to make sure that all the output has been sent to its destination. If you
forget to do this, you might find that some of the data that you have written to a file output
stream has not actually shown up in the file.
After you are finished using a file, it’s a good idea to close the file, to tell the operating
system that you are finished using it. You can close a file by calling the close() method of
the associated PrintWriter, BufferedReader, or Scanner. Once a file has been closed, it is no
longer possible to read data from it or write data to it, unless you open it again as a new I/O
stream. (Note that for most I/O stream classes, including BufferedReader the close() method
can throw an IOException, which must be handled; however, PrintWriter and Scanner override
this method so that it cannot throw such exceptions.) If you forget to close a file, the file
will ordinarily be closed automatically when the program terminates or when the file object
is garbage collected, but it is better not to depend on this. Note that calling close() should
automatically call flush() before the file is closed. (I have seen that fail, but not recently.)
As a complete example, here is a program that will read numbers from a file named
data.dat, and will then write out the same numbers in reverse order to another file named
result.dat. It is assumed that data.dat contains only real numbers. The input file is read
using a Scanner. Exception-handling is used to check for problems along the way. Although the
application is not a particularly useful one, this program demonstrates the basics of working
with files.
import java.io.*;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Scanner;
/**
* Reads numbers from a file named data.dat and writes them to a file
* named result.dat in reverse order. The input file should contain
* only real numbers.
*/
public class ReverseFileWithScanner {
public static void main(String[] args) {
Scanner data; // For reading the data.
PrintWriter result; // Character output stream for writing data.
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 577

ArrayList<Double> numbers; // An ArrayList for holding the data.

numbers = new ArrayList<Double>();
try { // Create the input stream.
data = new Scanner(new File("data.dat"));
}
catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
System.out.println("Can’t find file data.dat!");
return; // End the program by returning from main().
}
try { // Create the output stream.
result = new PrintWriter("result.dat");
}
catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
System.out.println("Can’t open file result.dat!");
System.out.println("Error: " + e);
data.close(); // Close the input file.
return; // End the program.
}
while ( data.hasNextDouble() ) { // Read until end-of-file.
double inputNumber = data.nextDouble();
numbers.add( inputNumber );
}
// Output the numbers in reverse order.
for (int i = numbers.size()-1; i >= 0; i--)
result.println(numbers.get(i));
System.out.println("Done!");
data.close();
result.close();
} // end of main()
} // end class ReverseFileWithScanner
Note that this program will simply stop reading data from the file if it encounters anything
other than a number in the input. That will not be considered to be an error.
∗ ∗ ∗
As mentioned at the end of Subsection 8.3.2, the pattern of creating or opening a “resource,”
using it, and then closing the resource is a very common one, and the pattern is supported by
the syntax of the try..catch statement. Files are resources in this sense, as are Scanner,
PrintWriter, and all of Java’s I/O streams. All of these things define close() methods, and
it is good form to close them when you are finished using them. Since they all implement
the AutoCloseable interface, they are all resources in the sense required by try..catch. A
try..catch statement can be used to automatically close a resource when the try statement
ends, which eliminates the need to close it by hand in a finally clause. This assumes that you
will open the resource and use it in the same try..catch.
As an example, the sample program ReverseFileWithResources.java is another version of
the example we have been looking at. In this case, try..catch statements using the resource
pattern are used to read the data from a file and to write the data to a file. My original
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 578

program opened a file in one try statement and used it in another try statement. The resource
pattern requires that it all be done in one try, which requires some reorganization of the code
(and can sometimes make it harder to determine the exact cause of an exception). Here is the
try..catch statement from the sample program that opens the input file, reads from it, and
closes it automatically.
try( Scanner data = new Scanner(new File("data.dat")) ) {
// Read numbers, adding them to the ArrayList.
while ( data.hasNextDouble() ) { // Read until end-of-file.
double inputNumber = data.nextDouble();
numbers.add( inputNumber );
}
}
catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
// Can be caused if file does not exist or can’t be read.
System.out.println("Can’t open input file data.dat!");
System.out.println("Error: " + e);
return; // Return from main(), since an error has occurred.
}
The resource, data, is constructed on the first line. The syntax requires a declaration of the
resource with an initial value, in parentheses after the word “try.” It’s possible to have several
resource declarations, separated by semicolons. They will be closed in the order opposite to the
order in which they are declared.

11.2.2 Files and Directories

The subject of file names is actually more complicated than I’ve let on so far. To fully specify
a file, you have to give both the name of the file and the name of the directory where that
file is located. A simple file name like “data.dat” or “result.dat” is taken to refer to a file in
a directory that is called the current directory (also known as the “default directory” or
“working directory”). The current directory is not a permanent thing. It can be changed by
the user or by a program. Files not in the current directory must be referred to by a path
name, which includes both the name of the file and information about the directory where it
can be found.
To complicate matters even further, there are two types of path names, absolute path
names and relative path names. An absolute path name uniquely identifies one file among
all the files available to the computer. It contains full information about which directory the
file is in and what the file’s name is. A relative path name tells the computer how to locate the
file starting from the current directory.
Unfortunately, the syntax for file names and path names varies somewhat from one type of
computer to another. Here are some examples:
• data.dat — on any computer, this would be a file named “data.dat” in the current
directory.
• /home/eck/java/examples/data.dat — This is an absolute path name in a UNIX
operating system, including Linux and MacOS X. It refers to a file named data.dat in
a directory named examples, which is in turn in a directory named java, . . . .
• C:\eck\java\examples\data.dat — An absolute path name on a Windows computer.
• examples/data.dat — a relative path name under UNIX; “examples” is the name
of a directory that is contained within the current directory, and data.dat is a file
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 579

in that directory. The corresponding relative path name for Windows would be
examples\data.dat.
• ../examples/data.dat — a relative path name in UNIX that means “go to the directory
that contains the current directory, then go into a directory named examples inside that
directory, and look there for a file named data.dat.” In general, “..” means “go up one
directory.” The corresponding path on Windows is ..\examples\data.dat.
When working on the command line, it’s safe to say that if you stick to using simple file names
only, and if the files are stored in the same directory with the program that will use them, then
you will be OK. Later in this section, we’ll look at a convenient way of letting the user specify
a file in a GUI program, which allows you to avoid the issue of path names altogether.
It is possible for a Java program to find out the absolute path names for two important
directories, the current directory and the user’s home directory. The names of these directories
are system properties, and they can be read using the function calls:
• System.getProperty("user.dir") — returns the absolute path name of the current
directory as a String.
• System.getProperty("user.home") — returns the absolute path name of the user’s home
directory as a String.
To avoid some of the problems caused by differences in path names between platforms, Java
has the class java.io.File. An object belonging to this class does not actually represent a
file! Precisely speaking, an object of type File represents a file name rather than a file as such.
The file to which the name refers might or might not exist. Directories are treated in the same
way as files, so a File object can represent a directory just as easily as it can represent a file.
A File object has a constructor, “new File(String)”, that creates a File object from a path
name. The name can be a simple name, a relative path, or an absolute path. For example,
new File("data.dat") creates a File object that refers to a file named data.dat, in the current
directory. Another constructor, “new File(File,String)”, has two parameters. The first is a
File object that refers to a directory. The second can be the name of the file in that directory
or a relative path from that directory to the file.
File objects contain several useful instance methods. Assuming that file is a variable of
type File, here are some of the methods that are available:
• file.exists() — This boolean-valued function returns true if the file named by the
File object already exists. You can use this method if you want to avoid overwriting the
contents of an existing file when you create a new output stream. The boolean function
file.canRead() returns true if the file exists and the program has permission to read the
file. And file.canWrite() is true if the program has permission to write to the file.
• file.isDirectory() — This boolean-valued function returns true if the File object
refers to a directory. It returns false if it refers to a regular file or if no file with the given
name exists.
• file.delete() — Deletes the file, if it exists. Returns a boolean value to indicate whether
the file was successfully deleted.
• file.list() — If the File object refers to a directory, this function returns an array of
type String[] containing the names of the files in that directory. Otherwise, it returns
null. The method file.listFiles() is similar, except that it returns an array of File
instead of an array of String.
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 580

Here, for example, is a program that will list the names of all the files in a directory specified
by the user. In this example, I have used a Scanner to read the user’s input:
import java.io.File;
import java.util.Scanner;
/**
* This program lists the files in a directory specified by
* the user. The user is asked to type in a directory name.
* If the name entered by the user is not a directory, a
* message is printed and the program ends.
*/
public class DirectoryList {

public static void main(String[] args) {

String directoryName; // Directory name entered by the user.
File directory; // File object referring to the directory.
String[] files; // Array of file names in the directory.
Scanner scanner; // For reading a line of input from the user.
scanner = new Scanner(System.in); // scanner reads from standard input.
System.out.print("Enter a directory name: ");
directoryName = scanner.nextLine().trim();
directory = new File(directoryName);
if (directory.isDirectory() == false) {
if (directory.exists() == false)
System.out.println("There is no such directory!");
else
System.out.println("That file is not a directory.");
}
else {
files = directory.list();
System.out.println("Files in directory \"" + directory + "\":");
for (int i = 0; i < files.length; i++)
System.out.println(" " + files[i]);
}
} // end main()
} // end class DirectoryList
All the classes that are used for reading data from files and writing data to files have
constructors that take a File object as a parameter. For example, if file is a variable of type
File, and you want to read character data from that file, you can create a FileReader to do so
by saying new FileReader(file).

11.2.3 File Dialog Boxes

In many programs, you want the user to be able to select the file that is going to be used for
input or output. If your program lets the user type in the file name, you will just have to
assume that the user understands how to work with files and directories. But in a graphical
user interface, the user expects to be able to select files using a file dialog box , which is a
window that a program can open when it wants the user to select a file for input or output.
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 581

JavaFX includes a platform-independent technique for using file dialog boxes in the form of a
class called FileChooser, in package javafx.stage.
A file dialog box shows the user a list of files and sub-directories in some directory, and
makes it easy for the user to specify a file in that directory. The user can also navigate easily
from one directory to another. The constructor for FileChooser has no parameter. Constructing
a FileChooser object does not make the dialog box appear on the screen. You have to call a
method in the object to do that. Often, before showing the dialog box, you will call instance
methods in the FileChooser object to set some properties of the dialog box. For example, you
can set the file name that is shown to the user as a default initial value for the file.
A file dialog box can have an “owner,” which is a window. In JavaFX, that means an object
of type Stage. Until the dialog box is dismissed by the user—either by canceling the dialog or
selecting a file—all interaction with the owner window is blocked. The owner can be specified
as a parameter to the method that opens the dialog. The owner can be null, which will mean
that no window is blocked.
There are two types of file dialog: an open file dialog that allows the user to specify an
existing file to be opened for reading data into the program; and a save file dialog that lets
the user specify a file, which might or might not already exist, to be opened for output. A
FileChooser has two instance methods for showing the two kinds of dialog box on the screen.
Suppose that fileDialog is a variable of type FileChooser. Then the following methods are
available:
• fileDialog.showOpenDialog(window) — shows an open file dialog box on the screen.
The parameter specifies the owner of the dialog box. This method does not return until
the user has selected a file or canceled the dialog without selecting a file. The method
returns a value of type File. The return value is null if the user canceled the dialog box.
Otherwise, it returns a File object representing the selected file.
• fileDialog.showSaveDialog(window) — shows a save file dialog box, with owner equal
to window. The parameter and return value are the same as for showOpenDialog(). If
the user selects a file that already exists, the system will automatically ask whether the
user wants to replace that file. So, you can safely go ahead and save the specified file.
• fileDialog.setTitle(title) — specifies a title to appear in the title bar of the dialog
box. The parameter is a string. This method must be called before showing the dialog
box.
• fileDialog.setInitialFileName(name) — sets the name that appears as a default name
in the input box for the file name. The parameter is a string. If the parameter is null,
the input box will be empty; that is also the default. This method must be called before
showing the dialog box.
• fileDialog.setInitialDirectory(directory) — sets the directory that is shown in
the dialog box when it first appears. The parameter is of type File. If the parameter is
null, the initial directory will be a system-dependent default (possibly the directory from
which the program was run). If the parameter is not null, it must be a File object that
represents a directory, not a regular file, or an error will occur. This method must be
called before showing the dialog box.
A typical program has “Save” and “Open” commands for working with files. When the
user selects a file for saving or opening, it can be a good idea to store the selected File object
in an instance variable. Later, that file can be used to initialize the directory and possibly the
file name the next time a file dialog box is created. If editFile is the instance variable that
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 582

records the selected file, and if it is non-null, then editFile.getName() is a String giving the
name of the file, and editFile.getParent() is a File representing the directory that contains
the file.
This leaves open one question: what to do when an error occurs while reading or writing
the selected file? The error should be caught, and the user should be informed that an error
occurred. In a GUI program, the natural way to do that is with another dialog box that shows
an error message to the user and has an “OK” button for dismissing the dialog. Dialog boxes
were not covered in Chapter 6, but some common simple dialog boxes can be shown using
objects of type Alert, from package javafx.scene.control. (See Subsection 13.4.1 for more
about alerts.) Here is how to show an error message to the user:
Alert errorAlert = new Alert( Alert.AlertType.ERROR, message );
errorAlert.showAndWait();
Putting all this together, we can look at a typical subroutine that saves data to a file. The
file is selected using a FileChooser. In this example, the data is written in text form, using a
PrintWriter :
private void doSave() {
FileChooser fileDialog = new FileChooser();
if (editFile == null) {
// No file is being edited. Set file name to "filename.txt"
// and set the directory to the user’s home directory.
fileDialog.setInitialFileName("filename.txt");
fileDialog.setInitialDirectory(
new File( System.getProperty("user.home")) );
}
else {
// Get the file name and directory for the dialog from
// the file that is currently being edited.
fileDialog.setInitialFileName(editFile.getName());
fileDialog.setInitialDirectory(editFile.getParentFile());
}
fileDialog.setTitle("Select File to be Saved");
File selectedFile = fileDialog.showSaveDialog(mainWindow);
if ( selectedFile == null )
return; // User did not select a file.
// Note: User has selected a file AND, if the file exists, has
// confirmed that it is OK to erase the exiting file.
PrintWriter out;
try {
FileWriter stream = new FileWriter(selectedFile);
out = new PrintWriter( stream );
}
catch (Exception e) {
// Most likely, user doesn’t have permission to write the file.
Alert errorAlert = new Alert(Alert.AlertType.ERROR,
"Sorry, but an error occurred while\n" +
trying to open the file for output.");
errorAlert.showAndWait();
return;
}
try {
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 583

.
. // WRITE TEXT TO THE FILE, using the PrintWriter
.
out.flush(); // (not needed?; it’s probably done by out.close();
out.close();
if (out.checkError()) // (need to check for errors in PrintWriter)
throw new IOException("Error check failed.");
editFile = selectedFile;
}
catch (Exception e) {
Alert errorAlert = new Alert(Alert.AlertType.ERROR,
"Sorry, but an error occurred while\n" +
"trying to write data to the file.");
errorAlert.showAndWait();
}
}
This general outline can easily be adapted to non-text files by using a different type of output
stream.
Reading data from a file is similar, and I won’t show the corresponding doOpen() method
here. You can find working subroutines for saving and opening text files in the sample program
TrivialEdit.java, which lets the user edit small text files. The file subroutines in that program
can be adapted to many GUI programs that work with files.

11.3 Programming With Files

In this section, we look at several programming examples that work with files, using the
techniques that were introduced in Section 11.1 and Section 11.2.

11.3.1 Copying a File

As a first example, we look at a simple command-line program that can make a copy of a
file. Copying a file is a pretty common operation, and every operating system already has a
command for doing it. However, it is still instructive to look at a Java program that does the
same thing. Many file operations are similar to copying a file, except that the data from the
input file is processed in some way before it is written to the output file. All such operations
can be done by programs with the same general form. Subsection 4.3.6 included a program for
copying text files using TextIO. The example in this section will work for any file.
Since the program should be able to copy any file, we can’t assume that the data in the file is
in human-readable form. So, we have to use the byte streams, InputStream and OutputStream,
to operate on the file. The program simply copies all the data from the InputStream to the
OutputStream, one byte at a time. If source is the variable that refers to the InputStream,
then the function source.read() can be used to read one byte. This function returns the
value -1 when all the bytes in the input file have been read. Similarly, if copy refers to the
OutputStream, then copy.write(b) writes one byte to the output file. So, the heart of the
program is a simple while loop. As usual, the I/O operations can throw exceptions, so this
must be done in a try..catch statement:
while(true) {
int data = source.read();
if (data < 0)
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 584

break;
copy.write(data);
}
The file-copy command in an operating system such as UNIX uses command line arguments
to specify the names of the files. For example, the user might say “copy original.dat
backup.dat” to copy an existing file, original.dat, to a file named backup.dat. Command-
line arguments can also be used in Java programs. The command line arguments are stored
in the array of strings, args, which is a parameter to the main() routine. The program can
retrieve the command-line arguments from this array. (See Subsection 4.3.6.) For example, if
the program is named CopyFile and if the user runs the program with the command
java CopyFile work.dat oldwork.dat
then in the program, args[0] will be the string "work.dat" and args[1] will be the string
"oldwork.dat". The value of args.length tells the program how many command-line
arguments were specified by the user.
The program CopyFile.java gets the names of the files from the command-line arguments.
It prints an error message and exits if the file names are not specified. To add a little interest,
there are two ways to use the program. The command line can simply specify the two file names.
In that case, if the output file already exists, the program will print an error message and end.
This is to make sure that the user won’t accidently overwrite an important file. However, if the
command line has three arguments, then the first argument must be “-f” while the second and
third arguments are file names. The -f is a command-line option, which is meant to modify
the behavior of the program. The program interprets the -f to mean that it’s OK to overwrite
an existing program. (The “f” stands for “force,” since it forces the file to be copied in spite of
what would otherwise have been considered an error.) You can see in the source code how the
command line arguments are interpreted by the program:
import java.io.*;
/**
* Makes a copy of a file. The original file and the name of the
* copy must be given as command-line arguments. In addition, the
* first command-line argument can be "-f"; if present, the program
* will overwrite an existing file; if not, the program will report
* an error and end if the output file already exists. The number
* of bytes that are copied is reported.
*/
public class CopyFile {
public static void main(String[] args) {
String sourceName; // Name of the source file,
// as specified on the command line.
String copyName; // Name of the copy,
// as specified on the command line.
InputStream source; // Stream for reading from the source file.
OutputStream copy; // Stream for writing the copy.
boolean force; // This is set to true if the "-f" option
// is specified on the command line.
int byteCount; // Number of bytes copied from the source file.
/* Get file names from the command line and check for the
presence of the -f option. If the command line is not one
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 585

of the two possible legal forms, print an error message and

end this program. */
if (args.length == 3 && args[0].equalsIgnoreCase("-f")) {
sourceName = args[1];
copyName = args[2];
force = true;
}
else if (args.length == 2) {
sourceName = args[0];
copyName = args[1];
force = false;
}
else {
System.out.println(
"Usage: java CopyFile <source-file> <copy-name>");
System.out.println(
" or java CopyFile -f <source-file> <copy-name>");
return;
}
/* Create the input stream. If an error occurs, end the program. */
try {
source = new FileInputStream(sourceName);
}
catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
System.out.println("Can’t find file \"" + sourceName + "\".");
return;
}
/* If the output file already exists and the -f option was not
specified, print an error message and end the program. */
File file = new File(copyName);
if (file.exists() && force == false) {
System.out.println(
"Output file exists. Use the -f option to replace it.");
return;
}
/* Create the output stream. If an error occurs, end the program. */
try {
copy = new FileOutputStream(copyName);
}
catch (IOException e) {
System.out.println("Can’t open output file \"" + copyName + "\".");
return;
}
/* Copy one byte at a time from the input stream to the output
stream, ending when the read() method returns -1 (which is
the signal that the end of the stream has been reached). If any
error occurs, print an error message. Also print a message if
the file has been copied successfully. */
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 586

byteCount = 0;
try {
while (true) {
int data = source.read();
if (data < 0)
break;
copy.write(data);
byteCount++;
}
source.close();
copy.close();
System.out.println("Successfully copied " + byteCount + " bytes.");
}
catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println("Error occurred while copying. "
+ byteCount + " bytes copied.");
System.out.println("Error: " + e);
}
} // end main()

} // end class CopyFile

It is actually quite inefficient to copy one byte at a time. Efficiency could be improved by using
alternative versions of the read() and write() methods that read and write multiple bytes
(see the API for details). Alternatively, the input and output streams could be wrapped in
objects of type BufferedInputStream and BufferedOutputStream which automatically read data
from and write data to files in larger blocks. This would require changing only the two lines in
the program that create the streams. For example, the input stream could be created using
source = new BufferedInputStream(new FileInputStream(sourceName));
The buffered stream would then be used in exactly the same way as the unbuffered stream.
There is also a sample program CopyFileAsResources.java that does the same thing as
CopyFile but uses the resource pattern in a try..catch statement to make sure that the
streams are closed in all cases. See the discussion at the end of Subsection 8.3.2)

11.3.2 Persistent Data

Once a program ends, any data that was stored in variables and objects in the program is gone.
In many cases, it would be useful to have some of that data stick around so that it will be
available when the program is run again. The problem is, how to make the data persistent
between runs of the program? The answer, of course, is to store the data in a file (or, for some
applications, in a database—but the data in a database is itself stored in files).
Consider a “phone book” program that allows the user to keep track of a list of names and
associated phone numbers. The program would make no sense at all if the user had to create
the whole list from scratch each time the program is run. It would make more sense to think of
the phone book as a persistent collection of data, and to think of the program as an interface to
that collection of data. The program would allow the user to look up names in the phone book
and to add new entries. Any changes that are made should be preserved after the program
ends.
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 587

The sample program PhoneDirectoryFileDemo.java is a very simple implementation of this

idea. It is meant only as an example of file use; the phone book that it implements is a “toy”
version that is not meant to be taken seriously. This program stores the phone book data in a
file named “.phone book demo” in the user’s home directory. To find the user’s home directory,
it uses the System.getProperty() method that was mentioned in Subsection 11.2.2. When
the program starts, it checks whether the file already exists. If the file exists, it should contain
the user’s phone book, which was saved in a previous run of the program; in that case, the data
from the file is read and entered into a TreeMap named phoneBook that represents the phone
book while the program is running. (See Subsection 10.3.1.) In order to store the phone book in
a file, some decision must be made about how the data in the phone book will be represented.
For this example, I chose a simple representation in which each line of the file contains one
entry consisting of a name and the associated phone number. A percent sign (’%’) separates
the name from the number. The following code at the beginning of the program will read the
phone book data file, if it exists and has the correct format:
File userHomeDirectory = new File( System.getProperty("user.home") );
File dataFile = new File( userHomeDirectory, ".phone book data" );
// A file named .phone book data in the user’s home directory.
if ( ! dataFile.exists() ) {
System.out.println("No phone book data file found. A new one");
System.out.println("will be created, if you add any entries.");
System.out.println("File name: " + dataFile.getAbsolutePath());
}
else {
System.out.println("Reading phone book data...");
try( Scanner scanner = new Scanner(dataFile) ) {
while (scanner.hasNextLine()) {
// Read one line from the file, containing one name/number pair.
String phoneEntry = scanner.nextLine();
int separatorPosition = phoneEntry.indexOf(’%’);
if (separatorPosition == -1)
throw new IOException("File is not a phonebook data file.");
name = phoneEntry.substring(0, separatorPosition);
number = phoneEntry.substring(separatorPosition+1);
phoneBook.put(name,number);
}
}
catch (IOException e) {
System.out.println("Error in phone book data file.");
System.out.println("File name: " + dataFile.getAbsolutePath());
System.out.println("This program cannot continue.");
System.exit(1);
}
}
The program then lets the user do various things with the phone book, including making
modifications. Any changes that are made are made only to the TreeMap that holds the data.
When the program ends, the phone book data is written to the file (if any changes have been
made while the program was running), using the following code:
if (changed) {
System.out.println("Saving phone directory changes to file " +
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 588

dataFile.getAbsolutePath() + " ...");

PrintWriter out;
try {
out = new PrintWriter( new FileWriter(dataFile) );
}
catch (IOException e) {
System.out.println("ERROR: Can’t open data file for output.");
return;
}
for ( Map.Entry<String,String> entry : phoneBook.entrySet() )
out.println(entry.getKey() + "%" + entry.getValue() );
out.flush();
out.close();
if (out.checkError())
System.out.println("ERROR: Some error occurred while writing data file.");
else
System.out.println("Done.");
}
The net effect of this is that all the data, including the changes, will be there the next time the
program is run. I’ve shown you all the file-handling code from the program. If you would like
to see the rest of the program, see the source code.

11.3.3 Storing Objects in Files

Whenever data is stored in files, some definite format must be adopted for representing the
data. As long as the output routine that writes the data and the input routine that reads the
data use the same format, the files will be usable. However, as usual, correctness is not the
end of the story. The representation that is used for data in files should also be robust. (See
Section 8.1.) To see what this means, we will look at several different ways of representing the
same data. This example builds on the example SimplePaint2.java from Subsection 7.3.3. (You
might want to run it now to remind yourself of what it can do.) In that program, the user
can use the mouse to draw simple sketches. Now, we will add file input/output capabilities to
that program. This will allow the user to save a sketch to a file and later read the sketch back
from the file into the program so that the user can continue to work on the sketch. The basic
requirement is that all relevant data about the sketch must be saved in the file, so that the
sketch can be exactly restored when the file is read by the program.
The new version of the program can be found in the source code file SimplePaintWith-
Files.java. A “File” menu has been added to the new version. It implements “Save” and
“Open” commands for writing program data to a file and reading saved data back into the
program.
The data for a sketch consists of the background color of the picture and a list of the
curves that were drawn by the user. A curve consists of a list of Point2Ds. A Point2D, pt, has
instance methods pt.getX() and pt.getY() that return the coordinates of a point in the xy-
plane as values of type double. Each curve can be a different color. Furthermore, a curve can
be “symmetric,” which means that in addition to the curve itself, the horizontal and vertical
reflections of the curve are also drawn. The data for each curve are stored in an object of type
CurveData, which is defined in the program as:
/**
* An object of type CurveData represents the data required to redraw one
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 589

* of the curves that have been sketched by the user.

*/
private static class CurveData {
Color color; // The color of the curve.
boolean symmetric; // Are horizontal and vertical reflections also drawn?
ArrayList<Point2D> points; // The points on the curve.
}
Then, a list of type ArrayList<CurveData> is used to hold data for all of the curves that the user
has drawn.
Let’s think about how the data for a sketch could be saved to a text file. The basic idea is
that all data necessary to reconstitute a sketch must be saved to the output file in some definite
format. The method that reads the file must follow exactly the same format as it reads the
data, and it must use the data to rebuild the data structures that represent the sketch while
the program is running.
When writing character data, all of the data has to be expressed, ultimately, in terms of
simple data values such as strings and primitive type values. A color, for example, can be
expressed in terms of three numbers giving the red, green, and blue components of the color.
The first (not very good) idea that comes to mind might be to just dump all the necessary data,
in some definite order, into the file. Suppose that out is a PrintWriter that is used to write to
the file. We could then say:
out.println( backgroundColor.getRed() ); // Write background color to file.
out.println( backgroundColor.getGreen() );
out.println( backgroundColor.getBlue() );
out.println( curves.size() ); // Write the number of curves.
for ( CurveData curve : curves ) { // For each curve, write...
out.println( curve.color.getRed() ); // the color of the curve
out.println( curve.color.getGreen() );
out.println( curve.color.getBlue() );
out.println( curve.symmetric ? 0 : 1 ); // the curve’s symmetry property
out.println( curve.points.size() ); // the number of points on curve
for ( Point2D pt : curve.points ) { // the coordinates of each point
out.println( pt.getX() );
out.println( pt.getY() );
}
}
This works in the sense that the file-reading method can read the data and rebuild the data
structures. Suppose that the input method uses a Scanner named scanner to read the data
file. Then it could say:
Color newBackgroundColor; // Read the background Color.
double red = scanner.nextDouble();
double green = scanner.nextDouble();
double blue = scanner.nextDouble();
newBackgroundColor = Color.color(red,green,blue);
ArrayList<CurveData> newCurves = new ArrayList<>();
int curveCount = scanner.nextInt(); // The number of curves to be read.
for (int i = 0; i < curveCount; i++) {
CurveData curve = new CurveData();
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 590

double r = scanner.nextDouble(); // Read the curve’s color.

double g = scanner.nextDouble();
double b = scanner.nextDouble();
curve.color = Color.color(r,g,b);
int symmetryCode = scanner.nextInt(); // Read the curve’s symmetry property.
curve.symmetric = (symmetryCode == 1);
curveData.points = new ArrayList<>();
int pointCount = scanner.nextInt(); // The number of points on this curve.
for (int j = 0; j < pointCount; j++) {
int x = scanner.nextDouble(); // Read the coordinates of the point.
int y = scanner.nextDouble();
curveData.points.add(new Point2D(x,y));
}
newCurves.add(curve);
}
curves = newCurves; // Install the new data structures.
backgroundColor = newBackgroundColor;
Note how every piece of data that was written by the output method is read, in the same order,
by the input method. While this does work, the data file is just a long string of numbers. It
doesn’t make much more sense to a human reader than a binary-format file would. Furthermore,
it is still fragile in the sense that any small change made to the data representation in the
program, such as adding a new property to curves, will render the data file useless (unless you
happen to remember exactly which version of the program created the file).
So, I decided to use a more complex, more meaningful data format for the text files created
by my program. Instead of just writing numbers, I add words to say what the numbers mean.
Here is a short but complete data file for the program; just by looking at it, you can probably
tell what is going on:
SimplePaintWithFiles 1.0
background 0.4 0.4 0.5
startcurve
color 1 1 1
symmetry true
coords 10 10
coords 200 250
coords 300 10
endcurve
startcurve
color 0 1 1
symmetry false
coords 10 400
coords 590 400
endcurve
The first line of the file identifies the program that created the data file; when the user
selects a file to be opened, the program can check the first word in the file as a simple test to
make sure the file is of the correct type. The first line also contains a version number, 1.0. If
the file format changes in a later version of the program, a higher version number would be
used; if the program sees a version number of 1.2 in a file, but the program only understands
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 591

version 1.0, the program can explain to the user that a newer version of the program is needed
to read the data file.
The second line of the file specifies the background color of the picture. The three numbers
specify the red, green, and blue components of the color. The word “background” at the
beginning of the line makes the meaning clear. The remainder of the file consists of data for the
curves that appear in the picture. The data for each curve is clearly marked with “startcurve”
and “endcurve.” The data consists of the color and symmetry properties of the curve and the
xy-coordinates of each point on the curve. Again, the meaning is clear. Files in this format can
easily be created or edited by hand. In fact, the data file shown above was actually created in
a text editor rather than by the program. Furthermore, it’s easy to extend the format to allow
for additional options. Future versions of the program could add a “thickness” property to the
curves to make it possible to have curves with differing line widths. Shapes such as rectangles
and ovals could easily be added.
Outputting data in this format is easy. Suppose that out is a PrintWriter that is being used
to write the sketch data to a file. Then the output is be done with:
out.println("SimplePaintWithFiles 1.0"); // Version number.
out.println( "background " + backgroundColor.getRed() + " " +
backgroundColor.getGreen() + " " + backgroundColor.getBlue() );
for ( CurveData curve : curves ) {
out.println();
out.println("startcurve");
out.println(" color " + curve.color.getRed() + " " +
curve.color.getGreen() + " " + curve.color.getBlue() );
out.println( " symmetry " + curve.symmetric );
for ( Point2D pt : curve.points )
out.println( " coords " + pt.getX() + " " + pt.getY() );
out.println("endcurve");
}
In the program, this code is used in a doSave() method that is similar to the one that is
presented in Subsection 11.2.3. The method uses a file dialog box to allow the user to select
the output file.
Reading the data is somewhat harder, since the input routine has to deal with all the extra
words in the data. In my input routine, I decided to allow some variation in the order in which
the data occurs in the file. For example, the background color can be specified at the end of the
file, instead of at the beginning. It can even be left out altogether, in which case white will be
used as the default background color. This is possible because each item of data is labeled with
a word that describes its meaning; the labels can be used to drive the processing of the input.
Here is the complete method from SimplePaintWithFiles.java that reads data files created by
the doSave() method. It uses a Scanner to read items from the file:
private void doOpen() {
FileChooser fileDialog = new FileChooser();
fileDialog.setTitle("Select File to be Opened");
fileDialog.setInitialFileName(null); // No file is initially selected.
if (editFile == null)
fileDialog.setInitialDirectory(new File(System.getProperty("user.home")));
else
fileDialog.setInitialDirectory(editFile.getParentFile());
File selectedFile = fileDialog.showOpenDialog(window);
if (selectedFile == null)
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 592

return; // User canceled.

Scanner scanner;
try {
scanner = new Scanner( selectedFile );
}
catch (Exception e) {
Alert errorAlert = new Alert(Alert.AlertType.ERROR,
"Sorry, but an error occurred\nwhile trying to open the file.");
errorAlert.showAndWait();
return;
}
try {
String programName = scanner.next();
if ( ! programName.equals("SimplePaintWithFiles") )
throw new IOException("File is not a SimplePaintWithFiles data file.");
double version = scanner.nextDouble();
if (version > 1.0)
throw new IOException("File requires a newer version of SimplePaintWithFiles.");
Color newBackgroundColor = Color.WHITE;
ArrayList<CurveData> newCurves = new ArrayList<CurveData>();
while (scanner.hasNext()) {
String itemName = scanner.next();
if (itemName.equalsIgnoreCase("background")) {
double red = scanner.nextDouble();
double green = scanner.nextDouble();
double blue = scanner.nextDouble();
newBackgroundColor = Color.color(red,green,blue);
}
else if (itemName.equalsIgnoreCase("startcurve")) {
CurveData curve = new CurveData();
curve.color = Color.BLACK;
curve.symmetric = false;
curve.points = new ArrayList<Point2D>();
itemName = scanner.next();
while ( ! itemName.equalsIgnoreCase("endcurve") ) {
if (itemName.equalsIgnoreCase("color")) {
double r = scanner.nextDouble();
double g = scanner.nextDouble();
double b = scanner.nextDouble();
curve.color = Color.color(r,g,b);
}
else if (itemName.equalsIgnoreCase("symmetry")) {
curve.symmetric = scanner.nextBoolean();
}
else if (itemName.equalsIgnoreCase("coords")) {
double x = scanner.nextDouble();
double y = scanner.nextDouble();
curve.points.add( new Point2D(x,y) );
}
else {
throw new Exception("Unknown term in input.");
}
itemName = scanner.next();
}
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 593

newCurves.add(curve);
}
else {
throw new Exception("Unknown term in input.");
}
}
scanner.close();
backgroundColor = newBackgroundColor;
curves = newCurves;
redraw();
editFile = selectedFile;
window.setTitle("SimplePaint: " + editFile.getName());
}
catch (Exception e) {
Alert errorAlert = new Alert(Alert.AlertType.ERROR,
"Sorry, but an error occurred while\ntrying to read the data:\n"
+ e);
errorAlert.showAndWait();
}
}
The main reason for this long discussion of file formats has been to get you to think about
the problem of representing complex data in a form suitable for storing the data in a file. The
same problem arises when data must be transmitted over a network. There is no one correct
solution to the problem, but some solutions are certainly better than others. In Section 11.5,
we will look at one solution to the data representation problem that has become increasingly
common.
∗ ∗ ∗
In addition to being able to save sketch data in text form, SimplePaintWithFiles can also
save the picture itself as an image file that could be, for example, printed or put on a web page.
This is a preview of image-handling techniques that will be covered in Subsection 13.2.6, and
it uses techniques that I have not yet covered.

11.4 Networking
As far as a program is concerned, a network is just another possible source of input data,
and another place where data can be output. That does oversimplify things, because networks
are not as easy to work with as files are. But in Java, you can do network communication using
input streams and output streams, just as you can use such streams to communicate with the
user or to work with files. Nevertheless, opening a network connection between two computers
is a bit tricky, since there are two computers involved and they have to somehow agree to open a
connection. And when each computer can send data to the other, synchronizing communication
can be a problem. But the fundamentals are the same as for other forms of I/O.
One of the standard Java packages is called java.net. This package includes several
classes that can be used for networking. Two different styles of network I/O are supported.
One of these, which is fairly high-level, is based on the World Wide Web, and provides the
sort of network communication capability that is used by a Web browser when it downloads
pages for you to view. The main classes for this style of networking are java.net.URL
and java.net.URLConnection. An object of type URL is an abstract representation of a
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 594

Universal Resource Locator , which is an address for an HTML document or other resource.
A URLConnection represents a network connection to such a resource.
The second style of I/O, which is more general and more important, views the network at
a lower level. It is based on the idea of a socket. A socket is used by a program to establish a
connection with another program on a network. Communication over a network involves two
sockets, one on each of the computers involved in the communication. Java uses a class called
java.net.Socket to represent sockets that are used for network communication. The term
“socket” presumably comes from an image of physically plugging a wire into a computer to
establish a connection to a network, but it is important to understand that a socket, as the
term is used here, is simply an object belonging to the class Socket. In particular, a program can
have several sockets at the same time, each connecting it to another program running on some
other computer on the network—or even running on the same computer. All these connections
use the same physical network connection.
This section gives a brief introduction to these basic networking classes, and shows how
they relate to input and output streams.

11.4.1 URLs and URLConnections

The URL class is used to represent resources on the World Wide Web. Every resource has an
address, which identifies it uniquely and contains enough information for a Web browser to find
the resource on the network and retrieve it. The address is called a “url” or “universal resource
locator.” (URLs can actually refer to resources from other sources besides the web; after all,
they are “universal.” For example, they can represent files on your computer.)
An object belonging to the URL class represents such an address. Once you have a URL
object, you can use it to open a URLConnection to the resource at that address. A url is
ordinarily specified as a string, such as “https://math.hws.edu/eck/index.html”. There are
also relative url’s. A relative url specifies the location of a resource relative to the location
of another url, which is called the base or context for the relative url. For example, if the
context is given by the url https://math.hws.edu/eck/, then the incomplete, relative url
“index.html” would really refer to https://math.hws.edu/eck/index.html.
An object of the class URL is not simply a string, but it can be constructed from a string
representation of a url. A URL object can also be constructed from another URL object,
representing a context, plus a string that specifies a url relative to that context. These
constructors have prototypes
public URL(String urlName) throws MalformedURLException
and
public URL(URL context, String relativeName) throws MalformedURLException
Note that these constructors will throw an exception of type MalformedURLException if the
specified strings don’t represent legal url’s. The MalformedURLException class is a subclass of
IOException, and it requires mandatory exception handling.
Once you have a valid URL object, you can call its openConnection() method to set up a
connection. This method returns a URLConnection. The URLConnection object can, in turn,
be used to create an InputStream for reading data from the resource represented by the URL.
This is done by calling its getInputStream() method. For example:
URL url = new URL(urlAddressString);
URLConnection connection = url.openConnection();
InputStream in = connection.getInputStream();
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 595

The openConnection() and getInputStream() methods can both throw exceptions of type
IOException. Once the InputStream has been created, you can read from it in the usual way,
including wrapping it in another input stream type, such as BufferedReader, or using a Scanner.
Reading from the stream can, of course, generate exceptions.
One of the other useful instance methods in the URLConnection class is getContentType(),
which returns a String that describes the type of information available from the URL. The
return value can be null if the type of information is not yet known or if it is not possible
to determine the type. The type might not be available until after the input stream has
been created, so you should generally call getContentType() after getInputStream(). The
string returned by getContentType() is in a format called a mime type. Mime types include
“text/plain”, “text/html”, “image/jpeg”, “image/png”, and many others. All mime types
contain two parts: a general type, such as “text” or “image”, and a more specific type within
that general category, such as “html” or “png”. If you are only interested in text data, for
example, you can check whether the string returned by getContentType() starts with “text”.
(Mime types were first introduced to describe the content of email messages. The name stands
for “Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions.” They are now used almost universally to specify
the type of information in a file or other resource.)
Let’s look at a short example that uses all this to read the data from a URL. This subroutine
opens a connection to a specified URL, checks that the type of data at the URL is text, and
then copies the text onto the screen. Many of the operations in this subroutine can throw
exceptions. They are handled by declaring that the subroutine “throws IOException” and
leaving it up to the main program to decide what to do when an error occurs.
static void readTextFromURL( String urlString ) throws IOException {
/* Open a connection to the URL, and get an input stream
for reading data from the URL. */
URL url = new URL(urlString);
URLConnection connection = url.openConnection();
InputStream urlData = connection.getInputStream();
/* Check that the content is some type of text. Note:
connection.getContentType() method should be called
after getInputStream(). */
String contentType = connection.getContentType();
System.out.println("Stream opened with content type: " + contentType);
System.out.println();
if (contentType == null || contentType.startsWith("text") == false)
throw new IOException("URL does not seem to refer to a text file.");
System.out.println("Fetching content from " + urlString + " ...");
System.out.println();
/* Copy lines of text from the input stream to the screen, until
end-of-file is encountered (or an error occurs). */
BufferedReader in; // For reading from the connection’s input stream.
in = new BufferedReader( new InputStreamReader(urlData) );
while (true) {
String line = in.readLine();
if (line == null)
break;
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 596

System.out.println(line);
}
in.close();
} // end readTextFromURL()
A complete program that uses this subroutine can be found in the file FetchURL.java. When
you run the program, you can specify the URL on the command line; if not, you will be
prompted to enter the URL. For this program, a URL can begin with “http://” or “https://”
for a URL that refers to a resource on the web, with “file://” for a URL that refers to a file on
your computer, or with “ftp://” for a URL that uses the “File Transfer Protocol.” If it does
not start with any of these, then “http://” is added to the start of the URL. Try the program
with URL math.hws.edu/javanotes to fetch the front page of this textbook from its website.
Try it with some bad inputs to see the various errors that can occur.

11.4.2 TCP/IP and Client/Server

Communication over the Internet is based on a pair of protocols called the Transmission
Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol , which are collectively referred to as TCP/IP.
(In fact, there is a more basic communication protocol called UDP that can be used instead
of TCP in certain applications. UDP is supported in Java, but for this discussion, I’ll stick to
TCP/IP, which provides reliable two-way communication between networked computers.)
For two programs to communicate using TCP/IP, each program must create a socket, as
discussed earlier in this section, and those sockets must be connected. Once such a connection
is made, communication takes place using input streams and output streams. Each program
has its own input stream and its own output stream. Data written by one program to its output
stream is transmitted to the other computer. There, it enters the input stream of the program
at the other end of the network connection. When that program reads data from its input
stream, it is receiving the data that was transmitted to it over the network.
The hard part, then, is making a network connection in the first place. Two sockets are
involved. To get things started, one program must create a socket that will wait passively until
a connection request comes in from another socket. The waiting socket is said to be listening
for a connection. On the other side of the connection-to-be, another program creates a socket
that sends out a connection request to the listening socket. When the listening socket receives
the connection request, it responds, and the connection is established. Once that is done, each
program can obtain an input stream and an output stream for sending data over the connection.
Communication takes place through these streams until one program or the other closes the
connection.
A program that creates a listening socket is sometimes said to be a server , and the socket is
called a server socket. A program that connects to a server is called a client, and the socket
that it uses to make a connection is called a client socket. The idea is that the server is out
there somewhere on the network, waiting for a connection request from some client. The server
can be thought of as offering some kind of service, and the client gets access to that service by
connecting to the server. This is called the client/server model of network communication.
In many actual applications, a server program can provide connections to several clients at the
same time. When a client connects to the listening socket in a server of that type, that socket
does not stop listening. Instead, it continues listening for additional client connection requests
at the same time that the client is being serviced. But to allow multiple clients to be connected
at the same time, it is necessary to use threads. We’ll look at how it works in the next chapter.
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 597

The URL class that was discussed at the beginning of this section uses a client socket behind
the scenes to do any necessary network communication. On the other side of that connection is
a server program that accepts a connection request from the URL object, reads a request from
that object for some particular file on the server computer, and responds by transmitting the
contents of that file over the network back to the URL object. After transmitting the data, the
server closes the connection.
∗ ∗ ∗
A client program has to have some way to specify which computer, among all those on the
network, it wants to communicate with. Every computer on the Internet has an IP address
which identifies it. Many computers can also be referred to by domain names such as
math.hws.edu or www.whitehouse.gov. (See Section 1.7.) Traditional (or IPv4 ) IP addresses
are 32-bit integers. They are usually written in the so-called “dotted decimal” form, such as
64.89.144.237, where each of the four numbers in the address represents an 8-bit integer in
the range 0 through 255. A new version of the Internet Protocol, IPv6 , is being introduced.
IPv6 addresses are 128-bit integers and are usually written in hexadecimal form (with some
colons and maybe some extra information thrown in). You might see IP addresses of either
form.
A computer can have several IP addresses, and can have both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.
Usually, one of these is the loopback address, which can be used when a program wants to
communicate with another program on the same computer. The loopback address has IPv4
address 127.0.0.1 and can also, in general, be referred to using the domain name localhost. In
addition, there can be one or more IP addresses associated with physical network connections.
Your computer probably has some utility for displaying your computer’s IP addresses. I have
written a small Java program, ShowMyNetwork.java, that does the same thing. When I run
ShowMyNetwork on one computer, the output was:
wlo1 : /2603:7080:7f41:f400:441a:459f:2c62:c349%wlo1 /192.168.0.2
lo : /0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1%lo /127.0.0.1
The first thing on each line is a network interface name, which is really meaningful only to the
computer’s operating system. The same line also contains the IP addresses for that interface.
In this example, lo refers to the loopback address, which has IPv4 address 127.0.0.1 as usual.
The most important number here is 192.168.0.2, which is the IPv4 address that can be used
for communication over the network. (The slashes at the start of each address are not part
of the actual address.) The other numbers in the output are IPv6 addresses, but the IPv4
addresses are easier for a human to use.
Now, a single computer might have several programs doing network communication at the
same time, or one program communicating with several other computers. To allow for this
possibility, a network connection actually has a port number in combination with an IP
address. A port number is just a 16-bit positive integer. A server does not simply listen for
connections—it listens for connections on a particular port. A potential client must know both
the Internet address (or domain name) of the computer on which the server is running and
the port number on which the server is listening. A Web server, for example, generally listens
for connections on port 80; other standard Internet services also have standard port numbers.
(The standard port numbers are all less than 1024, and are reserved for particular services. If
you create your own server programs, you should use port numbers greater than 1024.)
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 598

11.4.3 Sockets in Java

To implement TCP/IP connections, the java.net package provides two classes, ServerSocket
and Socket. A ServerSocket represents a listening socket that waits for connection requests
from clients. A Socket represents one endpoint of an actual network connection. A Socket
can be a client socket that sends a connection request to a server. But a Socket can also be
created by a server to handle a connection request from a client. This allows the server to create
multiple sockets and handle multiple connections. A ServerSocket does not itself participate
in connections; it just listens for connection requests and creates Sockets to handle the actual
connections.
When you construct a ServerSocket object, you have to specify the port number on which
the server will listen. The specification for the constructor is
public ServerSocket(int port) throws IOException
The port number must be in the range 0 through 65535, and should generally be greater than
1024. The constructor might throw a SecurityException if a port number smaller than 1024 is
specified. An IOException can also occur if, for example, the specified port number is already
in use. (A parameter value of 0 in this method tells the server socket to listen on any available
port.)
As soon as a ServerSocket is created, it starts listening for connection requests. The
accept() method in the ServerSocket class accepts such a request, establishes a connection
with the client, and returns a Socket that can be used for communication with the client. The
accept() method has the form
public Socket accept() throws IOException
When you call the accept() method, it will not return until a connection request is received (or
until some error occurs). The method is said to block while waiting for the connection. (While
the method is blocked, the program—or more exactly, the thread—that called the method
can’t do anything else. If there are other threads in the same program, they can proceed.) You
can call accept() repeatedly to accept multiple connection requests. The ServerSocket will
continue listening for connections until it is closed, using its close() method, or until some
error occurs, or until the program is terminated in some way.
Suppose that you want a server to listen on port 1728, and that you want it to continue to
accept connections as long as the program is running. Suppose that you’ve written a method
provideService(Socket) to handle the communication with one client. Then the basic form
of the server program would be:
try {
ServerSocket server = new ServerSocket(1728);
while (true) {
Socket connection = server.accept();
provideService(connection);
}
}
catch (IOException e) {
System.out.println("Server shut down with error: " + e);
}
On the client side, a client socket is created using a constructor in the Socket class. To
connect to a server on a known computer and port, you would use the constructor
public Socket(String computer, int port) throws IOException
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 599

The first parameter can be either an IP number or a domain name. This constructor will block
until the connection is established or until an error occurs.
Once you have a connected socket, no matter how it was created, you can use the Socket
methods getInputStream() and getOutputStream() to obtain streams that can be used for
communication over the connection. These methods return objects of type InputStream and
OutputStream, respectively. Keeping all this in mind, here is the outline of a method for
working with a client connection:
/**
* Open a client connection to a specified server computer and
* port number on the server, and then do communication through
* the connection.
*/
void doClientConnection(String computerName, int serverPort) {
Socket connection;
InputStream in;
OutputStream out;
try {
connection = new Socket(computerName,serverPort);
in = connection.getInputStream();
out = connection.getOutputStream();
}
catch (IOException e) {
System.out.println(
"Attempt to create connection failed with error: " + e);
return;
}
.
. // Use the streams, in and out, to communicate with the server.
.
try {
connection.close();
}
catch (IOException e) {
}
} // end doClientConnection()
All this makes network communication sound easier than it really is. (And if you think it
sounded hard, then it’s even harder.) If networks were completely reliable, things would be
almost as easy as I’ve described. The problem, though, is to write robust programs that can
deal with network and human error. I won’t go into detail. However, what I’ve covered here
should give you the basic ideas of network programming, and it is enough to write some simple
network applications. Let’s look at a few working examples of client/server programming.

11.4.4 A Trivial Client/Server

The first example consists of two programs. The source code files for the programs are
DateClient.java and DateServer.java. One is a simple network client and the other is a matching
server. The client makes a connection to the server, reads one line of text from the server, and
displays that text on the screen. The text sent by the server consists of the current date and
time on the computer where the server is running. In order to open a connection, the client
must know the computer on which the server is running and the port on which it is listening.
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 600

The server listens on port number 32007. The port number could be anything between 1025
and 65535, as long as the server and the client use the same port. Port numbers between 1 and
1024 are reserved for standard services and should not be used for other servers. The name or
IP number of the computer on which the server is running can be specified as a command-line
argument. For example, if the server is running on a computer named math.hws.edu, then you
could run the client with the command “java DateClient math.hws.edu”. If a computer is
not specified on the command line, then the user is prompted to enter one. Here is the complete
client program:
import java.net.*;
import java.util.Scanner;
import java.io.*;
/**
* This program opens a connection to a computer specified
* as the first command-line argument. If no command-line
* argument is given, it prompts the user for a computer
* to connect to. The connection is made to
* the port specified by LISTENING PORT. The program reads one
* line of text from the connection and then closes the
* connection. It displays the text that it read on
* standard output. This program is meant to be used with
* the server program, DateServer, which sends the current
* date and time on the computer where the server is running.
*/
public class DateClient {
public static final int LISTENING PORT = 32007;
public static void main(String[] args) {
String hostName; // Name of the server computer to connect to.
Socket connection; // A socket for communicating with server.
BufferedReader incoming; // For reading data from the connection.
/* Get computer name from command line. */
if (args.length > 0)
hostName = args[0];
else {
Scanner stdin = new Scanner(System.in);
System.out.print("Enter computer name or IP address: ");
hostName = stdin.nextLine();
}
/* Make the connection, then read and display a line of text. */
try {
connection = new Socket( hostName, LISTENING PORT );
incoming = new BufferedReader(
new InputStreamReader(connection.getInputStream()) );
String lineFromServer = incoming.readLine();
if (lineFromServer == null) {
// A null from incoming.readLine() indicates that
// end-of-stream was encountered.
throw new IOException("Connection was opened, " +
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 601

"but server did not send any data.");

}
System.out.println();
System.out.println(lineFromServer);
System.out.println();
incoming.close();
}
catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println("Error: " + e);
}
} // end main()

} //end class DateClient

Note that all the communication with the server is done in a try..catch statement. This
will catch the IOExceptions that can be generated when the connection is opened or closed
and when data is read from the input stream. The connection’s input stream is wrapped in a
BufferedReader, which has a readLine() method that makes it easy to read one line of text.
If that method returns null, it probably means that the server closed the connection without
sending any data.
In order for this program to run without error, the server program must be running on
the computer to which the client tries to connect. By the way, it’s possible to run the client
and the server program on the same computer. For example, you can open two command
windows, start the server in one window and then run the client in the other window. To make
things like this easier, most computers will recognize the domain name localhost and the
IP number 127.0.0.1 as referring to “this computer.” This means that the command “java
DateClient localhost” will tell the DateClient program to connect to a server running on the
same computer. If that command doesn’t work, try “java DateClient 127.0.0.1”.
∗ ∗ ∗
The server program that corresponds to the DateClient client program is called DateServer.
The DateServer program creates a ServerSocket to listen for connection requests on port 32007.
After the listening socket is created, the server will enter an infinite loop in which it accepts and
processes connections. This will continue until the program is killed in some way—for example
by typing a CONTROL-C in the command window where the server is running. When a connection
request is received from a client, the server calls a subroutine to handle the connection. In the
subroutine, any Exception that occurs is caught, so that it will not crash the server. Just
because a connection to one client has failed for some reason, it does not mean that the server
should be shut down; the error might have been the fault of the client. The connection-handling
subroutine creates a PrintWriter for sending data over the connection. It writes the current date
and time to this stream and then closes the connection. (The standard class java.util.Date
is used to obtain the current time. An object of type Date represents a particular date and
time. The default constructor, “new Date()”, creates an object that represents the time when
the object is created.) The complete server program is as follows:
import java.net.*;
import java.io.*;
import java.util.Date;
/**
* This program is a server that takes connection requests on
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 602

* the port specified by the constant LISTENING PORT. When a

* connection is opened, the program sends the current time to
* the connected socket. The program will continue to receive
* and process connections until it is killed (by a CONTROL-C,
* for example). Note that this server processes each connection
* as it is received, rather than creating a separate thread
* to process the connection.
*/
public class DateServer {
public static final int LISTENING PORT = 32007;
public static void main(String[] args) {
ServerSocket listener; // Listens for incoming connections.
Socket connection; // For communication with the connecting program.
/* Accept and process connections forever, or until some error occurs.
(Note that errors that occur while communicating with a connected
program are caught and handled in the sendDate() routine, so
they will not crash the server.) */
try {
listener = new ServerSocket(LISTENING PORT);
System.out.println("Listening on port " + LISTENING PORT);
while (true) {
// Accept next connection request and handle it.
connection = listener.accept();
sendDate(connection);
}
}
catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println("Sorry, the server has shut down.");
System.out.println("Error: " + e);
return;
}
} // end main()

/**
* The parameter, client, is a socket that is already connected to another
* program. Get an output stream for the connection, send the current time,
* and close the connection.
*/
private static void sendDate(Socket client) {
try {
System.out.println("Connection from " +
client.getInetAddress().toString() );
Date now = new Date(); // The current date and time.
PrintWriter outgoing; // Stream for sending data.
outgoing = new PrintWriter( client.getOutputStream() );
outgoing.println( now.toString() );
outgoing.flush(); // Make sure the data is actually sent!
client.close();
}
catch (Exception e){
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 603

System.out.println("Error: " + e);

}
} // end sendDate()

} //end class DateServer

When you run DateServer in a command-line interface, it will sit and wait for connection
requests and report them as they are received. To make the DateServer service permanently
available on a computer, the program would be run as a daemon. A daemon is a program that
runs continually on a computer, independently of any user. The computer can be configured
to start the daemon automatically as soon as the computer boots up. It then runs in the
background, even while the computer is being used for other purposes. For example, a computer
that makes pages available on the World Wide Web runs a daemon that listens for requests
for web pages and responds by transmitting the pages. It’s just a souped-up analog of the
DateServer program! However, the question of how to set up a program as a daemon is not one
I want to go into here. For testing purposes, it’s easy enough to start the program by hand,
and, in any case, my examples are not really robust enough or full-featured enough to be run
as serious servers. (By the way, the word “daemon” is just an alternative spelling of “demon”
and is usually pronounced the same way.)
Note that after calling outgoing.println() to send a line of data to the client, the server
program calls outgoing.flush(). The flush() method is available in every output stream
class. Calling it ensures that data that has been written to the stream is actually sent to its
destination. You should generally call this function every time you use an output stream to
send data over a network connection. If you don’t do so, it’s possible that the stream will collect
data until it has a reasonably large batch of data to send. This is done for efficiency, but it can
impose unacceptable delays when the client is waiting for the transmission. It is even possible
that some of the data might remain untransmitted when the socket is closed, so it is especially
important to call flush() before closing the connection. This is one of those unfortunate cases
where different implementations of Java can behave differently. If you fail to flush your output
streams, it is possible that your network application will work on some types of computers but
not on others.

11.4.5 A Simple Network Chat

In the DateServer example, the server transmits information and the client reads it. It’s also
possible to have two-way communication between client and server. As a first example, we’ll
look at a client and server that allow a user on each end of the connection to send messages
to the other user. The program works in a command-line environment where the users type in
their messages. In this example, the server waits for a connection from a single client and then
closes down its listener so that no other clients can connect. After the client and server are
connected, both ends of the connection work in much the same way. The user on the client end
types a message, and it is transmitted to the server, which displays it to the user on that end.
Then the user of the server types a message that is transmitted to the client. Then the client
user types another message, and so on. This continues until one user or the other enters “quit”
when prompted for a message. When that happens, the connection is closed and both programs
terminate. The client program and the server program are very similar. The techniques for
opening the connections differ, and the client is programmed to send the first message while
the server is programmed to receive the first message. The client and server programs can be
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 604

found in the files CLChatClient.java and CLChatServer.java. (The name “CLChat” stands for
“command-line chat.”) Here is the source code for the server; the client is similar:
import java.net.*;
import java.util.Scanner;
import java.io.*;
/**
* This program is one end of a simple command-line interface chat program.
* It acts as a server which waits for a connection from the CLChatClient
* program. The port on which the server listens can be specified as a
* command-line argument. If it is not, then the port specified by the
* constant DEFAULT PORT is used. Note that if a port number of zero is
* specified, then the server will listen on any available port.
* This program only supports one connection. As soon as a connection is
* opened, the listening socket is closed down. The two ends of the connection
* each send a HANDSHAKE string to the other, so that both ends can verify
* that the program on the other end is of the right type. Then the connected
* programs alternate sending messages to each other. The client always sends
* the first message. The user on either end can close the connection by
* entering the string "quit" when prompted for a message. Note that the first
* character of any string sent over the connection must be 0 or 1; this
* character is interpreted as a command.
*/
public class CLChatServer {
/**
* Port to listen on, if none is specified on the command line.
*/
static final int DEFAULT PORT = 1728;
/**
* Handshake string. Each end of the connection sends this string to the
* other just after the connection is opened. This is done to confirm that
* the program on the other side of the connection is a CLChat program.
*/
static final String HANDSHAKE = "CLChat";
/**
* This character is prepended to every message that is sent.
*/
static final char MESSAGE = ’0’;
/**
* This character is sent to the connected program when the user quits.
*/
static final char CLOSE = ’1’;

public static void main(String[] args) {

int port; // The port on which the server listens.
ServerSocket listener; // Listens for a connection request.
Socket connection; // For communication with the client.
BufferedReader incoming; // Stream for receiving data from client.
PrintWriter outgoing; // Stream for sending data to client.
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 605

String messageOut; // A message to be sent to the client.

String messageIn; // A message received from the client.
Scanner userInput; // A wrapper for System.in, for reading
// lines of input from the user.
/* First, get the port number from the command line,
or use the default port if none is specified. */
if (args.length == 0)
port = DEFAULT PORT;
else {
try {
port= Integer.parseInt(args[0]);
if (port < 0 || port > 65535)
throw new NumberFormatException();
}
catch (NumberFormatException e) {
System.out.println("Illegal port number, " + args[0]);
return;
}
}
/* Wait for a connection request. When it arrives, close
down the listener. Create streams for communication
and exchange the handshake. */
try {
listener = new ServerSocket(port);
System.out.println("Listening on port " + listener.getLocalPort());
connection = listener.accept();
listener.close();
incoming = new BufferedReader(
new InputStreamReader(connection.getInputStream()) );
outgoing = new PrintWriter(connection.getOutputStream());
outgoing.println(HANDSHAKE); // Send handshake to client.
outgoing.flush();
messageIn = incoming.readLine(); // Receive handshake from client.
if (! HANDSHAKE.equals(messageIn) ) {
throw new Exception("Connected program is not a CLChat!");
}
System.out.println("Connected. Waiting for the first message.");
}
catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println("An error occurred while opening connection.");
System.out.println(e.toString());
return;
}
/* Exchange messages with the other end of the connection until one side
or the other closes the connection. This server program waits for
the first message from the client. After that, messages alternate
strictly back and forth. */
try {
userInput = new Scanner(System.in);
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 606

System.out.println("NOTE: Enter ’quit’ to end the program.\n");

while (true) {
System.out.println("WAITING...");
messageIn = incoming.readLine();
if (messageIn.length() > 0) {
// The first character of the message is a command. If
// the command is CLOSE, then the connection is closed.
// Otherwise, remove the command character from the
// message and proceed.
if (messageIn.charAt(0) == CLOSE) {
System.out.println("Connection closed at other end.");
connection.close();
break;
}
messageIn = messageIn.substring(1);
}
System.out.println("RECEIVED: " + messageIn);
System.out.print("SEND: ");
messageOut = userInput.nextLine();
if (messageOut.equalsIgnoreCase("quit")) {
// User wants to quit. Inform the other side
// of the connection, then close the connection.
outgoing.println(CLOSE);
outgoing.flush(); // Make sure the data is sent!
connection.close();
System.out.println("Connection closed.");
break;
}
outgoing.println(MESSAGE + messageOut);
outgoing.flush(); // Make sure the data is sent!
if (outgoing.checkError()) {
throw new IOException("Error occurred while transmitting message.");
}
}
}
catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println("Sorry, an error has occurred. Connection lost.");
System.out.println("Error: " + e);
System.exit(1);
}
} // end main()

} //end class CLChatServer

This program is a little more robust than DateServer. For one thing, it uses a handshake to
make sure that a client who is trying to connect is really a CLChatClient program. A handshake
is simply information sent between a client and a server as part of setting up a connection,
before any actual data is sent. In this case, each side of the connection sends a string to
the other side to identify itself. The handshake is part of the protocol that I made up for
communication between CLChatClient and CLChatServer. A protocol is a detailed specification
of what data and messages can be exchanged over a connection, how they must be represented,
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 607

and what order they can be sent in. When you design a client/server application, the design
of the protocol is an important consideration. Another aspect of the CLChat protocol is that
after the handshake, every line of text that is sent over the connection begins with a character
that acts as a command. If the character is 0, the rest of the line is a message from one user to
the other. If the character is 1, the line indicates that a user has entered the “quit” command,
and the connection is to be shut down.
Remember that if you want to try out this program on a single computer, you can use
two command-line windows. In one, give the command “java CLChatServer” to start the
server. Then, in the other, use the command “java CLChatClient localhost” to connect to
the server that is running on the same machine. If the server is not listening on the default
port, you can add the port number as a second command line option to the program. If you
do not specify the connection information on the command line, you will be asked to enter it.

11.5 A Brief Introduction to XML

When data is saved to a file or transmitted over a network, it must be represented in
some way that will allow the same data to be rebuilt later, when the file is read or the
transmission is received. We have seen that there are good reasons to prefer textual, character-
based representations in many cases, but there are many ways to represent a given collection
of data as text. In this section, we’ll take a brief look at one type of character-based data
representation that has become increasingly common.
XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is a syntax for creating data representation languages.
There are two aspects or levels of XML. On the first level, XML specifies a strict but relatively
simple syntax. Any sequence of characters that follows that syntax is a well-formed XML
document. On the second level, XML provides a way of placing further restrictions on what
can appear in a document. This is done by associating a DTD (Document Type Definition)
with an XML document. A DTD is essentially a list of things that are allowed to appear in the
XML document. A well-formed XML document that has an associated DTD and that follows
the rules of the DTD is said to be a valid XML document. The idea is that XML is a general
format for data representation, and a DTD specifies how to use XML to represent a particular
kind of data. (There are also alternatives to DTDs, such as XML schemas, for defining valid
XML documents, but let’s ignore them here.)
There is nothing magical about XML. It’s certainly not perfect. It’s a very verbose language,
and some people think it’s ugly. On the other hand it’s very flexible. It can be used to represent
almost any type of data. It was built from the start to support all languages and alphabets.
Most important, it has become an accepted standard. There is support in just about any
programming language for processing XML documents. There are standard DTDs for describing
many different kinds of data. There are many ways to design a data representation language,
but XML is one that has happened to come into widespread use. In fact, it has found its way
into almost every corner of information technology. For example: There are XML languages for
representing mathematical expressions (MathML), musical notation (MusicXML), molecules
and chemical reactions (CML), vector graphics (SVG), and many other kinds of information.
XML is used by OpenOffice and recent versions of Microsoft Office in the document format
for office applications such as word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations. XML site
syndication languages (RSS, ATOM) make it possible for web sites, newspapers, and blogs to
make a list of recent headlines available in a standard format that can be used by other web
sites and by web browsers; the same format is used to publish podcasts. And XML is a common
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 608

format for the electronic exchange of business information.

My purpose here is not to tell you everything there is to know about XML. I will just
explain a few ways in which it can be used in your own programs. In particular, I will not
say anything further about DTDs and valid XML. For many purposes, it is sufficient to use
well-formed XML documents with no associated DTDs.

11.5.1 Basic XML Syntax

If you know HTML, the language for writing web pages, then XML will look familiar. An XML
document looks a lot like an HTML document. HTML is not itself an XML language, since it
does not follow all the strict XML syntax rules, but the basic ideas are similar. Here is a short,
well-formed XML document:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<simplepaint version="1.0">
<background red=’1’ green=’0.6’ blue=’0.2’/>
<curve>
<color red=’0’ green=’0’ blue=’1’/>
<symmetric>false</symmetric>
<point x=’83’ y=’96’/>
<point x=’116’ y=’149’/>
<point x=’159’ y=’215’/>
<point x=’216’ y=’294’/>
<point x=’264’ y=’359’/>
<point x=’309’ y=’418’/>
<point x=’371’ y=’499’/>
<point x=’400’ y=’543’/>
</curve>
<curve>
<color red=’1’ green=’1’ blue=’1’/>
<symmetric>true</symmetric>
<point x=’54’ y=’305’/>
<point x=’79’ y=’289’/>
<point x=’128’ y=’262’/>
<point x=’190’ y=’236’/>
<point x=’253’ y=’209’/>
<point x=’341’ y=’158’/>
</curve>
</simplepaint>
The first line, which is optional, merely identifies this as an XML document. This line can
also specify other information, such as the character encoding that was used to encode the
characters in the document into binary form. If this document had an associated DTD, it
would be specified in a “DOCTYPE” directive on the next line of the file.
Aside from the first line, the document is made up of elements, attributes, and textual
content. An element starts with a tag , such as <curve> and ends with a matching end-tag
such as </curve>. Between the tag and end-tag is the content of the element, which can
consist of text and nested elements. (In the example, the only textual content is the true or
false in the <symmetric> elements.) If an element has no content, then the opening tag and
end-tag can be combined into a single empty tag , such as <point x=’83’ y=’96’/>, with
a “/” before the final “>”. This is an abbreviation for <point x=’83’ y=’96’></point>. A
tag can include attributes such as the x and y in <point x=’83’ y=’96’/> or the version
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 609

in <simplepaint version="1.0">. A document can also include a few other things, such as
comments, that I will not discuss here.
The author of a well-formed XML document gets to choose the tag names and attribute
names, and meaningful names can be chosen to describe the data to a human reader. (For a
valid XML document that uses a DTD, it’s the author of the DTD who gets to choose the tag
names.)
Every well-formed XML document follows a strict syntax. Here are some of the most
important syntax rules: Tag names and attribute names in XML are case sensitive. A name
must begin with a letter and can contain letters, digits and certain other characters. Spaces
and ends-of-line are significant only in textual content. Every tag must either be an empty
tag or have a matching end-tag. By “matching” here, I mean that elements must be properly
nested; if a tag is inside some element, then the matching end-tag must also be inside that
element. A document must have a root element, which contains all the other elements. The
root element in the above example has tag name simplepaint. Every attribute must have
a value, and that value must be enclosed in quotation marks; either single quotes or double
quotes can be used for this. The special characters < and &, if they appear in attribute values
or textual content, must be written as &lt; and &amp;. “&lt;” and “&amp;” are examples
of entities. The entities &gt;, &quot;, and &apos; are also defined, representing >, double
quote, and single quote. (Additional entities can be defined in a DTD.)
While this description will not enable you to understand everything that you might
encounter in XML documents, it should allow you to design well-formed XML documents
to represent data structures used in Java programs.

11.5.2 Working With the DOM

The sample XML file shown above was designed to store information about simple drawings
made by the user. The drawings in question are ones that could be made using the sample
program SimplePaint2.java from Subsection 7.3.3. We’ll look at another version of that program
that can save the user’s drawing using an XML format for the data file. The new version is
SimplePaintWithXML.java. The sample XML document shown earlier in this section can be
used with that program. I designed the format of that document to represent all the data
needed to reconstruct a picture in SimplePaint2. The document encodes the background color
of the picture and a list of curves. Each <curve> element contains the data from one object of
type CurveData.
It is easy enough to write data in a customized XML format, although we have to be very
careful to follow all the syntax rules. Here is how SimplePaintWithXML writes the data for a
SimplePaint2 picture to a PrintWriter, out. This produces an XML file with the same structure
as the example shown above:
out.println("<?xml version=\"1.0\"?>");
out.println("<simplepaint version=\"1.0\">");
out.println(" <background red=’" + backgroundColor.getRed() + "’ green=’" +
backgroundColor.getGreen() + "’ blue=’" + backgroundColor.getBlue() + "’/>");
for (CurveData c : curves) {
out.println(" <curve>");
out.println(" <color red=’" + c.color.getRed() + "’ green=’" +
c.color.getGreen() + "’ blue=’" + c.color.getBlue() + "’/>");
out.println(" <symmetric>" + c.symmetric + "</symmetric>");
for (Point2D pt : c.points)
out.println(" <point x=’" + pt.getX() + "’ y=’" + pt.getY() + "’/>");
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 610

out.println(" </curve>");
}
out.println("</simplepaint>");
Reading the data back into the program is another matter. To reconstruct the data structure
represented by the XML Document, it is necessary to parse the document and extract the data
from it. This could be difficult to do by hand. Fortunately, Java has a standard API for parsing
and processing XML Documents. (Actually, it has two, but we will only look at one of them.)
A well-formed XML document has a certain structure, consisting of elements containing
attributes, nested elements, and textual content. It’s possible to build a data structure in the
computer’s memory that corresponds to the structure and content of the document. Of course,
there are many ways to do this, but there is one common standard representation known as
the Document Object Model , or DOM. The DOM specifies how to build data structures
to represent XML documents, and it specifies some standard methods for accessing the data
in that structure. The data structure is a kind of tree whose structure mirrors the structure
of the document. The tree is constructed from nodes of various types. There are nodes to
represent elements, attributes, and text. (The tree can also contain several other types of node,
representing aspects of XML that we can ignore here.) Attributes and text can be processed
without directly manipulating the corresponding nodes, so we will be concerned almost entirely
with element nodes.
(The sample program XMLDemo.java lets you experiment with XML and the DOM. It has
a text area where you can enter an XML document. Initially, the input area contains the sample
XML document from this section. When you click a button named “Parse XML Input”, the
program will attempt to read the XML from the input box and build a DOM representation of
that document. If the input is not well-formed XML, an error message is displayed. If it is legal,
the program will traverse the DOM representation and display a list of elements, attributes,
and textual content that it encounters. The program uses a few techniques for processing XML
that I won’t discuss here.)
In Java, the DOM representation of an XML document file can be created with just two
statements. If selectedFile is a variable of type File that represents the XML file, and xmldoc
is of type Document, then
DocumentBuilder docReader
= DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance().newDocumentBuilder();
xmldoc = docReader.parse(selectedFile);
will open the file, read its contents, and build the DOM representation. The classes Document-
Builder and DocumentBuilderFactory are both defined in the package javax.xml.parsers. The
method docReader.parse() does the actual work. It will throw an exception if it can’t read
the file or if the file does not contain a legal XML document. If it succeeds, then the value
returned by docReader.parse() is an object that represents the entire XML document. (This
is a very complex task! It has been coded once and for all into a method that can be used very
easily in any Java program. We see the benefit of using a standardized syntax.)
The structure of the DOM data structure is defined in the package org.w3c.dom, which
contains several data types that represent an XML document as a whole and the individual
nodes in a document. The “org.w3c” in the name refers to the World Wide Web Consortium,
W3C, which is the standards organization for the Web. DOM, like XML, is a general standard,
not just a Java standard. The data types that we need here are Document, Node, Element, and
NodeList. (They are defined as interfaces rather than classes, but that fact is not relevant
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 611

here.) We can use methods that are defined in these data types to access the data in the DOM
representation of an XML document.
An object of type Document represents an entire XML document. The return value of
docReader.parse()—xmldoc in the above example—is of type Document. We will only need
one method from this class: If xmldoc is of type Document, then
xmldoc.getDocumentElement()
returns a value of type Element that represents the root element of the document. (Recall that
this is the top-level element that contains all the other elements.) In the sample XML document
from earlier in this section, the root element consists of the tag <simplepaint version="1.0">,
the end-tag </simplepaint>, and everything in between. The elements that are nested inside
the root element are represented by their own nodes, which are said to be children of the
root node. An object of type Element contains several useful methods. If element is of type
Element, then we have:
• element.getTagName() — returns a String containing the name that is used in the
element’s tag. For example, the name of a <curve> element is the string “curve”.
• element.getAttribute(attrName) — if attrName is the name of an attribute in the
element, then this method returns the value of that attribute. For the element,
<point x="83" y="42"/>, element.getAttribute("x") would return the string “83”.
Note that the return value is always a String, even if the attribute is supposed to represent
a numerical value. If the element has no attribute with the specified name, then the return
value is an empty string.
• element.getTextContent() — returns a String containing all of the textual content that
is contained in the element. Note that this includes text that is contained inside other
elements that are nested inside the element.
• element.getChildNodes() — returns a value of type NodeList that contains all the Nodes
that are children of the element. The list includes nodes representing other elements and
textual content that are directly nested in the element (as well as some other types of node
that I don’t care about here). The getChildNodes() method makes it possible to traverse
the entire DOM data structure by starting with the root element, looking at children of
the root element, children of the children, and so on. (There is a similar method that
returns the attributes of the element, but I won’t be using it here.)
• element.getElementsByTagName(tagName) — returns a NodeList that contains all the
nodes representing all elements that are nested inside element and which have the given
tag name. Note that this includes elements that are nested to any level, not just elements
that are directly contained inside element. The getElementsByTagName() method allows
you to reach into the document and pull out specific data that you are interested in.
An object of type NodeList represents a list of Nodes. Unfortunately, it does not use the
API defined for lists in the Java Collection Framework. Instead, a value, nodeList, of type
NodeList has two methods: nodeList.getLength() returns the number of nodes in the list,
and nodeList.item(i) returns the node at position i, where the positions are numbered 0,
1, . . . , nodeList.getLength() - 1. Note that the return value of nodeList.get() is of type
Node, and it might have to be type-cast to a more specific node type before it is used.
Knowing just this much, you can do the most common types of processing of DOM
representations. Let’s look at a few code fragments. Suppose that in the course of processing
a document you come across an Element node that represents the element
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 612

<background red=’1’ green=’0.6’ blue=’0.2’/>

This element might be encountered either while traversing the document with getChildNodes()
or in the result of a call to getElementsByTagName("background"). Our goal is to reconstruct
the data structure represented by the document, and this element represents part of that data.
In this case, the element represents a color, and the red, green, and blue components are given
by the attributes of the element. If element is a variable that refers to the node, the color can
be obtained by saying:
double r = Double.parseDouble( element.getAttribute("red") );
double g = Double.parseDouble( element.getAttribute("green") );
double b = Double.parseDouble( element.getAttribute("blue") );
Color bgColor = Color.color(r,g,b);
Suppose now that element refers to the node that represents the element
<symmetric>true</symmetric>
In this case, the element represents the value of a boolean variable, and the value is encoded
in the textual content of the element. We can recover the value from the element with:
String bool = element.getTextContent();
boolean symmetric;
if (bool.equals("true"))
symmetric = true;
else
symmetric = false;
Next, consider an example that uses a NodeList. Suppose we encounter an element that
represents a list of Point2Ds:
<pointlist>
<point x=’17’ y=’42’/>
<point x=’23’ y=’8’/>
<point x=’109’ y=’342’/>
<point x=’18’ y=’270’/>
</pointlist>
Suppose that element refers to the node that represents the <pointlist> element. Our goal
is to build the list of type ArrayList<Point2D> that is represented by the element. We can do
this by traversing the NodeList that contains the child nodes of element:
ArrayList<Point2D> points = new ArrayList<>();
NodeList children = element.getChildNodes();
for (int i = 0; i < children.getLength(); i++) {
Node child = children.item(i); // One of the child nodes of element.
if ( child instanceof Element ) {
Element pointElement = (Element)child; // One of the <point> elements.
double x = Double.parseDouble( pointElement.getAttribute("x") );
double y = Double.parseDouble( pointElement.getAttribute("y") );
Point2D pt = new Point2D(x,y); // Create the Point represented by pointElement.
points.add(pt); // Add the point to the list of points.
}
}
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 613

All the nested <point> elements are children of the <pointlist> element. The if statement
in this code fragment is necessary because an element can have other children in addition to its
nested elements. In this example, we only want to process the children that are elements.
All these techniques can be employed to write the file input method for the sample program
SimplePaintWithXML.java. When building the data structure represented by an XML file, my
approach is to start with a default data structure and then to modify and add to it as I traverse
the DOM representation of the file. It’s not a trivial process, but I hope that you can follow it:
Color newBackground = Color.WHITE;
ArrayList<CurveData> newCurves = new ArrayList<>();
Element rootElement = xmldoc.getDocumentElement();
if ( ! rootElement.getNodeName().equals("simplepaint") )
throw new Exception("File is not a SimplePaint file.");
String version = rootElement.getAttribute("version");
try {
double versionNumber = Double.parseDouble(version);
if (versionNumber > 1.0)
throw new Exception("File requires a newer version of SimplePaint.");
}
catch (NumberFormatException e) {
}
NodeList nodes = rootElement.getChildNodes();
for (int i = 0; i < nodes.getLength(); i++) {
if (nodes.item(i) instanceof Element) {
Element element = (Element)nodes.item(i);
if (element.getTagName().equals("background")) {
double r = Double.parseDouble(element.getAttribute("red"));
double g = Double.parseDouble(element.getAttribute("green"));
double b = Double.parseDouble(element.getAttribute("blue"));
newBackground = Color.color(r,g,b);
}
else if (element.getTagName().equals("curve")) {
CurveData curve = new CurveData();
curve.color = Color.BLACK;
curve.points = new ArrayList<>();
newCurves.add(curve);
NodeList curveNodes = element.getChildNodes();
for (int j = 0; j < curveNodes.getLength(); j++) {
if (curveNodes.item(j) instanceof Element) {
Element curveElement = (Element)curveNodes.item(j);
if (curveElement.getTagName().equals("color")) {
double r = Double.parseDouble(curveElement.getAttribute("red"));
double g = Double.parseDouble(curveElement.getAttribute("green"));
double b = Double.parseDouble(curveElement.getAttribute("blue"));
curve.color = Color.color(r,g,b);
}
else if (curveElement.getTagName().equals("point")) {
double x = Double.parseDouble(curveElement.getAttribute("x"));
double y = Double.parseDouble(curveElement.getAttribute("y"));
curve.points.add(new Point2D(x,y));
}
else if (curveElement.getTagName().equals("symmetric")) {
String content = curveElement.getTextContent();
CHAPTER 11. I/O STREAMS, FILES, AND NETWORKING 614

if (content.equals("true"))
curve.symmetric = true;
}
}
}
}
}
}
backgroundColor = newBackground;
curves = newCurves;
You can find the complete source code in SimplePaintWithXML.java.
∗ ∗ ∗
XML has developed into an extremely important technology, and some applications of it are
very complex. But there is a core of simple ideas that can be easily applied in Java. Knowing
just the basics, you can make good use of XML in your own Java programs.
Exercises 615

Exercises for Chapter 11

1. The sample program DirectoryList.java, given as an example in Subsection 11.2.2, will (solution)
print a list of files in a directory specified by the user. But some of the files in that
directory might themselves be directories. And the subdirectories can themselves contain
directories. And so on. Write a modified version of DirectoryList that will list all the
files in a directory and all its subdirectories, to any level of nesting. You will need a
recursive subroutine to do the listing. The subroutine should have a parameter of type
File. You will need the constructor from the File class that has the form
public File( File dir, String fileName )
// Constructs the File object representing a file
// named fileName in the directory specified by dir.

2. Write a program that will count the number of lines in each file that is specified on the (solution)
command line. Assume that the files are text files. Note that multiple files can be specified,
as in:
java LineCounts file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt
Write each file name, along with the number of lines in that file, to standard output. If an
error occurs while trying to read from one of the files, you should print an error message
for that file, but you should still process all the remaining files. Do not use TextIO to
process the files; use a Scanner or a BufferedReader to process each file.

3. For this exercise, you will write a network server program. The program is a simple file (solution)
server that makes a collection of files available for transmission to clients. When the server
starts up, it needs to know the name of the directory that contains the collection of files.
This information can be provided as a command-line argument. You can assume that the
directory contains only regular files (that is, it does not contain any sub-directories). You
can also assume that all the files are text files.
When a client connects to the server, the server first reads a one-line command from
the client. The command can be the string “INDEX”. In this case, the server responds by
sending a list of names of all the files that are available on the server. Or the command can
be of the form “GET <filename>”, where <filename> is a file name. The server checks
whether the requested file actually exists. If so, it first sends the word “OK” as a message
to the client. Then it sends the contents of the file and closes the connection. Otherwise,
it sends a line beginning with the word “ERROR” to the client and closes the connection.
(The error response can include an error message on the rest of the line.)
Your program should use a subroutine to handle each request that the server receives.
It should not stop after handling one request; it should remain open and continue to
accept new requests. See the DirectoryList example in Subsection 11.2.2 for help with the
problem of getting the list of files in the directory.

4. Write a client program for the server from Exercise 11.3. Design a user interface that will (solution)
let the user do at least two things: (1) Get a list of files that are available on the server
and display the list on standard output; and (2) Get a copy of a specified file from the
server and save it to a local file (on the computer where the client is running).
Exercises 616

5. The sample program PhoneDirectoryFileDemo.java, from Subsection 11.3.2, stores (solution)

name/number pairs for a simple phone book in a text file in the user’s home directory.
Modify that program so that it uses an XML format for the data. The only significant
changes that you will have to make are to the parts of the program that read and write
the data file. Use the DOM to read the data, as discussed in Subsection 11.5.2. You can
use the XML format illustrated in the following sample phone directory file:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<phone directory>
<entry name=’barney’ number=’890-1203’/>
<entry name=’fred’ number=’555-9923’/>
</phone directory>
(This is just a short exercise in basic XML processing; as before, the program in this
exercise is not meant to be a useful phone directory program.)

6. The sample program Checkers.java from Subsection 7.6.3 lets two players play checkers. (solution)
It would be nice if, in the middle of a game, the state of the game could be saved to a file.
Later, the file could be read back into the file to restore the game and allow the players to
continue. Add the ability to save and load files to the checkers program. Design a simple
text-based format for the files. Here is a picture of my solution to this exercise, showing
that Load and Save buttons have been added:

It’s a little tricky to restore the complete state of a game after reading the data from
a file. The program has a variable board of type CheckersData that stores the current
contents of the board, and it has a variable currentPlayer of type int that indicates
whether Red or Black is currently moving. This data must be stored in the file when a
file is saved. When a file is read into the program, you should read the data into two local
variables newBoard of type CheckersData and newCurrentPlayer of type int. Once you
have successfully read all the data from the file, you can use the following code to set up
the remaining program state correctly. This code assumes that you have introduced two
Exercises 617

new variables saveButton and loadButton of type Button to represent the “Save Game”
and “Load Game” buttons:
board = newBoard; // Set up game with data read from file.
currentPlayer = newCurrentPlayer;
legalMoves = board.getLegalMoves(currentPlayer);
selectedRow = -1;
gameInProgress = true;
newGameButton.setDisable(true);
loadButton.setDisable(true);
saveButton.setDisable(false);
resignButton.setDisable(false);
if (currentPlayer == CheckersData.RED)
message.setText("Game loaded -- it’s RED’s move.");
else
message.setText("Game loaded -- it’s BLACK’s move.");
drawBoard();
Quiz 618

Quiz on Chapter 11
(answers)

1. In Java, input/output is done using I/O streams. I/O streams are an abstraction. Explain
what this means and why it is important.

2. Java has two types of I/O stream: character streams and byte streams. Why? What is
the difference between the two types of streams?

3. What is a file? Why are files necessary?

4. What is the point of the following statement?

out = new PrintWriter( new FileWriter("data.dat") );
Why would you need a statement that involves two different stream classes, PrintWriter
and FileWriter ?

5. The package java.io includes a class named URL. What does an object of type URL
represent, and how is it used?

6. What is the purpose of the FileChooser class?

7. Explain what is meant by the client / server model of network communication.

8. What is a socket?

9. What is a ServerSocket and how is it used?

10. What is meant by an element in an XML document?

11. What is it about XML that makes it suitable for representing almost any type of data?

12. Write a complete program that will display the first ten lines from a text file. The lines
should be written to standard output, System.out. The file name is given as the command-
line argument args[0]. You can assume that the file contains at least ten lines. Don’t
bother to make the program robust. Do not use TextIO to process the file; read from the
file using methods covered in this chapter.
Chapter 12

Threads and Multiprocessing

In the classic programming model, there is a single central processing unit that reads
instructions from memory and carries them out, one after the other. The purpose of a program
is to provide the list of instructions for the processor to execute. This is the only type of
programming that we have considered so far.
However, this model of programming has limitations. Modern computers have multiple
processors, making it possible for them to perform several tasks at the same time. To use the
full potential of all those processors, you will need to write programs that can do parallel
processing . For Java programmers, that means learning about threads. A single thread is
similar to the programs that you have been writing up until now, but more than one thread
can be running at the same time, “in parallel.” What makes things more interesting—and
more difficult—than single-threaded programming is the fact that the threads in a parallel
program are rarely completely independent of one another. They usually need to cooperate
and communicate. Learning to manage and control cooperation among threads is the main
hurdle that you will face in this chapter.
There are several reasons to use parallel programming. One is simply to do computations
more quickly by setting several processors to work on them simultaneously. Just as important,
however, is to use threads to deal with “blocking” operations, where a process can’t proceed
until some event occurs. In the previous chapter, for example, we saw how programs can block
while waiting for data to arrive over a network connection. Threads make it possible for one
part of a program to continue to do useful work even while another part is blocked, waiting for
some event to occur. In this context, threads are a vital programming tool even for a computer
that has only a single processing unit.
As Java has developed, new features have been added to the language that make it possible
to do parallel programming without using threads directly. We have already seen one of these:
parallel streams in the stream API from Section 10.6. We will encounter several more in this
chapter. But to use these higher level language features safely and efficiently, you still need to
know something about the hazards and benefits of threads.

12.1 Introduction to Threads

Like people, computers can multitask . That is, they can be working on several different
tasks at the same time. A computer that has just a single central processing unit can’t literally
do two things at the same time, any more than a person can, but it can still switch its attention
back and forth among several tasks. Furthermore, most computers, and even mobile devices,

619
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 620

now have more than one processing unit, and such computers can literally work on several tasks
simultaneously. It is likely that from now on, most of the increase in computing power will
come from adding additional processors to computers rather than from increasing the speed of
individual processors. To use the full power of these multiprocessing computers, a programmer
must do parallel programming , which means writing a program as a set of several tasks that
can be executed simultaneously. Even on a single-processor computer, parallel programming
techniques can be useful, since some problems can be tackled most naturally by breaking the
solution into a set of simultaneous tasks that cooperate to solve the problem.
In Java, a single task is called a thread . The term “thread” refers to a “thread of control” or
“thread of execution,” meaning a sequence of instructions that are executed one after another—
the thread extends through time, connecting each instruction to the next. In a multithreaded
program, there can be many threads of control, weaving through time in parallel and forming
the complete fabric of the program. (Ok, enough with the metaphor, already!) Every Java
program has at least one thread; when the Java virtual machine runs your program, it creates a
thread that is responsible for executing the main routine of the program. This main thread can
in turn create other threads that can continue even after the main thread has terminated. In a
GUI program, there is at least one additional thread, which is responsible for handling events
and drawing components on the screen. In JavaFX, that thread is the application thread.
Unfortunately, parallel programming is even more difficult than ordinary, single-threaded
programming. When several threads are working together on a problem, a whole new category
of errors is possible. This just means that techniques for writing correct and robust programs are
even more important for parallel programming than they are for normal programming. On the
other hand, fortunately, Java has a nice thread API that makes basic uses of threads reasonably
easy. It also has a variety of standard classes to help with some of the more tricky parts or to
hide them entirely. It won’t be until midway through Section 12.3 that you’ll learn about the
low-level techniques that are necessary to handle the trickiest parts of parallel programming.
In fact, a programmer can do a lot with threads without ever learning about the low-level stuff.

12.1.1 Creating and Running Threads

In Java, a thread is represented by an object belonging to the class java.lang.Thread (or to
a subclass of this class). The purpose of a Thread object is to execute a single method and to
execute it just once. This method represents the task to be carried out by the thread. The
method is executed in its own thread of control, which can run in parallel with other threads.
When the execution of the thread’s method is finished, either because the method terminates
normally or because of an uncaught exception, the thread stops running. Once this happens,
there is no way to restart the thread or to use the same Thread object to start another thread.
There are two ways to program a thread. One is to create a subclass of Thread and to define
the method public void run() in the subclass. This run() method defines the task that will
be performed by the thread; that is, when the thread is started, it is the run() method that
will be executed in the thread. For example, here is a simple, and rather useless, class that
defines a thread that does nothing but print a message on standard output:
public class NamedThread extends Thread {
private String name; // The name of this thread.
public NamedThread(String name) { // Constructor gives name to thread.
this.name = name;
}
public void run() { // The run method prints a message to standard output.
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 621

System.out.println("Greetings from thread ’" + name + "’!");

}
}
To use a NamedThread, you must of course create an object belonging to this class. For
example,
NamedThread greetings = new NamedThread("Fred");
However, creating the object does not automatically start the thread running or cause its run()
method to be executed. To do that, you must call the start() method in the thread object.
For the example, this would be done with the statement
greetings.start();
The purpose of the start() method is to create the new thread of control that will execute the
Thread object’s run() method. The new thread runs in parallel with the thread in which the
start() method was called, along with any other threads that already existed. The start()
method returns immediately after starting the new thread of control, without waiting for
the thread to terminate. This means that the code in the thread’s run() method executes
at the same time as the statements that follow the call to the start() method. Consider this
code segment:
NamedThread greetings = new NamedThread("Fred");
greetings.start();
System.out.println("Thread has been started");
After greetings.start() is executed, there are two threads. One of them will print “Thread
has been started” while the other one wants to print “Greetings from thread ’Fred’ !”. It is
important to note that these messages can be printed in either order. The two threads run
simultaneously and will compete for access to standard output, so that they can print their
messages. Whichever thread happens to be the first to get access will be the first to print its
message. In a normal, single-threaded program, things happen in a definite, predictable order
from beginning to end. In a multi-threaded program, there is a fundamental indeterminacy.
You can’t be sure what order things will happen in. This indeterminacy is what makes parallel
programming so difficult!
Note that calling greetings.start() is very different from calling greetings.run().
Calling greetings.run() would execute the run() method in the same thread, rather than
creating a new thread. This means that all the work of the run() method will be done before
the computer moves on to the statements that follow the call to greetings.run(). There is
no parallelism and no indeterminacy.
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 622

When a thread ÃÄÅÆÇÈ ÃÄÅÆÇÈ When a thread

calls a subroutine, of of starts another thread,
there is still ÉÊËÌÅÊÍ Time ÉÊËÌÅÊÍ there is a new thread
only one thread of control that runs in
of control, which parallel with the original
is in the subroutine thread of control, and
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terminates.

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This discussion has assumed that the computer on which the program is running has more
than one processing unit, so that it is possible for the original thread and the newly created
thread to literally be executed at the same time. However, it’s possible to create multiple
threads even on a computer that has only one processor (and, more generally, it is possible to
create many more threads than there are processors, on any computer). In that case, the two
threads will compete for time on the processor. However, there is still indeterminacy because
the processor can switch from one thread to another at unpredictable times. In fact, from
the point of view of the programmer, there is no difference between programming for a single-
processor computer and programming for a multi-processor computer, and we will mostly ignore
the distinction from now on.
∗ ∗ ∗
I mentioned that there are two ways to program a thread. The first way was to
define a subclass of Thread. The second is to define a class that implements the interface
java.lang.Runnable. The Runnable interface defines a single method, public void run().
Given a Runnable, it is possible to create a Thread whose task is to execute the Runnable’s
run() method.
The Thread class has a constructor that takes a Runnable as its parameter. When an object
that implements the Runnable interface is passed to that constructor, the run() method of the
thread will simply call the run() method from the Runnable, and calling the thread’s start()
method will create a new thread of control in which the Runnable’s run() method is executed.
For example, as an alternative to the NamedThread class, we could define the class:
public class NamedRunnable implements Runnable {
private String name; // The name of this Runnable.
public NamedRunnable(String name) { // Constructor gives name to object.
this.name = name;
}
public void run() { // The run method prints a message to standard output.
System.out.println("Greetings from runnable ’" + name +"’!");
}
}
To use this version of the class, we would create a NamedRunnable object and use that object
to create an object of type Thread:
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 623

NamedRunnable greetings = new NamedRunnable("Fred");

Thread greetingsThread = new Thread(greetings);
greetingsThread.start();
The advantage of doing things this way is that any object can implement the Runnable interface
and can contain a run() method, which can then be executed in a separate thread. That run()
method has access to everything in the class, including private variables and methods. The
disadvantage is that this way of doing things is not very object-oriented: It violates the principle
that each object should have a single, clearly-defined responsibility. Instead of making some
random object Runnable just so that you can use it to make a thread, you can consider defining
the thread using a nested class that is a subclass of the Thread class. (See Section 5.8.)
Finally, I’ll note that Runnable is a functional interface, so that a Runnable object can be
given as a lambda expression. In particular, the parameter to new Thread(r) can be a lambda
expression. For example:
Thread greetingsFromFred = new Thread(
() -> System.out.println("Greetings from Fred!")
);
greetingsFromFred.start();

∗ ∗ ∗
To help you understand how multiple threads are executed in parallel, we consider the
sample program ThreadTest1.java. This program creates several threads. Each thread performs
exactly the same task. The task is to count the number of integers less than 10,000,000 that
are prime. (The particular task that is done is not important for our purposes here, as long as
it is something that takes a non-trivial amount of time. This is a demo program; it would be
silly in a real program to have multiple threads that do the same thing, and the method that
is used for counting the primes is very inefficient.) This computation should take no more than
a few seconds on a modern computer. The threads that perform this task are defined by the
following static nested class, where MAX is 10,000,000:
/**
* When a thread belonging to this class is run it will count the
* number of primes between 2 and MAX. It will print the result
* to standard output, along with its ID number and the elapsed
* time between the start and the end of the computation.
*/
private static class CountPrimesThread extends Thread {
int id; // An id number for this thread; specified in the constructor.
public CountPrimesThread(int id) {
this.id = id;
}
public void run() {
long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
int count = countPrimes(2,MAX); // Counts the primes.
long elapsedTime = System.currentTimeMillis() - startTime;
System.out.println("Thread " + id + " counted " +
count + " primes in " + (elapsedTime/1000.0) + " seconds.");
}
}
The main program asks the user how many threads to run, and then creates and starts the
specified number of threads:
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 624

public static void main(String[] args) {

int numberOfThreads = 0;
while (numberOfThreads < 1 || numberOfThreads > 30) {
System.out.print("How many threads do you want to use (1 to 30) ? ");
numberOfThreads = TextIO.getlnInt();
if (numberOfThreads < 1 || numberOfThreads > 30)
System.out.println("Please enter a number between 1 and 30 !");
}
System.out.println("\nCreating " + numberOfThreads
+ " prime-counting threads...");
CountPrimesThread[] worker = new CountPrimesThread[numberOfThreads];
for (int i = 0; i < numberOfThreads; i++)
worker[i] = new CountPrimesThread( i );
for (int i = 0; i < numberOfThreads; i++)
worker[i].start();
System.out.println("Threads have been created and started.");
}
It would be a good idea for you to compile and run the program.
My computer has six processors. When I ran the program on that computer with using one
thread, it took about 3.36 seconds. When I ran it using twelve threads, the output was:
Creating 12 prime-counting threads...
Threads have been created and started.
Thread 1 counted 664579 primes in 6.424 seconds.
Thread 11 counted 664579 primes in 6.694 seconds.
Thread 0 counted 664579 primes in 6.727 seconds.
Thread 3 counted 664579 primes in 6.74 seconds.
Thread 10 counted 664579 primes in 6.759 seconds.
Thread 7 counted 664579 primes in 6.77 seconds.
Thread 2 counted 664579 primes in 6.798 seconds.
Thread 9 counted 664579 primes in 6.792 seconds.
Thread 5 counted 664579 primes in 6.824 seconds.
Thread 4 counted 664579 primes in 6.836 seconds.
Thread 8 counted 664579 primes in 6.841 seconds.
Thread 6 counted 664579 primes in 6.877 seconds.
The second line was printed immediately after the first. At this point, the main program
has ended but the twelve threads continued to run. After a pause of about 6.5 seconds, all eight
threads completed at about the same time. The order in which the threads complete is not the
same as the order in which they were started, and the order is indeterminate. That is, if the
program is run again, the order in which the threads complete will probably be different.
On this computer, twelve threads took about twice as long as one thread. This is because
the computer has six processors. With twelve threads running on six processors—one-half
processor per thread—each thread was only actively being executed for about half of the time,
so it took twice as long to finish its task. On a single-processor computer, twelve threads would
take about twelve times as long as one thread. On a computer with six or more processors,
six threads might take no more time than a single thread. Because of overhead and other
reasons, the actual speedup will probably be a little smaller than this analysis indicates, but
on a multiprocessor machine, you should see a definite speedup. What happens when you run
the program on your own computer? How many processors do you have?
Whenever there are more threads to be run than there are processors to run them, the
computer divides its attention among all the runnable threads by switching rapidly from one
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 625

thread to another. That is, each processor runs one thread for a while then switches to another
thread and runs that one for a while, and so on. Typically, these “context switches” occur
about 100 times or more per second. The result is that the computer makes progress on all
the tasks, and it looks to the user as if all the tasks are being executed simultaneously. This
is why in the sample program, in which each thread has the same amount of work to do, all
the threads complete at about the same time: Over any time period longer than a fraction of
a second, the computer’s time is divided approximately equally among all the threads.

12.1.2 Operations on Threads

Much of Java’s thread API can be found in the Thread class. However, we’ll start with a
thread-related method in Runtime, a class that allows a Java program to get information about
the environment in which it is running. When you do parallel programming in order to spread
the work among several processors, you might want to take into account the number of available
processors. You might, for example, want to create one thread for each processor. In Java, you
can find out the number of processors by calling the function
Runtime.getRuntime().availableProcessors()
which returns an int giving the number of processors that are available to the Java Virtual
Machine. In some cases, this might be less than the actual number of processors in the computer.
∗ ∗ ∗
A Thread object contains several useful methods for working with threads. Most important
is the start() method, which was discussed above.
Once a thread has been started, it will continue to run until its run() method ends
for some reason. Sometimes, it’s useful for one thread to be able to tell whether another
thread has terminated. If thrd is an object of type Thread, then the boolean-valued function
thrd.isAlive() can be used to test whether or not thrd has terminated. A thread is “alive”
between the time it is started and the time when it terminates. After the thread has terminated
it is said to be “dead.” (The rather gruesome metaphor is also used when we refer to “killing”
or “aborting” a thread.) Remember that a thread that has terminated cannot be restarted.
The static method Thread.sleep(milliseconds) causes the thread that executes this
method to “sleep” for the specified number of milliseconds. A sleeping thread is still alive,
but it is not running. While a thread is sleeping, the computer can work on any other runnable
threads (or on other programs). Thread.sleep() can be used to insert a pause in the execution
of a thread. The sleep() method can throw an exception of type InterruptedException, which is
a checked exception that requires mandatory exception handling. In practice, this means that
the sleep() method is usually called inside a try..catch statement that catches the potential
InterruptedException:
try {
Thread.sleep(lengthOfPause);
}
catch (InterruptedException e) {
}
One thread can interrupt another thread to wake it up when it is sleeping or paused for certain
other reasons. A Thread, thrd, can be interrupted by calling the method thrd.interrupt().
Doing so can be a convenient way to send a signal from one thread to another. A thread knows
it has been interrupted when it catches an InterruptedException. Outside any catch handler
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 626

for the exception, the thread can check whether it has been interrupted by calling the static
method Thread.interrupted(). This method tells whether the current thread—the thread
that executes the method—has been interrupted. It also has the unusual property of clearing
the interrupted status of the thread, so you only get one chance to check for an interruption.
In your own programs, your threads are not going to be interrupted unless you interrupt them.
So most often, you are not likely to need to do anything in response to an InterruptedException
(except to catch it).
Sometimes, it’s necessary for one thread to wait for another thread to die. This is done with
the join() method from the Thread class. Suppose that thrd is a Thread. Then, if another
thread calls thrd.join(), that other thread will go to sleep until thrd terminates. If thrd is
already dead when thrd.join() is called, then it simply has no effect. The join() method can
throw an InterruptedException, which must be handled as usual. As an example, the following
code starts several threads, waits for them all to terminate, and then outputs the elapsed time:
CountPrimesThread[] worker = new CountPrimesThread[numberOfThreads];
long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
for (int i = 0; i < numberOfThreads; i++) {
worker[i] = new CountPrimesThread();
worker[i].start();
}
for (int i = 0; i < numberOfThreads; i++) {
try {
worker[i].join(); // Wait until worker[i] finishes, if it hasn’t already.
}
catch (InterruptedException e) {
}
}
// At this point, all the worker threads have terminated.
long elapsedTime = System.currentTimeMillis() - startTime;
System.out.println("Total elapsed time: " + (elapsedTime/1000.0) + " seconds");
An observant reader will note that this code assumes that no InterruptedException will occur.
To be absolutely sure that the thread worker[i] has terminated in an environment where
InterruptedExceptions are possible, you would have to do something like:
while (worker[i].isAlive()) {
try {
worker[i].join();
}
catch (InterruptedException e) {
}
}
Another version of the join() method takes an integer parameter that specifies the
maximum number of milliseconds to wait. A call to thrd.join(m) will wait until either thrd
has terminated or until m milliseconds have elapsed (or until the waiting thread is interrupted).
This can be used to allow a thread to wake up occasionally to perform some task while it is
waiting. Here, for example, is a code segment that will start a thread, thrd, and then will
output a period every two seconds as long as thrd continues to run:
System.out.print("Running the thread ");
thrd.start();
while (thrd.isAlive()) {
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 627

try {
thrd.join(2000);
System.out.print(".");
}
catch (InterruptedException e) {
}
}
System.out.println(" Done!");

∗ ∗ ∗
Threads have two properties that are occasionally useful: a daemon status and a priority.
A Thread thrd can be designated as a daemon thread by calling thrd.setDaemon(true).
This must be done before the thread is started, and it can throw an exception of type
SecurityException if the calling thread is not allowed to modify thrd’s properties. This has
only one effect: The Java Virtual Machine will exit as soon as there are no non-daemon
threads that are still alive. That is, the fact that a daemon thread is still alive is not enough
to keep the Java Virtual Machine running. A daemon thread might exist, for example, only
to provide some service to other, non-daemon threads. When there are no more non-daemon
threads, there will be no further call for the daemon thread’s services, so the program might
as well shut down. (A call to System.exit() forces the JVM to terminate, even if there are
non-daemon threads still running.)
The priority of a thread is a more important property. Every thread has a priority , specified
as an integer. A thread with a greater priority value will be run in preference to a thread with a
smaller priority. For example, computations that can be done in the background, when no more
important thread has work to do, can be run with a low priority. In the next section, we will see
how this can be useful in GUI programs. If thrd is of type Thread, then thrd.getPriority()
returns the integer that specifies thrd’s priority, and thrd.setPriority(p) can be used to set
its priority to a given integer, p.
Priorities cannot be arbitrary integers, and thrd.setPriority() will throw an IllegalArgu-
mentException if the specified priority is not in the legal range for the thread. The range of legal
priority values can differ from one computer to another. The range of legal values is specified
by the constants Thread.MIN PRIORITY and Thread.MAX PRIORITY, but a given thread might
be further restricted to values less than Thread.MAX PRIORITY. The default priority is given
by Thread.NORM PRIORITY. To set thrd to run with a priority value just below the normal
priority, you can call
thrd.setPriority( Thread.NORM PRIORITY - 1 );
Note that thrd.setPriority() can also throw an exception of type SecurityException, if
the thread that calls the method is not allowed to set the priority of thrd to the specified value.
Finally, I’ll note that the static method Thread.currentThread() returns the current
thread. That is, the return value of this method is the thread that executed the method.
This allows a thread to get a reference to itself, so that it can modify its own properties.
For example, you can determine the priority of the currently running thread by calling
Thread.currentThread().getPriority().

12.1.3 Mutual Exclusion with “synchronized”

It’s pretty easy to program several threads to carry out completely independent tasks. The real
difficulty arises when threads have to interact in some way. One way that threads interact is
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 628

by sharing resources. When two threads need access to the same resource, such as a variable or
a window on the screen, some care must be taken that they don’t try to use the same resource
at the same time. Otherwise, the situation could be something like this: Imagine several cooks
sharing the use of just one measuring cup, and imagine that Cook A fills the measuring cup
with milk, only to have Cook B grab the cup before Cook A has a chance to empty the milk
into his bowl. There has to be some way for Cook A to claim exclusive rights to the cup while
he performs the two operations: Add-Milk-To-Cup and Empty-Cup-Into-Bowl.
Something similar happens with threads, even with something as simple as adding one to a
counter. The statement
count = count + 1;
is actually a sequence of three operations:
Step 1. Get the value of count
Step 2. Add 1 to the value.
Step 3. Store the new value in count
Suppose that each of several threads performs these three steps. Remember that it’s possible
for two threads to run at the same time, and even if there is only one processor, it’s possible
for that processor to switch from one thread to another at any point. Suppose that while one
thread is between Step 2 and Step 3, another thread starts executing the same sequence of
steps. Since the first thread has not yet stored the new value in count, the second thread
reads the old value of count and adds one to that old value. Both threads have computed the
same new value for count, and both threads then go on to store that value back into count
by executing Step 3. After both threads have done so, the value of count has gone up only
by 1 instead of by 2! This type of problem is called a race condition. This occurs when one
thread is in the middle of a multi-step operation, and another thread can change some value or
condition that the first thread is depending upon. (The first thread is “in a race” to complete
all the steps before it is interrupted by another thread.)
Another example of a race condition can occur in an if statement. Consider the following
statement, which is meant to avoid a division-by-zero error:
if ( A != 0 ) {
B = C / A;
}
Suppose that this statement is executed by some thread. If the variable A is shared by one
or more other threads, and if nothing is done to guard against the race condition, then it is
possible that one of those other threads will change the value of A to zero between the time
that the first thread checks the condition A != 0 and the time that it does the division. This
means that the thread can end up dividing by zero, even though it just checked that A was not
zero!
To fix the problem of race conditions, there has to be some way for a thread to get exclusive
access to a shared resource. This is not a trivial thing to implement, but Java provides a high-
level and relatively easy-to-use approach to exclusive access. It’s done with synchronized
methods and with the synchronized statement. These are used to protect shared resources
by making sure that only one thread at a time will try to access the resource. Synchronization in
Java actually provides only mutual exclusion, which means that exclusive access to a resource
is only guaranteed if every thread that needs access to that resource uses synchronization.
Synchronization is like a cook leaving a note that says, “I’m using the measuring cup.” This
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 629

will get the cook exclusive access to the cup—but only if all the cooks agree to check the note
before trying to grab the cup.
Because this is a difficult topic, I will start with a simple example. Suppose that we want
to avoid the race condition that occurs when several threads all want to add 1 to a counter. We
can do this by defining a class to represent the counter and by using synchronized methods in
that class. A method is declared to be synchronized by adding the reserved word synchronized
as a modifier to the definition of the method:
public class ThreadSafeCounter {
private int count = 0; // The value of the counter.
synchronized public void increment() {
count = count + 1;
}
synchronized public int getValue() {
return count;
}
}
If tsc is of type ThreadSafeCounter, then any thread can call tsc.increment() to add 1 to the
counter in a completely safe way. The fact that tsc.increment() is synchronized means that
only one thread can be in this method at a time; once a thread starts executing this method, it
is guaranteed that it will finish executing it before another thread is allowed to access count.
There is no possibility of a race condition. Note that the guarantee depends on the fact that
count is a private variable. This forces all access to tsc.count to occur in the synchronized
methods that are provided by the class. If count were public, it would be possible for a
thread to bypass the synchronization by, for example, saying tsc.count++. This could change
the value of count while another thread is in the middle of tsc.increment(). Remember
that synchronization by itself does not guarantee exclusive access; it only guarantees mutual
exclusion among all the threads that are synchronized.
However, the ThreadSafeCounter class does not prevent all possible race conditions that
might arise when using a counter. Consider the if statement:
if ( tsc.getValue() == 10 ) {
doSomething();
}
where doSomething() is some method that requires the value of the counter to be 10. There is
still a race condition here, which occurs if a second thread increments the counter between the
time the first thread tests tsc.getValue() == 10 and the time it executes doSomething().
The first thread needs exclusive access to the counter during the execution of the whole if
statement. (The synchronization in the ThreadSafeCounter class only gives it exclusive access
during the time it is evaluating tsc.getValue().) We can solve the race condition by putting
the if statement in a synchronized statement:
synchronized(tsc) {
if ( tsc.getValue() == 10 )
doSomething();
}
Note that the synchronized statement takes an object—tsc in this case—as a kind of
parameter. The syntax of the synchronized statement is:
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 630

synchronized( hobject i ) {
hstatements i
}
In Java, mutual exclusion is always associated with an object; we say that the synchronization
is “on” that object. For example, the if statement above is “synchronized on tsc.” A
synchronized instance method, such as those in the class ThreadSafeCounter, is synchronized on
the object that contains the instance method. In fact, adding the synchronized modifier to the
definition of an instance method is pretty much equivalent to putting the body of the method
in a synchronized statement of the form synchronized(this) {...}. It is also possible to
have synchronized static methods; a synchronized static method is synchronized on the special
class object that represents the class containing the static method.
The real rule of synchronization in Java is this: Two threads cannot be synchronized
on the same object at the same time; that is, they cannot simultaneously be executing
code segments that are synchronized on that object. If one thread is synchronized on an object,
and a second thread tries to synchronize on the same object, the second thread is forced to
wait until the first thread has finished with the object. This means that it is not only true
that two threads cannot be executing the same synchronized method at the same time, but
in fact two threads cannot be executing two different methods at the same time, if the two
methods are synchronized on the same object. This is implemented using something called a
synchronization lock . Every object has a synchronization lock, and that lock can be “held”
by only one thread at a time. To enter a synchronized statement or synchronized method, a
thread must obtain the associated object’s lock. If the lock is available, then the thread obtains
the lock and immediately begins executing the synchronized code. It releases the lock after it
finishes executing the synchronized code. If Thread A tries to obtain a lock that is already held
by Thread B, then Thread A has to wait until Thread B releases the lock. In fact, Thread A
will go to sleep, and will not be awoken until the lock becomes available.
The discussion of invariants in Subsection 8.2.3 mentioned that reasoning about invariants
becomes much more complicated when threads are involved. The problem is race conditions. We
would like our ThreadSafeCounter class to have the class invariant that “the value of count is the
number of times that increment() has been called.” In a single-threaded program, that would
be true even without synchronization. However, in a multithreaded program, synchronization
is needed to ensure that the class invariant is really invariant.
∗ ∗ ∗
As a simple example of shared resources, we return to the prime-counting problem. In this
case, instead of having every thread perform exactly the same task, we’ll do some real parallel
processing. The program will count the prime numbers in a given range of integers, and it will
do so by dividing the work up among several threads. Each thread will be assigned a part of
the full range of integers, and it will count the primes in its assigned part. At the end of its
computation, the thread has to add its count to the overall total of primes in the entire range.
The variable that represents the total is shared by all the threads, since each thread has to add
a number to the total. If each thread just says
total = total + count;
then there is a (small) chance that two threads will try to do this at the same time and that the
final total will be wrong. To prevent this race condition, access to total has to be synchronized.
My program uses a synchronized method to add the counts to the total. This method is called
once by each thread, and it is the only method in which the value of total is changed:
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 631

synchronized private static void addToTotal(int x) {

total = total + x;
System.out.println(total + " primes found so far.");
}
The source code for the program can be found in ThreadTest2.java. This program counts
the primes in the range 6,000,001 to 12,000,000. (The numbers are rather arbitrary.) The
main() routine in this program creates between 1 and 6 threads and assigns part of the job
to each thread. It waits for all the threads to finish, using the join() method as described
above. It then reports the total number of primes found, along with the elapsed time. Note
that join() is required here, since it doesn’t make sense to report the number of primes until
all of the threads have finished. If you run the program on a multiprocessor computer, it should
take less time for the program to run when you use more than one thread.
∗ ∗ ∗
Synchronization can help to prevent race conditions, but it introduces the possibility of
another type of error, deadlock . A deadlock occurs when a thread waits forever for a resource
that it will never get. In the kitchen, a deadlock might occur if two very simple-minded cooks
both want to measure a cup of milk at the same time. The first cook grabs the measuring cup,
while the second cook grabs the milk. The first cook needs the milk, but can’t find it because
the second cook has it. The second cook needs the measuring cup, but can’t find it because
the first cook has it. Neither cook can continue and nothing more gets done. This is deadlock.
Exactly the same thing can happen in a program, for example if there are two threads (like the
two cooks) both of which need to obtain locks on the same two objects (like the milk and the
measuring cup) before they can proceed. Deadlocks can easily occur, unless great care is taken
to avoid them.

12.1.4 Volatile Variables

Synchronization is only one way of controlling communication among threads. We will cover
several other techniques later in the chapter. For now, we finish this section with two such
techniques: volatile variables and atomic variables.
In general, threads communicate by sharing variables and accessing those variables in
synchronized methods or synchronized statements. However, synchronization is fairly expensive
computationally, and excessive use of it should be avoided. So in some cases, it can make sense
for threads to refer to shared variables without synchronizing their access to those variables.
However, a subtle problem arises when the value of a shared variable is set in one thread
and used in another. Because of the way that threads are implemented in Java, the second
thread might not see the changed value of the variable immediately. That is, it is possible that
a thread will continue to see the old value of the shared variable for some time after the value
of the variable has been changed by another thread. This is because threads are allowed to
cache shared data. That is, each thread can keep its own local copy of the shared data. When
one thread changes the value of a shared variable, the local copies in the caches of other threads
are not immediately changed, so the other threads can continue to see the old value, at least
briefly.
It is safe to use a shared variable in a synchronized method or statement, as long as all
access to that variable is synchronized, using the same synchronization object in all cases.
More precisely, any thread that accesses a variable in synchronized code is guaranteed to see
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 632

changes that were made by other threads, as long as the changes were made in code that was
synchronized on the same object.
It is possible to use a shared variable safely outside of synchronized code, but in that case,
the variable must be declared to be volatile. The volatile keyword is a modifier that can be
added to a global variable declaration, as in
private volatile int count;
If a variable is declared to be volatile, no thread will keep a local copy of that variable in its
cache. Instead, the thread will always use the official, main copy of the variable. This means
that any change that is made to the variable will immediately be visible to all threads. This
makes it safe for threads to refer to volatile shared variables even outside of synchronized
code. Access to volatile variables is less efficient than access to non-volatile variables, but more
efficient than using synchronization. (Remember, though, that using a volatile variable does
not solve race conditions that occur, for example, when the value of the variable is incremented.
The increment operation can still be interrupted by another thread.)
When the volatile modifier is applied to an object variable, only the variable itself is
declared to be volatile, not the contents of the object that the variable points to. For this reason,
volatile is used mostly for variables of simple types such as primitive types or immutable types
like String.
A typical example of using volatile variables is to send a signal from one thread to another
that tells the second thread to terminate. The two threads would share a variable
volatile boolean terminate = false;
The run method of the second thread would check the value of terminate frequently, and it
would end when the value of terminate becomes true:
public void run() {
while ( terminate == false ) {
.
. // Do some work.
.
}
}
This thread will run until some other thread sets the value of terminate to true. Something
like this is really the only clean way for one thread to cause another thread to die.
(By the way, you might be wondering why threads should use local data caches in the first
place, since it seems to complicate things unnecessarily. Caching is allowed because of the
structure of multiprocessing computers. In many multiprocessing computers, each processor
has some local memory that is directly connected to the processor. A thread’s cache can be
stored in the local memory of the processor on which the thread is running. Access to this local
memory is much faster than access to the main memory that is shared by all processors, so it
is more efficient for a thread to use a local copy of a shared variable rather than some “master
copy” that is stored in main memory.)

12.1.5 Atomic Variables

The problem with a statement like “count = count + 1” for parallel programming is that it
takes several steps to execute the statement. The statement is only correctly executed if those
steps are completed without interruption.
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 633

An atomic operation is something that cannot be interrupted. It is an all-or-nothing affair.

It cannot be partly completed. Most computers have operations that are atomic on the machine
language level. For example, there might be a machine language instruction that can atomically
increment the value in a memory location. Such an instruction could be used without fear of
race conditions.
In a program, an operation can be atomic even if it is not literally atomic on the machine
language level. An operation can be considered atomic if it can never be seen by any thread as
partly completed. For example, we can say that the ThreadSafeCounter class that was defined
above has an atomic increment operation. Synchronization can be seen as a way of ensuring
that operations are, at least effectively, atomic.
Still, it would be nice to have atomic operations that don’t require synchronization,
especially since such operations might be implemented very efficiently on the hardware level.
Java has a package java.util.concurrent.atomic that defines classes that implement
atomic operations on several simple variable types. We will look at the class AtomicInteger,
which defines some atomic operations on an integer value, including atomic add, increment,
and decrement. Suppose, for example, that we want to add some integer values that are being
produced by a number of different threads. We can do that with an AtomicInteger such as
private static AtomicInteger total = new AtomicInteger();
The total is created with an initial value of zero. When a thread wants to add a value to
the total, it can use the method total.addAndGet(x), which adds x to the total and returns
the new value of total after x has been added. This is an atomic operation, which cannot be
interrupted, so we can be sure that the value of total will be correct in the end. The sample
program ThreadTest3.java is a small variation on ThreadTest2.java that uses an AtomicInteger
instead of synchronization to safely add up values from several threads.
AtomicInteger has similar methods for adding one to the total and subtracting one
from the total: total.incrementAndGet() and total.decrementAndGet(). The method
total.getAndSet(x) sets the value of the total to x and returns the previous value that x is
replacing. All of these operations are done atomically (either because they use atomic machine
language instructions or because they use synchronization internally).
I should close with my usual warning: Using an atomic variable does not automatically
solve all race conditions involving that variable. For example, in the code
int currentTotal = total.addAndGet(x);
System.out.println("Current total is " + currentTotal);
it is possible that by the time the output statement is executed, the total has been changed by
another thread so that currentTotal is no longer the current value of total!

12.2 Programming with Threads

Threads introduce new complexity into programming, but they are an important tool and
will only become more essential in the future. So, every programmer should know some of the
fundamental design patterns that are used with threads. In this section, we will look at some
basic techniques, with more to come as the chapter progresses.

12.2.1 Threads versus Timers

One of the most basic uses of threads is to perform some periodic task at set intervals. In fact,
this is so basic that there are specialized classes for performing this task—and you’ve already
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 634

worked with one of them: the AnimationTimer class, in package javafx.animation, which was
introduced in Subsection 6.3.5. An AnimationTimer calls its handle() method periodically,
and you can program an animation by overriding that method in a subclass of AnimationTimer.
Before timers were introduced, threads had to be used to implement a similar functionality.
Suppose that we wanted to do something similar with a thread. That is, we would like to
call some subroutine at periodic intervals, say every 30 milliseconds. The run() method of the
thread would have to execute a loop in which the thread sleeps for 30 milliseconds, then wakes
up to call the subroutine. This could be implemented in a nested class as follows using the
method Thread.sleep() that was discussed in Subsection 12.1.2:
private class MyAnimator extends Thread {
public void run() {
while (true) {
try {
Thread.sleep(30);
}
catch (InterruptedException e) {
}
callSubroutine();
}
}
}
To use this class, you would create an object belonging to it and call its start() method. As
it stands, there would be no way to stop the thread once it is started. One way to make that
possible would be to end the loop when a volatile boolean variable, terminate, becomes
true, as discussed in Subsection 12.1.4. A thread object can only be executed once, so in order
to restart the animation after it has been stopped in this way, it would be necessary to create a
new thread. In the next section, we’ll see some more versatile techniques for controlling threads.
There is a subtle difference between using threads and using timers for animation. The
thread that is used by a JavaFX AniamtionTimer does nothing but call its handle() routine
repeatedly. That method is actually executed in the JavaFX application thread, which also
handles repainting of components and responses to user actions. This is important because
JavaFX is not thread-safe. That is, it does not use synchronization to avoid race conditions
among threads trying to access GUI components and their state variables. As long as everything
is done in the application thread, there is no problem. A problem can arise when another thread
tries to manipulate components or the variables that are also used in the GUI thread. Using
synchronization would be a solution in some cases. The best solution is probably to use an
AnimationTimer, if that is possible. But if you really need to use a separate thread, you might
be able to use Platform.runLater().
Platform.runLater(r) is a static method in class Platform, from package javafx.application.
The parameter is an object of type Runnable, the same interface that is used when creating
threads. Platform.runLater(r) can be called from any thread. Its purpose is to submit r to
be run on the JavaFX application thread. Platform.runLater(r) returns immediately, with-
out waiting for r to be run; r.run() will be called by the application thread at some future
time (which means within a fraction of a second, and perhaps almost immediately, unless the
computer is excessively busy). Runnables are executed in the order in which they are submitted.
Since the Runnable is called on the application thread, it can safely operate on the GUI, without
synchronization. It is often convenient to specify the parameter to Platform.runLater() as a
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 635

lambda expression of type Runnable. I will use Platform.runLater() in several examples in

this chapter and the next.
As an example, the sample program RandomArtWithThreads.java uses a thread to drive
a very simple animation. In this example, the thread does nothing except to call a redraw()
method every two seconds. The method redraws the content of a canvas. Platform.runLater()
is used to execute redraw() on the application thread. The user can click a button to start and
stop the animation. A new thread is created each time the animation is started. A volatile
boolean variable, running, is set to false when the user stops the animation, as a signal to the
thread to stop, as discussed in Subsection 12.1.4. The thread is defined by the following class:
private class Runner extends Thread {
public void run() {
while (running) {
Platform.runLater( () -> redraw() );
try {
Thread.sleep(2000); // Wait two seconds between redraws.
}
catch (InterruptedException e) {
}
}
}
}

12.2.2 Recursion in a Thread

One reason to use a separate thread to drive an animation is when the thread is running a
recursive algorithm, and you want to redraw the display many times over the course of the
recursion. (Recursion is covered in Section 9.1.) It’s difficult to break up a recursive algorithm
into a series of method calls in a timer; it’s much more natural to use a single recursive method
call to do the recursion, and it’s easy to do that in a thread.
As an example, the program QuicksortThreadDemo.java uses an animation to illustrate the
recursive QuickSort algorithm for sorting an array. In this case, the array contains colors, and
the goal is to sort the colors into a standard spectrum from red to violet. In the program,
the user clicks a “Start” button to start the process. The order of the colors is randomized
and QuickSort is called to sort them, showing the process in slow motion. During the sort, the
“Start” button changes to a “Finish” button that can be used to abort the sort before it finishes
on its own. (It’s an interesting program to watch, and it might even help you to understand
QuickSort better, so you should try running it.)
In this program, the picture in a Canvas needs to change every time the algorithm makes a
change to the array. The array is changed in the animation thread, but the corresponding change
to the canvas has to be made in the JavaFX application thread, using Platform.runLater(),
as discussed above. Each time it calls Platform.runLater(), the animation thread sleeps
for 100 milliseconds to allow time for the application thread to run the Runnable and for the
user to see the change. There is also a longer delay, one full second, just after the array is
randomized, before the sorting starts. Since these delays occur at several points in the code,
QuicksortThreadDemo defines a delay() method that makes the thread that calls it sleep for
a specified period.
An interesting question is how to implement the “Finish” button, which should abort the
sort and terminate the thread. Pressing this button causes the value of a volatile boolean
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 636

variable, running, to be set to false, as a signal to the thread that it should terminate. The
problem is that this button can be clicked at any time, even when the algorithm is many levels
down in the recursion. Before the thread can terminate, all of those recursive method calls must
return. A nice way to cause that is to throw an exception. QuickSortThreadDemo defines a new
exception class, ThreadTerminationException, for this purpose. The delay() method checks the
value of the signal variable, running. If running is false, the delay() method throws the
exception that will cause the recursive algorithm, and eventually the animation thread itself,
to terminate. Here, then, is the delay() method:
private void delay(int millis) {
if (! running)
throw new ThreadTerminationException();
try {
Thread.sleep(millis);
}
catch (InterruptedException e) {
}
if (! running) // Check again, in case it changed during the sleep period.
throw new ThreadTerminationException();
}
The ThreadTerminationException is caught in the thread’s run() method:
/**
* This class defines the thread that runs the recursive
* QuickSort algorithm. The thread begins by randomizing the
* hue array. It then calls quickSort() to sort the entire array.
* If quickSort() is aborted by a ThreadTerminationException,
* which would be caused by the user clicking the Finish button,
* then the thread will restore the array to sorted order before
* terminating, so that whether or not the quickSort is aborted,
* the array ends up sorted. In any case, in the end, it
* resets the text on the button to "Start".
*/
private class Runner extends Thread {
public void run() {
for (int i = 0; i < hue.length; i++) {
// fill hue array with indices in order
hue[i] = i;
}
for (int i = hue.length-1; i > 0; i--) {
// Randomize the order of the hues.
int r = (int)((i+1)*Math.random());
int temp = hue[r];
hue[r] = hue[i];
// The last assignment that needs to be done in this
// loop is hue[i] = temp. The value of hue[i] will
// not change after this, so the assignment is done
// by calling a method setHue(i,temp) that will change
// the value in the array and also use Platform.runLater()
// to change the color of the i-th color bar in the canvas.
setHue(i,temp);
}
try {
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 637

delay(1000); // Wait one second before starting the sort.

quickSort(0,hue.length-1); // Sort the whole array.
}
catch (ThreadTerminationException e) { // User aborted quickSort.
// Put the colors back into sorted order. The drawSorted()
// method draws all of the color bars in sorted order.
Platform.runLater( () -> drawSorted() );
}
finally {
running = false; // make sure running is false; this is only
// really necessary if the thread terminated
// normally
Platform.runLater( () -> startButton.setText("Start") );
}
}
}
The program uses a variable, runner, of type Runner to represent the thread that does the
sorting. When the user clicks the “Start” button, the following code is executed to create and
start the thread:
startButton.setText("Finish");
runner = new Runner();
running = true; // Set the signal before starting the thread!
runner.start();
Note that the value of the signal variable, running, is set to true before starting the thread.
If running were false when the thread was started, the thread might see that value as soon
as it starts and interpret it as a signal to stop before doing anything. Remember that when
runner.start() is called, runner starts running in parallel with the thread that called it.
When the user clicks the “Finish” button, the value of running is set to false as a signal
to the thread to terminate. However, the thread might be sleeping when the “Finish” button
is pressed, and in that case, the thread has to wake up before it can act on the signal. To make
the thread a little more responsive, the program calls runner.interrupt(), which will wake
the thread if it is sleeping. (See Subsection 12.1.2.) This doesn’t have much practical effect in
this program, but it does make the program respond noticeably more quickly if the user presses
“Finish” immediately after pressing “Start,” while the thread is sleeping for a full second.

12.2.3 Threads for Background Computation

In order for a GUI program to be responsive—that is, to respond to events very soon after they
are generated—it’s important that event-handling methods in the program finish their work
very quickly. Remember that events go into a queue as they are generated, and the computer
cannot respond to an event until after the event-handler methods for previous events have done
their work. This means that while one event handler is being executed, other events will have
to wait. If an event handler takes a while to run, the user interface will effectively freeze up
during that time. This can be very annoying if the delay is more than a fraction of a second.
Fortunately, modern computers can do an awful lot of computation in a fraction of a second.
However, some computations are too big to be done in event handlers (or in Runnables passed
to Platform.runlater()). A solution, in that case, is to do the computation in another thread
that runs in parallel with the event-handling thread. This makes it possible for the computer
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 638

to respond to user events even while the computation is ongoing. We say that the computation
is done “in the background.”
Note that this application of threads is very different from the previous example. When a
thread is used to drive a simple animation, it actually does very little work. The thread only
has to wake up several times each second, do a few computations to update state variables for
the next frame of the animation, and then arrange for that frame to be drawn. This leaves
plenty of time while the animation thread is sleeping between frames for the JavaFX application
thread to do any necessary redrawing of the GUI and to handle any other events.
When a thread is used for background computation, however, we want to keep the computer
as busy as possible working on the computation. The thread will compete for processor
time with the event-handling thread; if you are not careful, event-handling—redrawing in
particular—can still be delayed. Fortunately, you can use thread priorities to avoid the problem.
By setting the computation thread to run at a lower priority than the event-handling thread,
you make sure that events will be processed as quickly as possible, while the computation thread
will get all the extra processing time. Since event handling generally uses very little time, this
means that most of the processing time goes to the background computation, but the interface
is still very responsive. (Thread priorities were discussed in Subsection 12.1.2.)
The sample program BackgroundComputationDemo.java is an example of background
processing. This program creates an image that takes a while to compute because it takes
some computation to compute the color of each pixel in the image. The image itself is a piece
of a mathematical object known as the Mandelbrot set. We will use the same image in several
examples in this chapter.
In outline, BackgroundComputationDemo is similar to the QuicksortThreadDemo discussed
above. The computation is done in a thread defined by a nested class, Runner. A volatile
boolean variable, running, is used to control the thread: If the value of running is set to
false, the thread should terminate. The sample program has a button that the user clicks
to start and to abort the computation. The difference is that the thread in this case is meant
to run continuously, without sleeping. To allow the user to see that progress is being made in
the computation (always a good idea), every time the thread computes a row of pixels, it uses
Platform.runLater() to copy those pixels to the image that is shown on the screen. The
user sees the image being built up line-by-line.
When the computation thread is created in response to the “Start” button, we need to set
it to run at a priority lower than the JavaFX application thread. The code that creates the
thread is itself running in the event-handling thread, so we can use a priority that is one less
than the priority of the thread that is executing the code. Note that the priority is set inside a
try..catch statement. If an error occurs while trying to set the thread priority, the program
will still work, though perhaps not as smoothly as it would if the priority was correctly set.
Here is how the thread is created and started:
runner = new Runner();
try {
runner.setPriority( Thread.currentThread().getPriority() - 1 );
}
catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println("Error: Can’t set thread priority: " + e);
}
running = true; // Set the signal before starting the thread!
runner.start();
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 639

Although BackgroundComputationDemo works OK, there is one problem: The goal is to get
the computation done as quickly as possible, using all available processing time. The program
accomplishes that goal on a computer that has only one processor. But on a computer that
has several processors, we are still using only one of those processors for the computation.
(And in fact, in that case the business about thread priority is not all that relevant, because
the animation thread and the application thread can run both run simultaneously, on different
processors.) It would be nice to get all of the processors working on the computation. To
do that, we need real parallel processing, with several computation threads. We turn to that
problem next.

12.2.4 Threads for Multiprocessing

Our next example, MultiprocessingDemo1.java, is a variation on BackgroundComputationDemo.
Instead of doing the computation in a single thread, MultiprocessingDemo1 can divide the
problem among several threads. The user can select the number of threads to be used. Each
thread is assigned one section of the image to compute. The threads perform their tasks in
parallel. For example, if there are two threads, the first thread computes the top half of the
image while the second thread computes the bottom half. Here is a picture of the program
nearing the end of a computation using three threads. The gray areas represent parts of the
image that have not yet been computed:

You should try out the program. On a multi-processor computer, the computation will complete
more quickly when using several threads than when using just one. Note that when using one
thread, this program has the same behavior as the previous example program.
The approach used in this example for dividing up the problem among threads is not optimal.
We will see in the next section how it can be improved. However, MultiprocessingDemo1 makes
a good first example of multiprocessing.
When the user clicks the “Start” button, the program has to create and start the specified
number of threads, and it has to assign a segment of the image to each thread. Here is how
this is done:
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 640

workers = new Runner[threadCount]; // Holds the computation threads.

int rowsPerThread; // How many rows of pixels should each thread compute?
rowsPerThread = height / threadCount; // (height = vertical size of image)
running = true; // Set the signal before starting the threads!
threadsCompleted = 0; // Records how many of the threads have terminated.
for (int i = 0; i < threadCount; i++) {
int startRow; // first row computed by thread number i
int endRow; // last row computed by thread number i
// Create and start a thread to compute the rows of the image from
// startRow to endRow. Note that we have to make sure that
// the endRow for the last thread is the bottom row of the image.
startRow = rowsPerThread*i;
if (i == threadCount-1)
endRow = height-1;
else
endRow = rowsPerThread*(i+1) - 1;
workers[i] = new Runner(startRow, endRow);
try {
workers[i].setPriority( Thread.currentThread().getPriority() - 1 );
}
catch (Exception e) {
}
workers[i].start();
}
Beyond creating more than one thread, very few changes are needed to get the benefits of
multiprocessing. Just as in the previous example, each time a thread has computed the colors
for a row of pixels, it copies that row into the image, using Platform.runLater().
One thing is new, however. When all the threads have finished running, the name of the
button in the program changes from “Abort” to “Start Again”, and the pop-up menu, which
has been disabled while the threads were running, is re-enabled. The problem is, how to tell
when all the threads have terminated? (You might think about why we can’t use join() to
wait for the threads to end, as was done in the example in Subsection 12.1.2; at least, we
certainly can’t do that in the JavaFX application thread!) In this example, I use an instance
variable, threadsRunning, to keep track of how many computation threads are still running.
As each thread finishes, it calls a method that subtracts one from the value of this variable.
(The method is called in the finally clause of a try statement to make absolutely sure that
it is called when the thread ends.) When the number of running threads drops to zero, the
method updates the state of the program appropriately. Here is the method that is called by
each thread just before terminating:
synchronized private void threadFinished() {
threadsRunning--;
if (threadsRunning == 0) { // all threads have finished
Platform.runLater( () -> {
// make sure GUI state is correct when threads end.
startButton.setText("Start Again");
startButton.setDisable(false);
threadCountSelect.setDisable(false);
});
running = false; // Make sure running is false after the threads end.
workers = null; // Discard the array that holds the threads.
}
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 641

}
Note that this method is synchronized. This is to avoid the race condition when
threadsRunning is decremented. Without the synchronization, it is possible that two threads
might call the method at the same time. If the timing is just right, both threads could read
the same value for threadsRunning and get the same answer when they decrement it. The net
result will be that threadsRunning goes down by one instead of by two. One thread is not
properly counted, and threadsRunning will never become zero. The program would hang in a
kind of deadlock. The problem would occur only very rarely, since it depends on exact timing.
But in a large program, problems of this sort can be both very serious and very hard to debug.
Proper synchronization makes the error impossible.

12.3 Threads and Parallel Processing

The example in Subsection 12.2.4 in the previous section used parallel processing to execute
pieces of a large task. On a computer that has several processors, this allows the computation
to be completed more quickly. However, the way that the program divided up the computation
into subtasks was not optimal. Nor was the way that the threads were managed. In this section,
we will look at two more versions of that program. The first improves the way the problem is
decomposed into subtasks. The second improves the way threads are used. Along the way, I’ll
introduce a couple of built-in classes that Java provides to support parallel processing. Later in
the section, I will cover wait() and notify(), lower-level methods that can be used to control
parallel processes more directly.

12.3.1 Problem Decomposition

The sample program MultiprocessingDemo1.java divides the task of computing an image into
several subtasks and assigns each subtask to a thread. While this works OK, there is a problem:
Some of the subtasks might take substantially longer than others. The program divides the
image up into equal parts, but the fact is that some parts of the image require more computation
than others. In fact, if you run the program with three threads, you’ll notice that the middle
piece takes a little longer to compute than the top or bottom piece. In general, when dividing
a problem into subproblems, it is very hard to predict just how much time it will take to solve
each subproblem. Let’s say that one particular subproblem happens to take a lot longer than all
the others. The thread that computes that subproblem will continue to run for a relatively long
time after all the other threads have completed. During that time, only one of the computer’s
processors will be working; the rest will be idle.
As a simple example, suppose that your computer has two processors. You divide the
problem into two subproblems and create a thread to run each subproblem Your hope is that
by using both processors, you can get your answer in half the time that it would take when
using one processor. But if one subproblem takes four times longer than the other to solve,
then for most of the time, only one processor will be working. In this case, you will only have
cut the time needed to get your answer by 20%.
Even if you manage to divide your problem into subproblems that require equal amounts
of computation, you still can’t depend on all the subproblems requiring equal amounts of time
to solve. For example, some of the processors on your computer might be busy running other
programs. Or perhaps some of the processors are simply slower than others. (This is not so
likely when running your computation on a single computer, but when distributing computation
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 642

across several networked computers, as we will do later in this chapter, differences in processor
speed can be a major issue.)
The common technique for dealing with all this is to divide the problem into a fairly large
number of subproblems—many more subproblems than there are processors. This means that
each processor will have to solve several subproblems. Each time a processor completes one
subtask, it is assigned another subtask to work on, until all the subtasks have been assigned. Of
course, there will still be variation in the time that the various subtasks require. One processor
might complete several subproblems while another works on one particularly difficult case. And
a slow or busy processor might complete only one or two subproblems while another processor
finishes five or six. Each processor can work at its own pace. As long as the subproblems are
fairly small, most of the processors can be kept busy until near the end of the computation.
This is known as load balancing : the computational load is balanced among the available
processors in order to keep them all as busy as possible. Of course, some processors will still
finish before others, but not by longer than the time it takes to complete the longest subtask.
While the subproblems should be small, they should not be too small. There is some
computational overhead involved in creating the subproblems and assigning them to processors.
If the subproblems are very small, this overhead can add significantly to the total amount of
work that has to be done. In my example program, the task is to compute a color for each pixel
in an image. For dividing that task up into subtasks, one possibility would be to have each
subtask compute just one pixel. But the subtasks produced in that way are probably too small.
So, instead, each subtask in my program computes the colors for one row of pixels. Since there
are several hundred rows of pixels in the image, the number of subtasks will be fairly large,
while each subtask will also be fairly large. The result is fairly good load balancing, with a
reasonable amount of overhead.
Note, by the way, that the problem that we are working on is a very easy one for parallel
programming. When we divide the problem of calculating an image into subproblems, all
the subproblems are completely independent. It is possible to work on any number of them
simultaneously, and they can be done in any order. Things get a lot more complicated when
some subtasks produce results that are required by other subtasks. In that case, the subtasks are
not independent, and the order in which the subtasks are performed is important. Furthermore,
there has to be some way for results from one subtask to be shared with other tasks. When the
subtasks are executed by different threads, this raises all the issues involved in controlling access
of threads to shared resources. So, in general, decomposing a problem for parallel processing
is much more difficult than it might appear from our relatively simple example. But for the
most part, that’s a topic for a course in parallel computing, not an introductory programming
course.

12.3.2 Thread Pools and Task Queues

Once we have decided how to decompose a task into subtasks, there is the question of how to
assign those subtasks to threads. Typically, in an object-oriented approach, each subtask will
be represented by an object. Since a task represents some computation, it’s natural for the
object that represents it to have an instance method that does the computation. To execute
the task, it is only necessary to call its computation method. In my program, the computation
method is called run() and the task object implements the standard Runnable interface that
was discussed in Subsection 12.1.1. This interface is a natural way to represent computational
tasks. It’s possible to create a new thread for each Runnable. However, that doesn’t really
make sense when there are many tasks, since there is a significant amount of overhead involved
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 643

in creating each new thread. A better alternative is to create just a few threads and let each
thread execute a number of tasks.
The optimal number of threads to use is not entirely clear, and it can depend on exactly
what problem you are trying to solve. The goal is to keep all of the computer’s processors busy.
In the image-computing example, it works well to create one thread for each available processor,
but that won’t be true for all problems. In particular, if a thread can block for a non-trivial
amount of time while waiting for some event or for access to some resource, you want to have
extra threads around for the processor to run while other threads are blocked. We’ll encounter
exactly that situation when we turn to using threads with networking in Section 12.4.
When several threads are available for performing tasks, those threads are called a thread
pool . Thread pools are used to avoid creating a new thread to perform each task. Instead,
when a task needs to be performed, it can be assigned to any idle thread in the “pool.”
Once all the threads in the thread pool are busy, any additional tasks will have to wait until
one of the threads becomes idle. This is a natural application for a queue: Associated with
the thread pool is a queue of waiting tasks. As tasks become available, they are added to the
queue. Every time that a thread finishes a task, it goes to the queue to get another task to
work on.
Note that there is only one task queue for the thread pool. All the threads in the pool
use the same queue, so the queue is a shared resource. As always with shared resources, race
conditions are possible and synchronization is essential. Without synchronization, for example,
it is possible that two threads trying to get items from the queue at the same time will end up
retrieving the same item. (See if you can spot the race conditions in the dequeue() method in
Subsection 9.3.2.)
Java has a built-in class to solve this problem: ConcurrentLinkedQueue. This class and others
that can be useful in parallel programming are defined in the package java.util.concurrent.
It is a parameterized class; to create a queue that can hold objects of type Runnable, you can
say
ConcurrentLinkedQueue<Runnable> queue = new ConcurrentLinkedQueue<>();
This class represents a queue, implemented as a linked list, in which operations on the queue are
properly synchronized. The operations on a ConcurrentLinkedQueue are not exactly the queue
operations that we are used to. The method for adding a new item, x, to the end of queue is
queue.add(x). The method for removing an item from the front of queue is queue.poll().
The queue.poll() method returns null if the queue is empty; thus, poll() can be used to
test whether the queue is empty and to retrieve an item if it is not. It makes sense to do
things in this way because testing whether the queue is non-empty before taking an item from
the queue involves a race condition: Without synchronization, it is possible for another thread
to remove the last item from the queue between the time when you check that the queue is
non-empty and the time when you try to take the item from the queue. By the time you try to
get the item, there’s nothing there! On the other hand, queue.poll() is an “atomic” operation
(Subsection 12.1.5).
∗ ∗ ∗
To use ConcurrentLinkedQueue in our image-computing example, we can use the queue along
with a thread pool. To begin the computation of the image, we create all the tasks that make
up the image and add them to the queue. Then, we can create and start the worker threads that
will execute the tasks. Each thread will run in a loop in which it gets one task from the queue,
by calling the queue’s poll() method, and carries out that task. Since the task is an object of
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 644

type Runnable, it is only necessary for the thread to call the task’s run() method. When the
poll() method returns null, the queue is empty and the thread can terminate because all the
tasks have been assigned to threads.
The sample program MultiprocessingDemo2.java implements this idea. It uses a queue,
taskQueue, of type ConcurrentLinkedQueue<Runnable> to hold the tasks. In addition, in order
to allow the user to abort the computation before it finishes, it uses the volatile boolean
variable running to signal the thread when the user aborts the computation. The thread
should terminate when this variable is set to false, even if there are still tasks remaining in
the queue. The threads are defined by a nested class named WorkerThread. It is quite short
and simple to write:
private class WorkerThread extends Thread {
public void run() {
try {
while (running) {
Runnable task = taskQueue.poll(); // Get a task from the queue.
if (task == null)
break; // (because the queue is empty)
task.run(); // Execute the task;
}
}
finally {
threadFinished(); // Records fact that this thread has terminated.
// Done in finally to make sure it gets called.
}
}
}
The program uses a nested class named MandelbrotTask to represent the task of computing
one row of pixels in the image. This class implements the Runnable interface. Its run() method
does the actual work, that is, compute the color of each pixel, and apply the colors to the image.
Here is what the program does to start the computation (with a few details omitted):
taskQueue = new ConcurrentLinkedQueue<Runnable>(); // Create the queue.
for (int row = 0; row < height; row++) { // height is number of rows in image
MandelbrotTask task;
task = ... ; // Create a task to compute one row of the image.
taskQueue.add(task); // Add the task to the queue.
}
int threadCount = ... ; // Number of threads in the pool (selected by user).
workers = new WorkerThread[threadCount];
running = true; // Set the signal before starting the threads!
threadsRemaining = workers; // Records how many threads are still running.
for (int i = 0; i < threadCount; i++) {
workers[i] = new WorkerThread();
try {
workers[i].setPriority( Thread.currentThread().getPriority() - 1 );
}
catch (Exception e) {
}
workers[i].start();
}
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 645

Note that it is important that the tasks be added to the queue before the threads are started.
The threads see an empty queue as a signal to terminate. If the queue is empty when the
threads are started, they might see an empty queue and terminate immediately after being
started, without performing any tasks!
You should try out MultiprocessingDemo2. It computes the same image as
MultiprocessingDemo1, but the rows of pixels are not computed in the same order as in
that program (if there is more than one thread). If you look carefully, you might see that the
rows of pixels are not added to the image in strict order from top to bottom. This is because
it is possible for one thread to finish row number i+1 while another thread is still working on
row i, or even earlier rows. (The effect might be more apparent if you use more threads than
you have processors. Try it with 20 threads.)

12.3.3 Producer/Consumer and Blocking Queues

MultiprocessingDemo2 creates an entirely new thread pool every time it draws an image. This
seems wasteful. Shouldn’t it be possible to create one set of threads at the beginning of the
program and use them whenever an image needs to be computed? After all, the idea of a thread
pool is that the threads should sit around and wait for tasks to come along and should execute
them when they do. The problem is that, so far, we have no way to make a thread wait for a
task to come along. To do that, we will use something called a blocking queue.
A blocking queue is an implementation of one of the classic patterns in parallel processing:
the producer/consumer pattern. This pattern arises when there are one or more “producers”
who produce things and one or more “consumers” who consume those things. All the producers
and consumers should be able to work simultaneously (hence, parallel processing). If there are
no things ready to be processed, a consumer will have to wait until one is produced. In many
applications, producers also have to wait sometimes: If things can only be consumed at a rate
of, say, one per minute, it doesn’t make sense for the producers to produce them indefinitely
at a rate of two per minute. That would just lead to an unlimited build-up of things waiting
to be processed. Therefore, it’s often useful to put a limit on the number of things that can
be waiting for processing. When that limit is reached, producers should wait before producing
more things.
We need a way to get the things from the producers to the consumers. A queue is an obvious
answer: Producers place items into the queue as they are produced. Consumers remove items
from the other end of the queue.

Consumer
3
Producer
1 Consumer
Blocking Queue
3
Producer
2 Consumer
3
Producer
3 Consumer
3

We are talking parallel processing, so we need a synchronized queue, but we need more than
that. When the queue is empty, we need a way to have consumers wait until an item appears in
the queue. If the queue becomes full, we need a way to have producers wait until a space opens
up in the queue. In our application, the producers and consumers are threads. A thread that
is suspended, waiting for something to happen, is said to be blocked, and the type of queue
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 646

that we need is called a blocking queue. In a blocking queue, the operation of dequeueing an
item from the queue can block if the queue is empty. That is, if a thread tries to dequeue an
item from an empty queue, the thread will be suspended until an item becomes available; at
that time, it will wake up, retrieve the item, and proceed. Similarly, if the queue has a limited
capacity, a producer that tries to enqueue an item can block if there is no space in the queue.
Java has two classes that implement blocking queues: LinkedBlockingQueue and ArrayBlock-
ingQueue. These are parameterized types to allow you to specify the type of item that the queue
can hold. Both classes are defined in the package java.util.concurrent and both implement
an interface called BlockingQueue. If bqueue is a blocking queue belonging to one of these
classes, then the following operations are defined:
• bqueue.take() – Removes an item from the queue and returns it. If the queue is empty
when this method is called, the thread that called it will block until an item becomes
available. This method throws an InterruptedException if the thread is interrupted while
it is blocked.
• bqueue.put(item) – Adds the item to the queue. If the queue has a limited capacity
and is full, the thread that called it will block until a space opens up in the queue. This
method throws an InterruptedException if the thread is interrupted while it is blocked.
• bqueue.add(item) – Adds the item to the queue, if space is available. If the queue has
a limited capacity and is full, an IllegalStateException is thrown. This method does not
block.
• bqueue.clear() – Removes all items from the queue and discards them.
Java’s blocking queues define many additional methods (for example, bqueue.poll(500) is
similar to bqueue.take(), except that it will not block for longer than 500 milliseconds), but
the four listed here are sufficient for our purposes. Note that I have listed two methods for adding
items to the queue: bqueue.put(item) blocks if there is not space available in the queue and is
most appropriate for use with blocking queues that have a limited capacity; bqueue.add(item)
does not block and is most appropriate for use with blocking queues that have an unlimited
capacity.
An ArrayBlockingQueue has a maximum capacity that is specified when it is constructed.
For example, to create a blocking queue that can hold up to 25 objects of type ItemType, you
could say:
ArrayBlockingQueue<ItemType> bqueue = new ArrayBlockingQueue<>(25);
With this declaration, bqueue.put(item) will block if bqueue already contains 25 items, while
bqueue.add(item) will throw an exception in that case. Recall that this ensures that items are
not produced indefinitely at a rate faster than they can be consumed. A LinkedBlockingQueue
is meant for creating blocking queues with unlimited capacity. For example,
LinkedBlockingQueue<ItemType> bqueue = new LinkedBlockingQueue<>();
creates a queue with no upper limit on the number of items that it can contain. In
this case, bqueue.put(item) will never block and bqueue.add(item) will never throw an
IllegalStateException. You would use a LinkedBlockingQueue when you want to avoid
blocking of producers, and you have some other way of ensuring that the queue will not grow
to arbitrary size. For both types of blocking queue, bqueue.take() will block if the queue is
empty.
∗ ∗ ∗
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 647

The sample program MultiprocessingDemo3.java uses a LinkedBlockingQueue in place of the

ConcurrentLinkedQueue in the previous version, MultiprocessingDemo2.java. In this example,
the queue holds tasks, that is, items of type Runnable, and the queue is declared as an instance
variable named taskQueue:
LinkedBlockingQueue<Runnable> taskQueue;
When the user clicks the “Start” button and it’s time to compute an image, all of the tasks that
make up the computation are put into this queue. This is done by calling taskQueue.add(task)
for each task. It’s important that this can be done without blocking, since the tasks are created
in the event-handling thread, and we don’t want to block that. The queue in this program
cannot grow indefinitely because the program only works on one image at a time, and there are
only a few hundred tasks per image.
Just as in the previous version of the program, worker threads belonging to a thread pool
will remove tasks from the queue and carry them out. However, in this case, the threads are
created once at the beginning of the program—actually, the first time the “Start” button is
pressed—and the same threads are reused for any number of images. When there are no tasks to
execute, the task queue is empty and the worker threads will block until tasks become available.
Each worker thread runs in an infinite loop, processing tasks forever, but it will spend a lot
of its time blocked, waiting for a task to be added to the queue. Here is the inner class that
defines the worker threads:
/**
* This class defines the worker threads that make up the thread pool.
* A WorkerThread runs in a loop in which it retrieves a task from the
* taskQueue and calls the run() method in that task. Note that if
* the queue is empty, the thread blocks until a task becomes available
* in the queue. The constructor starts the thread, so there is no
* need for the main program to do so. The thread will run at a priority
* that is one less than the priority of the thread that calls the
* constructor.
*
* A WorkerThread is designed to run in an infinite loop. It will
* end only when the Java virtual machine exits. (This assumes that
* the tasks that are executed don’t throw exceptions, which is true
* in this program.) The constructor sets the thread to run as
* a daemon thread; the Java virtual machine will exit automatically when
* the only threads are daemon threads, so the existence of the thread
* pool will not stop the JVM from exiting.
*/
private class WorkerThread extends Thread {
WorkerThread() {
try {
setPriority( Thread.currentThread().getPriority() - 1);
}
catch (Exception e) {
}
try {
setDaemon(true);
}
catch (Exception e) {
}
start(); // Thread starts as soon as it is constructed.
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 648

}
public void run() {
while (true) {
try {
Runnable task = taskQueue.take(); // wait for task if necessary
task.run();
}
catch (InterruptedException e) {
}
}
}
}
We should look more closely at how the thread pool works. The worker threads are created and
started before there is any task to perform. Each thread immediately calls taskQueue.take().
Since the task queue is empty, all the worker threads will block as soon as they are started. To
start the computation of an image, the event-handling thread will create tasks and add them
to the queue. As soon as this happens, worker threads will wake up and start processing tasks,
and they will continue doing so until the queue is emptied. (Note that on a multi-processor
computer, some worker threads can start processing even while the event thread is still adding
tasks to the queue.) When the queue is empty, the worker threads will go back to sleep until
processing starts on the next image.
∗ ∗ ∗
An interesting point in this program is that we want to be able to abort the computation
before it finishes, but we don’t want the worker threads to terminate when that happens. When
the user clicks the “Abort” button, the program calls taskQueue.clear(), which prevents any
more tasks from being assigned to worker threads. However, some tasks are most likely already
being executed when the task queue is cleared. Those tasks will complete after the computation
in which they are subtasks has supposedly been aborted. When those subtasks complete, we
don’t want their output to be applied to the image.
My solution is to assign a job number to each computation job. The job number of the
current job is stored in an instance variable named jobNum, and each task object has an instance
variable that tells which task that job is part of. When a job ends—either because the job
finishes on its own or because the user aborts it—the value of jobNum is incremented. When a
task completes, the job number stored in the task object is compared to jobNum. If they are
equal, then the task is part of the current job, and its output is applied to the image. If they
are not equal, then the task was part of a previous job, and its output is discarded.
It’s important that access to jobNum be properly synchronized. Otherwise, one thread might
check the job number just as another thread is incrementing it, and output meant for an old
job might sneak through after that job has been aborted. In the program, all the methods that
access or change jobNum are synchronized. You can read the source code to see how it works.
∗ ∗ ∗
One more point about MultiprocessingDemo3. . . . I have not provided any way to terminate
the worker threads in this program. They will continue to run until the Java Virtual Machine
exits. To allow thread termination before that, we could use a volatile signaling variable,
running, and set its value to false when we want the worker threads to terminate. The run()
methods for the threads would be replaced by
public void run() {
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 649

while ( running ) {
try {
Runnable task = taskQueue.take();
task.run();
}
catch (InterruptedException e) {
}
}
}
However, if a thread is blocked in taskQueue.take(), it will not see the new value of
running until it becomes unblocked. To ensure that that happens, it is necessary to call
worker.interrupt() for each worker thread worker, just after setting runner to false.
If a worker thread is executing a task when running is set to false, the thread will not
terminate until that task has completed. If the tasks are reasonably short, this is not a problem.
If tasks can take longer to execute than you are willing to wait for the threads to terminate,
then each task must also check the value of running periodically and exit when that value
becomes false.

12.3.4 The ExecutorService Approach

Since thread pools are common in parallel programming, it is not surprising that Java has
higher level tools for creating and managing thread pools. The interface ExecutorService, in
package java.util.concurrent, defines services that can execute tasks that are submitted to
it. Class Executors contains static methods that can be used to create ExecutorServices of
various types. In particular, Executors.newFixedThreadPool(n), where n is an int, creates a
thread pool with n threads. To get a thread pool with one thread per available processor, you
can say
int processors = Runtime.getRuntime().availableProcessors();
ExecutorService executor = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(processors);
The method executor.execute(task) can be used to submit a Runnable object, task, for
execution. The method returns immediately after placing task into a queue of waiting tasks.
Threads in the thread pool remove tasks from the queue and execute them.
The method executor.shutdown() tells the thread pool to shut down after all waiting
tasks have been executed. The method returns immediately, without waiting for the threads
to finish. After this method has been called, it is not legal to add new tasks. It is not an error
to call shutdown() more than once. The threads in the thread pool are not daemon threads;
if the service is not shut down, the existence of the threads will stop the Java Virtual Machine
from shutting down after other threads have exited. Before exiting, the threads in the pool will
complete any tasks they have already removed from the queue.
The method executor.shutdownNow() is similar to executor.shutdown() but it discards
any waiting tasks that are still in the queue, and tries to stop any tasks that are currently being
executed.
The sample program MultiprocessingDemo4.java is a variation on MultiprocessingDemo3
that uses an ExecutorService instead of using threads and a blocking queue directly. (Since I
have not found an easy way to get an ExecutorService to drop waiting tasks without shutting
down, MultiprocessingDemo4 creates a new ExecutorService each time it computes a new
image.)
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 650

∗ ∗ ∗
Tasks for an ExecutorService can also be represented by objects of type Callable<T>, which
is a parameterized functional interface that defines the method call() with no parameters and
a return type of T. A Callable represents a task that outputs a value.
A Callable, c, can be submitted to an ExecutorService by calling executor.submit(c). The
Callable will then be executed at some future time. The problem is, how to get the result of the
computation when it completes? This problem is solved by another interface, Future<T>, which
represents a value of type T that might not be available until some future time. The method
executor.submit(c) returns a Future that represents the result of the future computation.
A Future, v, defines several methods, including v.isDone(), which is a boolean-valued
function that can be called to check whether the result is available; and v.get(), which will
retrieve the value of the future. The method v.get() will block until the value is available. It
can also generate exceptions and needs to be called in a try..catch statement.
As an example, ThreadTest4.java uses Callables, Futures, and an ExecutorService to count the
number of primes in a certain range of integers. (This is the same rather useless computation
that was done by ThreadTest2.java in Subsection 12.1.3.) In this program, a subtask counts
the primes in a subrange of integers. The subtasks are represented by objects of type
Callable<Integer>, defined by this nested class:
/**
* An object belonging to this class will count primes in a specified range
* of integers. The range is from min to max, inclusive, where min and max
* are given as parameters to the constructor. The counting is done in
* the call() method, which returns the number of primes that were found.
*/
private static class CountPrimesTask implements Callable<Integer> {
int min, max;
public CountPrimesTask(int min, int max) {
this.min = min;
this.max = max;
}
public Integer call() {
int count = countPrimes(min,max); // does the counting
return count;
}
}
All the subtasks are submitted to a thread pool implemented as an ExecutorService, and the
Futures that are returned are saved in an array list. In outline:
int processors = Runtime.getRuntime().availableProcessors();
ExecutorService executor = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(processors);
ArrayList<Future<Integer>> results = new ArrayList<>();
for (int i = 0; i < numberOfTasks; i++) {
CountPrimesTask oneTask = . . . ;
Future<Integer> oneResult = executor.submit( oneTask );
results.add(oneResult); // Save the Future representing the (future) result.
}
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 651

The integers that are output by all the subtasks need to be added up to give a final result. The
outputs of the subtasks are obtained using the get() methods of the Futures in the list. Since
get() blocks until the result is available, the process completes only when all subtasks have
finished:
int total = 0;
for ( Future<Integer> res : results) {
try {
total += res.get(); // Waits for task to complete!
}
catch (Exception e) { // Should not occur in this program.
}
}

12.3.5 Wait and Notify

Suppose that we wanted to implement our own blocking queue. To do that, we must be able
to make a thread block just until some event occurs. The thread is waiting for the event to
occur. Somehow, it must be notified when that happens. There are two threads involved since
the event that will wake one thread is caused by an action taken by another thread, such as
adding an item to the queue.
Note that this is not just an issue for blocking queues. Whenever one thread produces some
sort of result that is needed by another thread, that imposes some restriction on the order in
which the threads can do their computations. If the second thread gets to the point where
it needs the result from the first thread, it might have to stop and wait for the result to be
produced. Since the second thread can’t continue, it might as well go to sleep. But then there
has to be some way to notify the second thread when the result is ready, so that it can wake
up and continue its computation.
Java, of course, has a way to do this kind of “waiting” and “notifying”: It has wait() and
notify() methods that are defined as instance methods in class Object and so can be used
with any object. These methods can be used internally in blocking queues. They are fairly
low-level, tricky, and error-prone, and you should use higher-level control strategies such as
blocking queues when possible. However, it’s nice to know about wait() and notify() in case
you ever need to use them directly. (I don’t know whether they are actually used in Java’s
standard blocking queue classes, since Java has other ways of solving the wait/notify problem.)
The reason why wait() and notify() should be associated with objects is not obvious,
so don’t worry about it at this point. It does, at least, make it possible to direct different
notifications to different recipients, depending on which object’s notify() method is called.
The general idea is that when a thread calls a wait() method in some object, that thread
goes to sleep until the notify() method in the same object is called. It will have to be called,
obviously, by another thread, since the thread that called wait() is sleeping. A typical pattern
is that Thread A calls wait() when it needs a result from Thread B, but that result is not yet
available. When Thread B has the result ready, it calls notify(), which will wake Thread A
up, if it is waiting, so that it can use the result. It is not an error to call notify() when no
one is waiting; it just has no effect. To implement this, Thread A will execute code similar to
the following, where obj is some object:
if ( resultIsAvailable() == false )
obj.wait(); // wait for notification that the result is available
useTheResult();
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 652

while Thread B does something like:

generateTheResult();
obj.notify(); // send out a notification that the result is available
Now, there is a really nasty race condition in this code. The two threads might execute
their code in the following order:
1. Thread A checks resultIsAvailable() and finds that the result is not ready,
so it decides to execute the obj.wait() statement, but before it does,
2. Thread B finishes generating the result and calls obj.notify()
3. Thread A calls obj.wait() to wait for notification that the result is ready.
In Step 3, Thread A is waiting for a notification that will never come, because notify() has
already been called in Step 2. This is a kind of deadlock that can leave Thread A waiting forever.
Obviously, we need some kind of synchronization. The solution is to enclose both Thread A’s
code and Thread B’s code in synchronized statements, and it is very natural to synchronize
on the same object, obj, that is used for the calls to wait() and notify(). In fact, since
synchronization is almost always needed when wait() and notify() are used, Java makes it
an absolute requirement. In Java, a thread can legally call obj.wait() or obj.notify() only
if that thread holds the synchronization lock associated with the object obj. If it does not hold
that lock, then an exception is thrown. (The exception is of type IllegalMonitorStateException,
which does not require mandatory handling and which is typically not caught.) One further
complication is that the wait() method can throw an InterruptedException and so should be
called in a try statement that handles the exception.
To make things more definite, let’s consider how we can get a result that is computed by
one thread to another thread that needs the result. This is a simplified producer/consumer
problem in which only one item is produced and consumed. Assume that there is a shared
variable named sharedResult that is used to transfer the result from the producer to the
consumer. When the result is ready, the producer sets the variable to a non-null value. The
consumer can check whether the result is ready by testing whether the value of sharedResult
is null. We will use a variable named lock for synchronization. The code for the producer
thread could have the form:
makeResult = generateTheResult(); // Not synchronized!
synchronized(lock) {
sharedResult = makeResult;
lock.notify();
}
while the consumer would execute code such as:
synchronized(lock) {
while ( sharedResult == null ) {
try {
lock.wait();
}
catch (InterruptedException e) {
}
}
useResult = sharedResult;
}
useTheResult(useResult); // Not synchronized!
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 653

The calls to generateTheResult() and useTheResult() are not synchronized, which allows
them to run in parallel with other threads that might also synchronize on lock. Since
sharedResult is a shared variable, all references to sharedResult should be synchronized,
so the references to sharedResult must be inside the synchronized statements. The goal is
to do as little as possible (but not less) in synchronized code segments.
If you are uncommonly alert, you might notice something funny: lock.wait() does
not finish until lock.notify() is executed, but since both of these methods are called in
synchronized statements that synchronize on the same object, shouldn’t it be impossible for
both methods to be running at the same time? In fact, lock.wait() is a special case: When
a thread calls lock.wait(), it gives up the lock that it holds on the synchronization object.
This gives another thread a chance to execute the synchronized(lock) block that contains the
lock.notify() statement. After the second thread exits from this block, the lock is returned
to the consumer thread so that it can continue.
In the full producer/consumer pattern, multiple results are produced by one or more
producer threads and are consumed by one or more consumer threads. Instead of having
just one sharedResult object, we keep a list of objects that have been produced but not yet
consumed. Let’s see how this might work in a very simple class that implements the three
operations on a LinkedBlockingQueue<Runnable> that are used in MultiprocessingDemo3:
import java.util.LinkedList;
public class MyLinkedBlockingQueue {
private LinkedList<Runnable> taskList = new LinkedList<Runnable>();
public void clear() {
synchronized(taskList) {
taskList.clear();
}
}
public void add(Runnable task) {
synchronized(taskList) {
taskList.addLast(task);
taskList.notify();
}
}
public Runnable take() throws InterruptedException {
synchronized(taskList) {
while (taskList.isEmpty())
taskList.wait();
return taskList.removeFirst();
}
}
}
An object of this class can be used as a direct replacement for the taskQueue in
MultiprocessingDemo3.
In this class, I have chosen to synchronize on the taskList object, but any object could be
used. In fact, I could simply use synchronized methods, which is equivalent to synchronizing
on this. (Note that you might see a call to wait() or notify() in a synchronized instance
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 654

method, with no reference to the object that is being used. Remember that wait() and
notify() in that context really mean this.wait() and this.notify().)
By the way, it is essential that the call to taskList.clear() be synchronized on the same
object, even though it doesn’t call wait() or notify(). Otherwise, there is a race condition
that can occur: The list might be cleared just after the take() method checks that taskList
is non-empty and before it removes an item from the list. In that case, the list is empty again
by the time taskList.removeFirst() is called, resulting in an error.
∗ ∗ ∗
It is possible for several threads to be waiting for notification. A call to obj.notify() will
wake only one of the threads that is waiting on obj. If you want to wake all threads that
are waiting on obj, you can call obj.notifyAll(). obj.notify() works OK in the above
example because only consumer threads can be blocked. We only need to wake one consumer
thread when a task is added to the queue, and it doesn’t matter which consumer gets the task.
But consider a blocking queue with limited capacity, where producers and consumers can both
block. When an item is added to the queue, we want to make sure that a consumer thread is
notified, not just another producer. One solution is to call notifyAll() instead of notify(),
which will notify all threads including any waiting consumer.
I should also mention a possible confusion about the name of the method obj.notify().
This method does not notify obj of anything! It notifies a thread that has called obj.wait()
(if there is such a thread). Similarly, in obj.wait(), it’s not obj that is waiting for something;
it’s the thread that calls the method.
And a final note on wait: There is another version of wait() that takes a number of
milliseconds as a parameter. A thread that calls obj.wait(milliseconds) will wait only up
to the specified number of milliseconds for a notification. If a notification doesn’t occur during
that period, the thread will wake up and continue without the notification. In practice, this
feature is most often used to let a waiting thread wake periodically while it is waiting in order
to perform some periodic task, such as causing a message “Waiting for computation to finish”
to blink.
∗ ∗ ∗
Let’s look at an example that uses wait() and notify() to allow one thread to control
another. The sample program TowersOfHanoiGUI.java solves the Towers Of Hanoi puzzle
(Subsection 9.1.2), with control buttons that allow the user to control the execution of the
algorithm. The user can click a “Next Step” button to execute just one step in the solution,
which moves a single disk from one pile to another. Clicking “Run” lets the algorithm run
automatically on its own; the text on the button changes from “Run” to “Pause”, and clicking
“Pause” stops the automatic execution. There is also a “Start Over” button that aborts the
current solution and puts the puzzle back into its initial configuration. Here is a picture of the
program in the middle of a solution, including the buttons:
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 655

In this program, there are two threads: a thread that runs a recursive algorithm to solve the
puzzle, and the event-handling thread that reacts to user actions. When the user clicks one of
the buttons, a method is called in the event-handling thread. But it’s actually the thread that
is running the recursion that has to respond by, for example, doing one step of the solution or
starting over. The event-handling thread has to send some sort of signal to the solution thread.
This is done by setting the value of a variable that is shared by both threads. The variable is
named status, and its possible values are the constants GO, PAUSE, STEP, and RESTART.
When the event-handling thread changes the value of this variable, the solution thread
should see the new value and respond. When status equals PAUSE, the solution thread is
paused, waiting for the user to click “Run” or “Next Step”. This is the initial state, when
the program starts. If the user clicks “Next Step”, the event-handling thread sets the value of
status to “STEP”; the solution thread should see the new value and respond by executing one
step of the solution and then resetting status to PAUSE. If the user clicks “Run”, status is
set to GO, which should cause the solution thread to run automatically. When the user clicks
“Pause” while the solution is running, status is reset to PAUSE, and the solution thread should
return to its paused state. If the user clicks “Start Over”, the event-handling thread sets status
to RESTART, and the solution thread should respond by ending the current recursive solution.
The main point for us is that when the solution thread is paused, it is sleeping. It won’t see a
new value for status unless it wakes up! To make that possible, the program uses wait() in the
solution thread to put that thread to sleep, and it uses notify() in the event-handling thread
to wake up the solution thread whenever it changes the value of status. Here are the methods
that respond to clicks on the buttons. When the user clicks a button, the corresponding method
changes the value of status and calls notify() to wake up the solution thread:
synchronized private void doStopGo() {
if (status == GO) { // Animation is running. Pause it.
status = PAUSE;
nextStepButton.setDisable(false);
runPauseButton.setText("Run");
}
else { // Animation is paused. Start it running.
status = GO;
nextStepButton.setDisable(true); // Disabled when animation is running
runPauseButton.setText("Pause");
}
notify(); // Wake up the thread so it can see the new status value!
}
synchronized private void doNextStep() {
status = STEP;
notify();
}
synchronized private void doRestart() {
status = RESTART;
notify();
}
These methods are synchronized to allow the calls to notify(). Remember that the notify()
method in an object can only be called by a thread that holds that object’s synchronization
lock. In this case, the synchronization object is this. Synchronization is also necessary because
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 656

of race conditions that arise due to the fact that the value of status can also be changed by
the solution thread.
The solution thread calls a method named checkStatus() to check the value of status.
This method calls wait() if the status is PAUSE, which puts the solution thread to sleep until
the event-handling thread calls notify(). Note that if the status is RESTART, checkStatus()
throws an IllegalStateException:
synchronized private void checkStatus() {
while (status == PAUSE) {
try {
wait();
}
catch (InterruptedException e) {
}
}
// At this point, status is RUN, STEP, or RESTART.
if (status == RESTART)
throw new IllegalStateException("Restart");
// At this point, status is RUN or STEP, and the solution should proceed.
}
The run() method for the solution thread sets up the initial state of the puzzle and
then calls a solve() method to solve the puzzle. It runs in an infinite loop so that it can
solve the puzzle multiple times. To implement the wait/notify control strategy, run() calls
checkStatus() before starting the solution, and solve() calls checkStatus() after each move.
If checkStatus() throws an IllegalStateException, the call to solve() is terminated early.
(We used the method of throwing an exception to terminate a recursive algorithm before, in
Subsection 12.2.2.)
You can check the full source code to see how this all fits into the complete program. If you
want to learn how to use wait() and notify() directly, understanding this example is a good
place to start!

12.4 Threads and Networking

In the previous chapter, we looked at several examples of network programming. Those
examples showed how to create network connections and communicate through them, but they
didn’t deal with one of the fundamental characteristics of network programming, the fact that
network communication is asynchronous. From the point of view of a program on one end of a
network connection, messages can arrive from the other side of the connection at any time; the
arrival of a message is an event that is not under the control of the program that is receiving
the message. Perhaps an event-oriented networking API would be a good approach to dealing
with the asynchronous nature of network communication, but that is not the approach that is
taken in Java. Instead, network programming in Java typically uses threads.

12.4.1 The Blocking I/O Problem

As covered in Section 11.4, network programming uses sockets. A socket, in the sense that
we are using the term here, represents one end of a network connection. Every socket has an
associated input stream and output stream. Data written to the output stream on one end of
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 657

the connection is transmitted over the network and appears in the input stream at the other
end.
A program that wants to read data from a socket’s input stream calls one of that input
stream’s input methods. It is possible that the data has already arrived before the input
method is called; in that case, the input method retrieves the data and returns immediately.
More likely, however, the input method will have to wait for data to arrive from the other side
of the connection. Until the data arrives, the input method and the thread that called it will
be blocked.
It is also possible for an output method in a socket’s output stream to block. This can happen
if the program tries to output data to the socket faster than the data can be transmitted over
the network. (It’s a little complicated: a socket uses a “buffer” to hold data that is supposed
to be transmitted over the network. A buffer is just a block of memory that is used like a
queue. The output method drops its data into the buffer; lower-level software removes data
from the buffer and transmits it over the network. If the buffer fills up, the output method will
block until space becomes available in the buffer. Note that when the output method returns,
it doesn’t mean that the data has gone out over the network—it just means that the data has
gone into the buffer and is scheduled for later transmission.)
We say that network communication uses blocking I/O, because input and output
operations on the network can block for indefinite periods of time. Programs that use the
network must be prepared to deal with this blocking. In some cases, it’s acceptable for a
program to simply shut down all other processing and wait for input. (This is what happens
when a command line program reads input typed by the user. User input is another type of
blocking I/O.) However, threads make it possible for some parts of a program to continue doing
useful work while other parts are blocked. A network client program that sends requests to
a server might get by with a single thread, if it has nothing else to do while waiting for the
server’s responses. A network server program, on the other hand, can typically be connected
to several clients at the same time. While waiting for data to arrive from a client, the server
certainly has other things that it can do, namely communicate with other clients. When a
server uses different threads to handle the communication with different clients, the fact that
I/O with one client is blocked won’t stop the server from communicating with other clients.
It’s important to understand that using threads to deal with blocking I/O differs in a
fundamental way from using threads to speed up computation. When using threads for speed-
up in Subsection 12.3.2, it made sense to use one thread for each available processor. If only
one processor is available, using more than one thread will yield no speed-up at all; in fact, it
would slow things down because of the extra overhead involved in creating and managing the
threads.
In the case of blocking I/O, on the other hand, it can make sense to have many more threads
than there are processors, since at any given time many of the threads can be blocked. Only the
active, unblocked threads are competing for processing time. In the ideal case, to keep all the
processors busy, you would want to have one active thread per processor (actually somewhat
less than that, on average, to allow for variations over time in the number of active threads).
On a network server program, for example, threads generally spend most of their time blocked
waiting for I/O operations to complete. If threads are blocked, say, about 90% of the time,
you’d like to have about ten times as many threads as there are processors. So even on a
computer that has just a single processor, server programs can make good use of large numbers
of threads.
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 658

12.4.2 An Asynchronous Network Chat Program

As a first example of using threads for network communication, we consider a GUI chat program.
The command-line chat programs, CLChatClient.java and CLChatServer.java, from Sub-
section 11.4.5 use a straight-through, step-by-step protocol for communication. After a user on
one side of a connection enters a message, the user must wait for a reply from the other side of
the connection. An asynchronous chat program would be much nicer. In such a program, a user
could just keep typing lines and sending messages without waiting for any response. Messages
that arrive—asynchronously—from the other side would be displayed as soon as they arrive.
It’s not easy to do this in a command-line interface, but it’s a natural application for a graphical
user interface. The basic idea for a GUI chat program is to create a thread whose job is to read
messages that arrive from the other side of the connection. As soon as the message arrives,
it is displayed to the user; then, the message-reading thread blocks until the next incoming
message arrives. While it is blocked, however, other threads can continue to run. In particular,
the event-handling thread that responds to user actions keeps running; that thread can send
outgoing messages as soon as the user generates them.
The GUIChat program can act as either the client end or the server end of a connection.
(Refer back to Subsection 11.4.3 for information about how clients and servers work.) The
program has a “Listen on port” button that the user can click to create a server socket that
will listen for an incoming connection request; this makes the program act as a server. It
also has a “Connect” button that the user can click to send a connection request; this makes
the program act as a client. As usual, the server listens on a specified port number. The
client needs to know the computer on which the server is running and the port on which the
server is listening. There are input boxes in the GUIChat window where the user can enter this
information.
Once a connection has been established between two GUIChat windows, each user can send
messages to the other. The window has an input box where the user types a message. Pressing
return sends the message. This means that the sending of the message is handled by the usual
event-handling thread, in response to an event generated by a user action. Messages are received
by a separate thread that just sits around waiting for incoming messages. This thread blocks
while waiting for a message to arrive; when a message does arrive, it displays that message to
the user. The window contains a large transcript area that displays both incoming and outgoing
messages, along with other information about the network connection.
I urge you to compile the source code, GUIChat.java, and try the program. To try it
on single computer, you can run two copies of the program on that computer, and make a
connection between one program window and the other program window, using “localhost” or
“127.0.0.1” as the name of the computer. I also urge you to read the source code. I will discuss
only parts of it here.
The program uses a nested class, ConnectionHandler, to handle most network-related tasks.
ConnectionHandler is a subclass of Thread. The ConnectionHandler thread is responsible for
opening the network connection and then for reading incoming messages once the connection
has been opened. By putting the connection-opening code in a separate thread, we make sure
that the GUI is not blocked while the connection is being opened. (Like reading incoming
messages, opening a connection is a blocking operation that can take some time to complete.)
The ConnectionHandler handles opening the connection both when the program acts as a server
and when it acts as a client. The thread is created when the user clicks either the “Listen”
button or the “Connect” button. The “Listen” button makes the thread act as a server, while
“Connect” makes it act as a client. To distinguish these two cases, the ConnectionHandler class
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 659

has the two constructors that are shown below. Note that the postMessage() method posts a
message to the transcript area of the window, where it will be visible to the user:
/**
* Listen for a connection on a specified port. The constructor
* does not perform any network operations; it just sets some
* instance variables and starts the thread. Note that the
* thread will only listen for one connection, and then will
* close its server socket.
*/
ConnectionHandler(int port) { // For acting as the "server."
state = ConnectionState.LISTENING;
this.port = port;
postMessage("\nLISTENING ON PORT " + port + "\n");
try { setDaemon(true); }
catch (Exception e) {}
start();
}
/**
* Open a connection to a specified computer and port. The constructor
* does not perform any network operations; it just sets some
* instance variables and starts the thread.
*/
ConnectionHandler(String remoteHost, int port) { // For acting as "client."
state = ConnectionState.CONNECTING;
this.remoteHost = remoteHost;
this.port = port;
postMessage("\nCONNECTING TO " + remoteHost + " ON PORT " + port + "\n");
try { setDaemon(true); }
catch (Exception e) {}
start();
}
Here, state is an instance variable whose type is defined by an enumerated type:
enum ConnectionState { LISTENING, CONNECTING, CONNECTED, CLOSED };
The values of this enum represent different possible states of the network connection. It is
often useful to treat a network connection as a state machine (see Subsection 6.3.6), since the
response to various events can depend on the state of the connection when the event occurs.
Setting the state variable to LISTENING or CONNECTING tells the thread whether to act as a
server or as a client when setting up the connection.
Once the thread has been started, it executes the following run() method:
/**
* The run() method that is executed by the thread. It opens a
* connection as a client or as a server (depending on which
* constructor was used).
*/
public void run() {
try {
if (state == ConnectionState.LISTENING) {
// Open a connection as a server.
listener = new ServerSocket(port);
socket = listener.accept();
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 660

listener.close();
}
else if (state == ConnectionState.CONNECTING) {
// Open a connection as a client.
socket = new Socket(remoteHost,port);
}
connectionOpened(); // Sets up to use the connection (including
// creating a BufferedReader, in, for reading
// incoming messages).
while (state == ConnectionState.CONNECTED) {
// Read one line of text from the other side of
// the connection, and report it to the user.
String input = in.readLine();
if (input == null)
connectionClosedFromOtherSide(); // Close socket and report to user.
else
received(input); // Report message to user.
}
}
catch (Exception e) {
// An error occurred. Report it to the user, but not
// if the connection has been closed (since the error
// might be the expected error that is generated when
// a socket is closed).
if (state != ConnectionState.CLOSED)
postMessage("\n\n ERROR: " + e);
}
finally { // Clean up before terminating the thread.
cleanUp();
}
}
This method calls several other methods to do some of its work, but you can see the general
outline of how it works. After opening the connection as either a server or client, the run()
method enters a while loop in which it receives and processes messages from the other side of
the connection until the connection is closed. It is important to understand how the connection
can be closed. The GUIChat window has a “Disconnect” button that the user can click to close
the connection. The program responds to this event by closing the socket that represents the
connection and by setting the connection state to CLOSED. It is likely that when this happens, the
connection-handling thread is blocked in the in.readLine() method, waiting for an incoming
message. When the socket is closed by the GUI thread, this method will fail and will throw an
exception; this exception causes the thread to terminate. (If the connection-handling thread
happens to be between calls to in.readLine() when the socket is closed, the while loop will
terminate because the connection state changes from CONNECTED to CLOSED.) Note that closing
the window will also close the connection in the same way.
It is also possible for the user on the other side of the connection to close the connection.
When that happens, the stream of incoming messages ends, and the in.readLine() on this
side of the connection returns the value null, which indicates end-of-stream and acts as a signal
that the connection has been closed by the remote user.
For a final look into the GUIChat code, consider the methods that send and receive messages.
These methods are called from different threads. The send() method is called by the event-
handling thread in response to a user action. Its purpose is to transmit a message to the remote
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 661

user. (It is conceivable, though not likely, that the data output operation could block, if the
socket’s output buffer fills up. A more sophisticated program might take this possibility into
account by using another thread to transmit outgoing messages.) The send() method uses a
PrintWriter, out, that writes to the socket’s output stream. Synchronization of this method
prevents the connection state from changing in the middle of the send operation:
/**
* Send a message to the other side of the connection, and post the
* message to the transcript. This should only be called when the
* connection state is ConnectionState.CONNECTED; if it is called at
* other times, it is ignored.
*/
synchronized void send(String message) {
if (state == ConnectionState.CONNECTED) {
postMessage("SEND: " + message);
out.println(message);
out.flush();
if (out.checkError()) {
postMessage("\nERROR OCCURRED WHILE TRYING TO SEND DATA.");
close(); // Closes the connection.
}
}
}
The received() method is called by the connection-handling thread after a message has been
read from the remote user. Its only job is to display the message to the user, but again it is
synchronized to avoid the race condition that could occur if the connection state were changed
by another thread while this method is being executed:
/**
* This is called by the run() method when a message is received from
* the other side of the connection. The message is posted to the
* transcript, but only if the connection state is CONNECTED. (This
* is because a message might be received after the user has clicked
* the "Disconnect" button; that message should not be seen by the
* user.)
*/
synchronized private void received(String message) {
if (state == ConnectionState.CONNECTED)
postMessage("RECEIVE: " + message);
}

12.4.3 A Threaded Network Server

Threads are often used in network server programs. They allow the server to deal with several
clients at the same time. When a client can stay connected for an extended period of time, other
clients shouldn’t have to wait for service. Even if the interaction with each client is expected
to be very brief, you can’t always assume that that will be the case. You have to allow for the
possibility of a misbehaving client—one that stays connected without sending data that the
server expects. This can hang up a thread indefinitely, but in a threaded server there will be
other threads that can carry on with other clients.
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 662

The DateServer.java sample program, from Subsection 11.4.4, is an extremely simple

network server program. It does not use threads, so the server must finish with one client
before it can accept a connection from another client. Let’s see how we can turn DateServer
into a threaded server. (This server is so simple that doing so doesn’t make a great deal of
sense. However, the same techniques will work for more complicated servers. See, for example,
Exercise 12.5. Also note that the client program, DateClient.java, which implements a client
for the date server, does not need to use threads, since the client only uses one connection. The
original client program will work with the new versions of the server.)
As a first attempt, consider DateServerWithThreads.java. This sample program creates
a new thread every time a connection request is received, instead of handling the connection
itself by calling a subroutine. The main program simply creates the thread and hands the
connection to the thread. This takes very little time, and in particular will not block. The
run() method of the thread handles the connection in exactly the same way that it would be
handled by the original program. This is not at all difficult to program. Here’s the new version
of the program, with significant changes shown in italic. Note again that the constructor for
the connection thread does very little and in particular cannot block; this is very important
since the constructor runs in the main thread:
import java.net.*;
import java.io.*;
import java.util.Date;
/**
* This program is a server that takes connection requests on
* the port specified by the constant LISTENING PORT. When a
* connection is opened, the program sends the current time to
* the connected socket. The program will continue to receive
* and process connections until it is killed (by a CONTROL-C,
* for example).
*
* This version of the program creates a new thread for
* every connection request.
*/
public class DateServerWithThreads {
public static final int LISTENING PORT = 32007;
public static void main(String[] args) {
ServerSocket listener; // Listens for incoming connections.
Socket connection; // For communication with the connecting program.
/* Accept and process connections forever, or until some error occurs. */
try {
listener = new ServerSocket(LISTENING PORT);
System.out.println("Listening on port " + LISTENING PORT);
while (true) {
// Accept next connection request and create a thread to handle it.
connection = listener.accept();
ConnectionHandler handler = new ConnectionHandler(connection);
handler.start();
}
}
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 663

catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println("Sorry, the server has shut down.");
System.out.println("Error: " + e);
return;
}
} // end main()

/**
* Defines a thread that handles the connection with one
* client.
*/
private static class ConnectionHandler extends Thread {
Socket client; // The connection to the client.
ConnectionHandler(Socket socket) {
client = socket;
}
public void run() {
// (code copied from the original DateServer program)
String clientAddress = client.getInetAddress().toString();
try {
System.out.println("Connection from " + clientAddress );
Date now = new Date(); // The current date and time.
PrintWriter outgoing; // Stream for sending data.
outgoing = new PrintWriter( client.getOutputStream() );
outgoing.println( now.toString() );
outgoing.flush(); // Make sure the data is actually sent!
client.close();
}
catch (Exception e){
System.out.println("Error on connection with: "
+ clientAddress + ": " + e);
}
}
}

} //end class DateServerWithThreads

One interesting change is at the end of the run() method, where I’ve added the clientAddress
to the output of the error message. I did this to identify which connection the error message
refers to. Since threads run in parallel, it’s possible for outputs from different threads to be
intermingled in various orders. Messages from the same thread don’t necessarily come together
in the output; they might be separated by messages from other threads. This is just one of the
complications that you have to keep in mind when working with threads!

12.4.4 Using a Thread Pool

It’s not very efficient to create a new thread for every connection, especially when the
connections are typically very short-lived. Fortunately, we have an alternative: thread pools
(Subsection 12.3.2).
DateServerWithThreadPool.java is an improved version of our server that uses a thread
pool. Each thread in the pool runs in an infinite loop. Each time through the loop, it handles
one connection. We need a way for the main program to send connections to the threads. It’s
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 664

natural to use a blocking queue (Subsection 12.3.3) named connectionQueue for that purpose.
A connection-handling thread takes connections from this queue. Since it is a blocking queue,
the thread blocks when the queue is empty and wakes up when a connection becomes available
in the queue. No other synchronization or communication technique is needed; it’s all built into
the blocking queue. Here is the run() method for the connection-handling threads:
public void run() {
while (true) {
Socket client;
try {
client = connectionQueue.take(); // Blocks until item is available.
}
catch (InterruptedException e) {
continue; // (If interrupted, just go back to start of while loop.)
}
String clientAddress = client.getInetAddress().toString();
try {
System.out.println("Connection from " + clientAddress );
System.out.println("Handled by thread " + this);
Date now = new Date(); // The current date and time.
PrintWriter outgoing; // Stream for sending data.
outgoing = new PrintWriter( client.getOutputStream() );
outgoing.println( now.toString() );
outgoing.flush(); // Make sure the data is actually sent!
client.close();
}
catch (Exception e){
System.out.println("Error on connection with: "
+ clientAddress + ": " + e);
}
}
}
The main program, in the meantime, runs in an infinite loop in which connections are accepted
and added to the queue:
while (true) {
// Accept next connection request and put it in the queue.
connection = listener.accept();
try {
connectionQueue.put(connection); // Blocks if queue is full.
}
catch (InterruptedException e) {
}
}
The queue in this program is of type ArrayBlockingQueue<Socket>. As such, it has a limited
capacity, and the put() operation on the queue will block if the queue is full. But wait—didn’t
we want to avoid blocking the main program? When the main program is blocked, the server is
no longer accepting connections, and clients who are trying to connect are kept waiting. Would
it be better to use a LinkedBlockingQueue, with an unlimited capacity?
In fact, connections in the blocking queue are waiting anyway; they are not being serviced.
If the queue grows unreasonably long, connections in the queue will have to wait for an
unreasonable amount of time. If the queue keeps growing indefinitely, that just means that
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 665

the server is receiving connection requests faster than it can process them. That could happen
for several reasons: Your server might simply not be powerful enough to handle the volume of
traffic that you are getting; you need to buy a new server. Or perhaps the thread pool doesn’t
have enough threads to fully utilize your server; you should increase the size of the thread pool
to match the server’s capabilities. Or maybe your server is under a “Denial Of Service” attack,
in which some bad guy is deliberately sending your server more requests than it can handle in
an attempt to keep other, legitimate clients from getting service.
In any case, ArrayBlockingQueue with limited capacity is the correct choice. The queue
should be short enough so that connections in the queue will not have to wait too long for
service. In a real server, the size of the queue and the number of threads in the thread pool
should be adjusted to “tune” the server to account for the particular hardware and network on
which the server is running and for the nature of the client requests that it typically processes.
Optimal tuning is, in general, a difficult problem.
There is, by the way, another way that things can go wrong: Suppose that the server needs
to read some data from the client, but the client doesn’t send any data. The thread that is
trying to read the data can then block indefinitely, waiting for the input. If a thread pool is
being used, this could happen to every thread in the pool. In that case, no further processing
can ever take place! The solution to this problem is to have connections “time out” if they are
inactive for an excessive period of time. Typically, each connection thread will keep track of
the time when it last received data from the client. The server runs another thread (sometimes
called a “reaper thread”, after the Grim Reaper) that wakes up periodically and checks each
connection thread to see how long it has been inactive. A connection thread that has been
waiting too long for input is terminated, and a new thread is started in its place. The question
of how long the timeout period should be is another difficult tuning issue.

12.4.5 Distributed Computing

We have seen how threads can be used to do parallel processing, where a number of processors
work together to complete some task. So far, we have assumed that all the processors were
inside one multi-processor computer. But parallel processing can also be done using processors
that are in different computers, as long as those computers are connected to a network over
which they can communicate. This type of parallel processing—in which a number of computers
work together on a task and communicate over a network—is called distributed computing .
In some sense, the whole Internet is an immense distributed computation, but here I am
interested in how computers on a network can cooperate to solve some computational problem.
There are several approaches that can be used for distributed computing in Java. One general
technique that is a a standard part of Java is RMI (Remote Method Invocation). RMI enables
a program running on one computer to call methods in objects that exist on other computers.
This makes it possible to design an object-oriented program in which different parts of the
program are executed on different computers. As is commonly the case in networking, there
is the problem of locating services (where in this case, a “service” means an object that is
available to be called over the network). That is, how can one computer know which computer
a service is located on and what port it is listening on? RMI solves this problem using a “request
broker”—a server program running at a known location that keeps a list of services that are
available on other computers. Computers that offer services register those services with the
request broker; computers that need services must know the location of the broker, and they
contact it to find out what services are available and where they are located.
RMI is a complex system that is not very easy to use. I mention it here because they are
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 666

part of Java’s standard network API, but I will not discuss it further. Instead, we will look at
a relatively simple demonstration of distributed computing that uses only basic networking.
The problem that we will consider is the same one that was used in Section 12.2 and
Section 12.3 for MultiprocessingDemo1.java and its variations, namely the computation of a
complex image. In this case, however, the program is not a GUI program and the image
is not shown on the screen. The computation is one that uses the simplest type of parallel
programming, in which the problem can be broken down into tasks that can be performed
independently, with no communication between the tasks. To apply distributed computing to
this type of problem, we can use one “master” program that divides the problem into tasks and
sends those tasks over the network to “worker” programs that do the actual work. The worker
programs send their results back to the master program, which combines the results from all
the tasks into a solution of the overall problem. In this context, the worker programs are often
called “slaves,” and the program uses the so-called master/slave approach to distributed
computing.
The demonstration program is defined by three source code files: CLMandelbrotMaster.java
defines the master program; CLMandelbrotWorker.java defines the worker programs; and
CLMandelbrotTask.java defines the class that represents the individual tasks that are performed
by the workers. The master divides the overall problem into a collection of tasks; it distributes
those tasks to the workers that will execute the tasks and send the results back to the master;
and the master applies the results from all the individual tasks to the overall problem.
To run the demonstration, you must first start the CLMandelbrotWorker program on several
computers (probably by running it on the command line). This program uses CLMandelbrotTask,
so both class files, CLMandelbrotWorker.class and CLMandelbrotTask.class, must be
present on the worker computers. You can then run CLMandelbrotMaster on the master
computer. Note that the master program also requires the class CLMandelbrotTask. You must
specify the host name or IP address of each of the worker computers as command line arguments
for CLMandelbrotMaster. The worker programs listen for connection requests from the master
program, and the master program must be told where to send those requests. For example, if
the worker program is running on three computers with IP addresses 172.21.7.101, 172.21.7.102,
and 172.21.7.103, then you can run CLMandelbrotMaster with the command
java CLMandelbrotMaster 172.21.7.101 172.21.7.102 172.21.7.103
The master will make a network connection to the worker at each IP address; these connections
will be used for communication between the master program and the workers.
It is possible to run several copies of CLMandelbrotWorker on the same computer, but
they must listen for network connections on different ports. It is also possible to run
CLMandelbrotWorker on the same computer as CLMandelbrotMaster. You might even see
some speed-up when you do this, if your computer has several processors. See the comments in
the program source code files for more information, but here are some commands that you can
use to run the master program and two copies of the worker program on the same computer.
Give these commands in separate command windows:
java CLMandelbrotWorker (Listens on default port)
java CLMandelbrotWorker 2501 (Listens on port 2501)
java CLMandelbrotMaster localhost localhost:2501
Every time CLMandelbrotMaster is run, it solves exactly the same problem. (For this
demonstration, the nature of the problem is not important, but the problem is to compute the
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 667

data needed for a picture of a small piece of the famous “Mandelbrot Set.” If you are interested
in seeing the picture that is produced, uncomment the call to the saveImage() method at the
end of the main() routine in CLMandelbrotMaster.java.)
You can run CLMandelbrotMaster with different numbers of worker programs to see how
the time required to solve the problem depends on the number of workers. (Note that
the worker programs continue to run after the master program exits, so you can run the
master program several times without having to restart the workers.) In addition, if you run
CLMandelbrotMaster with no command line arguments, it will solve the entire problem on its
own, so you can see how long it takes to do so without using distributed computing. In a trial
that I ran on some very old, slow computers, it took 40 seconds for CLMandelbrotMaster to solve
the problem on its own. Using just one worker, it took 43 seconds. The extra time represents
extra work involved in using the network; it takes time to set up a network connection and
to send messages over the network. Using two workers (on different computers), the problem
was solved in 22 seconds. In this case, each worker did about half of the work, and their
computations were performed in parallel, so that the job was done in about half the time. With
larger numbers of workers, the time continued to decrease, but only up to a point. The master
program itself has a certain amount of work to do, no matter how many workers there are,
and the total time to solve the problem can never be less than the time it takes for the master
program to do its part. In this case, the minimum time seemed to be about five seconds.
∗ ∗ ∗
Let’s take a look at how this distributed application is programmed. The master program
divides the overall problem into a set of tasks. Each task is represented by an object of type
CLMandelbrotTask. These tasks have to be communicated to the worker programs, and the
worker programs must send back their results. Some protocol is needed for this communication.
I decided to use character streams. The master encodes a task as a line of text, which is sent
to a worker. The worker decodes the text (into an object of type CLMandelbrotTask) to find
out what task it is supposed to perform. It performs the assigned task. It encodes the results
as another line of text, which it sends back to the master program. Finally, the master decodes
the results and combines them with the results from other tasks. After all the tasks have been
completed and their results have been combined, the problem has been solved.
A CLMandelbrotWorker receives not just one task, but a sequence of tasks. Each time
it finishes a task and sends back the result, it is assigned a new task. After all tasks are
completed, the worker receives a “close” command that tells it to close the connection. In
CLMandelbrotWorker.java, all this is done in a method named handleConnection() that
is called to handle a connection that has already been opened to the master program. It
uses a method readTask() to decode a task that it receives from the master and a method
writeResults() to encode the results of the task for transmission back to the master. It must
also handle any errors that occur:
private static void handleConnection(Socket connection) {
try {
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(
new InputStreamReader( connection.getInputStream()) );
PrintWriter out = new PrintWriter(connection.getOutputStream());
while (true) {
String line = in.readLine(); // Message from the master.
if (line == null) {
// End-of-stream encountered -- should not happen.
throw new Exception("Connection closed unexpectedly.");
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 668

}
if (line.startsWith(CLOSE CONNECTION COMMAND)) {
// Represents the normal termination of the connection.
System.out.println("Received close command.");
break;
}
else if (line.startsWith(TASK COMMAND)) {
// Represents a CLMandelbrotTask that this worker is
// supposed to perform.
CLMandelbrotTask task = readTask(line); // Decode the message.
task.compute(); // Perform the task.
out.println(writeResults(task)); // Send back the results.
out.flush(); // Make sure data is sent promptly!
}
else {
// No other messages are part of the protocol.
throw new Exception("Illegal command received.");
}
}
}
catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println("Client connection closed with error " + e);
}
finally {
try {
connection.close(); // Make sure the socket is closed.
}
catch (Exception e) {
}
}
}
Note that this method is not executed in a separate thread. The worker has only one thing to
do at a time and does not need to be multithreaded.
Turning to the master program, CLMandelbrotMaster.java, we encounter a more complex
situation. The master program must communicate with several workers over several network
connections. To accomplish this, the master program is multi-threaded, with one thread to
manage communication with each worker. A pseudocode outline of the main() routine is quite
simple:
create the tasks that must be performed and add them to a queue
if there are no command line arguments {
// The master program does all the tasks itself.
Remove each task from the queue and perform it.
}
else {
// The tasks will be performed by worker programs.
for each command line argument:
Get information about a worker from command line argument.
Create and start a thread to send tasks to workers.
Wait for all threads to terminate.
}
// All tasks are now complete (assuming no error occurred).
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 669

The tasks are put into a variable of type ConcurrentBlockingQueue<CLMandelbrotTask>

named tasks (see Subsection 12.3.2.) The communication threads take tasks from this queue
and send them to worker programs. The method tasks.poll() is used to remove a task from
the queue. If the queue is empty, it returns null, which acts as a signal that all tasks have
been assigned and the communication thread can terminate.
The job of a thread is to send a sequence of tasks to a worker thread and to receive the
results that the worker sends back. The thread is also responsible for opening the connection
in the first place. A pseudocode outline for the process executed by the thread might look like:
Create a socket connected to the worker program.
Create input and output streams for communicating with the worker.
while (true) {
Let task = tasks.poll().
If task == null
break; // All tasks have been assigned.
Encode the task into a message and transmit it to the worker.
Read the response from the worker.
Decode and process the response.
}
Send a "close" command to the worker.
Close the socket.
This would work OK. However, there are a few subtle points. First of all, the thread must be
ready to deal with a network error. For example, a worker might shut down unexpectedly. But if
that happens, the master program can continue, provided other workers are still available. (You
can try this when you run the program: Stop one of the worker programs, with CONTROL-C,
and observe that the master program still completes successfully.) A difficulty arises if an
error occurs while the thread is working on a task: If the problem as a whole is going to
be completed, that task will have to be reassigned to another worker. I take care of this by
putting the uncompleted task back into the task list. (Unfortunately, my program does not
handle all possible errors. If the last worker thread fails, there will be no one left to take
over the uncompleted task. Also, if a network connection “hangs” indefinitely without actually
generating an error, my program will also hang, waiting for a response from a worker that
will never arrive. A more robust program would have some way of detecting the problem and
reassigning the task.)
Another defect in the procedure outlined above is that it leaves the worker program idle
while the thread in the master program is processing the worker’s response. It would be nice
to get a new task to the worker before processing the response from the previous task. This
would keep the worker busy and allow two operations to proceed simultaneously instead of
sequentially. (In this example, the time it takes to process a response is so short that keeping
the worker waiting while it is done probably makes no significant difference. But as a general
principle, it’s desirable to have as much parallelism as possible in the algorithm.) We can
modify the procedure to take this into account:
try {
Create a socket connected to the worker program.
Create input and output streams for communicating with the worker.
Let currentTask = tasks.poll()
if (currentTask != null)
Encode currentTask into a message and send it to the worker.
while (currentTask != null) {
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 670

Read the response from the worker.

Let nextTask = tasks.poll().
If nextTask != null {
// Send nextTask to the worker before processing the
// response to currentTask.
Encode nextTask into a message and send it to the worker.
}
Decode and process the response to currentTask.
currentTask = nextTask.
}
Send a "close" command to the worker.
Close the socket.
}
catch (Exception e) {
Put uncompleted task, if any, back into the task queue.
}
finally {
Close the connection.
}
To see how this all translates into Java, check out the WorkerConnection nested class in
CLMandelbrotMaster.java

12.5 Network Programming Example:

A Networked Game Framework
This section presents several programs that use networking and threads. The common
problem in each application is to support network communication between several programs
running on different computers. A typical example of such an application is a networked game
with two or more players, but the same problem can come up in less frivolous applications
as well. The first part of this section describes a framework that can be used for a variety
of such applications, and the rest of the section discusses three specific applications that use
that framework. This is a fairly complex example, probably the most complex in this book.
Understanding it is not essential for a basic understanding of networking.
This section was inspired by a pair of students, Alexander Kittelberger and Kieran
Koehnlein, who wanted to write a networked poker game as a final project in a class that I
was teaching. I helped them with the network part of the project by writing a basic framework
to support communication between the players. Since the application illustrates a variety of
important ideas, I decided to include a somewhat more advanced and general version of that
framework in this book. The final example in this section is a networked poker game.

12.5.1 The Netgame Framework

One can imagine playing many different games over the network. As far as the network goes,
all of those games have at least one thing in common: There has to be some way for actions
taken by one player to be communicated over the network to other players. It makes good
programming sense to make that capability available in a reusable common core that can be
used in many different games. I have written such a core; it is defined by several classes in the
package netgame.common.
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 671

We have not done much with packages in this book, aside from using built-in classes.
Packages were introduced in Subsection 2.6.6, but we have stuck to the “default package”
in our programming examples. In practice, however, packages are used in all but the simplest
programming projects to divide the code into groups of related classes. It makes particularly
good sense to define a reusable framework in a package that can be included as a unit in a
variety of projects.
Integrated development environments such as Eclipse make it very easy to use packages:
To use the netgame package in a project in an IDE, simply copy-and-paste the entire netgame
directory into the project. Of course, since netgames use JavaFX, you need to use an Eclipse
project configured to support JavaFX, as discussed in Section 2.6.
If you work on the command line, you should be in a working directory that includes the
netgame directory as a subdirectory. You need to add JavaFX options to the javac and java
commands. Let’s say that you’ve defined jfxc and jfx commands that are equivalent to
the javac and java with JavaFX options included, as discussed in Subsection 2.6.7. Then,
to compile all the java files in the package netgame.common, for example, you can use the
following command in MacOS or Linux:
jfxc netgame/common/*.java
For Windows, you should use backslashes instead of forward slashes:
jfxc netgame\common\*.java
You will need similar commands to compile the source code for the examples in this section,
which are defined in other subpackages of netgame.
To run a main program that is defined in a package, you should again be in a directory
that contains the package as a subdirectory, and you should use the full name of the class that
you want to run. For example, the ChatRoomWindow class, discussed later in this section, is
defined in the package netgame.chat, so you would run it with the command
jfx netgame.chat.ChatRoomWindow

∗ ∗ ∗
The applications discussed in this section are examples of distributed computing, since they
involve several computers communicating over a network. Like the example in Subsection 12.4.5,
they use a central “server,” or “master,” to which a number of “clients” will connect. All
communication goes through the server; a client cannot send messages directly to another
client. In this section, I will refer to the server as a hub, in the sense of “communications hub”:

Client
Client

HUB

Client Client
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 672

The main things that you need to understand are that: The hub must be running before
any clients are started. Clients connect to the hub and can send messages to the hub. The
hub processes all messages from clients sequentially, in the order in which they are received.
The processing can result in the hub sending messages out to one or more clients. Each client
is identified by a unique ID number. This is a framework that can be used in a variety of
applications, and the messages and processing will be defined by the particular application.
Here are some of the details. . .
In Subsection 12.4.5, messages were sent back and forth between the server and the client in a
definite, predetermined sequence. Communication between the server and a client was actually
communication between one thread running on the server and another thread running on the
client. For the netgame framework, however, I want to allow for asynchronous communication,
in which it is not possible to wait for messages to arrive in a predictable sequence. To make
this possible a netgame client will use two threads for communication, one for sending messages
to the hub and one for receiving messages from the hub. Similarly, the netgame hub will use
two threads for communicating with each client.
The hub is generally connected to many clients and can receive messages from any of those
clients at any time. The hub will have to process each message in some way. To organize
this processing, the hub uses a single thread to process all incoming messages. When a
communication thread receives a message from a client, it simply drops that message into
a queue of incoming messages. There is only one such queue, which is used for messages from
all clients. The message processing thread runs in a loop in which it removes a message from
the queue, processes it, removes another message from the queue, processes it, and so on. The
queue itself is implemented as an object of type LinkedBlockingQueue (see Subsection 12.3.3).

send thread

Client
receive thread
HUB
receive
Incoming
Message Queue
send

Message
Processing
Thread

There is one more thread in the hub, not shown in the illustration. This final thread creates
a ServerSocket and uses it to listen for connection requests from clients. Each time it accepts
a connection request, it hands off the client socket to another object, defined by the nested
class ConnectionToClient, which will handle communication with that client. Each connected
client is identified by an ID number. ID numbers 1, 2, 3, . . . are assigned to clients as they
connect. Since clients can also disconnect, the clients connected at any give time might not
have consecutive IDs. A variable of type TreeMap<Integer,ConnectionToClient> associates the
ID numbers of connected clients with the objects that handle their connections.
The messages that are sent and received are objects. The I/O streams that are used
for reading and writing objects are of type ObjectInputStream and ObjectOutputStream. (See
Subsection 11.1.6.) The output stream of a socket is wrapped in an ObjectOutputStream to
make it possible to transmit objects through that socket. The socket’s input stream is wrapped
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 673

in an ObjectInputStream to make it possible to receive objects. Remember that the objects that
are used with such streams must implement the interface java.io.Serializable.
The netgame Hub class is defined in the file Hub.java, in the package netgame.common.
The port on which the server socket will listen must be specified as a parameter to the Hub
constructor. The Hub class defines a method
protected void messageReceived(int playerID, Object message)
When a message from some client arrives at the front of the queue of messages, the message-
processing thread removes it from the queue and calls this method. This is the point at which
the message from the client is actually processed.
The first parameter, playerID, is the ID number of the client from whom the message
was received, and the second parameter is the message itself. In the Hub class, this method
will simply forward a copy of the message to every connected client. This defines the
default processing for incoming messages to the hub. To forward the message, it wraps both
the playerID and the message in an object of type ForwardedMessage (defined in the file
ForwardedMessage.java, in the package netgame.common). In a simple application such as the
chat room discussed in the next subsection, this default processing might be exactly what is
needed by the application. For most applications, however, it will be necessary to define a
subclass of Hub and redefine the messageReceived() method to do more complicated message
processing. There are several other methods in the Hub class that you might want to redefine
in a subclass, including
• protected void playerConnected(int playerID) — This method is called each time
a player connects to the hub. The parameter playerID is the ID number of the newly
connected player. In the Hub class, this method does nothing. (The hub has already sent a
StatusMessage to every client to inform them about the new player; playerConnected()
is for any additional actions that a subclass of Hub might want to take.) Note that the
complete list of ID numbers for currently connected players can be obtained by calling
getPlayerList().
• protected void playerDisconnected(int playerID) — This is called each time a
player disconnects from the hub (after the hub sends a StatusMessage to the clients).
The parameter tells which player has just disconnected. In the Hub class, this method
does nothing.
The Hub class also defines a number of useful public methods, notably
• sendToAll(message) — sends the specified message to every client that is currently
connected to the hub. The message must be a non-null object that implements the
Serializable interface.
• sendToOne(recipientID,message) — sends a specified message to just one user. The
first parameter, recipientID is the ID number of the client who will receive the message.
This method returns a boolean value, which is false if there is no connected client with
the specified recipientID.
• shutDownServerSocket() — shuts down the hub’s server socket, so that no additional
clients will be able to connect. This could be used, for example, in a two-person game,
after the second client has connected.
• setAutoreset(autoreset) — sets the boolean value of the autoreset property. If this
property is true, then the ObjectOutputStreams that are used to transmit messages to
clients will automatically be reset before each message is transmitted. The default value
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 674

is false. (Resetting an ObjectOutputStream is something that has to be done if an object

is written to the stream, modified, and then written to the stream again. If the stream is
not reset before writing the modified object, then the old, unmodified value is sent to the
stream instead of the new value. See Subsection 11.1.6 for a discussion of this technicality.
The preferred solution is to use only immutable objects for communication; in that case,
no resetting is necessary.)
For more information—and to see how all this is implemented—you should read the source
code file Hub.java. With some effort and study, you should be able to understand everything
in that file. (However, you only need to understand the public and protected interface of Hub
and other classes in the netgame framework to write applications based on it.)
∗ ∗ ∗
Turning to the client side, the basic netgame client class is defined in the file Client.java, in
the package netgame.common. The Client class has a constructor that specifies the host name
(or IP address) and port number of the hub to which the client will connect. This constructor
blocks until the connection has been established.
Client is an abstract class. Every netgame application must define a subclass of Client
and provide a definition for the abstract method:
abstract protected void messageReceived(Object message);
This method is called each time a message is received from the netgame hub. A subclass of
client might also override the protected methods playerConnected, playerDisconnected,
serverShutdown, and connectionClosedByError. See the source code for more information.
I should also note that Client contains the protected instance variable connectedPlayerIDs,
of type int[], an array containing the ID numbers of all the clients that are currently connected
to the hub. The most important public methods that are provided by the Client class are
• send(message) — transmits a message to the hub. The message can be any non-null
object that implements the Serializable interface.
• getID() — gets the ID number that was assigned to this client by the hub.
• disconnect() — closes the client’s connection to the hub. It is not possible to send
messages after disconnecting. The send() method will throw an IllegalStateException if
an attempt is made to do so.
The Hub and Client classes are meant to define a general framework that can be used as the
basis for a variety of networked games—and, indeed, of other distributed programs. The low
level details of network communication and multithreading are hidden in the private sections
of these classes. Applications that build on these classes can work in terms of higher-level
concepts such as players and messages. The design of these classes was developed though
several iterations, based on experience with several actual applications. I urge you to look
at the source code to see how Hub and Client use threads, sockets, and I/O streams. In the
remainder of this section, I will discuss three applications built on the netgame framework. I
will not discuss these applications in great detail. You can find the complete source code for
all three in the netgame package.

12.5.2 A Simple Chat Room

Our first example is a “chat room,” a network application where users can connect to a server
and can then post messages that will be seen by all current users of the room. It is similar to
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 675

the GUIChat program from Subsection 12.4.2, except that any number of users can participate
in a chat. While this application is not a game, it does show the basic functionality of the
netgame framework.
The chat room application consists of two programs. The first, ChatRoomServer.java, is a
completely trivial program that simply creates a netgame Hub to listen for connection requests
from netgame clients:
public static void main(String[] args) {
try {
new Hub(PORT);
}
catch (IOException e) {
System.out.println("Can’t create listening socket. Shutting down.");
}
}
The port number, PORT, is defined as a constant in the program and is arbitrary, as long as
both the server and the clients use the same port. Note that ChatRoom uses the Hub class
itself, not a subclass.
The second part of the chat room application is the program ChatRoomWindow.java, which
is meant to be run by users who want to participate in the chat room. A potential user must
know the name (or IP address) of the computer where the hub is running. (For testing, it
is possible to run the client program on the same computer as the hub, using localhost as
the name of the computer where the hub is running.) When ChatRoomWindow is run, it uses
a dialog box to ask the user for this information. It then opens a window that will serve as
the user’s interface to the chat room. The window has a large transcript area that displays
messages that users post to the chat room. It also has a text input box where the user can
enter messages. When the user enters a message, that message will be posted to the transcript
of every user who is connected to the hub, so all users see every message sent by every user.
Let’s look at some of the programming.
Any netgame application must define a subclass of the abstract Client class. For the chat
room application, clients are defined by a nested class ChatClient inside ChatRoomWindow.
The program has an instance variable, connection, of type ChatClient, which represents the
program’s connection to the hub. When the user enters a message, that message is sent to the
hub by calling
connection.send(message);
When the hub receives the message, it packages it into an object of type ForwardedMessage,
along with the ID number of the client who sent the message. The hub sends a copy of that
ForwardedMessage to every connected client, including the client who sent the message. On the
client side in each client, when the message is received from the hub, the messageReceived()
method of the ChatClient object in that client is called. ChatClient overrides this method to
program it to add the message to the transcript of the ChatClientWindow. To summarize: Every
message entered by any user is sent to the hub, which just sends out copies of each message
that it receives to every client. Each client will see exactly the same stream of messages from
the hub.
A client is also notified when a player connects to or disconnects from the hub and when the
connection with the hub is lost. ChatClient overrides the methods that are called when these
events happen so that they post appropriate messages to the transcript. Here’s the complete
definition of the client class for the chat room application:
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 676

/**
* A ChatClient connects to the Hub and is used to send messages to
* the Hub and receive messages from the Hub. Messages received from
* the Hub will be of type ForwardedMessage and will contain the
* ID number of the sender and the string that was sent by
* that user.
*/
private class ChatClient extends Client {
/**
* Opens a connection to the chat room server on a specified computer.
*/
ChatClient(String host) throws IOException {
super(host, PORT);
}
/**
* Responds when a message is received from the server. It should be
* a ForwardedMessage representing something that one of the participants
* in the chat room is saying. The message is simply added to the
* transcript, along with the ID number of the sender.
*/
protected void messageReceived(Object message) {
if (message instanceof ForwardedMessage) {
// (no other message types are expected)
ForwardedMessage bm = (ForwardedMessage)message;
addToTranscript("#" + bm.senderID + " SAYS: " + bm.message);
}
}
/**
* Called when the connection to the client is shut down because of some
* error message. (This will happen if the server program is terminated.)
*/
protected void connectionClosedByError(String message) {
addToTranscript(
"Sorry, communication has shut down due to an error:\n "
+ message );
Platform.runLater( () -> {
sendButton.setDisable(true);
messageInput.setEditable(false);
messageInput.setDisable(true);
messageInput.setText("");
});
connected = false;
connection = null;
}
/**
* Posts a message to the transcript when someone joins the chat room.
*/
protected void playerConnected(int newPlayerID) {
addToTranscript(
"Someone new has joined the chat room, with ID number "
+ newPlayerID );
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 677

}
/**
* Posts a message to the transcript when someone leaves the chat room.
*/
protected void playerDisconnected(int departingPlayerID) {
addToTranscript( "The person with ID number "
+ departingPlayerID + " has left the chat room");
}
} // end nested class ChatClient
Except for the constructor, none of the methods in the ChatClient class are called by the
ChatRoomWindow program; they are called from the connection-handling thread in the client
object, which was programmed in Client.java. For the full source code of the chat room
application, see the source code files, which can be found in the package netgame.chat.
Note: A user of my chat room application is identified only by an ID number that is
assigned by the hub when the client connects. Essentially, users are anonymous, which is not
very satisfying. See Exercise 12.7 at the end of this chapter for a way of addressing this issue.

12.5.3 A Networked TicTacToe Game

My second example is a very simple game: the familiar children’s game TicTacToe. In
TicTacToe, two players alternate placing marks on a three-by-three board. One player plays
X’s; the other plays O’s. The object is to get three X’s or three O’s in a row.
At a given time, the state of a TicTacToe game consists of various pieces of information
such as the current contents of the board, whose turn it is, and—when the game is over—who
won or lost. In a typical non-networked version of the game, this state would be represented
by instance variables. The program would consult those instance variables to determine how
to draw the board and how to respond to user actions such as mouse clicks. In the networked
netgame version, however, there are three objects involved: Two objects belonging to a client
class, which provide the interface to the two players of the game, and the hub object that
manages the connections to the clients. These objects are not even on the same computer, so
they certainly can’t use the same state variables! Nevertheless, the game has to have a single,
well-defined state at any time, and both players have to be aware of that state.
My solution for TicTacToe is to store the “official” game state in the hub, and to send a
copy of that state to each player every time the state changes. The players can’t change the
state directly. When a player takes some action, such as placing a piece on the board, that
action is sent as a message to the hub. The hub changes the state to reflect the result of the
action, and it sends the new state to both players. The window used by each player will then
be updated to reflect the new state. In this way, we can be sure that the game always looks
the same to both players. (Instead of sending a complete copy of the state each time the state
changes, I might have sent just the change. But that would require some way to encode the
changes into messages that can be sent over the network. Since the state is so simple, it seemed
easier just to send the entire state as the message in this case.)
Networked TicTacToe is defined in several classes in the package netgame.tictactoe. The
class TicTacToeGameState represents the state of a game. It includes a method
public void applyMessage(int senderID, Object message)
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 678

that modifies the state of the game to reflect the effect of a message received from one of the
players of the game. The message will represent some action taken by the player, such as
clicking on the board.
The basic Hub class knows nothing about TicTacToe. Since the hub for the TicTacToe
game has to keep track of the state of the game, it has to be defined by a subclass of Hub.
The TicTacToeGameHub class is quite simple. It overrides the messageReceived() method
so that it responds to a message from a player by applying that message to the game state
and sending a copy of the new state to both players. It also overrides the playerConnected()
and playerDisconnected() methods to take appropriate actions, since the game can only be
played when there are exactly two connected players. Here is the complete source code:
package netgame.tictactoe;
import java.io.IOException;
import netgame.common.Hub;
/**
* A "Hub" for the network TicTacToe game. There is only one Hub
* for a game, and both network players connect to the same Hub.
* Official information about the state of the game is maintained
* on the Hub. When the state changes, the Hub sends the new
* state to both players, ensuring that both players see the
* same state.
*/
public class TicTacToeGameHub extends Hub {
private TicTacToeGameState state; // Records the state of the game.
/**
* Create a hub, listening on the specified port. Note that this
* method calls setAutoreset(true), which will cause the output stream
* to each client to be reset before sending each message. This is
* essential since the same state object will be transmitted over and
* over, with changes between each transmission.
* @param port the port number on which the hub will listen.
* @throws IOException if a listener cannot be opened on the specified port.
*/
public TicTacToeGameHub(int port) throws IOException {
super(port);
state = new TicTacToeGameState();
setAutoreset(true);
}
/**
* Responds when a message is received from a client. In this case,
* the message is applied to the game state, by calling state.applyMessage().
* Then the possibly changed state is transmitted to all connected players.
*/
protected void messageReceived(int playerID, Object message) {
state.applyMessage(playerID, message);
sendToAll(state);
}
/**
* This method is called when a player connects. If that player
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 679

* is the second player, then the server’s listening socket is

* shut down (because only two players are allowed), the
* first game is started, and the new state -- with the game
* now in progress -- is transmitted to both players.
*/
protected void playerConnected(int playerID) {
if (getPlayerList().length == 2) {
shutdownServerSocket();
state.startFirstGame();
sendToAll(state);
}
}
/**
* This method is called when a player disconnects. This will
* end the game and cause the other player to shut down as
* well. This is accomplished by setting state.playerDisconnected
* to true and sending the new state to the remaining player, if
* there is one, to notify that player that the game is over.
*/
protected void playerDisconnected(int playerID) {
state.playerDisconnected = true;
sendToAll(state);
}
}
A player’s interface to the game is represented by the class TicTacToeWindow. As in the
chat room application, this class defines a nested subclass of Client to represent the client’s
connection to the hub. When the state of the game changes, a message is sent to each client,
and the client’s messageReceived() method is called to process that message. That method,
in turn, calls a newState() method in the TicTacToeWindow class to update the window. That
method is called on the JavaFX application thread using Platform.runLater():
protected void messageReceived(Object message) {
if (message instanceof TicTacToeGameState) {
Platform.runLater( () -> newState( (TicTacToeGameState)message ) );
}
}
To run the TicTacToe netgame, the two players should each run the program Main.java in
the package netgame.tictactoe. This program presents the user with a window where the user
can choose to start a new game or to join an existing game. If the user starts a new game, then a
TicTacToeHub is created to manage the game, and a second window of type TicTacToeWindow
is opened that immediately connects to the hub. The game will start as soon as a second
player connects to the hub. On the other hand, if the user running Main chooses to connect
to an existing game, then no hub is created. A TicTacToeWindow is created, and that window
connects to the hub that was created by the first player. The second player has to know the
name of the computer where the first player’s program is running. As usual, for testing, you
can run everything on one computer and use “localhost” as the computer name.
(This is the first program that we have seen that uses two different windows. Note that
TicTacToeWindow is defined as a subclass of Stage, the JavaFX class that represents windows.
A JavaFX program starts with a “primary stage” that is created by the system and passed
CHAPTER 12. THREADS AND MULTIPROCESSING 680

as a parameter to the start() method. But an application can certainly create additional
windows.)

12.5.4 A Networked Poker Game

And finally, we turn very briefly to the application that inspired the netgame framework: Poker.
In particular, I have implemented a two-player version of the traditional “five card draw” version
of that game. This is a rather complex application, and I do not intend to say much about it
here other than to describe the general design. The full source code can be found in the package
netgame.fivecarddraw. To fully understand it, you will need to be familiar with the game of
five card draw poker.
In general outline, the Poker game is similar to the TicTacToe game. There is a Main class
that is run by both players. The first player starts a new game; the second must join that
existing game. There is a class PokerGameState to represent the state of a game. And there is
a subclass, PokerHub, of Hub to manage the game.
But Poker is a much more complicated game than TicTacToe, and the game state is
correspondingly more complicated. It’s not clear that we want to broadcast a new copy of
the complete game state to the players every time some minor change is made in the state.
Furthermore, it doesn’t really make sense for both players to know the full game state—that
would include the opponent’s hand and full knowledge of the deck from which the cards are
dealt. (Of course, our client programs wouldn’t have to show the full state to the players, but it
would be easy enough for a player to substitute their own client program to enable cheating.) So
in the Poker application, the full game state is known only to the PokerHub. A PokerGameState
object represents a view of the game from the point of view of one player only. When the state
of the game changes, the PokerHub creates two different PokerGameState objects, representing
the state of the game from each player’s point of view, and it sends the appropriate game state
object to each player. You can see the source code for details.
(One of the hard parts in poker is to implement some way to compare two hands, to see
which is higher. In my game, this is handled by the class PokerRank. You might find this class
useful in other poker games.)
Exercises 681

Exercises for Chapter 12

1. Subsection 12.1.3 discusses the need for synchronization in multithreaded programs, and (solution)
it defines a ThreadSafeCounter class with the necessary synchronization. Is this really
important? Can you really get errors by using an unsynchronized counter with multiple
threads? Write a program to find out. Use the following unsynchronized counter class,
which you can include as a nested class in your program:
static class Counter {
int count;
void inc() {
count = count+1;
}
int getCount() {
return count;
}
}
Write a thread class that will repeatedly call the inc() method in an object of type
Counter. The object should be a shared global variable. Create several threads, start
them all, and wait for all the threads to terminate. Print the final value of the counter,
and see whether it is correct.
Let the user enter the number of threads and the number of times that each thread
will increment the counter. You might need a fairly large number of increments to see
an error. And of course there can never be any error if you use just one thread. Your
program can use join() to wait for a thread to terminate (see Subsection 12.1.2).

2. Exercise 3.2 asked you to find the integer in the range 1 to 10000 that has the largest (solution)
number of divisors. Now write a program that uses multiple threads to solve the same
problem, but for the range 1 to 100000. By using threads, your program will take less
time to do the computation when it is run on a multiprocessor computer. At the end of
the program, output the elapsed time, the integer that has the largest number of divisors,
and the number of divisors that it has. The program can be modeled on the sample
prime-counting program ThreadTest2.java from Subsection 12.1.3. For this exercise, you
should simply divide up the problem into parts and create one thread to do each part.

3. In the previous exercise, you divided up a large task into a small number of large pieces (solution)
and created a thread to execute each task. Because of the nature of the problem, this
meant that some threads had much more work to do than others—it is much easier to
find the number of divisors of a small number than it is of a big number. As discussed in
Subsection 12.3.1, a better approach is to break up the problem into a fairly large number
of smaller problems. Subsection 12.3.2 shows how to use a thread pool to execute the
tasks: Each thread in the pool runs in a loop in which it repeatedly takes a task from a
queue and carries out that task. Implement a thread pool strategy for solving the same
maximum-number-of-divisors problem as in the previous exercise.
To make things even more interesting, you should try a new technique for combining
the results from all the tasks: Use two queues in your program. Use a queue of tasks, as
usual, to hold the tasks that will be executed by the thread pool (Subsection 12.3.2). But
also use a queue of results produced by the threads. When a task completes, the result
Exercises 682

from that task should be placed into the result queue. The main program can read results
from the second queue as they become available, and combine all the results to get the
final answer. The result queue will have to be a blocking queue (Subsection 12.3.3), since
the main program will have to wait for results to become available. Note that the main
program knows the exact number of results that it expects to read from the queue, so it
can do so in a for loop; when the for loop completes, the main program knows that all
the tasks have been executed.

4. In previous exercise, you used a thread pool and a queue of tasks to find the integer in the (solution)
range 1 to 100000 that has the largest number of divisors. Subsection 12.3.4 discusses a
higher-level approach that uses an ExecutorService. Write one more program to solve the
problem, this time using an ExecutorService and Futures. The program should still break
up the computation into a fairly large number of fairly small tasks, and it should still print
out the largest number of divisors and the integer that has that number of divisors.
(There is yet another way to solve the same problem: the stream API from Section 10.6.
My on-line solution of this exercise also discusses how to use streams to solve the problem.)

5. In Exercise 11.3, you wrote a network server program that can send text files from a (solution)
specified directory to clients. That program used a single thread, which handled all the
communication with each client. Modify the program to turn it into a multithreaded
server. Use a thread pool of connection-handling threads and use an ArrayBlockingQueue
to get connected sockets from the main() routine to the threads. The sample program
DateServerWithThreads.java from Subsection 12.4.3 is an example of a multithreaded
server that works in this way. Your server program will work with the same client program
as the original server. You wrote the client program as the solution to Exercise 11.4.

6. It is possible to get an estimate of the mathematical constant π by using a random process. (solution)
The idea is based on the fact that the area of a circle of radius 1 is equal to π, and the
area of a quarter of that circle is π/4. Here is a picture of a quarter of a circle of radius 1,
inside a 1-by-1 square:

The area of the whole square is one, while the area of the part inside the circle is π/4. If
we choose a point in the square at random, the probability that it is inside the circle is
π/4. If we choose N points in the square at random, and if C of them are inside the circle,
we expect the fraction C/N of points that fall inside the circle to be about π/4. That is,
we expect 4*C/N to be close to π. If N is large, we can expect 4*C/N to be a good estimate
for π, and as N gets larger and larger, the estimate is likely to improve.
We can pick a random point in the square by choosing numbers x and y in the range
0 to 1 (using Math.random()). Since the equation of the circle is x*x+y*y=1, the point
lies inside the circle if x*x+y*y is less than 1. One trial consists of picking x and y and
testing whether x*x+y*y is less than 1. To get an estimate for π, you have to do many
trials, count the trials, and count the number of trials in which x*x+y*y is less than 1,
Exercises 683

For this exercise, you should write a GUI program that does this computation and
displays the result. The computation should be done in a separate thread, and the results
should be displayed periodically. The program can use Labels to the display the results.
It should set the text on the labels after running each batch of, say, one million trials.
(Setting the text after each trial doesn’t make sense, since millions of trials can be done in
one second, and trying to change the display millions of times per second would be silly.
Your program should have a “Run”/”Pause” button that controls the computation.
When the program starts, clicking “Run” will start the computation and change the text
on the button to “Pause”. Clicking “Pause” will cause the computation to pause. The
thread that does the computation should be started at the beginning of the program, but
should immediately go into the paused state until the “Run” button is pressed. Use the
wait() method in the thread to make it wait until “Run” is pressed. Use the notify()
method when the “Run” button is pressed to wake up the thread. Use a boolean signal
variable, running, to control whether the computation thread is paused. (The wait()
and notify() methods are covered in Subsection 12.3.5.)
Here is a picture of the program after it has run many trials:

You might want to start with a version of the program with no control button. In that
version, the computation thread can run continually from the time it is started. Once that
is working, you can add the button and the control feature.
To get you started, here is the code from the thread in my solution that runs one batch
of trials and updates the display labels:
for (int i = 0; i < BATCH SIZE; i++) {
double x = Math.random();
double y = Math.random();
trialCount++;
if (x*x + y*y < 1)
inCircleCount++;
}
double estimateForPi = 4 * ((double)inCircleCount / trialCount);
Platform.runLater( () -> {
countLabel.setText( " Number of Trials: " + trialCount);
piEstimateLabel.setText( " Current Estimate: " + estimateForPi);
} );
The variables trialCount and inCircleCount are of type long in order to allow the
number of trials to be more than the two billion or so that would be possible with a
variable of type int.
(I was going to ask you to use multiple computation threads, one for each available
processor, but I ran into an issue when using the Math.random() method in several threads.
This method requires synchronization, which causes serious performance problems when
Exercises 684

several threads are using it to generate large amounts of random numbers. A solution
to this problem is to have each thread use its own object of type java.util.Random to
generate its random numbers (see Subsection 5.3.1). My on-line solution to this exercise
discusses this problem further.)

7. The chat room example from Subsection 12.5.2 can be improved in several ways. First, it (solution)
would be nice if the participants in the chat room could be identified by name instead of
by number. Second, it would be nice if one person could send a private message to another
person that would be seen just by that person rather than by everyone. Make these two
changes. You can start with a copy of the package netgame.chat. You will also need the
package netgame.common, which defines the netgame framework.
To make the first change, you will have to implement a subclass of Hub that can keep
track of client names as well as numbers. To get the name of a client to the hub, you
can override the extraHandshake() method both in the Hub subclass and in the Client
subclass. The extraHandshake() method is called as part of setting up the connection
between the client and the hub. It is called after the client has been assigned an ID
number but before the connection is considered to be fully established. It should throw an
IOException if some error occurs during the setup process. Note that any messages that
are sent by the hub as part of the handshake must be read by the client and vice versa.
The extraHandshake() method in the Client is defined as:
protected void extraHandshake(ObjectInputStream in, ObjectOutputStream out)
throws IOException
while in the Hub, there is an extra parameter that tells the ID number of the client whose
connection is being set up:
protected void extraHandshake(in playerID, ObjectInputStream in,
ObjectOutputStream out) throws IOException
In the ChatRoomWindow class, the main() routine asks the user for the name of the
computer where the server is running. You can add some code there to ask the user their
name. (Just imitate the code that asks for the host name.) You will have to decide what
to do if two users want to use the same name.
For the second improvement, personal messages, I suggest writing a new PrivateMessage
class. A PrivateMessage object would include both the string that represents the message
and the ID numbers of the player to whom the message is being sent and of the player who
sent the message. The hub will have to be programmed to know how to deal with such
messages. A PrivateMessage should only be sent by the hub to the client who is listed as
the recipient of the message. You need to decide how the user will input a private message
and how the user will select the recipient of the message. Don’t forget that PrivateMessage
needs to be declared to implement Serializable.
If you attempt this exercise, you are likely to find it quite challenging.
Quiz 685

Quiz on Chapter 12
(answers)

1. Write a complete subclass of Thread to represent a thread that writes out the numbers
from 1 to 10. Then write some code that creates and starts a thread belonging to that
class.

2. Suppose that thrd is an object of type Thread. Explain the difference between calling
thrd.start() and calling thrd.run().

3. What is a race condition?

4. How does synchronization prevent race conditions, and what does it mean to say that
synchronization only provides mutual exclusion?

5. Suppose that a program uses a single thread that takes 4 seconds to run. Now suppose
that the program creates two threads and divides the same work between the two threads.
What can be said about the expected execution time of the program that uses two threads?

6. What is an ArrayBlockingQueue and how does it solve the producer/consumer problem?

7. What is a thread pool ?

8. Network server programs are often multithreaded. Explain what this means and why it is
true.

9. Why does a multithreaded network server program often use many times more threads
than the number of available processors?

10. Consider the ThreadSafeCounter example from Subsection 12.1.3:

public class ThreadSafeCounter {
private int count = 0; // The value of the counter.
synchronized public void increment() {
count = count + 1;
}
synchronized public int getValue() {
return count;
}
}
The increment() method is synchronized so that the caller of the method can complete
the three steps of the operation “Get value of count,” “Add 1 to value,” “Store new value in
count” without being interrupted by another thread. But getValue() consists of a single,
simple step. Why is getValue() synchronized? (This is a deep and tricky question.)
Chapter 13

GUI Programming Continued

It’s possible to program a wide variety of GUI applications using only the techniques
covered in Chapter 6. In many cases, the basic events, components, layouts, and graphics
routines covered in that chapter suffice. But the JavaFX graphical user interface library is
far richer than what we have seen so far, and it can be used to build highly sophisticated
applications. This chapter continues the study of JavaFX, but still does not cover it fully.
Some advanced topics, such as support for video and three-dimensional graphics, are not even
mentioned. Full coverage of JavaFX would require at least another complete book. However,
this chapter should deepen your understanding of JavaFX and GUI programming.

13.1 Properties and Bindings

We have seen that GUI programming makes heavy use of events, including low-level
mouse and keyboard events and higher-level events such as those that are generated when the
user makes a menu selection or adjusts the value of a slider. In Subsection 6.4.5, we saw that
events from a slider actually come from an “observable property” of the slider. That is, in order
to respond to changes in the value of a Slider, sldr, you need to register a listener with the
valueProperty of the slider:
sldr.valueProperty().addListener( . . . );
When the value of the slider changes, its valueProperty emits an event that allows your
event-handling code to respond to the change.
In fact, the value property of a slider is an object of type DoubleProperty. A DoubleProperty
has several aspects. First of all, it wraps a value of type double, and it has methods get() and
set() for retrieving and changing that value. Second, it is an “observable value,” which means
that it emits events when the double value is changed. Third, it is a “bindable property,”
an aspect that is possibly unique to JavaFX. A bindable property can be bound to another
property of the same type. Properties that are bound in this way are forced to have the same
value. Bindable properties are used throughout the JavaFX API. This section explores how
and why they are used.
The classes discussed in this section are defined in package javafx.beans and its
subpackages. However, you will rarely need to import classes from those packages into your
JavaFX programs, since you will mostly be using objects that already exist.

687
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 688

13.1.1 Observable Values

Many instance variables in JavaFX objects are observable values, meaning that they emit
events. Many of the observables are actually observable properties in the sense that they
are bindable. The width and height of a canvas are observables of type DoubleProperty. The
text in a text field or label is an observable of type StringProperty. The list of children of a
Pane is an observable of type ObservableList<Node>. A checkbox has observable property of
type BooleanProperty that says whether the box is currently checked. The color of the text in
a label is an observable of type ObjectProperty<Paint>.
An observable value emits two kinds of events. It emits a change event whenever the
value changes. A handler for the event must implement the parameterized functional interface
ChangeListener<T>, which defines a method changed(target,oldValue,newValue). The first
parameter of change() is the observable whose value has changed; the second parameter is
the previous value of that observable; and the third parameter is the new value. Suppose, for
example, we want the text on a label to display the current value of a slider. When the slider
value changes, we need to change the text on the label to match. One way to do that is to
register a change listener with the property that records the value of the slider:
slider.valueProperty().addListener(
(t,oldVal,newVal) -> label.setText("Slider Value: " + newVal) );
However, we will see below that there is a better way to accomplish the same thing.
The second type of event emitted by an observable value is an invalidation event, which is
emitted when the current value becomes invalid for some reason. An invalid value will never be
seen by another object; any attempt to read the value will cause the value to be recomputed and
become valid again. An invalidation event is a notice that the value needs to be recomputed,
but the value won’t actually be recomputed until it is needed. This is something called “lazy
evaluation” of the value: The work of recomputing the value is not done until the new value
is actually needed for something. Lazy evaluation can be more efficient than recomputing the
value every time it is invalidated. Let’s say a dozen things happen that invalidate the value
before the value is needed—with lazy evaluation, the value will only be recomputed once, when
it is needed, rather than a dozen times. More important for us, the observable would only
emit one invalidation event, not a dozen. This avoids multiple redundant calls to invalidation
listeners. In most cases in JavaFX, invalidation listeners should be used in preference to change
listeners.
An InvalidationListener defines the single method invalidated(obv), where the parameter
is the observable that has been invalidated. Consider this code, where sayHello is a CheckBox:
sayHello.selectedProperty().addListener( e -> {
if (sayHello.isSelected())
label.settext("Hello");
else
label.setText("Goodbye");
});
In this example, an InvalidationListener is registered as a listener. You could accomplish
almost the same thing using sayHello.setOnAction(). However, an ActionListener would
be called only when the user changes the selected state of the checkbox, while the
invalidation listener is called whenever the value changes, including changes made by calling
sayHello.setSelected(). Note that ChangeListeners are also registered using a method named
addListener(). The compiler can tell the difference, even when the listener is given by a
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 689

lambda expression, because a lambda expression for a ChangeListener has three parameters,
while a lambda expression for an InvalidationListener has only one parameter.
You might have asked yourself what would happen if the selectedProperty of sayHello
was merely invalidated rather than changed. Would sayHello.isSelected() return the
current invalid value or the new value? In fact, calling sayHello.isSelected() would force
the computation of the new value, and it would return the new value. An invalid value is never
seen because any attempt to read it forces the new value to be computed.
The general pattern in JavaFX is that an observable property of an object is accessed by
calling an instance method whose name ends with “Property”. For example, the value property
of a slider is given by slider.valueProperty(), and the text property of a label is given by
label.textProperty(). Some JavaFX objects have observable values that are not properties.
An observable property is bindable, as we will see in the next section. A plain observable value
is not bindable, but it does emit change events and invalidation events, and you can register
listeners if you want to respond to changes in the value.

13.1.2 Bindable Properties

Many JavaFX observable properties can be bound to another property of the same type. (The
exceptions are “read-only properties”; you can’t bind a read-only property to another property,
although you can bind a property to a read-only property.) As a basic example, suppose that
we want the text in a label to always be the same as the text in a text field. That can be
implemented simply by binding the textProperty of the label to the textProperty of the text
field:
Label message = new Label("Never Seen");
TextField input = new TextField("Type Here!");
message.textProperty().bind( input.textProperty() );
The bind() method forces the value of message.textProperty() to be the same as the value
of input.textProperty(). As soon as bind() is executed, the text from the text field is copied
into the label, so that the initial text in the label—”Never Seen” in the example—is never seen
by the user. As the program runs, any change to the text in the text field will automatically be
applied to the label as well, whether that change is due to the user typing in the text field or
due to input.setText() being called. Bindings are implemented internally using events and
listeners, but the point is that you don’t have to set up the listeners and respond to the events
yourself—everything is set up by the bind() method.
When bind() is used to bind a property to another property, it becomes illegal to change
the value of the bound property directly. In the example, any call to message.setText() would
throw an exception. And of course, a property can only be bound to one other property at a
time. The unbind() method, which takes no parameter, can be used to remove a binding:
message.textProperty().unbind();
The sample program BoundPropertyDemo.java contains several examples of bound prop-
erties. In particular, the text property of a large label is bound to the text property of a text
field, as in the preceding example, so that typing in the text field also changes the text on the
label. Here is a screenshot:
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 690

The label at the lower right of this window provides another example of binding. The label
displays the value of the slider, and the text on the label will change as the user adjusts the
slider value. As noted at the beginning of this section, one way to implement this interaction
would be to register a listener with the slider’s valueProperty. Here, however, it’s done with
a binding. Now, the textProprety of the label is a StringProperty while the valueProperty of
the slider is a DoubleProperty, so it’s not possible to directly bind the two values. A binding only
works for properties of the same type. However, a DoubleProperty has a method, asString()
that converts the property into a string property. That is, if slider is a Slider, then
slider.valueProperty().asString()
is a string property representing the double value of the slider as a string. The text property
of a label can be bound to that string property. In fact, asString() can take a format string
(like the ones used with System.out.printf) as an optional parameter that is used to format
the double value. In the program, the label is sliderVal, and its text property is bound by
saying:
sliderVal.textProperty().bind(
slider.valueProperty().asString("Slider Value: %1.2f") );
(Actually, slider.valueProperty().asString is of type StringBinding rather than StringProp-
erty, but the distinction is not important here, and I will ignore it.)
Property objects have many methods for converting properties of one type into properties of
another type, as well as other operations. For another example, a DoubleProperty has a method
lessThan(number) that returns a boolean property whose value is true when the value of
the DoubleProperty is less than number. For example, a Button, btn has a BooleanProperty,
btn.disableProperty() that tells whether the button is disabled. If we want the button to
be disabled when the value on a slider is less than 20, we can do that by binding the button’s
disable property as follows:
btn.disableProperty().bind( slider.valueProperty().lessThan(20) );
There are similar methods greaterThan(), lessThanOrEqual(), isNotEqualTo(), and so on.
There are also methods for doing math. For example,
slider.valueProperty().multiply(2)
is a double property whose value is 2 times the value of the slider.
∗ ∗ ∗
The class When, from package javafx.beans.binding, can be used to apply something like
the ternary operator, “?:” (see Subsection 2.5.5), to boolean properties, with a rather strange
syntax. If boolProp is a boolean property, and if trueVal and falseVal are any values that
both have the same type, then
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 691

new When(boolProp).then(trueVal).otherwise(falseVal)
represents a property whose type is the same as the type of trueVal and falseVal. The
value of this property is trueVal if boolProp has the value true, and the value is falseVal if
boolProp has the value false.
In an earlier example, we used a listener to set the text in a label to “Hello” or “Goodbye”
depending on whether or not a checkbox, sayHello, is checked. Here’s how to do the same
thing with a property binding:
label.textProperty().bind(
new When(sayHello.selectedProperty()).then("Hello").otherwise("Goodbye")
);
The parameter in new When(sayHello.selectedProperty()) is a boolean property. Since
“Hello” and “Goodbye” are values of type String, the property that results from the complete
expression is a string property, which matches the type of label.textProperty().
The same sort of thing is done in BoundPropertyDemo.java to control the background color
of the big label. The background is controlled by a checkbox using binding and an object of
type When. See the well-commented source code for details.
∗ ∗ ∗
A straightforward, but useful, application of property binding can be found in the sample
program CanvasResizeDemo.java. The program shows fifty small red disks that bounce around
in a window. The disks are drawn to a Canvas that fills the window, and the disks bounce
off the edges of the canvas. In previous examples that used a canvas, the window was made
non-resizable because canvasses do not automatically change size. However, it is possible for
a program to change the size of a canvas by setting the canvas’s height and width properties.
That can be done by calling canvas.setWidth(w) and canvas.setHeight(h). However, the
height and width are bindable properties of type DoubleProperty, so another way to set the
canvas size is to bind these properties to an appropriate source.
In the program, the canvas is contained in a Pane that serves as the root of the scene graph
and fills the window. When the size of the window is changed by the user, the size of the Pane
is automatically set to match. If we want the canvas size to track the size of the pane, it is only
necessary to bind the width property of the canvas to the width property of the pane, and to
bind the height property of the canvas to the height property of the pane. That is done in the
program with two lines of code:
canvas.widthProperty().bind( root.widthProperty() );
canvas.heightProperty().bind( root.heightProperty() );
If you run the program and increase the size of the window, you can see that the canvas has
also increased in size, because the bouncing red disks will spread out to fill the larger space.
Similarly, if you decrease the size, the disks will be trapped in the smaller space.
In this program, the canvas is being continually redrawn, so no special action needs to be
taken to redraw it when the canvas size is changed. In some programs, it might be necessary
to redraw the contents of the canvas when its size changes. One way to make that happen is
to add listeners to the width and height properties of the canvas. The listeners can redraw the
canvas in response to changes in the width or height.

13.1.3 Bidirectional Bindings

Bindings created using the bind() method are one-way bindings: They only work in one
direction. One-way bindings are not always appropriate. Suppose for example that cb1 and
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 692

cb2 are of type CheckBox, and that we would like the two checkboxes to always be in the same
state. That can’t be done with a one-way binding. If we do
cb2.selectedProperty().bind( cb1.selectedProperty() );
that will make cb2 match its state to cb1. But changing the selected state of cb2 will not
change the state of cb1; instead, it will cause an exception, since it is illegal to try to change
the value of a property that has been bound using bind(). In fact, if the user just clicks cb2,
there will be an exception as the checkbox tries to change state.
The solution that we need here is something called a bidirectional binding . When two
properties are bound bidirectionally, then the value of either property can be changed, and the
other property will automatically be changed to the same value. Bidirectional bindings are set
up with the method bindBidirectional(). For our two checkboxes, we can say:
cb2.selectedProperty().bindBidirectional( cb1.selectedProperty() );
Now, the user can click either checkbox, and the other will also change state. This would
probably not be useful for two checkboxes, but it can be useful to synchronize the state of a
CheckBox in a window with the state of a CheckMenuItem in a menu. The user would have a
choice of using either interface element. Similar redundant interface elements are common in
menus and toolbars.
The sample program BoundPropertyDemo.java does something similar with RadioButtons
and RadioMenuItems. The color of the label in the program can be controlled using either a
“Color” menu or a set of radio buttons. The state of each RadioButton is bidirectionally bound
to the state of a corresponding RadioMenuItem. It might be worth looking at how it’s done in
detail:
Menu colorMenu = new Menu("Color");
Color[] colors = { Color.BLACK, Color.RED, Color.GREEN, Color.BLUE };
String[] colorNames = { "Black", "Red", "Green", "Blue" };
ToggleGroup colorGroup = new ToggleGroup();
for (int i = 0; i < colors.length; i++) {
// Make a menu item and corresponding radio button.
RadioButton button = new RadioButton(colorNames[i]);
RadioMenuItem menuItem = new RadioMenuItem(colorNames[i]);
button.selectedProperty().bindBidirectional( menuItem.selectedProperty() );
menuItem.setToggleGroup(colorGroup);
// Note how UserData is used to store the color object
// associated with the menu item, for later use.
menuItem.setUserData(colors[i]);
right.getChildren().add(button); // add button to a container
colorMenu.getItems().add(menuItem); // add menu item to a menu
if (i == 0)
menuItem.setSelected(true);
}
colorGroup.selectedToggleProperty().addListener( e -> {
// Listen for changes to the selectedToggleProperty
// of the ToggleGroup, so that the color of the
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 693

// label can be set to match the selected menu item.

Toggle t = colorGroup.getSelectedToggle();
if (t != null) {
// t is the selected RadioMenuItem. Get the color
// from its UserData, and use it to set the color
// of the text. The value of the selectedToggleProperty()
// can momentarily be null as one toggle is unselected
// and another is selected.
Color c = (Color)t.getUserData();
message.setTextFill(c);
}
});
Note that the menu items are added to a ToggleGroup (see Subsection 6.4.3), but the buttons are
not. Suppose that the user clicks on a currently unselected radio button. The state of the button
changes to “selected.” Because of the bidirectional binding, the state of the corresponding
radio menu item must also be changed to “selected.” Before that can happen, however, the
ToggleGroup will change the state of the currently selected radio menu item to “unselected,”
which will in turn cause the state of its associated radio button to change to “unselected”. In
the end, the states of two radio buttons and two radio menu items are changed.
(Although it is not relevant to property binding, you should also check out how this code
uses the userData property of the radio buttons. Every scene graph node has user data of type
Object, which is not used by the system. The userData property of a node can be a convenient
place for a programmer to store data of any type that the programmer wants to associate with
the node. In this case, the user data for a radio menu item is a value of type Color, and that
color value is used when the menu item is selected.)
∗ ∗ ∗
I hope that the examples in this section have convinced you that property binding can be
an effective way to program interactions between objects in a JavaFX program. This style of
programming might look strange at first, but it can be easier and clearer than working directly
with events and listeners.

13.2 Fancier Graphics

We have seen many examples of using a GraphicsContext to draw on a Canvas.
But GraphicsContext has many features besides those that have already been covered. This
section continues our study of canvas graphics. We begin by looking at two methods that can
be useful for managing the state of a graphics context.
A GraphicsContext, g, has various properties, such as fill color and line width, that affect
any drawing done with g. It’s important to remember that a canvas has only one graphics
context, and any changes made to a property of the graphics context will carry over to all
future drawing, until the value of the property is changed again. In particular, changes are
not restricted to the subroutine in which they are made. It often happens that a programmer
wants to change the value of some properties temporarily and then restore them to their previous
values. The graphics API includes methods g.save() and g.restore() that makes this easy.
When g.save() is executed, the current state of the graphics context, g, is stored. The state
includes almost all of the properties that affect drawing. In fact, the graphics context keeps a
stack of states (see Subsection 9.3.1), and g.save() pushes the current state onto that stack.
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 694

A call to g.restore() pops the top state from the stack, and sets the values of all properties
to match their saved values.
Because they use a stack, it is possible to call save() several times before calling restore().
Every call to save() should be matched, eventually, by a call to restore(). (However,
unmatched calls to restore() will not produce an error; the extra calls are simply ignored.)
An easy way to make sure that changes made to a graphics context in one subroutine do not
carry over to future subroutine calls is to call save() at the beginning of the subroutine and
restore() at the end.
Save and restore are particularly useful when working with transforms, which are covered
later in this section.

13.2.1 Fancier Strokes

We have seen how to stroke lines and curves and even the outlines of text characters, and how
to set the color and line width that are used for the stroke. Strokes have other properties that
affect their appearance. It is possible to draw strokes that are dotted or dashed instead of solid.
And you can control what happens at the endpoints of a stroke, and at the “join” between
two lines or curves that meet at a point, such as two sides of a rectangle meeting at one of
the corners of the rectangle. A graphics context has properties to control all of these features.
You need to be working with fairly wide lines for the endpoint and join properties to have any
visual effect. This illustration shows the available options:
StrokeLineJoin
BUTT
Values
ROUND

SQUARE

StrokeLineCap MITER Dash Patterns

Values BEVEL ROUND

The endpoints of the three line segments on the left show the three possible styles of line
“cap.” The stroke is shown in black, and the geometric line is indicated by a yellow line down
the center of the stroke. In the BUTT cap style, the stroke is simply cut off at the end of the
geometric line. For the ROUND cap, a disk is added at the endpoint, with a diameter equal to
the line width. For the SQUARE cap, a square is added instead of a disk. The round or square
style is what you would get if you draw a stroke with a physical pen that has a round or square
tip.
In a graphics context, g, the cap style for strokes is set by calling g.setLineCap(cap). The
parameter is of type StrokeLineCap, an enumerated type in package javafx.scene.shape whose
possible values are StrokeLineCap.BUTT, StrokeLineCap.ROUND, and StrokeLineCap.SQUARE.
The default style is SQUARE.
Line joins are similar. The appearance of a vertex where two lines or curves meet is set by
calling g.setLineJoin(join). The parameter is of type StrokeLineJoin, and the possible values
are StrokeLineJoin.MITER, StrokeLineJoin.ROUND, and StrokeLineJoin.BEVEL. The three
styles are shown in the middle section of the above illustration. The default join style is MITER.
In the miter style, the two line segments are continued to make a sharp point. In the other two
styles, the corner is cut off; for bevel, it is cut off by a line segment, and for round it is cut off
by an arc of a circle. I have found that round joins can look better if you draw a wide curve as
a sequence of short line segments.
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 695

Dotted and dashed strokes can be made by setting a dash pattern, using the method
g.setLineDashes(). The parameters to this method specify the lengths of the dashes and
of the gaps between them:
g.setLineDashes( dash1, gap1, dash2, gap2, . . . );
The parameters are of type double (and could also be given as a single array of type double[ ]).
If a stroke is drawn when this dash pattern is in effect, the curve consists of a line or curve of
length dash1, followed by a gap of length gap1, followed by a line or curve of length dash2,
and so on. The pattern of dashes and gaps will be repeated as often as necessary to cover the
full length of the stroke.
For example, g.setLineDashes(5,5) draws a stroke as series of segments of length 5
followed by gaps of length 5, while g.setLineDashes(10,2) produces a series of long segments
separated by short gaps. A pattern of dashes and dots could be specified, for example, as
g.setLineDashes(10,2,2,2). The default dash pattern, of course, is a solid line with no dots
or dashes.
The sample program StrokeDemo.java lets you draw lines and rectangles with a variety of
line styles. See the source code for details.

13.2.2 Fancier Paints

So now we can draw fancier strokes. But all of our individual drawing operations have been
restricted to drawing with a single color. We can get around that restriction by using Paint. An
object of type Paint is used to assign color to each pixel that is “hit” by a drawing operation.
Paint is an abstract class in package javafx.scene.paint. The Color class is just one concrete
subclass of Paint. Any object of type Paint can be used as the parameter to g.setFill() and
g.setStroke(). When a Color is used as the paint, it applies the same color to every pixel
that is hit. However, there are other types of paint where the color that is applied to a pixel
depends on the coordinates of that pixel. JavaFX has several classes that define paint with
this property: ImagePattern and two kinds of gradient paint. In an image pattern, the pixel
colors come from an image, which is repeated, if necessary, like a wallpaper pattern to cover
the entire xy-plane. In a gradient, the color that is applied to pixels changes gradually from
one color to another color as you move from point to point. Java has two gradient paint classes,
LinearGradient and RadialGradient.
It will be helpful to look at some examples. The following illustration shows a polygon
filled with two different paints. The polygon on the left uses a LinearGradient while the one on
the right uses an ImagePattern. Note that in this picture, the paint is used only for filling the
polygon. The outline of the polygon is drawn in a plain black color. However, Paint objects can
be used for stroking shapes as well as for filling them. These pictures were made by the sample
program PaintDemo.java. In that program, you can select among several different paints, and
you can control certain properties of the paints.
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 696

To create an ImagePattern, you first need an image. The Image class was introduced in
Subsection 6.2.3. As we saw then, an Image object can easily be constructed from an image
resource file, which is considered to be part of the program that uses it. Given an Image, pict,
an ImagePattern can be created with a constructor of the form
patternPaint = new ImagePattern( pict, x, y, width, height, proportional );
The parameters x, y, width, and height are double values that specify the position and size of
the image on the canvas. One copy of the image is placed with its top left corner at (x,y), and
is scaled to the given width and height. The image is then repeated horizontally and vertically
to fill the canvas (but you only see the part of the pattern that is within the shape to which
the paint is applied).
The last parameter to the constructor is a boolean that specifies how x, y, width and
height are interpreted. If proportional is false, the width and height are measured in the
usual coordinate system on the canvas. If proportional is true, then width and height are
measured in multiples of the size of the shape to which the paint is applied, and (x,y) is (0,0)
at the upper left corner of the shape (more precisely, of the rectangle that just contains the
shape). For example,
patternPaint = new ImagePattern( pict, 0, 0, 1, 1, true );
creates an image paint where one copy of the image just covers the shape. If the paint is applied
to several shapes of different sizes, the paint will be scaled differently for each shape. If you
want the shape to contain four copies of the shape horizontally and two copies vertically, you
would use
patternPaint = new ImagePattern( pict, 0, 0, 0.25, 0.5, true );

∗ ∗ ∗
A linear gradient is defined by specifying a line segment and the color of several points along
the line segment. The points and their associated colors are called color stops. Colors are
interpolated between the color stops to give a color to each point on the line. The colors are
then extended perpendicularly to the line segment to give an infinite colored strip. You also
have to specify what happens outside that strip of color. In JavaFX, this is done by specifying
a “cycle method.” The possibilities are CycleMethod.REPEAT, meaning that the color strip
is repeated to cover the entire plane; CycleMethod.MIRROR, meaning that the color strip is
repeated, but every other copy is reversed so that the colors match up at the boundaries; and
CycleMethod.NO REPEAT, meaning that the color along each boundary is extended infinitely.
Here are pictures of three red/blue/yellow gradients using the same original line segment and
color stops. The picture on the left uses the MIRROR cycle method, the one in the middle uses
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 697

REPEAT, and the one on the right uses NO REPEAT. The basic line segments for the gradients are
shown, and the positions of the three color stops on that line segment are marked:

The constructor for a linear gradient paint takes the form

linearGradient = new LinearGradient( x1,y1, x2,y2, proportional, cycleMethod,
stop1, stop2, . . . );
The first four parameters are double values that specify the endpoints of the line segment:
(x1,y1) and (x2,y2). The fifth parameter, proportional, is a boolean; if false, the endpoints
are specified in the usual coordinate system of the canvas; if true, they are specified in a
coordinate system in which (0,0) is at the upper left corner of the shape to which the paint is
applied, and (1,1) is at the lower right corner. The sixth parameter, cycleMethod, is one of
the constants CycleMethod.REPEAT, CycleMethod.MIRROR, or CycleMethod.NO REPEAT. The
remaining parameters are the color stops for the gradient. A color stop is given as an object
of type Stop. The constructor takes a double and a Color. The first parameter specifies the
position of the stop along the basic line segment as a fraction of the distance from the first
endpoint to the second endpoint. In general, the first color stop should have position 0, and
the last one should have position 1, and the position value for each color stop should be greater
than the position of the preceding color stop. As an example, the gradient paint for the first
gradient in the above illustration was constructed as
grad = new LinearGradient( 120,120, 200,180, false, CycleMethod.MIRROR,
new Stop( 0, Color.color(1, 0.3, 0.3) ),
new Stop( 0.5, Color.color(0.3, 0.3, 1) ),
new Stop( 1, Color.color(1, 1, 0.3) ) );

∗ ∗ ∗
For a linear gradient, the color is constant along certain lines. For a radial gradient, color
is constant along certain circles. For a basic radial gradient, color stops are specified along the
radius of a circle, and color is constant along circles that have the same center as that circle.
Colors outside the circle are determined based on the cycle method. Things are a little more
complicated than that because a radial gradient can have a “focal point” inside the circle. For
a basic radial gradient, the focal point is the center of the circle but the focal point can be any
point inside the circle. The color of the gradient at the focal point is given by the color stop at
position 0. The color along the circle is given by the color stop at position 1. It’s easiest to see
this in an illustration. The gradients in this picture are the same, except for the focal point.
In the top row, the circle and the focal point are marked. Note that in all cases, the gradient
is red at the focal point and yellow along the circle:
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 698

The constructor for a radial gradient has a lot of parameters. . .

radialGradient = new RadialGradient( focalAngle,focalDistance,
centerX,centerY,radius,
proportional, cycleMethod,
stop1, stop2, . . . );
The first two parameters specify the location of the focus. The focal distance is the distance
of the focus from the center of the circle, given as a fraction of the radius; it must be strictly
less than 1. The focal angle is the direction in which the focus is moved away from the center.
For a basic radial gradient, the focal distance is 0, and the focal angle is irrelevant. The next
three parameters specify the center and radius of the circle, and the remaining parameters are
similar to the same parameters for linear gradients.

13.2.3 Transforms
In the standard drawing coordinates on a canvas, the upper left corner of the component has
coordinates (0,0), and the coordinates (x,y) refer to the point that is x pixels over from the
left edge of the component and y pixels down from the top. However, you are not restricted
to using these coordinates. In fact, you can set up a graphics context to use other coordinate
systems, with different units of length and different coordinate axes. You can use this capability
to select the coordinate system that is most appropriate for the things that you want to draw.
For example, if you are drawing architectural blueprints, you might use coordinates in which
one unit represents an actual distance of one foot.
Changes to a coordinate system are referred to as transforms (or “transformations”).
There are three basic types of transform. A translate transform changes the position of the
origin, (0,0). A scale transform changes the scale, that is, the unit of distance. And a
rotation transform applies a rotation about some point. Less common is a shear transform,
which “tilts” an image. This illustration shows an original picture and several transformed
copies of the picture:
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 699

Hello
Hello
Horizontal Shear;
Original Image shear amount = 1

Hello
Uniform Scaling;
olleH scale factor = 1/2
llo
He
Horizontal Scaling,
scale factor = -1 Rotated 30 degrees
counterclockwise

Notice that everything in the image, including the text, is affected by a transform.
You can make more complex transforms by combining transforms of the three basic types.
For example, you can apply a rotation, followed by a scale, followed by a translation, followed
by another rotation. When you apply several transforms in a row, their effects are cumulative.
It takes a fair amount of study to fully understand complex transforms, and transforms are a
major topic in a course in computer graphics. I will limit myself here to discussing a few simple
cases, just to give you an idea of what transforms can do.
The current overall transform is a property of the graphics context. It is part of the state
that is saved by the save() method and restored by the restore() method. It is especially
important to use save() and restore() when working with transforms, to prevent the effect
of a transform from carrying over from one subroutine call to another.
You should also remember that, like other properties of a graphics context, a transform
affects things that are drawn after the transform is applied to the graphics context. It does
not transform the picture that has already been drawn.
Suppose that g is of type GraphicsContext. A translation transform can be applied to g by
calling g.translate(x,y), where x and y are of type double. Mathematically, the effect is to
automatically add (x,y) to coordinates in subsequent drawing operations. For example, if you
use coordinates (0,0) after applying the translation, you are actually referring to the point
that had coordinates (x,y) in the usual coordinate system. All other coordinate pairs are
moved by the same amount. For example the two statements
g.translate(x,y);
g.strokeLine( 0, 0, 100, 200 );
draws the same line as the single statement
g.strokeLine( x, y, 100+x, 200+y );
In the second code segment, you are just doing the same translation “by hand.” Instead of
thinking in terms of coordinate systems, you might find it clearer to think of what happens to
the objects that are drawn. After you say g.translate(x,y), any objects that you draw are
displaced x units horizontally and y units vertically.
As an example, perhaps you would prefer to have (0,0) at the center of a component,
instead of at its upper left corner. To do this, just use the following command before drawing
anything:
g.translate( canvas.getWidth()/2, canvas.getHeight()/2 );
To apply a scale transform to g, use g.scale(sx,sy), where the parameters specify the
scaling factor in the x-direction and the y-direction. After this command, x-coordinates are
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 700

multiplied by sx, and y-coordinates are multiplied by sy. The effect of scaling is to make
objects bigger or smaller. Scale factors greater than 1 will magnify sizes of shapes, while scale
factors less than 1 will shrink the shapes. In many cases, the two scale factors are the same;
this is called “uniform scaling.”
The center of scaling is (0,0). That is, the point (0,0) is unaffected by the scaling, and
other points move toward or away from (0,0). If an object is not located at (0,0), then the
effect of scaling is not just to change its size but also to move it farther away from (0,0) (for
scaling factors greater than 1) or closer to (0,0) (for scaling factors less than 1).
It is possible to use a negative scaling factor, which results in a reflection. For example,
after calling g.scale(-1,1), objects will be reflected horizontally through the line x=0.
The third type of basic transform is rotation. The command g.rotate(r) rotates all
subsequently drawn objects through an angle of r about the point (0,0). Angles are measured
in degrees. Positive angles are clockwise rotations, while negative angles are counterclockwise
(unless you have applied a negative scale factor, which reverses the direction of rotation).
Shearing is not considered a basic transform, since it can be done (with some difficulty) by
a series of rotations and scalings. The effect of a horizontal shear is to shift horizontal lines
to the left or right by an amount that is proportional to the distance from the x-axis. That
is, the point (x,y) is transformed to (x+a*y,y), where a is the amount of shear. JavaFX
does not have a method that applies a shear transform, but it does have a way to apply an
arbitrary transform. For those who know some linear algebra, transforms are represented as
matrices, and it is possible to specify a transform directly by giving the numbers that go in
the matrix. A transform in JavaFX is represented by an object of type Affine, and the method
g.transform(t) applies the Affine transform t to the graphics context. I don’t want to go into
the math here, but to do a horizontal shear with shear amount equal to a, you can use
g.transform( new Affine(1, a, 0, 0, 1, 0) );
Sometimes you will need to apply several transforms to get the effect you want. Suppose,
for example, that you would like to show the string “hello world” tilted at a rising 30-degree
angle and with its basepoint at (x,y). This won’t do it:
g.rotate(-30);
g.fillText("hello world", x, y);
The problem is that the rotation applies to the point (x,y) as well as to the text. After the
rotation, the basepoint is no longer at (x,y). What you need to do is make a rotated string
with its basepoint at (0,0), and then translate by (x,y), which will move the basepoint from
(0,0) to (x,y). That can be done as follows:
g.translate(x,y);
g.rotate(-30);
g.fillText("hello world", 0, 0);
The important thing to note is the order of the transforms. The translation applies to everything
that comes after the translate command. What comes after it is some code that draws a
rotated string with its basepoint at (0,0). That rotated string will be translated by (x,y).
In effect, the string is first rotated, then translated. The rule for multiple transforms is that
transforms are applied to objects in the opposite of the order in which the transform
commands occur in the code.
The sample program TransformDemo.java can apply various transformations to a picture.
The user controls the amount of scaling, horizontal shear, rotation and translation. Running
the program might help you understand transforms, and you can read the source code to see
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 701

how to code the transforms. Note that the transforms in this program are applied to the
objects in the order scale-shear-rotate-translate. If you look in the code, you will see that the
transform methods are called in the opposite order, translate-rotate-shear-scale. There is also
an additional translation that moves the origin to the center of the canvas, so that the center
of scaling, rotation, and shearing is at the center of the canvas.

13.2.4 Stacked Canvasses

The final example for this section is another simple paint program, ToolPaint.java. The paint
programs in Chapter 6 could only draw curves. In the new program, the user can select a “tool”
for drawing. In addition to a curve tool there are tools for drawing five kinds of shape: straight
lines, rectangles, ovals, filled rectangles, and filled ovals.
When the user draws with one of the five shape tools, the user drags the mouse and a shape
is drawn between the starting point of the drag gesture and the current position of the mouse.
Each time the mouse moves, the previous shape is deleted and a new shape is drawn. The new
shape doesn’t actually become part of the picture until the user releases the mouse button. For
the line tool, for example, the effect is that the user sees a line that stretches from the starting
point to the current mouse position, and that line moves along with the mouse. I urge you to
try the program to see the effect!
The difficulty for the programmer is that parts of the drawing are continually being covered
and uncovered as the user moves the mouse around. When part of the current drawing is
covered and then uncovered, the drawing must still be there! This means that while the user
is dragging the mouse, the program can’t simply draw the new shape on the same canvas that
contains the current picture, since doing so would obliterate whatever was in that part of the
picture.
The solution in JavaFX is to use two canvases, one stacked on top of the other. The
bottom canvas contains the actual drawing. The top canvas is used to implement the shape
tools. Ordinarily, the top canvas is completely transparent. That is, it is filled with a color
that has alpha component zero. When a shape tool is being used, the shapes that are drawn as
the user drags the mouse are drawn to the top canvas. The bottom canvas is not affected, but
part of it is hidden behind the shape that was drawn in the top canvas. Each time the mouse
moves, the top canvas is cleared, and a new shape is drawn to the top canvas. When the user
releases the mouse at the end of the drag, the top canvas is cleared, and the shape is drawn to
the bottom canvas, where it becomes part of the actual drawing. In the end, the top canvas is
once again completely transparent, and the drawing in the bottom canvas is fully visible. Note
that a canvas can be cleared to full transparency by calling
g.clearRect( 0, 0, canvas.getWidth(), canvas.getHeight() );
where g is a GraphicsContext for the canvas. (Canvasses are also fully transparent when they
are first created.)
To stack one canvas on top of another, you can use a StackPane. A StackPane will simply
stack up its child nodes one on top of the other, in the order in which they were added to the
pane. The two canvasses in the program were set up like this:
canvas = new Canvas(width,height); // main drawing canvas
canvasGraphics = canvas.getGraphicsContext2D();
canvasGraphics.setFill(backgroundColor);
canvasGraphics.fillRect(0,0,width,height);
overlay = new Canvas(width,height); // transparent top canvas
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 702

overlayGraphics = overlay.getGraphicsContext2D();
overlay.setOnMousePressed( e -> mousePressed(e) );
overlay.setOnMouseDragged( e -> mouseDragged(e) );
overlay.setOnMouseReleased( e -> mouseReleased(e) );
StackPane canvasHolder = new StackPane(canvas,overlay);
Note that the mouse event handlers were added to the top canvas, since the top canvas covers
the bottom canvas. When the user clicks on the drawing, it is actually the top canvas that is
being clicked.
The curve tool, by the way, does not use the top canvas. Curves are drawn directly to the
bottom canvas. Since no part of the curve will ever be deleted after it is drawn, there is no
need to put a temporary copy in the top canvas.

13.2.5 Pixel Manipulation

ToolPaint.java has two more tools: “Erase” and “Smudge.” (Both of these tools work directly
on the bottom canvas.) The Erase tool does what it says: as the user drags the mouse, a
small square around the mouse location is filled with the background color, erasing part of the
drawing at that location. The Smudge tool is more interesting. Dragging with the smudge tool
smears the color under the tool, as if you are dragging your finger through wet paint. In this
picture from the program, the smudge tool was dragged around on the center of a red rectangle:

There is no built-in subroutine in JavaFX for smudging a picture. This is something that
requires direct manipulation of the colors of individual pixels. Here is the basic idea: To
implement the smudge tool, the program uses three 9-by-9 two-dimensional arrays of color
components, one to hold the red components of the colors, one for the green components, and
one for the blue. When the user presses the mouse while using the smudge tool, the color
components of the pixels in a 9-by-9 square around the mouse location are copied into the
arrays. When the mouse moves, some of the color from the arrays is blended into the colors
of the image pixels at the new mouse location, and, at the same time, some of the color from
the image is blended into the arrays. That is, the arrays drop off some of the color that they
are carrying and pick up some of the color from the new location. (If you think about it, you
should see that something similar happens when you smear paint with your finger.)
To implement this idea, we need to be able to read the colors of pixels in the image, and we
need to be able to write new colors to those pixels. It is fairly easy to write colors to individual
pixels, using something called a PixelWriter. If g is a GraphicsContext for a canvas, you can get
a PixelWriter for the canvas by calling
PixelWriter pixWriter = g.getPixelWriter();
Then, to set the color of the pixel at (x,y) in the canvas, you can simply call
pixWriter.setColor( x, y, color );
where color is of type Color. (Note that x and y are pixel coordinates; they are not subject to
any transform that might have been set in the graphics context.)
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 703

If JavaFX had a similarly easy way to read pixel colors from a canvas, we would be all set.
Unfortunately, it is not so simple. The reason, as I understand it, is technical: It turns out that
drawing operations do not immediately draw to the canvas. Instead, for efficiency, a bunch of
drawing operations are saved and sent to the graphics hardware in a batch. Ordinarily, a batch
is sent only when the canvas needs to be redrawn on the screen. This means that if you simply
read a pixel color from the canvas, the value that you get would not necessarily reflect all of
the drawing commands that you have applied to the canvas. In order to read pixel colors, you
have to do something that will force all of the drawing operations to complete. The only way
I know to do that is by taking a “snapshot” of the canvas.
You can actually take a snapshot of any scene graph node. A snapshot returns a
WritableImage that contains a picture of the node, after all pending operations have been
applied. It’s easy to take a picture of an entire node:
WritableImage nodePic = node.snapshot(null,null);
The WritableImage will contain a picture of the node as it would appear on the screen, and
it can be used in the same way as a regular Image object. The parameters are of type
SnapshotParameters and WriteableImage. If a non-null writable image is provided, it will be
used for the image, as long as it is large enough to contain a picture of the node; this can be
more efficient than creating a new writable image. The SnapshotParameters can be used to get
more control over the picture that is produced. In particular, they can be used to specify that
the snapshot should contain only a certain rectangle within the node.
To implement the smudge tool, we need to grab the pixels from a small, 9-by-9 rectangle
within the canvas. To do that efficiently, we can provide SnapshotParameters that pick out
just that rectangle. We can then read the colors of the pixels using a PixelReader for the
WritableImage. There are a lot of details, so I will just show you how it’s done. In the program,
I create a single WritableImage, a PixelReader, and a SnapshotParameters that will be used for
all snapshots. Things are complicated a bit by the fact that some of the pixels in the snapshot
might lie outside of the canvas, and I don’t want to try to use color data for those non-existent
pixels. Here is the code:
pixels = new WritableImage(9,9); // a 9-by-9 writable image
pixelReader = pixels.getPixelReader(); // a PixelReader for the writable image
snapshotParams = new SnapshotParameters();
When the uses presses the mouse, I need to take a snapshot of the 9-by-9 square in the canvas
that surrounds the current mouse coordinates, (startX,startY). And I need to copy the
color data from the snapshot into the color component arrays, smudgeRed, smudgeGreen, and
smudgeBlue:
snapshotParams.setViewport( new Rectangle2D(startX - 4, startY - 4, 9, 9) );
// (The SnapshotParameter’s "viewport" is the rectangle in the canvas
// that will be included in the snapshot.)
canvas.snapshot(snapshotParams, pixels);
int h = (int)canvas.getHeight();
int w = (int)canvas.getWidth();
for (int j = 0; j < 9; j++) { // row in the snapshot
int r = startY + j - 4; // the corresponding row in the canvas
for (int i = 0; i < 9; i++) { // column in the snapshot
int c = startX + i - 4; // the corresponding column in canvas
if (r < 0 || r >= h || c < 0 || c >= w) {
// The point (c,r) is outside the canvas.
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 704

// A -1 in the smudgeRed array indicates that the

// corresponding pixel was outside the canvas.
smudgeRed[j][i] = -1;
}
else {
Color color = pixelReader.getColor(i, j);
// pixelReader gets color from the snapshot
smudgeRed[j][i] = color.getRed();
smudgeGreen[j][i] = color.getGreen();
smudgeBlue[j][i] = color.getBlue();
}
}
}
To blend the color from the color component arrays into a square of pixels around another
point (x,y), I need to take a new snapshot, this time of the 9-by-9 square of pixels surrounding
(x,y). Once we have that snapshot, we can do the blending calculations and write the new
color back to the canvas, using the PixelWriter that writes to the canvas:
snapshotParams.setViewport( new Rectangle2D(x - 4, y - 4, 9, 9) );
canvas.snapshot(snapshotParams, pixels);
for (int j = 0; j < 9; j++) { // row in the snapshot
int c = x - 4 + j; // corresponding row in the canvas
for (int i = 0; i < 9; i++) { // column in the snapshot
int r = y - 4 + i; // corresponding column in the canvas
if ( r >= 0 && r < h && c >= 0 && c < w && smudgeRed[i][j] != -1) {
// PixelReader gets current pixel color from the snapshot:
Color oldColor = pixelReader.getColor(j,i);
// Get a new color for the pixel by blending current color
// with the color components from the arrays:
double newRed = (oldColor.getRed()*0.8 + smudgeRed[i][j]*0.2);
double newGreen = (oldColor.getGreen()*0.8 + smudgeGreen[i][j]*0.2);
double newBlue = (oldColor.getBlue()*0.8 + smudgeBlue[i][j]*0.2);
// PixelWriter writes new pixel color to the canvas:
pixelWriter.setColor( c, r, Color.color(newRed,newGreen,newBlue) );
// Also blend some of the color from the canvas into the arrays:
smudgeRed[i][j] = oldColor.getRed()*0.2 + smudgeRed[i][j]*0.8;
smudgeGreen[i][j] = oldColor.getGreen()*0.2 + smudgeGreen[i][j]*0.8;
smudgeBlue[i][j] = oldColor.getBlue()*0.2 + smudgeBlue[i][j]*0.8;
}
}
}
This is a fairly complex operation, but I hope it gives you an idea of how to work with
pixels. Remember that you can write pixel colors to a canvas using a PixelWriter, but to read
pixels from the canvas, you need to take a Snapshot of the canvas, and use a PixelReader to
read pixel colors from the WritableImage that contains the snapshot.
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 705

13.2.6 Image I/O

The sample paint program ToolPaint.java has a “File” menu with commands for loading an
image from a file into the canvas and for saving the image from the canvas into a file.
To load the image from a file, you first need to load it into an object of type Image. We
have seen in Subsection 6.2.3 how to load an Image from a resource file and how to draw that
image onto a canvas. Loading the image from a file is not much different:
Image imageFromFile = new Image( fileURL );
The parameter is a string that specifies the file location as a URL—essentially a path to the
file, preceded by “file:”. If imageFile is an object of type File representing a path to the file,
you can say
Image imageFromFile = new Image( "file:" + imageFile );
Typically, you would let the user select the file using a FileChooser dialog (Subsection 11.2.3),
and imageFile would simply be the selected File returned by that dialog.
Of course, the user might select a file that can’t be read or that does not contain an
image. The Image constructor does not throw an exception in that case. Instead, it sets
an error condition in the image object that you can check using the boolean-valued function
imageFromFile.isError(). If an error did occur, you can get the exception that caused the
error by calling imageFromFile.getException().
Once you have the image, and have checked that it was loaded without error, you can draw
it to a canvas using a graphics context for the canvas. This command will scale the image to
exactly fill the canvas:
g.drawImage( imageFromFile, 0, 0, canvas.getWidth(), canvas.getHeight() );
This is all put together in a method doOpenImage() that is used in ToolPaint to load an image
from a user-selected file:
private void doOpenImage() {
FileChooser fileDialog = new FileChooser();
fileDialog.setInitialFileName("");
fileDialog.setInitialDirectory(
new File( System.getProperty("user.home") ) );
fileDialog.setTitle("Select Image File to Load");
File selectedFile = fileDialog.showOpenDialog(window);
if ( selectedFile == null )
return; // User did not select a file.
Image image = new Image("file:" + selectedFile);
if (image.isError()) {
Alert errorAlert = new Alert(Alert.AlertType.ERROR,
"Sorry, an error occurred while\ntrying to load the file:\n"
+ image.getException().getMessage());
errorAlert.showAndWait();
return;
}
canvasGraphics.drawImage(image,0,0,canvas.getWidth(),canvas.getHeight());
}

∗ ∗ ∗
To save the image from a canvas into a file, you must first get the image from the canvas
by making a snapshot of the entire canvas. That can be done with
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 706

Image image = canvas.snapshot(null,null);

Unfortunately, at least in the current version, it seems that JavaFX does not itself include any
support for saving images to files. For that, it depends on something from the older “AWT” GUI
toolkit: the BufferedImage class from package java.awt.image. A BufferedImage represents an
image stored in the computer’s memory, similar to an Image in JavaFX. A JavaFX Image can
easily be converted into a BufferedImage, using a static method in class SwingFXUtils from
package javafx.embed.swing:
BufferedImage bufferedImage = SwingFXUtils.fromFXImage(canvasImage,null);
The second parameter, which is null here, could be an existing BufferedImage to hold the
image.
Once you have the BufferedImage, you can use a static method from class ImageIO, in package
javax.imageio, to write it to a file:
ImageIO.write( bufferedImage, format, file );
The second parameter is a String that specifies the file format for the image. Images can be
saved in several formats, including “PNG”, “JPEG”, and “GIF”. ToolPaint always saves
files in PNG format. The third parameter is of type File, and it specifies the file to be saved.
ImageIO.write() will throw an exception if it is unable to save the file. (It can also fail without
throwing an exception if it doesn’t recognize the format.) Putting all this together gives the
doSaveImage() method in ToolPaint:
private void doSaveImage() {
FileChooser fileDialog = new FileChooser();
fileDialog.setInitialFileName("imagefile.png");
fileDialog.setInitialDirectory(
new File( System.getProperty("user.home") ) );
fileDialog.setTitle("Select File to Save. Name MUST end with .png!");
File selectedFile = fileDialog.showSaveDialog(window);
if ( selectedFile == null )
return; // User did not select a file.
try {
Image canvasImage = canvas.snapshot(null,null);
BufferedImage image = SwingFXUtils.fromFXImage(canvasImage,null);
String filename = selectedFile.getName().toLowerCase();
if ( ! filename.endsWith(".png")) {
throw new Exception("The file name must end with \".png\".");
}
boolean hasFormat = ImageIO.write(image,"PNG",selectedFile);
if ( ! hasFormat ) { // (this should never happen)
throw new Exception( "PNG format not available.");
}
}
catch (Exception e) {
Alert errorAlert = new Alert(Alert.AlertType.ERROR,
"Sorry, an error occurred while\ntrying to save the image:\n"
+ e.getMessage());
errorAlert.showAndWait();
}
}
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 707

13.3 Complex Components and MVC

There is a lot more complexity than we have seen so far lurking in the JavaFX API.
However, a lot of that complexity works to your benefit as a programmer, since a lot of it is
hidden in typical uses of JavaFX components. You don’t have to know about the most complex
details of controls in order to use them effectively in most programs.
JavaFX defines several component classes that are much more complex than those we have
looked at, but even the most complex components are not very difficult to use for many purposes.
In this section, we’ll look at components that support display and manipulation of lists and
tables. To use these complex components effectively, it’s helpful to know something about the
Model-View-Controller pattern that is used as a basis for the design of many GUI components.
That pattern is discussed later in this section.
There are a number of JavaFX controls that are not covered in this book. Some useful
ones that you might want to look into include: TabbedPane, SplitPane, Tree, ProgressBar, and
various specialized input controls such as ColorPicker, DatePicker, PasswordField, and Spinner.
We start this section with a short example of writing a custom control—something that you
might consider when even the large variety of components that are already defined in JavaFX
don’t do quite what you want (or when they do too much, and you want something simpler).

13.3.1 A Simple Custom Component

JavaFX’s standard component classes are usually all you need to construct a user interface. At
some point, however, you might need something a bit different. In that case, you can consider
writing your own component class, by building on one of the components that JavaFX does
provide or on the basic Control class that serves as the base class for all controls.
For example, suppose I have a need for a “stopwatch” control. When the user clicks on
the stopwatch, I want it to start timing. When the user clicks again, I want it to display the
elapsed time since the first click. The textual display can be done with a Label, but we want a
Label that can respond to mouse clicks. We can get this behavior by defining a StopWatchLabel
component as a subclass of the Label class. A StopWatchLabel object will listen for mouse clicks
on itself. The first time the user clicks, it will change its display to “Timing...” and remember
the time when the click occurred. When the user clicks again, it will check the time again,
and it will compute and display the elapsed time. (Of course, I don’t necessarily have to define
a subclass. I could use a regular label in my program, set up a listener to respond to mouse
events on the label, and let the program do the work of keeping track of the time and changing
the text displayed on the label. However, by writing a new class, I have something that can be
reused in other projects. I also have all the code involved in the stopwatch function collected
together neatly in one place. For more complicated components, both of these considerations
are very important.)
The StopWatchLabel class is not very hard to write. I need an instance variable to record the
time when the user starts the stopwatch. In the mouse event handling method that responds to
mouse clicks on the stopwatch, I need to know whether the timer is being started or stopped, so I
need a boolean instance variable, running, to keep track of this aspect of the component’s state.
We can use the method System.currentTimeMillis() to get the current time, in milliseconds,
as a value of type long. When the timer is started, we can store the current time in an instance
variable, startTime. When the timer is stopped, we can use the current time and the start
time to compute the elapsed time that the timer has been running. The complete StopWatch
class is very short:
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 708

import javafx.scene.control.Label;
/**
* A custom component that acts as a simple stop-watch. When the user
* clicks on it, this component starts timing. When the user clicks again,
* it displays the time between the two clicks. Clicking a third time
* starts another timer, etc. While it is timing, the label just
* displays the message "Timing....".
*/
public class StopWatchLabel extends Label {
private long startTime; // Start time of timer.
// (Time is measured in milliseconds.)
private boolean running; // True when the timer is running.
/**
* Constructor sets initial text on the label to
* "Click to start timer." and sets up a mouse event
* handler so the label can respond to clicks.
*/
public StopWatchLabel() {
super(" Click to start timer. ");
setOnMousePressed( e -> setRunning( !running ) );
}

/**
* Tells whether the timer is currently running.
*/
public boolean isRunning() {
return running;
}

/**
* Sets the timer to be running or stopped, and changes the text that
* is shown on the label. (This method should be called on the JavaFX
* application thread.)
* @param running says whether the timer should be running; if this
* is equal to the current state, nothing is done.
*/
public void setRunning( boolean running ) {
if (this.running == running)
return;
this.running = running;
if (running == true) {
// Record the time and start the timer.
startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
setText("Timing....");
}
else {
// Stop the timer. Compute the elapsed time since the
// timer was started and display it.
long endTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
double seconds = (endTime - startTime) / 1000.0;
setText( String.format("Time: %1.3f seconds", seconds) );
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 709

}
}
} // end StopWatchLabel
Don’t forget that since StopWatchLabel is a subclass of Label, you can do anything with a
StopWatchLabel that you can do with a Label. You can add it to a container. You can set its
font, text color, max and preferred size, and CSS style. You can set the text that it displays
(although this would interfere with its stopwatch function).
StopWatchLabel.java is not an application and cannot be run on its own. The very
short program TestStopWatch.java shows a StopWatchLabel, and it sets several of the label’s
properties to improve the appearance.

13.3.2 The MVC Pattern

One of the principles of object-oriented design is division of responsibilities. Ideally, an object
should have a single, clearly defined role, with a limited realm of responsibility. One application
of this principle to the design of graphical user interfaces is the MVC pattern. “MVC” stands
for “Model-View-Controller” and refers to three different realms of responsibility in the design
of a graphical user interface.
When the MVC pattern is applied to a component, the model consists of the data that
represents the current state of the component. The view is simply the visual presentation of
the component on the screen. And the controller is the aspect of the component that carries
out actions in response to events generated by the user (or by other sources such as timers). The
idea is to assign responsibility for the model, the view, and the controller to different objects.
The view is the easiest part of the MVC pattern to understand. It is often represented by
the component object itself, and its responsibility is to draw the component on the screen. In
doing this, of course, it has to consult the model, since the model represents the state of the
component, and that state can determine what appears on the screen. To get at the model
data—which is stored in a separate object according to the MVC pattern—the component
object needs to keep a reference to the model object. Furthermore, when the model changes,
the view often needs to be redrawn to reflect the changed state. The component needs some way
of knowing when changes in the model occur. Typically, in Java, this is done with events and
listeners. The model object is set up to generate events when its data changes. The view object
registers itself as a listener for those events. When the model changes, an event is generated,
the view is notified of that event, and the view responds by updating its appearance on the
screen.
When MVC is used for JavaFX components, the controller is generally not so well defined as
the model and view, and its responsibilities are often split among several objects. The controller
might include mouse and keyboard listeners that respond to user events on the view, as well as
listeners for other high-level events, such as those from a button or slider, that affect the state
of the component. Usually, the controller responds to events by making modifications to the
model, and the view is changed only indirectly, in response to the changes in the model.
The MVC pattern is used in many places in the design of JavaFX, even when the terms
“model” and “view” are not used. The whole idea of observable properties (Subsection 13.1.1)
is a way of implementing the idea of a model that is separate from the view, although when
properties are used, the model can be spread over many different objects. For the list and table
controls that we will look at next, the model and view are somewhat more explicit.
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 710

13.3.3 ListView and ComboBox

A ListView is a control that represents a list of items that can be selected by the user. It is also
possible to let the user edit items in the list. The sample program SillyStamper.java allows the
user to select an icon (that is, a small image) in a ListView of icons. The user selects an icon
in the list by clicking on it. The selected icon can be “stamped” onto a canvas by clicking on
the canvas. Shift-clicking adds a larger version of the image to the canvas. (The icons in this
program are from the KDE desktop project.) Here is a picture of the program with several
icons already stamped onto the drawing area and with the “star” icon selected in the list:

ListView is defined in package javafx.scene.control. It is a parameterized type, where the

type parameter indicates what type of object can be displayed in the list. The most common
type is probably ListView<String>, but in the sample program, it’s ListView<ImageView>. A
ListView can display Strings and Nodes directly. When used with objects of other types, the
default is to display the string representation of the object, as returned by the toString()
method (which is often not very useful).
The items in a ListView<T> are stored in an ObservableList<T>. The list of items is part of
the model for the ListView. The list for a listView can be accessed as listView.getItems().
When items are added to this list or deleted from the list, the list view is automatically updated
to reflect the change.
In the SillyStamper program, the list is static. That is, no changes are made to the list
after it has been created, and the user cannot edit the list. The images for the icons are read
from resource files, and each Image is wrapped in an ImageView (Subsection 6.4.1), which is
added to the list of items in the ListView. The list is constructed in the following method, which
is called in the program’s start() method:
private ListView<ImageView> createIconList() {
String[] iconNames = new String[] {
// names of image resource file, in directory stamper icons
"icon5.png", "icon7.png", "icon8.png", "icon9.png", "icon10.png",
"icon11.png", "icon24.png", "icon25.png", "icon26.png",
"icon31.png", "icon33.png", "icon34.png"
};
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 711

iconImages = new Image[iconNames.length]; // Used for drawing the icons.

ListView<ImageView> list = new ListView<>();
list.setPrefWidth(80);
list.setPrefHeight(100);
for (int i = 0; i < iconNames.length; i++) {
Image icon = new Image("stamper icons/" + iconNames[i]);
iconImages[i] = icon;
list.getItems().add( new ImageView(icon) );
}
list.getSelectionModel().select(0); // Select the first item in the list.
return list;
}
This method sets a preferred width and height for the list. The default preferred size for a list
seems to be about 200-by-400, no matter what it contains. The icon list needs a much smaller
width. The preferred height is set to a small value, but in this program it will grow to fill the
available space in the “right” position of the BorderPane that fills the window. The default
preferred height would have forced the container to be bigger than I wanted.
The other point of interest is the use of the “selection model” of the list. The selection
model is the part of the model that records which items are selected in the list. By default, at
most one item can be selected in a list, which is the correct behavior for this program. However,
it would be possible to allow multiple items to be selected at the same time by calling
list.getSelectionModel().setSelectionMode(SelectionMode.MULTIPLE);
With the default single selection mode, when the user selects an item, the previously selected
item, if any, is deselected. The user can select an item by clicking it, and the program can set
the selection by calling list.getSelectionModel().select(index). The parameter is the
index of the item in the list, with numbering starting from zero as usual. If index is -1, than no
item in the list is selected. The selected item in the list is highlighted in the list view. The list
view listens for changes in the selection model. When the user clicks an item, a mouse listener
(which is a built-in part of the controller for the list) changes the selection model. When that
happens, the list view is notified of the change and updates its appearance to reflect the fact
that a different item is now selected. A program can find out which item is currently selected
by calling
list.getSelectionModel().getSelectedIndex()
In SillyStamper.java, this method is used when the user clicks on the canvas, to find out which
icon should be stamped into the picture.
∗ ∗ ∗
The list in SillyStamper.java is not editable. Our second sample program, EditList-
Demo.java, shows two lists that can be edited by the user. One is a list of strings and one is
a list of numbers. The user can initiate editing of an item by double-clicking it, or simply by
clicking it if it is already selected. The user finishes the edit by pressing return or by hitting
the escape key to cancel the edit. Selecting another item in the list will also cancel the edit.
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 712

There are a few things that you need to do if you want the user to be able to edit the items
in a ListView. The list must be made editable by calling
list.setEditable(true);
However, that by itself is not enough. The individual cells in the list must also be editable.
The term “cell” refers to an area in a list that displays one item. A list cell is an object that
is responsible for displaying the item and, optionally, implementing user editing of the item.
Default list cells are not editable.
A ListView uses a cell factory to create list cell objects. The cell factory is another object
that is responsible for creating cells. To get a different kind of cell, you have to provide a
different cell factory for the list. (This follows something called the “factory pattern.” By using
a a factory object to create cells, the cells can be customized without changing the ListView
source code. You simply have to install a new cell factory.)
Writing cell factories is not a trivial task, but JavaFX has several standard cell factories.
If listView is of type ListView<String>, you can install a cell factory that makes editable cells
simply by calling
listView.setCellFactory( TextFieldListCell.forListView() );
The method TextFieldListCell.forListView() returns a cell factory that creates cells
that can display and edit strings. When the cell is simply displaying the string, it actually uses
a Label for the display. When the item is being edited, it is displayed as a TextField.
That’s all you need to know to make an editable list of strings. There are other item
types for which it is natural to display the item as a string and to use a TextField for editing
the item. That includes numbers, single character values, dates, and times. However, when
the items are not strings, there has to be some way to convert between items and their string
representations. Again, JavaFX makes things reasonably easy in the common cases: It provides
standard converters for all of the types mentioned above. For example, if intList is an editable
ListType<Integer>, you can install an appropriate cell factory with
intView.setCellFactory(
TextFieldListCell.forListView( new IntegerStringConverter() ) );
The parameter to forListView is an object that can convert between integers and their string
representations. As it happens I was not completely satisfied with the standard converter, since
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 713

it didn’t handle illegal inputs in the text field very well, so for the list of integers in the sample
program EditListDemo.java, I wrote my own converter and used it create the cell factory for
the list:
StringConverter<Integer> myConverter = new StringConverter<Integer>() {
// This custom string converter will convert a bad input string to
// null, instead of just failing. And it will display a null value
// as "Bad Value" and an empty string value as 0.
public Integer fromString(String s) {
// Convert a string to an integer.
if (s == null || s.trim().length() == 0)
return 0;
try {
return Integer.parseInt(s);
}
catch (NumberFormatException e) {
return null;
}
}
public String toString(Integer n) {
// Convert an integer to a String.
if (n == null)
return "Bad Value";
return n.toString();
}
};
listView.setCellFactory( TextFieldListCell.forListView( myConverter ) );
As you can see, a StringConverter just needs to define two functions, fromString() and
toString().
Standard string converters can be found in package javafx.util.converters, and the
factory class TextFieldListCell is in package javafx.scene.control.cell. There are also
similar classes for use with cells in tables, which we will need below.
∗ ∗ ∗
In addition to the lists themselves in the sample program, a few interesting things are done
with labels and buttons, by using observable properties of the ListView’s model, as discussed in
Subsection 13.1.2. For example, there are labels that show the selected index and the selected
item in the list. This is coded by binding the text property of the label with a property of the
list’s selection model:
Label selectedIndexLabel = new Label();
selectedIndexLabel.textProperty().bind(
listView.getSelectionModel()
.selectedIndexProperty()
.asString("Selected Index: %d") );
Label selectedNumberLabel = new Label();
selectedNumberLabel.textProperty().bind(
listView.getSelectionModel()
.selectedItemProperty()
.asString("SelectedItem: %s") );
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 714

And the button for deleting the selected item from the list should be enabled only when there
is actually a selected item. This is coded by binding the disable property of the button:
deleteNumberButton.disableProperty().bind(
listView.getSelectionModel()
.selectedIndexProperty()
.isEqualTo(-1) );
In effect, the labels and button are being used as alternative views of the same selection model
that is used by the list. This is a major feature of the MVC pattern: There can be multiple
views of the same model object. The views listen for changes in the model. When the model
changes, the views are notified of the change and update themselves to reflect the new state of
the model.
There is also an “Add” button that adds an item to the list. This uses another part of the
ListView model. The item is actually added to the ObservableList that holds the items. Since
the ListView listens for changes in that list, it will be notified of the change and will update
itself to show the new item in the visible on-screen view of the list. Beyond adding the item to
the observable list, no other action is needed in the program to get the item to appear on the
screen.
∗ ∗ ∗
We can look briefly at another control, ComboBox, that bears a lot of similarities to ListView.
In fact, a ComboBox is basically a list view in which only the selected item is normally visible.
When the user clicks on a combo box, the full list of items pops up, and the user can select
an item from the list. In fact, a ComboBox actually uses a ListView to show the items in the
pop-up list. You have seen combo boxes used as pop-up menus in some examples, starting with
GUIDemo.java all the way back in Section 1.6. Like ListView, ComboBox is a parameterized
type. Although other item types are supported (using cell factories and string converters), String
is the most common type for the items. Creating a combo box and managing the selection is
similar to working with ListView. For example,
ComboBox<String> flavors = new ComboBox<>();
flavors.getItems().addAll("Vanilla", "Chocolate", "Strawberry", "Pistachio");
flavors.getSelectionModel().select(0);
It is possible to set a combo box to be editable (and no special cell factory is needed for that,
as long as the items are strings). An editable combo box is like a strange combination of text
field and list view. Instead of using a label to show the selected item, the combo box uses a text
field. The user can edit the value in the text field, and the modified value becomes the selected
value in the combo box. However, the original value of the modified item is not removed from
the list; the new item is just added. And the new item does not become a permanent part of
the list. In the above example, the effect of saying flavors.setEditable(true) is to let the
user type in “Rum Raisin,” or anything else, as the selected flavor, but doing so won’t replace
“Vanilla”, “Chocolate”, “Strawberry”, or “Pistachio” in the list.
Unlike a ListView, a ComboBox emits an ActionEvent when the user selects a new item,
either by selecting it from the pop-up menu or by typing a new value into an editable combo
box and pressing return.

13.3.4 TableView
Like a ListView, a TableView control displays a collection of items to the user. However, tables
are more complicated than lists. Table items are arranged in a grid of rows and columns. Each
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 715

grid position is a cell of the table. Each column has a column header at the top, which contains
a name for the column. A column contains a sequence of items, and working with one of the
columns in a TableView is in many ways similar to working with a ListView.
TableView<T> is a parameterized type. The type T represents one row of the table; that is,
an object of the type parameter, T, contains the data for one row. (It can contain additional data
as well; the table can be a view of just some of the available data.) The data model for a table
of type TableView<T> is an ObservableList<T>, and it can be accessed as table.getItems().
Each item represents one row, and you can add and delete complete rows of the table by adding
and deleting elements of this list.
To define a table, it’s not enough to provide the class that represents the rows of the table;
you also have to say what data goes in each column of the table. A table column is described
by an object of type TableColumn<T,S>, where the first type parameter, T, is the same as the
type parameter of the table, and the second type parameter, S, is the data type for the items
that appear in the cells of that column. The type TableColumn<T,S> indicates that the column
displays items of type S derived from rows of type T. A table column object does not contain
the items that appear in the column; they are contained in the objects of type T that represent
the rows. But the table column object needs to specify how to get the item that appears in
the column from the object that represents the row. That is specified by something called a
“cell value factory.” It is possible to write a cell value factory that computes any function of
a row object, but the most common option is to use a PropertyValueFactory that simply picks
out one of the properties of the row object.
Let’s turn to an example. The sample program SimpleTableDemo.java shows an uneditable
table that contains the fifty states of the United States with their capital cities and population:

The data for the rows of the table are in objects of type StateData, which is defined in
the program as a public static nested class. (The class must be public for use with a
PropertyValueFactory ; it does not need to be static or nested.) The data values for a row
are properties of the class, in the sense that there is a getter method for each value. Properties
defined by getter methods are sufficient for uneditable table values (though as we shall see, you
need something different for editable table columns). Here is the class definition:
public static class StateData {
private String state;
private String capital;
private int population;
public String getState() {
return state;
}
public String getCapital() {
return capital;
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 716

}
public int getPopulation() {
return population;
}
public StateData(String s, String c, int p) {
state = s;
capital = c;
population = p;
}
}
The table that displays the state data is created with
TableView<StateData> table = new TableView<>();
and an item for each of the fifty states is added to the table data model, which is stored in
table.getItems(). Then the table column objects are created and configured and added to
the table column model, which is stored in table.getColumns():
TableColumn<StateData, String> stateCol = new TableColumn<>("State");
stateCol.setCellValueFactory(
new PropertyValueFactory<StateData, String>("state") );
table.getColumns().add(stateCol);
TableColumn<StateData, String> capitalCol = new TableColumn<>("Capital City");
capitalCol.setCellValueFactory(
new PropertyValueFactory<StateData, String>("capital") );
table.getColumns().add(capitalCol);
TableColumn<StateData, Integer> populationCol = new TableColumn<>("Population");
populationCol.setCellValueFactory(
new PropertyValueFactory<StateData, Integer>("population") );
table.getColumns().add(populationCol);
The parameter to the TableColumn constructor is the text that appears in the header at the top
of the column. As for the cell value factories, remember that a cell value factory needs to pull
the value for a cell out of a row object of type StateData. For the first column, the type of data
is String, so the property value factory takes an input of type StateData and outputs a property
value of a type String. The output value is the property named “state” in the StateData object.
More simply, the constructor
new PropertyValueFactory<StateData, String>("state")
creates a cell value factory that gets the value to be displayed in a cell by calling
obj.getState(), where obj is the object that represents the row of the table which contains
the cell. The other two columns are specified similarly.
That’s about all you need to know to create a table in which the user cannot edit the
contents of the cells. By default, the user will be able to change the column width by dragging
a separator between two column headers. And the user can click a column header to sort the
rows of the table into increasing or decreasing order according to the values in that column.
Both capabilities can be turned off by setting properties of the TableColumn object, as we will
do for the next example. The user can also rearrange the columns by dragging a table header
to the left or right.
∗ ∗ ∗
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 717

The sample program ScatterPlotTableDemo.java includes an example of a user-editable

table. Each row in the table represents a point in the plane, and the two columns contain the
x-coordinates and the y-coordinates of the points. To add some interest, the program also shows
the points on a canvas; the canvas is a “scatter plot” with a small crosshair at the location of
each point. In the picture, one of the x-coordinates is being edited:

We need a data type to represent the rows of the table. It can be a simple class, with two
properties x and y that hold the coordinates of a point. However, for an editable table column,
we can’t use simple properties defined by getters and setters. The problem is that an editable
column expects the property for that column to be an observable property (see Section 13.1).
More exactly, the class should follow the JavaFX pattern for observable properties: The values
for the properties named x and y should be stored in observable property objects, and a
point object, pt, should have instance methods pt.xProperty() and pt.yProperty(). These
methods return the observable property objects so that they can be used to get and set the
property value. Since the properties store double values, they can be of type DoubleProperty.
The data class for the table is defined as:
public static class Point {
private DoubleProperty x, y;
public Point(double xVal, double yVal) {
x = new SimpleDoubleProperty(this,"x",xVal);
y = new SimpleDoubleProperty(this,"y",yVal);
}
public DoubleProperty xProperty() {
return x;
}
public DoubleProperty yProperty() {
return y;
}
}
The class DoubleProperty itself is an abstract class. SimpleDoubleProperty is concrete subclass.
whose constructor requires the object that contains the property, the name of the property, and
the initial value of the property. Support for adding change and invalidation listeners to the
property is already implemented in this class.
With the Point class in hand, we can create the table and add a few random points to it:
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 718

table = new TableView<Point>();

points = table.getItems();
for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++) { // add 5 random points to the table
points.add( new Point(5*Math.random(), 5*Math.random()) );
}
When a point is added to or deleted from the table, the canvas has to be redrawn. To implement
that, we can add a listener to the list, points, that serves as the data model for the table:
points.addListener( (Observable e) -> redrawDisplay() );
(The type for the parameter, e, in the lambda expression is given as Observable because an
observable list has two addListener() methods that require a one-parameter lamda expression.
The explicit type for e makes it possible for the compiler to tell which one is meant here: We
are adding an InvalidationListener rather than a ListChangeListener.)
We have arranged for the canvas to be redrawn whenever a point is added to or deleted
from the table. However, it will not be redrawn when the user edits one of the points in the
table. That is not a change in the list structure; it’s a change inside one of the objects in the
list. To respond to such changes, we could add listeners to both of the observable properties
in each Point object. In fact, that’s what the table does so that it can respond to any changes
in a point that might be made from outside the table. Since that seems a little extreme to me,
the program actually listens for a different kind of event to handle cell edits. A table has an
observable property named editingCell whose value is the cell that is currently being edited,
if any, or is null if no cell is being edited. When the value of this property changes to null,
it means that an editing operation has been completed. We can arrange for the canvas to be
redrawn after every editing operation by adding a change listener to the editingCell property:
table.editingCellProperty().addListener( (o,oldVal,newVal) -> {
if (newVal == null) {
redrawDisplay();
}
});
To complete the definition of the table, we have to define the columns. As in any table, we
need a cell value factory for each column, which can be created using a property value factory;
this follows the same pattern as the previous example. But for an editable column, we also need
a cell factory, just as we did for the editable list example above. Similarly to that example, the
cell factory can be created using
TextFieldTableCell.forTableColumn(myConverter)
where myConverter is a StringConverter<Double>. Furthermore, for this program, it makes
sense to stop the user from resizing the columns or sorting them. Here is the complete code for
setting up one of the columns:
TableColumn<Point, Double> xColumn = new TableColumn<>("X Coord");
xColumn.setCellValueFactory( new PropertyValueFactory<Point, Double>("x") );
xColumn.setCellFactory( TextFieldTableCell.forTableColumn(myConverter) );
xColumn.setSortable(false);
xColumn.setResizable(false);
xColumn.setPrefWidth(100); // (Default size is too small)
table.getColumns().add(xColumn);
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 719

The only other thing that is needed to make the table work is to set it to be editable by
calling table.setEditable(true). As you can see, you need to do quite a lot to make a
table work, especially if it’s an editable table. However, tables are complex, and the code that
JavaFX makes you write to set up a table is much less than you would need to implement a
table directly.
By the way, you should pay attention to the way that we have exploited the MVC pattern
in this program. The scatter plot is an alternative view of the same data model that is shown
in the table. The data from the model is used when the canvas is redrawn, and that happens
in response to events generated by changes in the model. It actually takes surprisingly little
thought and work to make sure that the scatter plot is always a correct view of the data.
I urge you to study the source code, which is well-commented. In addition to seeing
the full details of the TableView, you might be interested in looking at how transforms
(Subsection 13.2.3) are used when drawing the scatter plot.

13.4 Mostly Windows and Dialogs

All of the sample GUI programs that we have looked at have used a single window.
However, many real programs use multiple windows. In this section, we look at how to manage
a multi-window application. We will also discuss dialog boxes—small popup windows that are
mainly used for getting input from the user. As a bonus, you get to learn about WebView, a
JavaFX control that implements much of the functionality of a web browser window.

13.4.1 Dialog Boxes

A dialog , or dialog box, is a window that is dependent on another window. That window is
the “parent” or “owner” of the dialog box. If the parent window is closed, the dialog box is
automatically closed as well.
A dialog box can be modal or modeless. When a modal dialog box is opened, its parent
window is blocked. That is, the user cannot interact with the parent window until the dialog box
is closed. There are also application modal dialog boxes, which block the entire application,
not just one parent window. Many dialog boxes in JavaFX are application modal. Modal dialog
boxes are often popped up during program execution to get input from the user or sometimes
just to show a message to the user.
Modeless dialog boxes do not block interaction with their parent windows, but they will be
closed automatically when the parent window closes. A modeless dialog box might be used to
show an alternative view of data from the parent window, or to hold some controls that affect
the window.
It is possible to make a Stage work as a dialog box, but many dialog boxes in
JavaFX programs are created as objects belonging to the class Dialog, from package
javafx.scene.control, or to one of its subclasses. A Dialog, dlg, has two instance meth-
ods for showing the dialog: dlg.show() and dlg.showAndWait(). If the dialog is shown using
dlg.showAndWait(), then it is modal. (A dialog opened using showAndWait() is not just
modal; it is application modal.) The showAndWait() method does not return until the dialog
box has been closed, so that any input from the dialog box will be available to the program
immediately after the call to showAndWait(). If the dialog is shown using dlg.show(), on the
other hand, the dialog is modeless. The show() method returns immediately, and the user can
then use both regular windows and the dialog box, and can switch back and forth between them.
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 720

Using a modeless dialog box is a little like parallel programming—you have to understand that
two things are going on at the same time. We will consider only modal dialog boxes here.
∗ ∗ ∗
Dialog<T> is a parameterized type. The type parameter represents the type of value that
will be returned by the showAndWait() method. The return type is actually Optional<T>,
representing a value of type T that might or might not be present. Optional is defined in
package java.util. An Optional has a boolean method isPresent() to test whether the
value is present, and a method get() that returns the value if one is present. An exception
occurs if get() is called when no value is present. This just means that if you want to use the
return value from showAndWait(), you should first use isPresent() to test whether a value
was actually returned.
A dialog box will ordinarily contain one or more buttons for closing the dialog. Typical
button names include “OK”, “Cancel”, “Yes”, and “No”. The most common buttons are
represented by the enumerated type ButtonType, which has values including ButtonType.OK,
ButtonType.CANCEL, ButtonType.YES, and ButtonType.NO. ButtonType is a common return
type for a Dialog, representing the button that the user clicked to close the dialog. In that case,
the dialog box is of type Dialog<ButtonType>.
The class Alert is a subclass of Dialog<ButtonType> that makes it easy to create dialogs that
show a text message to the user, along with one or two buttons. This class was already used
in Subsection 11.2.3, without much explanation, to show error messages to the user. An alert
can be created with
Alert alert = new Alert( alertType, message );
The first parameter is of type Alert.AlertType which is a nested enumerated type with values in-
cluding Alert.AlertType.INFORMATION, Alert.AlertType.WARNING, Alert.AlertType.ERROR,
and Alert.AlertType.CONFIRMATION. Alerts of the first three types will have a single “OK”
button and do nothing but show the message to the user; for these alerts, there is no reason
to check the return value of alert.showAndWait(). A confirmation alert has an “OK” button
and a “Cancel” button and is typically used to ask whether the user would like to continue with
some potentially dangerous operation such as deleting a file; in this case, checking the return
value is important. Here is a typical use:
Alert confirm = new Alert( Alert.AlertType.CONFIRMATION,
"Do you really want to delete " + file.getName() );
Optional<ButtonType> response = confirm.showAndWait();
if ( response.isPresent() && response.get() == ButtonType.OK ) {
file.delete();
}
In addition to buttons, a Dialog can have: a content area; header text that appears above
the content area; a graphic that appears next to the header text, if there is any, or next to
the content; and of course a title in the title bar of the dialog window. Usually the graphic,
if any, would be a small icon image. For an Alert, the message goes in the content area. The
other properties are set automatically, depending on the alert type, but they can be changed
by calling methods from the Dialog class before showing the alert:
alert.setTitle( windowTitle );
alert.setGraphic( node );
alert.setHeaderText( headerText );
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 721

Any of the values can be null. The content can be set to an arbitrary scene graph node, replacing
the text of the message, by calling
alert.getDialogPane().setContent( node );
but it would be more common to do that for a plain Dialog than for an Alert. Here are a couple
of confirmation alerts, showing the various components of the dialog window. For the dialog
box on the right, the header text is null. Note, by the way, that to get multiline text in an
alert, you have to include line feed (“\n”) characters in the text.

Header Text Title Graphic

ContentText

For an example of a dialog that gets input from the user, the class TextInputDialog
is a subclass of Dialog<String>, meaning that the return value of showAndWait() will be
Optional<String>. A TextInputDialog contains a TextField where the user can enter a line of
text, and it has an “OK” button and a “Cancel” button. The constructor has a parameter
of type String that represents the initial content of the text input box. If you want to ask a
question or show some message to the user, you can put it into the dialog header text. The
return value, if present, will be the content of the input box. Note that the return value can be
the empty string. If the user clicks “Cancel” or simply closes the dialog box, then the return
value is not present. Here is a typical usage:
TextInputDialog getNameDialog = new TextInputBox("Fred");
getNameDialog.setHeaderText("Please enter your name.");
Optional<String> response = getNameDialog.showAndWait();
if (response.isPresent() && response.get().trim().length() > 0) {
name = response.get().trim();
}
else {
Alert error = new Alert( Alert.AlertType.ERROR,
"Anonymous users are not allowed!" );
error.showAndWait();
System.exit(1):
}

∗ ∗ ∗
Since I find Alert and TextInputDialog a little cumbersome to use (especially since I tend
to prefer dialogs without icons), I wrote my own utility class, SimpleDialogs.java, that defines
several more convenient static methods for showing some common kinds of dialog. In particular,
• SimpleDialogs.message(text) — shows the text and an OK button. There is no return
value. The text will be automatically wrapped, so that line feed characters are not needed
in long messages. An optional second parameter can be included to specify the title for
the dialog window.
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 722

• SimpleDialogs.prompt(text) — shows the text and a text input box, with an OK button
and a Cancel button. This method returns a String, which will be the content of the input
box if the user clicks OK, or will be null if the user cancels the dialog. The window title
can be given as an optional second parameter, and the initial content of the text input
box as an optional third parameter.
• SimpleDialogs.confirm(text) — shows the text along with “Yes”, “No”, and “Cancel”
buttons. The return value is a String which will always be one of “yes”, “no”, or “cancel”.
Again, the window title can be given as an optional second parameter.
There are some other options, including a basic color chooser dialog, which you can learn about
by reading the source code. The program TestDialogs.java lets the user try out the dialogs that
are defined in SimpleDialogs.

13.4.2 WebView and WebEngine

In the rest of this section, we will look at a multi-window web browser program. Writing a web
browser sounds complicated, and it is, but JavaFX makes it pretty easy, by doing most of the
work in a couple of standard classes. The WebView class, in package javafx.scene.control,
represents a control that can load and display a web page. It handles most web pages pretty
well, including running JavaScript code. (JavaScript is the programming language that is used
to program active web pages; it is not closely related to Java.) A WebView is basically the
“view” part of the Model-View-Controller pattern (Subsection 13.3.2). The actual work of
loading and managing the web page is done by an object of type WebEngine that is part of the
“controller.” The “model” would be a data structure containing the content that is displayed in
the web page. The model is created by the WebEngine when a page is loaded, and the WebView
then displays the content.
A WebView must be placed into a window. The sample class BrowserWindow.java is a
subclass of the standard window class, Stage, that represents a complete web browser window.
A BrowserWindow contains a WebView along with a menu bar and some other controls. In
particular, there is a text-input box where the user can type the URL for a web page and a
“Load” button that the user can click to load the web page from that URL into the WebView.
In addition, the BrowserWindow constructor can specify an initial URL to be loaded when the
window is first opened.
A WebView has an associated WebEngine that can be obtained by calling webEngine =
webview.getEngine(). Then, to load a web page, you can simply call
webEngine.load( urlString );
where urlString is a string containing the URL. (URLs were discussed in Subsection 11.4.1.)
The urlString must start with a “protocol” such as “http:” or “https:”; in my program, I add
“http://” to the front of the URL string, if the string does not already specify a protocol.
A new web page will also be loaded automatically if the user clicks a link on the page that
is currently being displayed.
Web page loading is asynchronous. That is, webEngine.load() returns immediately, and
the web page is loaded in a background thread. When the loading has completed, the web page
is shown in the WebView. If the load fails for some reason, there is no automatic notification.
However, you can get some information about what is going on by adding listeners to two
observable String properties of the web engine: the location and the title. The location is the
URL of the web page that is currently being displayed or loaded, while the title is the title
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 723

of the current web page, which usually appears in the title bar of the window that displays
the web page. For example, the BrowserWindow class monitors the title property and sets its
window title to match:
webEngine.titleProperty().addListener( (o,oldVal,newVal) -> {
if (newVal == null)
setTitle("Untitled " + owner.getNextUntitledCount());
else
setTitle(newVal);
});
(I will discuss the “owner” below.) It also monitors the location property and displays its
value in a Label at the bottom of the window.
To monitor the progress of loads, you can also add a listener to the property
webEngine.getLoadWorker().stateProperty(); see the BrowserWindow.java source code for
an example.
I said above that a WebView (with its WebEngine) can run JavaScript code that occurs on
web pages. That is not quite true. JavaScript has subroutines for popping up certain simple
dialog boxes: an “alert” dialog to simply display a message to the user; a “prompt” dialog to ask
the user a question and get back a response string; and a “confirm” dialog that shows a message
with an “OK” and a “Cancel” button. For a confirm dialog, the return value is a boolean
that tells whether the user dismissed the dialog by clicking “OK”. By default, requests from
JavaScript to show these dialogs are ignored by the WebEngine. However, it is possible to add
event handlers to the web engine to respond to those requests. In BrowserWindow, I use dialog
boxes from my SimpleDialogs class to respond to the events. For example, when JavaScript
tries to pop up an alert dialog, the web engine generates an event of type AlertEvent. The data
in the event object is the message that JavaScript wants to display. The BrowserWindow class
responds by using SimpleDialogs.message() to display the message to the user:
webEngine.setOnAlert(
evt -> SimpleDialogs.message(evt.getData(), "Alert from web page") );
Handling prompt and confirm dialogs is a little different, since they must return a value. Here
is what’s done in the sample program:
webEngine.setPromptHandler( promptData ->
SimpleDialogs.prompt( promptData.getMessage(),
"Query from web page", promptData.getDefaultValue() ) );
webEngine.setConfirmHandler( str ->
SimpleDialogs.confirm(str, "Confirmation Needed").equals("yes") );
I haven’t yet discussed the menu bar for a BrowserWindow. The menu bar contains a single
menu, named “Window”. That menu contains commands for opening new browser windows
and for closing the current window. It also contains a list of browser windows that are currently
open. The user can bring a different window to the front of the screen by selecting the window
from that list. To understand how that works, you need to understand how BrowserWindow is
used in a complete, multi-window program.

13.4.3 Managing Multiple Windows

The class BrowserWindow is not an Application. It cannot be run as a program; it represents
just one window in a multi-window program. The executable class for the program is defined in
WebBrowser.java. The class WebBrowser, like any JavaFX program, is a subclass of Application.
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 724

It depends on BrowserWindow.java and SimpleDialogs.java, so you need all three Java files to
run the program.
An Application has a start() method that is called by the system when the application
begins. The method has a parameter of type Stage that represents the “primary window” for
the program, but there is no requirement that the program actually use that window. The
start() method in WebBrowser ignores the primary window and instead creates and shows a
window of type BrowserWindow. That is the first window opened when the program is run. It
is set to load the front page of the web version of this very textbook.
That could have been everything that WebBrowser.java needs to do — except for the
“Window” menu, which contains a list of all open windows. That list is not part of the data
for an individual window, so it has to kept somewhere else. In the web browser application,
the application object, of type WebBrowser, maintains the list of open windows. There
is only one application object in the program, so we have just one list of open windows.
(Another possibility would have been to make the window list a static member variable in
the BrowserWindow class, since static variables in a class are shared by all instances of the
class.) The WebBrowser class has a newBrowserWindow() method for opening new windows.
A BrowserWindow has an instance variable, owner, that refers to the WebBrowser application
that opened the window. When the browser window wants to open a new window, it does so
by calling owner.newBrowserWindow(url), where the parameter, url, is the URL of the web
site to be loaded by the new window, or is null to open an empty browser window.
By default in JavaFX, the size of a window is determined by the size of the Scene that it
contains, and the window is centered on the screen. However, it is possible to set the size and
location of a window before it is opened. For a multi-window program, it is not desirable for
all of the windows to appear in exactly the same location. And it turns out that the default
size for a BrowserWindow is probably too small for most computer screens. In the WebBrowser
application, each window that is opened is offset a little from the location where the previous
window was opened, and the size of the window depends on the size of the screen.
The class Screen, in package javafx.stage has a static method Screen.getPrimary() that
returns an object containing information about the computer’s main screen. And that object
in turn has a method Screen.getPrimary().getVisualBounds() that returns a Rectangle2D
representing the usable area of the main screen. This is used in the program’s start() method
to compute a size and location for the first window:
public void start(Stage stage) { // (stage is not used)
openWindows = new ArrayList<BrowserWindow>(); // List of open windows.
screenRect = Screen.getPrimary().getVisualBounds();
// (locationX,locationY) will be the location of the upper left
// corner of the next window to be opened. For the first window,
// the window is moved a little down and over from the top-left
// corner of the primary screen’s visible bounds.
locationX = screenRect.getMinX() + 30;
locationY = screenRect.getMinY() + 20;
// The window size depends on the height and width of the screen’s
// visual bounds, allowing some extra space so that it will be
// possible to stack several windows, each displaced from the
// previous one. (For aesthetic reasons, limit the width to be
// at most 1.6 times the height.)
windowHeight = screenRect.getHeight() - 160;
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 725

windowWidth = screenRect.getWidth() - 130;

if (windowWidth > windowHeight*1.6)
windowWidth = windowHeight*1.6;
// Open the first window, showing the front page of this textbook.
newBrowserWindow("https://math.hws.edu/javanotes/index.html");
} // end start()
When a window is opened in the newBrowserWindow() method, its size and location are
taken from the variables windowWidth, windowHeight, locationX, and locationY. And the
values of locationX and locationY are modified so that the next window will be placed at
a different location. In addition, the new window is added to the open window list. We also
have to make sure that the window is removed from that list when it is closed. Fortunately, a
window generates an event when it is closed. We can add an event handler to listen for that
event, and the event handler can remove the window from the open window list. Here is the
code for newBrowserWindow():
void newBrowserWindow(String url) {
BrowserWindow window = new BrowserWindow(this,url);
openWindows.add(window); // Add new window to open window list.
window.setOnHidden( e -> {
// Called when the window has closed. Remove the window
// from the list of open windows.
openWindows.remove( window );
System.out.println("Number of open windows is " + openWindows.size());
if (openWindows.size() == 0) {
// Program ends automatically when all windows have been closed.
System.out.println("Program ends because all windows are closed");
}
});
if (url == null) {
window.setTitle("Untitled " + getNextUntitledCount());
}
window.setX(locationX); // set location and size of the window
window.setY(locationY);
window.setWidth(windowWidth);
window.setHeight(windowHeight);
window.show();
locationX += 30; // set up location for NEXT window
locationY += 20;
if (locationX + windowWidth + 10 > screenRect.getMaxX()) {
// Window would extend past the right edge of the screen,
// so reset locationX to its original value.
locationX = screenRect.getMinX() + 30;
}
if (locationY + windowHeight + 10 > screenRect.getMaxY()) {
// Window would extend past the bottom edge of the screen,
// so reset locationY to its original value.
locationY = screenRect.getMinY() + 20;
}
}
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 726

The WebBrowser class has a method getOpenWindowList() that returns the open window
list. This method is used by a BrowserWindow when it constructs the “Window” menu. This is
not done in a very efficient way: The menu is rebuilt each time it is shown. A menu emits an
event when the user clicks the menu name, just before the menu is shown. The BrowserWindow
registers a handler for that event with the Window menu. The event handler gets the open
window list by calling owner.getOpenWindowList() and uses it to rebuild the menu before it
appears on the screen. Here is the code, from the BrowserWindow class.
private void populateWindowMenu() {
ArrayList<BrowserWindow> windows = owner.getOpenWindowList();
while (windowMenu.getItems().size() > 4) {
// The menu contains 4 permanent items. Remove the other
// items, which correspond to open windows and are left
// over from the previous time the menu was shown.
windowMenu.getItems().remove(windowMenu.getItems().size() - 1);
}
if (windows.size() > 1) {
// Add a "Close All" command only if this is not the only window.
MenuItem item = new MenuItem("Close All and Exit");
item.setOnAction( e -> Platform.exit() );
windowMenu.getItems().add(item);
windowMenu.getItems().add( new SeparatorMenuItem() );
}
for (BrowserWindow window : windows) {
String title = window.getTitle(); // Menu item text is the window title.
if (title.length() > 60) {
// Let’s not use absurdly long menu item texts.
title = title.substring(0,57) + ". . .";
}
MenuItem item = new MenuItem(title);
final BrowserWindow win = window; // (for use in a lambda expression)
// The event handler for this menu item will bring the corresponding
// window to the front by calling its requestFocus() method.
item.setOnAction( e -> win.requestFocus() );
windowMenu.getItems().add(item);
if (window == this) {
// Since this window is already at the front, the item
// corresponding to this window is disabled.
item.setDisable(true);
}
}
}

∗ ∗ ∗
And that just about covers things. As you can see, it’s not very difficult to manage a multi-
window application. And it is wonderfully easy to write a reasonably functional web browser
in JavaFX. This has been a good example of building on existing classes. And we’ve also seen
some nice new examples of working with events. With that, we have almost reached the end of
this textbook. The final section will cover a few odds-and-ends of GUI programming.
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 727

13.5 Finishing Touches

In this final section, I will present a program that is more complex and a little more
polished than those we have looked at previously. Most of the examples in this book have been
“toy” programs that illustrated one or two points about programming techniques. It’s time
to put it all together into a full-scale program that uses many of the techniques that we have
covered, and a few more besides. After discussing the program and its basic design, I’ll use it
as an excuse to talk briefly about some of the features of Java that didn’t fit into the rest of
this book, including some that apply to all programs, not just GUI programs.
The program that we will look at is a Mandelbrot Viewer that lets the user explore the
famous Mandelbrot set. I will begin by explaining what that means. Note that an even more
capable Mandelbrot program can be found at
https://math.hws.edu/eck/js/mandelbrot/java/MB-java.html.
And there is a JavaScript version that will run in your web browser at
https://math.hws.edu/eck/js/mandelbrot/MB.html

13.5.1 The Mandelbrot Set

The Mandelbrot set is a set of points in the xy-plane that is defined by a computational
procedure. To use the program, all you really need to know is that the Mandelbrot set can be
used to make some pretty pictures, but here are the mathematical details: Consider the point
that has real-number coordinates (a,b) and apply the following computation:
Let x = a
Let y = b
Repeat:
Let newX = x*x - y*y + a
Let newY = 2*x*y + b
Let x = newX
Let y = newY
As the loop is repeated, the point (x,y) changes. The question for the Mandelbrot set is, does
(x,y) grow without bound, or is it trapped forever in a finite region of the plane? If (x,y)
escapes to infinity (that is, grows without bound), then the starting point (a,b) is not in the
Mandelbrot set. If (x,y) is trapped in a finite region, then (a,b) is in the Mandelbrot set.
Now, it is known that if x2 + y2 ever becomes strictly greater than 4, then (x,y) will escape to
infinity. So, if x2 + y2 ever becomes bigger than 4 in the above loop, we can end the loop and
say that (a,b) is definitely not in the Mandelbrot set. For a point (a,b) in the Mandelbrot
set, the loop will never end. When we do this on a computer, of course, we don’t want to have
a loop that runs forever, so we put a limit on the number of times that the loop is executed.
That limit is maxIterations:
x = a;
y = b;
count = 0;
while ( x*x + y*y < 4.1 ) {
count++;
if (count > maxIterations)
break;
double newX = x*x - y*y + a;
double newY = 2*x*y + b;
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 728

x = newY;
y = newY;
}
After this loop ends, if count is less than or equal to maxIterations, we can say that (a,b)
is definitely not in the Mandelbrot set. If count is greater than maxIterations, then (a,b)
might or might not be in the Mandelbrot set, but the larger maxIterations is, the more likely
that (a,b) is actually in the set.
To make a picture from this procedure, use a rectangular grid of pixels to represent some
rectangle in the plane. Each pixel corresponds to some real number coordinates (a,b). (Use
the coordinates of the center of the pixel.) Run the above loop for each pixel. If the count goes
past maxIterations, color the pixel black; this is a point that is possibly in the Mandelbrot
set. Otherwise, base the color of the pixel on the value of count after the loop ends, using
different colors for different counts. In some sense, the higher the count, the closer the point
is to the Mandelbrot set, so the colors give some information about points outside the set and
about the shape of the set. However, it’s important to understand that the colors are arbitrary
and that colored points are definitely not in the set. Here is a screenshot from the Mandelbrot
Viewer program that uses this computation. The black region is the Mandelbrot set (except
that not all black points are known to be definitely in the set):

When you use the program, you can “zoom in” on small regions of the plane. To do so, just
click-and-drag the mouse on the image. This will draw a rectangular “zoom box” around part
of the image, as shown in the illustration. When you release the mouse, the part of the picture
inside the rectangle will be zoomed to fill the entire display. If you simply click a point in the
picture, you will zoom in on the point where you click by a magnification factor of two. (Shift-
click or use the right mouse button to zoom out instead of zooming in.) The interesting points
are along the boundary of the Mandelbrot set. In fact, the boundary is infinitely complex.
(Note that if you zoom in too far, you will exceed the capabilities of the double data type;
nothing is done in the program to prevent this. The image will first become “blocky” and then
meaningless.)
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 729

You can use the “MaxIterations” menu to increase the maximum number of iterations
in the loop. Remember that black pixels might or might not be in the set; when you
increase “MaxIterations,” you might find that a black region becomes filled with color. The
“Palette” menu determines the set of colors that are used. Different palettes give very different
visualizations of the set, but it’s just the arbitrary colors that are different. The “PaletteLength”
menu determines how many different colors are used. In the default setting, a different color is
used for each possible value of count in the algorithm. Sometimes, you can get a much better
picture by using a different number of colors. If the palette length is less than maxIterations,
the palette is repeated to cover all the possible values of count; if the palette length is greater
than maxIterations, only part of of the palette will be used. (If the picture is of an almost
uniform color, try decreasing the palette length, since that makes the color vary more quickly
as count changes. If you see what look like randomly colored dots instead of bands of color,
try increasing the palette length.)
The program has a “File” menu that can be used to save the picture as a PNG image file.
You can also save a “param” file which simply saves the settings that produced the current
picture. A param file can be read back into the program using the “Open” command.
The Mandelbrot set is named after Benoit Mandelbrot, who was the first person to note the
incredible complexity of the set. It is astonishing that such complexity and beauty can arise
out of such a simple algorithm.

13.5.2 Design of the Program

Most classes in Java are defined in packages. While we have used standard packages such
as javafx.scene.control and java.io extensively, almost all of my programming examples
have been in the “default package,” which means that they are not declared to belong to any
named package. However, when doing more serious programming, it is good style to create
a package to hold the classes for your program. The Oracle corporation recommends that
package names should be based on an Internet domain name of the organization that produces
the package. My office computer has domain name eck.hws.edu, and no other computer in
the world should have the same name. According to Oracle, this allows me to use the package
name edu.hws.eck, with the elements of the domain name in reverse order. I can also use
subpackages of this package, such as edu.hws.eck.mdbfx, which is the package name that I
decided to use for my Mandelbrot Viewer application. No one else—or at least no one else who
uses the same naming convention—will ever use the same package name, so this package name
uniquely identifies my program.
I briefly discussed using packages in Subsection 2.6.6 and in the context of the programming
examples in Section 12.5. Here’s what you need to know for the Mandelbrot Viewer program:
The program is defined in seven Java source code files. They can be found in the directory
edu/hws/eck/mdbfx inside the source directory of the web site. (That is, they are in a directory
named mdbfx, which is inside a directory named eck, which is inside hws, which is inside edu.
The directory structure must follow the package name in this way.) The same directory also
contains a file named strings.properties; this file is used by the program and will be discussed
below. And there is an examples folder that contains resource files that are used with an
“Examples” menu. Since the Mandelbrot Viewer uses JavaFX, you need to make sure that
JavaFX is available to it when the program is compiled or run, as discussed in Section 2.6. For
an Integrated Development Environment such as Eclipse, you should just have to add the edu
directory to your project, provided that project has been configured to use JavaFX. If you want
to work on the command line instead, you must be working in the directory that contains the
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 730

edu directory, and you need to add JavaFX options to the javac and java commands. Let’s
say that you’ve defined jfxc and jfx commands that are equivalent to javac and java with
JavaFX options included, as discussed in Subsection 2.6.7. Then, to compile the source code,
use the command
jfxc edu/hws/eck/mdbfx/*.java
or, if you use Windows,
jfxc edu\hws\eck\mdbfx\*.java
The main application class for the program is defined by a class named Main. To run the
program, use the command:
jfx edu.hws.eck.mdbfx.Main
This command must also be given in the directory that contains the edu directory.
∗ ∗ ∗
The work of computing and displaying images of the Mandelbrot set is done in the file
MandelbrotCanvas.java. The MandelbrotCanvas class is a subclass of Canvas that can compute
and display visualizations of the Mandelbrot set, as discussed above. The image that is shown is
determined by the ranges of x and y values that are visible, the maximum number of iterations
for the Mandelbrot algorithm, and the palette that is used to color the pixels. The values
for these inputs come from elsewhere in the program; MandelbrotCanvas just calculates and
displays the image, based on the inputs that it is given.
In addition to coloring the pixels of the image, the MandelbrotCanvas class uses a two-
dimensional array to store the iteration count for each pixel in the image. As discussed above,
the iteration count for a pixel is used, along with the palette, to determine the color to use for
that pixel. If the palette is changed, the iteration counts are used to reset the color of each pixel
without doing the whole Mandelbrot computation again. However, if the range of xy-values
changes, or if the size of the window changes, all of the iteration counts must be recomputed.
Since the computation can take a while, it would not be acceptable to block the user interface
while the computation is being performed. The solution is to do the computation in separate
“worker” threads, as discussed in Subsection 12.2.3. The program uses one worker thread for
each available processor. When the computation begins, the image is transparent and you see
the gray background of the window. The full computation is broken into tasks, where each
task computes one row of the image. After finishing the computation, the task will apply the
appropriate colors to the pixels in the assigned row. Since the canvas can only be modified
in the JavaFX application thread, the task uses Platform.runLater() to make the changes.
(See Subsection 12.2.1.) The user can continue to use the menus and even the mouse while the
image is being computed.
The file MandelbrotPane.java represents the entire content of the Mandelbrot Viewer
window. MandelbrotPane is a subclass of BorderPane. The center position of a MandelbrotPane
holds a MandelbrotCanvas. In fact, a second, transparent, “overlay” canvas is stacked on top
of the canvas that contains the image. When the user draws a “zoom box” with the mouse,
the zoom box is actually drawn in the top canvas so that drawing it does not damage the
image. (See Subsection 13.2.4.) The bottom position in the MandelbrotPane contains a Label,
which serves as a “status bar” showing some information that might be interesting to the user.
Finally, there is a menu bar at the top of the pane.
The menu bar for the program is defined in Menus.java, which defines a subclass of
MenuBar. (See Subsection 6.6.2 for a discussion of menus and menu items.) All of
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 731

the menu items in the Menus class, as well as the commands that they represent, are
implemented by methods and nested subclasses in that class. Among the commands are file
manipulation commands that use techniques from Subsection 11.2.3, Subsection 11.5.2, and
Subsection 13.2.6. The “MaxIterations,” “Palette,” and “PaletteLength” menus each contain
a group of RadioMenuItems. In this program, I have defined a nested class inside Menus to
represent each group. For example, the PaletteManager class contains the menu items in the
“Palette” menu as instance variables. It registers an action event handler with each item, and
it defines a few utility routines for operating on the menu. The classes for the three menus are
very similar and should probably have been defined as subclasses of some more general class.
There is also an “Examples” menu that contains settings for several sample views of pieces of
the Mandelbrot set.
Much of the work of the program is done in MandelbrotPane. It installs MousePressed,
MouseDragged, and MouseReleased event handlers on the overlay canvas to implement zooming
the image. It also installs a MouseMoved event handler that updates the status bar to display
the xy-coordinates in the image that correspond to the mouse location. And a MouseExited
event handler on the canvas is used to reset the status bar to read “Idle” when the mouse moves
out of the canvas.
Furthermore, many menu commands are implemented by calling methods in the Mandebrot-
Pane class. For example, there is a setLimits() method that can be called to set the range
of xy-values that are shown in the image, and there are methods for setting the palette, the
palette length, and the value of maxIterations. Whenever one of these properties is changed,
the Mandelbrot image has to be modified. When the palette or palette length is changed, Man-
delbrotPane computes a new palette of colors, and calls a method in MandelbrotCanvas to tell
it to use the new palette. When the limits or maxIterations are changed, the image will have
to be entirely recomputed. MandelbrotPane calls a startJob() method in MandelbrotCanvas to
tell it to start a new background computation job. All of the work of setting up and managing
the job is done in MandelbrotCanvas.
The MandelbrotPane that is being used in the program is a parameter to the Menus
constructor, and the Menus object saves a copy in an instance variable, owner. Many of the
menu commands operate on the MandelbrotPane or on the MandelbrotCanvas that it contains.
In order to carry out these commands, the Menus uses its owner instance varialble to call
methods from the pane object. As for the MandelbrotCanvas, MandelbrotPane has an instance
method getDisplay() that returns a reference to the canvas that the pane contains. So, the
Menus object can obtain a reference to the canvas by calling owner.getDisplay(). In previous
examples in this book, everything was written as one large class file, so all the objects were
directly available to all the code. When a program is made up of multiple interacting files,
getting access to the necessary objects can be more of a problem.
MandelbrotPane, MandelbrotCanvas, and Menus are the major classes in the Mandelbrot
Viewer program. Main.java defines the subclass of Application that must be executed to
run the program. Its start() method just places a MandelbrotPane into the program’s
primary stage. (See Subsection 6.6.3.) It also has one other task, which is discussed below.
The program also contains three other classes. Two of them, from SetImageSizeDialog.java
and SetLimitsDialog.java, define custom dialog boxes. I will not discuss them further; see
Subsection 13.4.1. The final class is I18n, which I will discuss below.
This brief discussion of the design of the Mandelbrot Viewer has shown that it uses a wide
variety of techniques that were covered earlier in this book. In the rest of this section, we’ll
look at a few new features that are used in the program.
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 732

13.5.3 Events, Listeners, and Bindings

We have worked extensively with events and event listeners, and to a lesser extent with binding
of observable properties. But it is interesting to look at how they are used in the Mandelbrot
Viewer program, where there are several classes involved.
Let’s start from the following fact: The MandelbrotCanvas class knows nothing about the
Menus class, yet the menu bar contains menu items that seem to know what’s happening in
the canvas class. In particular, some of the menu items are disabled when a computation is
in progress. Since the canvas does not call methods or use variables from the menu class, how
can the menus know whether or not a computation is in progress in the canvas? The answer,
of course, is events—or more exactly, a binding (Subsection 13.1.2). A MandelbrotCanvas has
an observable boolean property named working that is true exactly when a computation is in
progress. The menu items should be disabled when the value of that property is true. That can
be set up in one line by binding the disableProperty of the menu item to the workingProperty
of the canvas. For example, this is done in the Menus constructor for the saveImage menu item
with the command
saveImage.disableProperty().bind(owner.getDisplay().workingProperty());
Here, owner refers to the MandelbrotPane, and owner.getDisplay() is the MandelbrotCanvas
that it contains.
Similarly, there is a “Restore Previous Limits” menu command that will reset the range
of the xy-values in the image to their values before the most recent change. The Menus
class uses an instance variable, previousLimits, of type double[ ], to remember the previous
limits. But how does it get that information? When the user zooms in or out on the image,
the change takes place entirely in the MandelbrotPane class. There has to be a way for
the menus to be notified of the change. Again, the solution is an observable property, this
time of type ObjectProperty<double[ ]>. The Menus constructor adds a ChangeListener to the
limitsProperty from the MandelbrotPane class:
owner.limitsProperty().addListener( (o,oldVal,newVal) -> {
// save old value of limitsProperty for use in "Restore Previous Limits"
previousLimits = oldVal;
undoChangeOfLimits.setDisable( previousLimits == null );
});
The point is that because events are used for communication, the MandelbrotCanvas and
MandelbrotPane classes are not strongly coupled to the Menus class. In fact, they could be used
without any modification in other programs that don’t even use the same Menus class. The
alternative to using events and binding would be to have the canvas and display classes call
methods such as limitsChanged() or computationStarted() in the Menus class. This would
be strong coupling: Any programmer who wanted to use MandelbrotCanvas would also have
to use Menus as well, or would have to modify the canvas class so that it no longer refers to
the Menus. Of course, not everything can be done with events and not all strong coupling is
bad: The MandelbrotPane class refers directly to the MandelbrotCanvas class and cannot be used
without it—but since the whole purpose of a MandelbrotPane is to hold a MandelbrotCanvas, the
coupling is not a problem. (MandelbrotCanvas, on the other hand, could be used independently
of MandelbrotPane.)
∗ ∗ ∗
There is another interesting use of events in MandelbrotPane. The image canvas and overlay
canvas are contained in a StackPane named displayHolder. When the user changes the size
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 733

of the window, the size of the displayHolder is changed to match. When that happens,
the canvasses should be resized to fit the new display size, and a new computation should be
started to compute a new image. The MandelbrotPane class installs listeners on the height
and width properties of displayHolder to respond to changes in size. (See the discussion of
canvas resizing in Subsection 13.1.2.) However when the user dynamically changes the size of
the window, the size of displayHolder can change many times each second. It is a fairly big
deal to set up and start a new image computation, not something I want to do many times in a
second. If you try resizing the program’s window, you’ll notice that the canvas doesn’t change
size dynamically as the window size changes. The same image is shown as long as the size is
changing. Only about one-third of a second after the size has stopped changing will a new,
resized image be computed. Here is how this works.
The listeners that handle changes in the size of displayHolder are set up to call a method
named startDelayedJob():
displayHolder.widthProperty().addListener( e -> startDelayedJob(300,true) );
displayHolder.heightProperty().addListener( e -> startDelayedJob(300,true) );
The first parameter to startDelayedJob() is the number of milliseconds to wait before resizing
the canvas and starting a new computation. (The second parameter merely says that the
canvas does need to be resized before the computation is started.) To implement the delay,
startDelayedJob() uses an object of type Timer, from package java.util. A TimerTask
can be submitted to a Timer to be executed after a specified delay. Until the time when it
is executed, it is possible to cancel a task. So, startDelayedJob() submits a task to the
timer that will resize the canvas after 300 milliseconds. If startDelayedJob() is called again
before that delay has expired, it cancels the previous task and submits a new one to the timer.
The result is that no task actually gets executed until 300 milliseconds pass with no call to
startDelayedJob() in that time.
(There is an option in the program to give a fixed size to the image. In that case, the size of
the displayHolder should not change. It is possible that the image might not fill the window,
leaving some of the gray background of the window visible. It is also possible that the image
might be too big for the window. In that case, scroll bars will appear that can be used to scroll
the image. This is done by a ScrollPane, a container that contains one component and provides
scroll bars for it if necessary. When the image size is fixed, the displayHolder is removed
from the MandelbrotPane and placed into a ScrollPane, and the ScrollPane is then placed in the
center position of the MandelbrotPane.)

13.5.4 A Few More GUI Details

To finish this textbook’s look at GUI programming, I would like to mention a couple details
that haven’t quite fit into previous sections.
We have seen that resource files are files that are part of a program but do not contain
program code. It is very easy to use image resource files with the Image class (Subsection 6.2.3).
But any kind of data can be stored in resource files. For example, the Mandelbrot Viewer
program has an “Examples” menu. When the user chooses a command from that menu, the
parameters for some particular view of the Mandelbrot set are loaded into the program. Those
parameters are stored in a resource file, which uses a simple XML text format. The question
is, how does the program get access to the file? Unfortunately, it’s not quite as easy as creating
an Image from an image resource file.
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 734

Resources are stored in files that are in the same locations as the compiled class files for
the program. Class files are located and loaded by something called a class loader , which
is represented in Java by an object of type ClassLoader. A class loader has a list of locations
where it will look for class files. This list is called the class path. It includes the location
where Java’s standard classes are stored. It generally includes the current directory. If the
program is stored in a jar file, the jar file is included on the class path. In addition to class
files, a ClassLoader is capable of finding resource files that are located on the class path or in
subdirectories of locations that are on the class path.
The first step in using a general resource is to obtain a ClassLoader. That class loader can
then be used to locate the resource file. Every object has an instance method getClass(),
which returns an object that represents the class of that object. The class object, in turn,
has a method getClassLoader() that returns the ClassLoader that loaded the class. So, in an
instance method of an object, you can say
ClassLoader classLoader = getClass().getClassLoader();
to get the class loader that you need. Another way to get a reference to a class object is to use
ClassName.class, where ClassName is the name of any class. For example, in the Mandelbrot
Viewer program, I could have used Menus.class.getClassLoader() to get the class loader for the
program.
Once you have a class loader, you can use it to look up a resource file. The class loader
will actually return a URL for a file, and you can read the data in the file from that URL.
(URLs, and reading the data that they refer to, were discussed in Section 11.4.) To find the
resource file, the class loader requires the path to the file, just as for an image resource file.
The path includes the file name as well as any directories that you need to traverse to get
to the file. The resource files that contain the Mandelbrot examples are inside a chain of
directories: edu/hws/eck/mdbfx/examples, and the full path for one of the files whose name
is “settings1.mdb” is edu/hws/eck/mdbfx/examples/settings1.mdb. Here’s a command that
gets a URL for that file:
URL resourceURL =
classLoader.getResource("edu/hws/eck/mdbfx/examples/settings1.mdb");
Once you have the URL, you can open an InputStream to read the data from the file:
InputStream stream = resourceURL.openStream();
and that’s exactly what’s done to implement the “Examples” menu in the Mandelbrot Viewer
program. By using an input stream, you can read any type of data from a resource file, and you
can do anything you want with it. But remember that for some kinds of data, such as images,
Java has more convenient ways to load the data into a program.
∗ ∗ ∗
My second, short topic is accelerators for menu items. An accelerator is a key or
combination of keys on the keyboard that can be used to invoke the menu item, as an alternative
to selecting the menu item with a mouse. A typical example is Control-S for saving a file. The
class KeyCombination, from package javafx.scene.input, represents combinations of keys that
can be used for accelerators. A KeyCombination can be created from a string such as “ctrl+S”.
The string contains items separated by plus signs. Each item except for the last represents a
modifier key: “ctrl”, “alt”, “meta”, “shift” and “shortcut”. (The modfiers can use upper or
lower case.) The “shortcut” modifier is special: On a Mac, it is equivalent to the command
key, “meta”; on Windows and Linux, it is equivalent to the control key, “ctrl”. So, by using
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 735

“shortcut”, you get the appropriate modifier for menu commands on the system where the
program is running. The last item in a key combination string is one of the enumerated type
constants from the KeyCode type. This will generally be an upper case letter, which represents
one of the letter keys (it must be upper case), but it can also be a function key such as F9. (Not
all keys will work.) For example, the string “ctrl+shift+N” represents holding down the control
and shift keys and pressing the “N” key; the string “shortcut+S” represents holding down the
appropriate modifier for the computer you are using and pressing the “S” key. The string that
describes a key combination can be passed to the static method KeyCombination.valueOf()
to make a key combination object that can be used to install an accelerator for a menu item.
Here, for example, is the code from the Mandebrot Viewer program that adds an accelerator
to the MenuItem, saveImage, for the “Save Image” command:
saveImage.setAccelerator( KeyCombination.valueOf("shortcut+shift+S") );
Accelerators can be used with any kind of menu items, including RadioMenuItem and
CheckMenuItem. In all cases when the user types the accelerator key combination, it has the
same effect as selecting the item with the mouse. The accelerator for a menu item is ordinarily
shown in the menu item, along with the text of the menu item. In the Mandelbrot Viewer
program, all of the commands in the “File” and “Control” menus have accelerators.

13.5.5 Internationalization
In the remainder of this section, we look at two topics the apply to all programs, not to GUI
programming in particular. These are things that you are not likely to use in a small program
written for your own use, but they are important for large applications.
Internationalization refers to writing a program that is easy to adapt for running in
different parts of the world. Internationalization is often referred to as I18n, where 18 is the
number of letters between the “I” and the final “n” in “Internationalization.” The process of
adapting the program to a particular location is called localization, and the locations are
called locales. Locales differ in many ways, including the type of currency used and the format
used for numbers and dates, but the most obvious difference is language. Here, I will discuss
how to write a program so that it can be easily translated into other languages.
The key idea is that strings that will be presented to the user should not be coded into the
program source code. If they were, then a translator would have to search through the entire
source code, replacing every string with its translation. Then the program would have to be
recompiled. In a properly internationalized program, all the strings are stored together in one
or more files that are separate from the Java source code, where they can easily be found and
translated. And since the source code doesn’t have to be modified to do the translation, no
recompilation is necessary.
To implement this idea, the strings are stored in one or more properties files. A properties
file is just a list of key/value pairs. For translation purposes, the values are strings that will be
presented to the user; these are the strings that have to be translated. The keys are also strings,
but they don’t have to be translated because they will never be presented to the user. Since
they won’t have to be modified, the key strings can be used in the program source code. Each
key uniquely identifies one of the value strings. The program can use the key string to look up
the corresponding value string from the properties file. The program only needs to know the
key string; the user will only see the value string. When the properties file is translated, the
user of the program will see different value strings.
The format of a properties file is very simple. The key/value pairs take the form
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 736

key.string=value string
There are no spaces in the key string or before the equals sign. Periods are often used to divide
words in the key string. The value string can contain spaces or any other characters. If the line
ends with a backslash (“\”), the value string is continued on the next line; in this case, spaces
at the beginning of that line are ignored. A properties file should use the UTF-8 charset (see
Subsection 11.1.3).
Suppose that the program wants to present a string to the user (as the name of a menu
command, for example). The properties file would contain a key/value pair such as
menu.saveimage=Save PNG Image...
where “Save PNG Image. . . ” is the value string, which will appear in the menu. The program
would use the key string, “menu.saveimage”, to look up the corresponding value string and
would then use the value string as the text of the menu item. In Java, the lookup process is
supported by the ResourceBundle class, which knows how to retrieve and use properties files.
Sometimes a string that is presented to the user contains substrings that are not known until
the time when the program is running. A typical example is the name of a file. Suppose, for
example, that the program wants to tell the user, “Sorry, the file, hfilenamei, cannot be loaded”,
where hfilenamei is the name of a file that was selected by the user at run time. To handle
cases like this, value strings in properties files can include placeholders that will be replaced by
strings to be determined by the program at run time. The placeholders take the form “{0}”,
“{1}”, “{2}”, . . . . For the file error example, the properties file might contain:
error.cantLoad=Sorry, the file, {0}, cannot be loaded
The program would fetch the value string for the key error.cantLoad. It would then substitute
the actual file name for the placeholder, “{0}”. Note that when the string is translated, the word
order might be completely different. By using a placeholder for the file name, the translator
can make sure that the file name is put in the correct grammatical position for the language
that is being used. Placeholder substitution is not handled by the ResourceBundle class, but
Java has another class, MessageFormat, that makes such substitutions easy.
For the Mandelbrot Viewer program, the properties file is strings.properties. (Any properties
file should have a name that ends in “.properties”.) Any string that you see when you run
the program comes from this file. For handling value string lookup, I wrote the class I18n.java.
The I18n class has a static method
public static tr( String key, Object... args )
that handles the whole process. Here, key is the key string that will be looked up in
strings.properties. Additional parameters, if any, will be substituted for placeholders in
the value string. (Recall that the formal parameter declaration “Object...” means that there
can be any number of actual parameters after key; see Subsection 7.1.2.) Typical uses would
include:
String saveImageCommandText = I18n.tr( "menu.saveimage" );
String errMess = I18n.tr( "error.cantLoad" , selectedFile.getName() );
You will see function calls like this throughout the Mandelbrot Viewer source code. The I18n
class is written in a general way so that it can be used in any program. As long as you provide
a properties file as a resource, the only things you need to do are change the resource file name
in I18n.java and put the class in your own package.
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 737

It is actually possible to provide several alternative properties files in the same program.
For example, you might include French and Japanese versions of the properties file along
with an English version. If the English properties file is named strings.properties, then
the names for the French and Japanese versions should be strings fr.properties and
strings ja.properties. Every language has a two-letter code, such as “fr” and “ja”, that is
used in constructing properties file names for that language. The program asks for the properties
file using the simple name “strings”. If the program is being run on a Java system in which
the preferred language is French, the program will try to load “strings fr.properties”; if
that fails, it will look for “strings.properties”. This means that the program will use the
French properties files in a French locale; it will use the Japanese properties file in a Japanese
locale; and in any other locale it will use the default properties file.

13.5.6 Preferences
Most serious programs allow the user to set preferences. A preference is really just a piece of
the program’s state that is saved between runs of the program. In order to make preferences
persistent from one run of the program to the next, the preferences could simply be saved to a
file in the user’s home directory. However, there would then be the problem of locating the file.
There would be the problem of naming the file in a way that avoids conflicts with file names
used by other programs. And there would be the problem of cluttering up the user’s home
directory with files that the user shouldn’t even have to know about.
To deal with these problems, Java has a standard means of handling preferences. It is
defined by the package java.util.prefs. In general, the only thing that you need from this
package is the class named Preferences.
In the Mandelbrot Viewer program, the file Main.java has an example of using Preferences.
In most programs, the user sets preferences in a custom dialog box. However, the Mandelbrot
program doesn’t have any preferences that are appropriate for that type of treatment. Instead,
as an example, I automatically save a few aspects of the program’s state as preferences. Every
time the program starts up, it reads the preferences, if any are available. Every time the
program terminates, it saves the preferences. (Saving the preferences poses an interesting
problem because the program ends when the application window closes, and we need a way to
arrange for preferences to be saved whenever that happens. The solution is to use events: The
start() method in Main registers an event handler with the window to listen for the event that
is generated when the window closes. The handler for that event saves the preferences.)
Preferences for Java programs are stored in some platform-dependent form in some platform-
dependent location. As a Java programmer, you don’t have to worry about it; the Java
preferences system knows where to store the data. There is still the problem of identifying
the preferences for one program among all the possible Java programs that might be running
on a computer. Java solves this problem in the same way that it solves the package naming
problem. In fact, by convention, the preferences for a program are identified by the package
name of the program, with a slight change in notation. For example, the Mandelbrot Viewer
program is defined in the package edu.hws.eck.mdbfx, and its preferences are identified by the
string “/edu/hws/eck/mdbfx”. (The periods have been changed to “/”, and an extra “/” has
been added at the beginning.)
The preferences for a program are stored in something called a “node.” The user preferences
node for a given program identifier can be accessed as follows:
Preferences root = Preferences.userRoot();
Preferences prefnode = root.node(pathName);
CHAPTER 13. GUI PROGRAMMING CONTINUED 738

where pathname is the string, such as “/edu/hws/eck/mdbfx”, that identifies the node. The
node itself consists of a simple list of key/value pairs, where both the key and the value are
strings. You can store any strings you want in preferences nodes—they are really just a way of
storing some persistent data between program runs. In general, though, the key string identifies
some particular preference item, and the associated value string is the value of that preference.
A Preferences object, prefnode, contains methods prefnode.get(key) for retrieving the value
string associated with a given key and prefnode.put(key,value) for setting the value string
for a given key.
In Main.java, I use preferences to store the shape and position of the program’s window.
This makes the size and shape of the window persistent between runs of the program; when
you run the program, the window will be right where you left it the last time you ran it. I also
store the name of the directory that contained the file most recently opened or saved by the
user of the program. This is particularly satisfying, since the default behavior for a file dialog
box is to start in the working directory, which is hardly ever the place where the user wants to
keep a program’s files. With the preferences feature, I can switch to the right directory the first
time I use the program, and from then on I’ll automatically be back in that directory when I
use the program again. You can look at the source code in Main.java for the details.
∗ ∗ ∗
And that’s it. . . . There’s a lot more that I could say about Java and about programming
in general, but this book is only “An Introduction to Programming Using Java,” and it’s time
for our journey to end. I hope that it has been a pleasant journey for you, and I hope that I
have helped you establish a foundation that you can use as a basis for further exploration.
Exercises 739

Exercises for Chapter 13

1. The folder nature-images contains several pictures of animals. (In the web site download, (solution)
you can find that folder in the chapter13 directory inside the source directory.) Write
a “scratch off” program that could be used by a small child that works as follows: The
program window starts by showing a large uniformly colored rectangle, with one of the
animal pictures hidden behind it. As the user drags the mouse over the image, part of the
colored overlay is scratched off, revealing the picture underneath. Here is what it should
look like after part of the overlay has been removed:

You can implement this by using one canvas, containing the colored overlay, stacked on
top of another canvas that contains the animal picture. (Stacked canvases were used in
the sample program ToolPaint.java from Subsection 13.2.4.) To implement scratching off
part of the overlay, just clear a small rect in the overlay canvas around the mouse location.
The program should have some way to move on to the next picture. Another idea is to
have several different sizes of scratchers, so that an impatient child can use a giant one
that will remove large swatches of color.

2. The StopWatchLabel component from Subsection 13.3.1 displays the text “Timing. . . ” (solution)
when the stopwatch is running. It would be nice if it displayed the elapsed time since
the stopwatch was started. For that, you need to create an AnimationTimer. (See Subsec-
tion 6.3.5.) Add an AnimationTimer to the original source code, StopWatchLabel.java, to
drive the display of the elapsed time in seconds.

3. Improve the program ToolPaint.java, from Section 13.2. You can any improvements you (solution)
like, but here are some suggestions:
• Have separate menus for “Fill Color” and “Stroke Color”.
• Make it possible for the user to draw shapes that are both filled and stroked. For
example, add two new tools, “Stroked Filled Rect” and “StrokedFilledOval”.
• Add a “Line Width” menu.
• Add keyboard accelerators for some commands (see Subsection 13.5.4).
Exercises 740

• Make it possible to use a translucent fill color. A simple approach to this is to use a
CheckMenuItem to select either fully opaque or 50% opaque fill. I don’t advise trying
to implement translucent stroke colors, since that’s more difficult.
• Add an “Undo” command that will restore the image to what it was before the last
time it was modified. This can be implemented by making a copy of the image before
you modify it. It’s possible to have a multi-level undo, but that’s harder and uses
more memory.
Remember that the ToolPaint program requires SimpleDialogs.java.

4. The sample program PhoneDirectoryFileDemo.java from Subsection 11.3.2 keeps data for (solution)
a “phone directory” in a file in the user’s home directory. Exercise 11.5 asked you to
revise that program to use an XML format for the data. Both programs have a simple
command-line user interface. For this exercise, you should provide a GUI interface for the
phone directory data. You can base your program either on the original sample program
or on the modified XML version from the exercise. Use a TableView to hold the data.
The user should be able to edit all the entries in the table. Also, the user should be able
to add and delete rows. Include either buttons or menu commands that can be used to
perform these actions. The delete command should delete the selected row, if any. New
rows should be added at the end of the table.
Your program should load data from the file when it starts and save data to the file
when it ends, just as the two previous programs do. For a GUI program, you need to
save the data when the user closes the window, which ends the program. To do that, you
can add a listener to the program’s Stage to handle the WindowHidden event. For an
example of using that event, the Mandelbrot Viewer program from Section 13.5 uses it to
save preferences when the program ends. For an example of creating an editable table,
see ScatterPlotTableDemo.java.
(I suggest keeping things simple. You not being asked to write a real phone book
application! The point is mostly to make an editable table. My program has text input
boxes for name and number, and an “Add” button for adding a new entry containing the
input in those boxes. My program always saves the data, whether or not the user has
changed it. The interface will be poor: The user has to double-click a cell to edit it and
press return to finish the edit and save the new value. It is possible to make a table with
a better editing interface, but to do that, you need to write a new CellFactory class for the
table.)
Quiz 741

Quiz on Chapter 13
(answers)

1. What is an “observable property”?

2. Suppose that input is a TextField and that label is a Label. Suppose that you want the
text on the label to always be the same as the text in the text field. Write two code
segments to accomplish that, one using an event listener and one using property binding.

3. Describe the picture that is produced by the following code, where canvas is a Canvas:
GraphicsContext g = canvas.getGraphicsContext2D();
g.setFill(Color.WHITE);
g.fillRect(0,0,canvas.getWidth(),canvas.getHeight());
g.translate( canvas.getWidth()/2, canvas.getHeight()/2 );
g.rotate( 30 );
g.setFill(Color.RED);
g.fillRect(0,0,100,100);

4. Create a LinearGradient paint and use it to fill the rectangle drawn by

g.fillRect(100,100,300,200). The rectangle should look like this, light gray at the
top and black at the bottom:

(The API for creating gradient paints is complicated. It’s OK to look it up!)

5. Suppose that g is a GraphicsContext. Explain the purpose of the methods g.save() and
g.restore().

6. What does the acronym MVC stand for, and how does it apply to the List class?

7. What is the difference between a “modal” dialog box and a “modeless” dialog box?

8. The Java API includes some classes in a package named org.w3c.dom. Why such a funny
package name?

9. Suppose that closeItem is a MenuItem. What is done by the following statement? (What
is an “accelerator”?)
closeItem.setAccelerator( KeyCombination.valueOf("ctrl+W") );

10. What is meant by Internationalization of a program?

Appendix: Source Files

This appendix contains a list of the examples appearing in the free, on-line textbook
Introduction to Programming Using Java, Version 9, JavaFX Edition.
The web site for the book, https://math.hws.edu/javanotes, has links for downloading the
entire web site. If you do that, you will find the source code files in a directory named source.
There is also a link for downloading just the source code files. The README file from the
download includes some instructions for compiling and running the programs. Note however
that some of these examples depend on other source files, such as TextIO.java, that are not
built into Java. These are classes that I have written. All necessary files are included in the
downloads, and links to the individual files are provided below.
The solutions to end-of-chapter exercises are not listed in this appendix. Each end-of-
chapter exercise has its own Web page, which discusses its solution. The source code of a
sample solution of each exercise is given on the solution page for that exercise. If you want to
compile the solution, you should be able to copy-and-paste the solution out of a Web browser
window and into a text editing program. (You can’t copy-and-paste from the HTML source
of the solution page, since it contains extra HTML markup commands that the Java compiler
won’t understand; the HTML markup does not appear when the page is displayed in a Web
browser.) Exercise solutions are also available as a download from the front page of the web
site. The README file from the download has more information.

Part 1: Text-oriented Examples

Many of the sample programs in the text are based on console-style input/output, where the
computer and the user type lines of text back and forth to each other. Almost all of these
programs use the standard output object, System.out, for output. Many of them use my non-
standard class, TextIO, for input. For the programs that use TextIO, one of the files TextIO.java
or TextIO.class must be available when you compile the program, and TextIO.class must be
available when you run the program. Since TextIO is defined in a package named textio, this
means that TextIO.java and/or TextIO.class must be in a directory named textio, which must
be in the same directory as the program. There is also a GUI version of TextIO; you can find
information about it in Part 3, below.
• HelloWorld.java, from Section 2.1, a trivial program that does nothing but print out the
message, “Hello World!”. A Hello World program is typically the first program for someone
learning a new programming language.
• Interest.java, from Section 2.2, computes the interest on a specific amount of money over
a period of one year.
• TimedComputation.java, from Section 2.3, demonstrates a few basic built-in subroutines
and functions.

743
Source Code Listing 744

• TextBlockDemo, from Subsection 2.3.4, demonstrates text blocks, a kind of multiline

string literal. This demo requires Java 17.
• EnumDemo.java, from Section 2.3, a very simple first demonstration of enum types.
The enum types used in this program are defined in the same file as the program. An
alternative version, SeparateEnumDemo.java, uses the same enums, but the enums are
defined in separate files, Day.java and Month.java
• PrintSquare.java, from Section 2.4, reads an integer typed in by the user and prints the
square of that integer. This program depends on TextIO.java. The same is true
for almost all of the programs in the rest of this list.
• Interest2.java, from Section 2.4, calculates interest on an investment for one year, based
on user input. Uses TextIO for user input.
• CreateProfile.java, from Section 2.4, a simple demo of output to a file, using TextIO.
• Interest2WithScanner.java, from Section 2.4, is a version of Interest2.java that uses Scanner
instead of TextIO to read input from the user.
• Interest3.java, from Section 3.1, the first example that uses control statements.
• ThreeN1.java, from Section 3.2, outputs a 3N+1 sequence for a given stating value.
• ComputeAverage.java, from Section 3.3, computes the average value of some integers
entered by the user.
• CountDivisors.java, from Section 3.4, counts the number of divisors of an integer entered
by the user.
• ListLetters.java, from Section 3.4, lists all the distinct letters in a string entered by the
user.
• LengthConverter.java, from Section 3.5, converts length measurements input by the user
into different units of measure.
• ComputeAverage2.java, from Section 3.7, computes the average value of some real numbers
entered by the user. Demonstrates the use of try..catch for Double.parseDouble.
• AverageNumbersFromFile.java, from Section 3.7, finds the sum and the average of numbers
read from a file. Demonstrates the use of try..catch statements with TextIO.
• BirthdayProblem.java, from Section 3.8, demonstrates random access to array elements
using the “birthday problem” (how many people do you have to choose at random until
two are found whose birthdays are on the same day of the year).
• ReverseInputNumbers.java, from Section 3.8, illustrates the use of a partially full array
by reading some numbers from the user and then printing them in reverse order.
• GuessingGame.java, from Section 4.2, lets the user play guessing games where the
computer picks a number and the user tries to guess it. A slight variation of this program,
which reports the number of games won by the user, is GuessingGame2.java.
• RowsOfChars.java, from Section 4.3, a rather useless program in which one subroutine
calls another.
• CopyTextFile.java, from Section 4.3, demonstrates the use of command-line arguments by
using file names from the command line.
• ThreeN2.java, from Section 4.4, is an improved 3N+1 program that uses subroutines and
prints its output in neat columns.
• RollTwoPairs.java, from Subsection 5.2.2, uses PairOfDice.java to simulate rolling two
pairs of dice until the same total is rolled on both pairs.
Source Code Listing 745

• HighLow.java, from Section 5.4, a simple card game. It uses the classes Card.java and
Deck.java, which are given as examples of object-oriented programming. Also available,
the card-related classes Hand.java and, from Subsection 5.5.1, BlackjackHand.java.
• ReverseWithDynamicArray.java, from Section 7.2, reads numbers from the user then
prints them out in reverse order. It does this using the class DynamicArrayOfInt.java
as an example of using dynamic arrays. ReverseWithArrayList.java, from Section 7.3, is
functionally identical, but it uses an ArrayList<Integer> instead of a DynamicArrayOfInt.
• SymmetricMatrix.java, from Section 7.6, implements a symmetric 2D array of double.
The program TestSymmetricMatrix.java tests the SymmetricMatrix class.
• LengthConverter2.java, from Section 8.2, converts measurements input by the user to
inches, feet, yards, and miles. This improvement on LengthConverter.java allows inputs
combining several measurements, such as “3 feet 7 inches,” and it detects illegal inputs.
• TryStatementDemo.java, from Section 8.3, a small demo program with a try..catch
statement that includes autoclosing of a resource.
• LengthConverter3.java, from Section 8.3, is a revision of LengthConverter2.java that uses
exceptions to handle errors in the user’s input.
• TowersOfHanoi.java, from Section 9.1, prints out the steps in a solution to the Towers of
Hanoi problem; an example of recursion.
• StringList.java, from Section 9.2, implements a linked list of strings. The program
ListDemo.java tests this class.
• PostfixEval.java, from Section 9.3, evaluates postfix expressions using a stack. Depends
on the StackOfDouble class defined in StackOfDouble.java.
• SortTreeDemo.java, from Section 9.4, demonstrates a binary sort tree of strings.
• SimpleParser1.java, SimpleParser2.java, and SimpleParser3.java, from Section 9.5, are
three programs that parse and evaluate arithmetic expressions input by the user.
SimpleParser1 only handles fully parenthesized expressions. SimpleParser2 evaluates
ordinary expressions where some parentheses can be omitted. SimpleParser3 constructs
expression trees to represent input expressions and uses the expression trees to evaluate
the expressions.
• WordListWithTreeSet.java, from Section 10.2, makes an alphabetical list of words from a
file. A TreeSet is used to eliminate duplicates and sort the words.
• WordListWithPriorityQueue.java, from Section 10.2, makes an alphabetical list of words
from a file. This is a small modification of the previous example that uses a PriorityQueue
instead of a TreeSet. The result is an alphabetical list of words in which duplicates are
not removed.
• SimpleInterpreter.java, from Section 10.4, demonstrates the use of a HashMap as a symbol
table in a program that interprets simple commands from the user.
• WordCount.java, from Section 10.4, counts the number of occurrences of each word in a
file. The program uses several features from the Java Collection Framework.
• RiemannSumStreamExperiment.java, from Section 10.6, demos Java’s stream API. Runs
an experiment to measure the compute time for a problem when it is solved using a for
loop, using a sequential stream, and using a parallel stream.
• ReverseFileWithScanner.java, from Section 11.2, shows how to read and write files in a
simple command-line application. ReverseFileWithResources.java is a version that uses
the “resource” pattern in try..catch statements.
Source Code Listing 746

• DirectoryList.java, from Section 11.2, lists the contents of a directory specified by the user;
demonstrates the use of the File class.
• CopyFile.java, from Section 11.3, is a program that makes a copy of a file, using file names
that are given as command-line arguments. CopyFileAsResources.java is a version of the
program that also demonstrates uses the “resource” pattern in a try..catch statement.
• PhoneDirectoryFileDemo.java, from Section 11.3, demonstrates the use of a file for storing
data between runs of a program.
• FetchURL.java, from Section 11.4, reads and displays the contents of a specified URL, if
the URL refers to a text file.
• ShowMyNetwork.java, mentioned in Section 11.4, is a short program that prints informa-
tion about each network interface on the computer where it is run, including IP addresses
associated with each interface.
• DateClient.java and DateServer.java, from Section 11.4, are very simple first examples of
network client and server programs.
• CLChatClient.java and CLChatServer.java, from Section 11.4, demonstrate two-way
communication over a network by letting users send messages back and forth; however,
no threading is used and the messages must strictly alternate.
• ThreadTest1.java, from section Section 12.1, runs one or more threads that all perform the
same task, to demonstrate that they run simultaneously and finish in an indeterminate
order.
• ThreadTest2.java, from section Section 12.1, divides up a task (counting primes) among
several threads, to demonstrate parallel processing and the use of synchronization.
ThreadTest3.java, from the same section, is a minor modification of ThreadTest2.java
that uses an AtomicInteger instead of synchronization to safely add up values from several
threads.
• DateServerWithThreads.java and DateServerWithThreadPool.java, from Section 12.4, are
modifications of chapter11/DateServer.java (Subsection 11.4.4) that use threads to handle
communication with clients. The first program creates a new thread for each connection.
The second uses a thread pool, and it uses a blocking queue to send connections from the
main program to the pool. The threaded servers will work with original client program,
chapter11/DateClient.java.
• CLMandelbrotMaster.java, CLMandelbrotWorker.java, and CLMandelbrotTask.java,
from Section 12.4, are a demonstration of distributed computing in which pieces of a
large computation are sent over a network to be computed by “worker” programs.

Part 2: Graphical Examples from the Text

The following sample programs use a graphical user interface. All of these programs use JavaFX
as the GUI toolbox.
• GUIDemo.java is a simple demonstration of some basic GUI components from the JavaFX
graphical user interface library. It appears in the text in Section 1.6, but you won’t be
able to understand it until you learn about GUI programming.
• SimpleGraphicsStarter.java, from Section 3.9, draws a large number of randomly colored,
randomly positioned disks. This simple graphics program is our first example of a GUI
Source Code Listing 747

program. It is meant both as an introduction to graphics and as an example of using

control structures.
• MovingRects.java, from Section 3.9, draws a set of nested rectangles that seem to move
infinitely towards the center. This program is based on SimpleAnimationStarter.java,
which can be used as a starting point for writing similar animation programs. Random-
Circles.java is another animation in which the computer continuously adds random colored
disks to an image.
• RandomMosaicWalk.java, a program that displays a window full of colored squares with a
moving disturbance, from Section 4.7. This program depends on MosaicCanvas.java and
Mosaic.java.
• RandomMosaicWalk2.java is a version of the previous example, modified to use a few
named constants. From Section 4.8.
• GrowingCircleAnimation.java, from Section 5.3, shows an animation of growing, semi-
transparent circles. Requires CircleInfo.java. Used as a simple example of programming
with object.
• ShapeDraw.java, from Section 5.5, is a program that lets the user place various shapes on
a drawing area; an example of abstract classes, subclasses, and polymorphism.
• HelloWorldFX.java from Section 6.1, displays a the message in a window, with three
buttons for changing the message and quitting the program. One of the messages is
“Hello World”, and this program is used as the first example for learning about JavaFX
programming.
• SimpleColorChooser.java, used in Section 6.3 to demonstrate RGB and HSB colors. This
program uses techniques that are not covered until later in the text, and it is not presented
as a programming example. You can run it to experiment with colors.
• RandomStringl.java, from Section 6.2, shows 25 copies of the string “Hello JavaFX!” in
random colors and fonts.
• RandomCards.java, from Section 6.2, shows 5 cards selected at random from a deck.
Depends on the files Deck.java Card.java, and the image resource file Cards.png
• SimpleTrackMouse.java, from Section 6.3, shows information about mouse events as the
user moves and clicks with the mouse.
• SimplePaint.java, from Section 6.3, lets the user draw curves in a drawing area and select
the drawing color from a palette.
• KeyboardEventsDemo.java, from Section 6.5, shows how to use keyboard events.
• SubKiller.java, from Section 6.3, lets the user play a simple arcade-style game. Uses an
AnimationTimer as well as keyboard events.
• SliderDemo.java and TextInputDemo.java, small programs that demonstrate basic com-
ponents, used as examples in Section 6.4
• OwnLayoutDemo.java, from Section 6.5, shows how to lay out the components in a Pane,
which allows you to do your own layout.
• SimpleCalc.java, from Section 6.5, lets the user add, subtract, multiply, or divide two
numbers input by the user. A demo of text fields, buttons, and layout with nested
subpanels.
• HighLowGUI.java, from Section 6.5, implements a GUI version of the card game
HighLow.java, in which the user sees a playing card and guesses whether the next card will
Source Code Listing 748

be higher or lower in value. This program depends on Card.java, Hand.java, Deck.java,

and an image resource file, cards.png.
• MosaicDraw.java, from Section 6.6, demonstrates menus. In this program, the user colors
the squares of a mosaic by clicking-and-dragging the mouse. It uses MosaicCanvas.java to
define the mosaic itself.
• RandomStringsWithArray.java, from Section 7.2, shows multiple copies of a message in
random colors, sizes, and positions. There is an animation in which the copies move
around in the window. This is an improved version of RandomStrings.java that uses an
array to keep track of the data.
• SimplePaint2.java, from Section 7.3, lets the user draw colored curves and stores the data
needed for repainting the drawing surface in a list of type ArrayList<CurveData>.
• Complex.java and FullName.java are examples of record classes, from Section 7.4.
RecordDemo.java is a simple program that tests the two record classes.
• Life.java, from Section 7.6, implements John H. Conway’s game of life and is an example
of using 2D arrays. This program depends on MosaicCanvas.java.
• Checkers.java, from Section 7.6, lets two users play a game of checkers against each other.
Illustrates the use of a two-dimensional array and a variety of programming techniques.
(This is the longest program in the book so far, at over 700 lines!)
• Maze.java and LittlePentominos.java are demo programs mentioned in Section 9.1 as
examples of recursion. They use techniques that have not covered until Chapter 12. Note
that LittlePentominos depends on MosaicCanvas.java.
• Blobs.java, from Section 9.1, uses recursion to count groups of colored squares in a grid.
• DepthBreadth.java, from Section 9.3, demonstrates stacks and queues.
• TrivialEdit.java, from Section 11.3, lets the user edit short text files. This program
demonstrates reading and writing files and using file dialogs.
• SimplePaintWithFiles.java, from Section 11.3, demonstrates saving data from a program
to a file in both binary and character form. The program is a simple sketching program
based on SimplePaint2.java.
• SimplePaintWithXML.java, from Section 11.5, demonstrate saving data from a program
to a file in XML format. This program is a modification of SimplePaintWithFiles.java.
• XMLDemo.java, from Section 11.5, is a simple program that demonstrates basic parsing
of an XML document and traversal of the Document Object Model representation of the
document. The user enters the XML to be parsed in a text area.
• RandomArtWithThreads.java, from Section 12.2, uses a thread to drive a very simple
animation.
• QuicksortThreadDemo.java, from Section 12.2, demonstrates using a separate thread to
perform a computation, with simple inter-thread communication.
• BackgroundComputationDemo.java, from Section 12.2, demonstrates using a thread
running at a lower priority to perform a lengthy computation in the background. (The
program computes a visualization of a small piece of the Mandelbrot set, but the particular
computation that is done is not important.)
• MultiprocessingDemo1.java, from Section 12.2, is a modification of the previous example
that uses several threads to perform the background computation. This speeds up the
computation on multi-processor machines.
Source Code Listing 749

• MultiprocessingDemo2.java, from Section 12.3, is a modification of the previous example

that decomposes its task into a large number of fairly small subtasks, in order to achieve
better load balancing. The program uses a thread pool and a queue of tasks.
• MultiprocessingDemo3.java, from Section 12.3, is yet another version of the previous
examples. This one uses a pool of threads that run forever, taking tasks from a queue and
executing them. To make this possible, a blocking queue is used, defined by the standard
LinkedBlockingQueue class. MyLinkedBlockingQueue.java is a simple example of using
wait() and notify() directly that can be used as a replacement for LinkedBlockingQueue
in MultiprocessingDemo3.
• MultiprocessingDemo4.java, from Section 12.3 has the same functionality as
MultiprocessingDemo3, but uses an ExecutorService, from package java.util.concurrent,
to execute the tasks.
• TowersOfHanoiGUI.java, from Section 12.3, shows an animation of the famous Towers
Of Hanoi problem. The user can control the animation with Run/Pause, Next, and
StartAgain buttons. The program is an example of using wait() and notify() directly
for communication between threads.
• GUIChat.java, from Section 12.4, is a simple GUI program for chatting between two
people over a network. It demonstrates using a thread for reading data from a network
connection.
• netgame.common, from Section 12.5, is a package that defines a framework for networked
games. This framework is used in several examples: A chat room, defined in package
netgame.chat; a tic-tac-toe game, defined in package netgame.tictactoe; and a poker game,
defined in package netgame.fivecarddraw.
• BoundPropertyDemo.java, from Section 13.1, demonstrates bindings and bidirectional
bindings of JavaFX observable properties.
• CanvasResizeDemo.java, from Section 13.1, shows how to use property bindings to resize
a Canvas whenever the Pane that contains the Canvas is resized.
• StrokeDemo.java, from Section 13.2, demonstrates the use of various line properties for
stroking lines and rectangles.
• PaintDemo.java, from Section 13.2, demonstrates using a LinearGradient paint and using
an ImagePattern paint to fill a polygon. Uses the image resource files tile.png and
face-smile.png.
• TransformDemo.java,from Section 13.2, demonstrates applying various transforms, such
as scale and rotate, to the drawing that is done in canvas. Uses the image resource file
face-smile.png.
• ToolPaint.java, from Section 13.2, is a little paint program that illustrates pixel
manipulation and the use of a transparent overlay canvas for some drawing operations.
This program requires SimpleDialogs.java.
• SillyStamper.java, from Section 13.3, demonstrates using a ListView whose items are
ImageViews. The user can “stamp” images of a selected icon onto a drawing area. This
program uses the icon images in the directory stamper icons as resources.
• SimpleTableDemo.java, from Section 13.3, is a small demo of an uneditable TableView.
• ScatterPlotTableDemo.java, from Section 13.3, demonstrates an editable TableView. The
table holds (x,y) coordinates of points, and the user can edit the coords. A scatter plot
of points is displayed.
Source Code Listing 750

• SimpleDialogs.java, from Section 13.4, contains static methods for showing several kinds
of dialog box. The program TestDialogs.java tests the dialog methods by letting the user
click buttons to open the different kinds of dialog.
• WebBrowser.java, from Section 13.4, is a simple web browser based on JavaFX’s WebView
control. This program shows how to manage multiple windows in a JavaFX application.
It requires BrowserWindow.java, a subclass of Stage that does most of the work, and on
SimpleDialogs.java.
• The Mandelbrot program from Section 13.5, which computes and displays visualizations
of the Mandelbrot set, is defined by several classes in the package edu.hws.eck.mdbfx.
The source code files can be found in the directory edu/hws/eck/mdbfx.

Part 3: Auxiliary Files

This section lists some of the extra source files that are required by various examples in the
previous sections. The files listed here are those which are general enough to be potentially
useful in other programming projects. Links to these files are also given above, along with the
programs that use them.
• TextIO.java defines a class containing some static methods for doing input/output. These
methods make it easier to use the standard input stream, System.in. TextIO also has
methods for printing to System.out. It also supports other input sources and output
destinations, such as files. TextIO is in a package named textio. The TextIO class
is only useful in a command-line environment, and it might be inconvenient to use in
integrated development environments such as Eclipse in which standard input does not
work particularly well. In that case, you might want to use the following file instead.
• textiogui/TextIO.java, a GUI version of TextIO that opens a window where TextIO I/O
operations are performed. This is part of a package named textiogui to distinguish it
from the normal TextIO. A companion class in that package, textiogui/System.java, is a
fake System class that makes it possible to use System.out and other features of System
in the same window. I use these classes to build executable jar files for my text-oriented
examples that run in a window instead of on the command line. See the comments in the
source code files for more information. (Note that this GUI version of TextIO uses the
Swing GUI toolkit rather than JavaFX.)
• SimpleGraphicsStarter.java and SimpleAnimationStarter.java are small programs that you
can edit to make very simple pictures and animations These programs were used in
Section 3.9 and in some of the exercises for Chapter 3.
• Mosaic.java contains subroutines for opening and controlling a window that contains a grid
of colored rectangles. It depends on MosaicCanvas.java. It is used in several examples
and exercises in Chapter 4.
• MosaicCanvas defines a subclass of Canvas that shows little rectangles arranged in rows
and columns, with many options.
• StatCalc.java is a simple class that computes some statistics of a set of numbers. It is
used only for a couple exercises in Chapter 5 and Chapter 6.
• Expr.java defines a class Expr that represents mathematical expressions involving the
variable x. It is used only in a couple of the exercises in Chapter 8.
Source Code Listing 751

• TextReader.java is not used in this textbook, but it might be useful to some readers. A
TextReader reads character data from input streams. Input methods in an object of type
TextReader are similar to the static input methods in TextIO.
• netgame.common is a package that defines a framework for networked games, which is
discussed in detail in Section 12.5. The netgame packages also includes several examples.
• PokerRank.java can be used to assign ranks to hands of cards in poker games. The cards
are defined in the class PokerCard.java. There is also a PokerDeck.java All of these classes
are part of the package netgame.fivecarddraw, which is discussed in Subsection 12.5.4, but
these classes can be used independently of the netgame framework.
• SimpleDialogs.java contains easy-to-use static methods for showing several kinds of
JavaFX dialog box and getting back the results of user interaction when appropriate.
Glossary

abstraction. Abstraction refers, in general, to the idea of providing a simplified or higher

level interface to a complex system. It is closely related to the idea of a “black box.”
Abstraction makes it possible to understand or use a system, while ignoring some of the
details of what actually goes on in the system. For example, control abstractions such as
if statements and while loops are actually implemented in machine language by jump and
conditional jump instructions, but it is possible—and easier—to use if statements and
while loops without knowing anything about their machine language implementation.
Control abstractions make it possible to implement algorithms on a higher level than
machine language. Abstraction is a fundamental concept in computer science.
abstract class. A class that cannot be used to create objects, and that exists only for the
purpose of creating subclasses. Abstract classes in Java are defined using the modifier
abstract.
abstract data type (ADT). A data type for which the possible values of the type and the
permissible operations on those values are specified, without specifying how the values
and operations are to be implemented.
access specifier. A modifier used on a method definition or variable specification that
determines what classes can use that method or variable. The access specifiers in Java
are public, protected, and private. A method or variable that has no access specifier
is said to have “package” visibility.
activation record. A data structure that contains all the information necessary to implement
a subroutine call, including the values of parameters and local variables of the subroutine
and the return address to which the computer will return when the subroutine ends.
Activation records are stored on a stack, which makes it possible for several subroutine
calls to be active at the same time. This is particularly important for recursion, where
several calls to the same subroutine can be active at the same time.
actual parameter. A parameter in a subroutine call statement, whose value will be passed
to the subroutine when the call statement is executed. Actual parameters are also called
“arguments”.
address. Each location in the computer’s memory has an address, which is a number
that identifies that location. Locations in memory are numbered sequentially. In
modern computers, each byte of memory has its own address. Addresses are used when
information is being stored into or retrieved from memory.
algorithm. An unambiguous, step-by-step procedure for performing some task, which is
guaranteed to terminate after a finite number of steps.
alpha color component. A component of a color that says how transparent or opaque that
color is. The higher the alpha component, the more opaque the color.

753
Glossary 754

ALU. Arithmetic Logic Unit. The ALU is the part of the CPU that performs arithmetic
operations such as addition and subtraction and logical operations such as AND and
OR.
API. Application Programming Interface. A specification of the interface to a software package
or “toolbox.” The API says what classes or subroutines are provided in the toolbox and
how to use them.
applet. A type of Java program that is meant to run on a Web page in a Web browser, as
opposed to a stand-alone application.
animation. An apparently moving picture created by rapidly showing a sequence of still
images, called frames, one after the other. In Java, animations are often driven by Timer
objects; a new frame of the animation is shown each time the timer fires.
antialiasing. Adjusting the color of pixels to reduce the “jagged” effect that can occur when
shapes and text are represented by pixels. For antialiased drawing, when the shape covers
only part of a pixel, the color of the shape is blended with the previous color of the pixel.
The degree of blending depends on how much of the pixel is covered.
array. A list of items, sequentially numbered. Each item in the list can be identified by its
index, that is, its sequence number. In Java, all the items in array must have the same
type, called the base type of the array. An array is a random access data structure; that
is, you can get directly at any item in the array at any time.
array type. A data type whose possible values are arrays. If Type is the name of a type, then
Type[ ] is the array type for arrays that have base type Type.
assignment statement. A statement in a computer program that retrieves or computes a
value and stores that value in a variable. An assignment statement in Java has the form:
hvariable-namei = hexpressioni;
asynchronous event. An event that can occur at an unpredictable time, outside the control
of a computer program. User input events, such as pressing a button on the mouse, are
asynchronous.
ASCII. American Standard Code for Information Interchange. A way of encoding characters
using 7 bits for characters. ASCII code only supports 128 characters, with no
accented letters, non-English alphabets, special symbols, or ideograms for non-alphabetic
languages such as Chinese. Java uses the much larger and more complete Unicode code
for characters.
base case. In a recursive algorithm, a simple case that is handled directly rather than by
applying the algorithm recursively.
binary number. A number encoded as a sequence of zeros and ones. A binary number is
represented in the “base 2” in the same way that ordinary numbers are represented in
the “base 10.”
binary tree. A linked data structure that is either empty or consists of a root node that
contains pointers to two smaller (possibly empty) binary trees. The two smaller binary
trees are called the left subtree and the right subtree.
bit. A single-digit binary number, which can be either 0 or 1.
black box. A system or component of a system that can be used without understanding what
goes on inside the box. A black box has an interface and an implementation. A black
box that is meant to be used as a component in a system is called a module.
Glossary 755

block. In Java programming, a sequence of statements enclosed between a pair of braces, {

and }. Blocks are used to group several statements into a single statement. A block
can also be empty, meaning that it contains no statements at all and consists of just an
empty pair of braces.
blocking operation. An operation, such as reading data from a network connection, is said
to “block” if it has to wait for some event to occur. A thread that performs a blocking
operation can be “blocked” until the required event occurs. A thread cannot execute
any instructions while it is blocked. Other threads in the same program, however, can
continue to run.
blocking queue. A queue in which the dequeue operation will block if the queue is empty,
until an item is added to the queue. If the blocking queue has a limited capacity, the
enqueue operation can also block, if the queue is full.
bottom-up design. An approach to software design in which you start by designing basic
components of the system, then combine them into more complex components, and so
on.
BufferedImage. A class representing “off-screen canvases,” that is, images that are stored in
the computer’s memory and that can be used for drawing images off-screen.
branch. A control structure that allows the computer to choose among two or more different
courses of action. Java has two branch statements: if statements and switch statements.
byte. A unit of memory that consists of eight bits. One byte of memory can hold an eight-bit
binary number.
bytecode. “Java bytecode” is the usual name for the machine language of the Java Virtual
Machine. Java programs are compiled into Java bytecode, which can then be executed
by the JVM.
charset. A particular encoding of character data into binary form. Examples include UTF-8
and ISO-8859-1.
checked exception. An exception in Java that must be handled, either by a try..catch
statement or by a throws clause on the method that can throw he exception. Failure to
handle a checked exception in one way or the other is a syntax error.
class. The basic unit of programming in Java. A class is a collection of static and non-static
methods and variables. Static members of a class are part of the class itself; non-static,
or “instance,” members constitute a blueprint for creating objects, which are then said
to “belong” to the class.
class invariant. A statement about the state of a class, or of an object created from that
class, that is always true. Any method in a class, to be correct, must preserve the truth
of all class invariants.
class variables and class methods. Alternative terms for “static variables” and “static
methods”, which are part of the class itself rather than of objects.
client/server. A model of network communication in which a “server” waits at a known
address on the network for connection requests that are sent to the server by “clients.”
This is the basic model for communication using the TCP/IP protocol.
command-line interface. A way of interacting with the computer in which the user types in
commands to the computer and the computer responds to each command.
comment. In a computer program, text that is ignored by the computer. Comments are for
human readers, to help them understand the program.
Glossary 756

compiler. A computer program that translates programs written in some computer language
(generally a high-level language) into programs written in machine language.
component. General term for a visual element of a GUI, such as a window, button, or menu.
constructor. A special kind of subroutine in a class whose purpose is to construct objects
belonging to that class. A constructor is called using the new operator, and is not
considered to be a “method.”
container. A component, such as a BorderPane, that can contain other GUI components.
contract of a method. The semantic component of the method’s interface. The contract
specifies the responsibilities of the method and of the caller of the method. It says how
to use the method correctly and specifies the task that the method will perform when
it is used correctly. The contract of a method should be fully specified by its Javadoc
comment.
control structure. A program structure such as an if statement or a while loop that affects
the flow of control in a program (that is, the order in which the instructions in the
program are executed).
CPU. Central Processing Unit. The CPU is the part of the computer that actually performs
calculations and carries out programs.
CSS. Cascading Style Sheets, a language that can be used to control the visual appearance of
components in JavaFX or of elements on a web page.
data structure. An organized collection of data, that can be treated as a unit in a program.
deadlock. A situation in which several threads hang indefinitely, for example because each of
them is waiting for some resource that is locked by one of the other threads.
default method. A method in a Java interface that has an implementation. The default
implementation is used in any class that implements the interface but does not override
the method. Default methods are marked with the reserved word default. Not supported
in Java 7 and earlier.
default package. The unnamed package. A class that does not declare itself to be in a named
package is considered to be in the default package.
definite assignment. Occurs at a particular point in a program if it is definitely true that
a given variable must have been assigned a value before that point in the program. It
is only legal to use the value of a local variable if that variable has “definitely” been
assigned a value before it is used. For this to be true, the compiler must be able to verify
that every path through the program from the declaration of the variable to its use must
pass through a statement that assigns a value to that variable.
deprecated. Considered to be obsolete, but still available for backwards compatibility. A
deprecated Java class or method is still part of the Java language, but it is not advisable
to use it in new code. Deprecated items might be removed in future versions of Java.
dialog box. A window that is dependent on another window, called its parent owner. Dialog
boxes are usually popped up to get information from the user or to display a message to
the user.
distributed computing. A kind of parallel processing in which several computers, connected
by a network, work together to solve a problem.
dummy parameter. Identifier that is used in a subroutine definition to stand for the value of
an actual parameter that will be passed to the subroutine when the subroutine is called.
Glossary 757

Dummy parameters are also called “formal parameters” (or sometimes just “parameters,”
when the term “argument” is used instead of actual parameter).
enum. Enumerated type. A type that is defined by listing every possible value of that type.
An enum type in Java is a class, and the possible values of the type are objects.
event. In GUI programming, something that happens outside the control of the program, such
as a mouse click, and that the program must respond to when it occurs.
exception. An error or exceptional condition that is outside the normal flow of control of a
program. In Java, an exception can be represented by an object of type Throwable that
can be caught and handled in a try..catch statement.
factory method. A method, usually a static function, that returns an object. Factory methods
are an alternative to constructors.
fetch-and-execute cycle. The process by which the CPU executes machine language
programs. It fetches (that is, reads) an instruction from memory and carries out (that
is, executes) the instruction, and it repeats this over and over in a continuous cycle.
fill. A drawing operation that applies a color (or other type of fill) to each of the pixels inside
a shape.
flag. A boolean value that is set to true to indicate that some condition or event is true. A
single bit in a binary number can also be used as a flag.
formal parameter. Another term for “dummy parameter.”
frame. One of the images that make up an animation. Also used as another name for activation
record.
function. A subroutine that returns a value.
functional interface. A Java interface that defines only a single subroutine (where the term
“interface” here means an interface that defines a Java type.)
garbage collection. The automatic process of reclaiming memory that is occupied by objects
that can no longer be accessed.
generic programming. Writing code that will work with various types of data, rather than
with just a single type of data. The Java Collection Framework, and classes that use
similar techniques, are examples of generic programming in Java.
getter. An instance method in a class that is used to read the value of some property of that
class. Usually the property is just the value of some instance variable. By convention, a
getter is named getXyz() where xyz is the name of the property.
global variable. Another name for member variable, emphasizing the fact that a member
variable in a class exists outside the methods of that class.
graphics context. The data and methods necessary for drawing to some particular
destination. A graphics context in JavaFX is an object belonging to the GraphicsContext
class.
GUI. Graphical User Interface. The modern way of interacting with a computer, in which the
computer displays interface components such as buttons and menus on a screen and the
user interacts with them—for example by clicking on them with a mouse.
hash table. A data structure optimized for efficient search, insertion, and deletion of objects.
A hash table consists of an array of locations, and the location in which an object is stored
is determined by that object’s “hash code,” an integer that can be efficiently computed
from the contents of the object.
Glossary 758

heap. The section of the computer’s memory in which objects are stored.
high level language. A programming language, such as Java, that is convenient for human
programmers but that has to be translated into machine language before it can be
executed.
HSB. A color system in which colors are specified by three numbers (in Java, real numbers in
the range 0.0 to 1.0) giving the hue, saturation, and brightness.
IDE. Integrated Development Environment. A programming environment with a graphical
user interface that integrates tools for creating, compiling, and executing programs.
identifier. A sequence of characters that can be used as a name in a program. Identifiers are
used as names of variables, methods, and classes.
index. The position number of one item in an array.
implementation. The inside of a black box, such as the code that defines a subroutine.
immutable object. An immutable object cannot be modified after it is constructed, because
all of its instance variables are final. (In my use of the term, an immutable object can
contain pointers to other objects that are not immutable.)
infinite loop. A loop that never ends, because its continuation condition always evaluates to
true.
inheritence. The fact that one class can extend another. It then inherits the data and behavior
of the class that it extends.
instance of a class. An object that belongs to that class (or a subclass of that class). An
object belongs to a class in this sense when the class is used as a template for the object
when the object is created by a constructor defined in that class.
instance method. A non-static method in a class and hence a method in any object that is
an instance of that class.
instance variable. A non-static variable in a class and hence a variable in any object that is
an instance of that class.
interface. As a general term, how to use a black box such as a subroutine. Knowing the
interface tells you nothing about what goes on inside the box. “Interface” is also a
reserved word in Java; in this sense, an interface is a type that specifies one or more
abstract methods. An object that implements the interface must provide definitions
for those methods.
interpreter. A computer program that executes program written in some computer language
by reading instructions from the program, one-by-one, and carrying each one out (by
translating it into equivalent machine language instructions).
I/O. Input/Output, the way a computer program communicates with the rest of the world,
such as by displaying data to the user, getting information from the user, reading and
writing files, and sending and receiving data over a network.
I/O stream. An abstraction representing a source of input data or a destination for output
data. Java has four basic IO stream classes representing input and output of character
and binary data. These classes form the foundation for Java’s input/output API.
iterator. An object associated with a collection, such a list or a set, that can be used to
traverse that collection. The iterator will visit each member of the collection in turn.
Java Collection Framework (JCF). A set of standard classes that implement generic data
structures, including ArrayList and TreeSet, for example.
Glossary 759

JavaFX. A toolkit for GUI applications, which was introduced as a more modern alternative
to the Swing GUI toolkit. JavaFX is not a standard part of Java but is used in this
textbook.
JDK. Java Development Kit. Basic software that supports both compiling and running Java
programs. A JDK includes a command-line programming environment as well as a JRE.
You need a JDK if you want to compile Java source code, as well as executing pre-
compiled programs.
JRE. Java Runtime Environment. Basic software that supports running standard Java
programs that have already been compiled. A JRE includes a Java Virtual Machine
and all the standard Java classes.
just-in-time compiler. A kind of combination interpreter/compiler that compiles parts of a
program as it interprets them. This allows subsequent executions of the same parts of
the program to be executed more quickly than they were the first time. This can result
is greatly increased speed of execution. Modern JVMs use a just-in-time compiler.
JVM. Java Virtual Machine. The imaginary computer whose machine language is Java
bytecode. Also used to refer to computer programs that act as interpreters for programs
written in bytecode; to run Java programs on your computer, you need a JVM.
lambda expression. A notation that defines an anonymous method. More precisely, a lambda
expression is a kind of literal that represents a value whose type is given by a functional
interface.
linked data structure. A collection of data consisting of a number of objects that are linked
together by pointers which are stored in instance variables of the objects. Examples
include linked lists and binary trees.
linked list. A linked data structure in which nodes are linked together by pointers into a linear
chain.
listener. In GUI programming, an object that can be registered to be notified when events of
some given type occur. The object is said to “listen” for the events.
literal. A sequence of characters that is typed in a program to represent a constant value. For
example, ’A’ is a literal that represents the constant char value, A, when it appears in
a Java program.
location (in memory). The computer’s memory is made up of a sequence of locations. These
locations are sequentially numbered, and the number that identifies a particular location
is called the address of that location.
local class. A class that is defined inside a method definition. Local classes are often
anonymous, but that is not required.
local variable. A variable declared within a method, for use only inside that method. A
variable declared inside a block is valid from the point where it is declared until the end
of block in which the declaration occurs.
loop. A control structure that allows a sequence of instructions to be executed repeatedly.
Java has three kinds of loops: for loops, while loops, and do loops
loop control variable. A variable in a for loop whose value is modified as the loop is executed
and is checked to determine whether or not to end the loop.
loop invariant. A statement such that, if the statement is true before a loop executes, then
it will remain true after each execution of the loop, and therefore will still be true after
the loop ends. Loop invariants can be a tool for proving correctness of loops.
Glossary 760

machine language. A programming language consisting of instructions that can be executed

directed by a computer. Instructions in machine language are encoded as binary numbers.
Each type of computer has its own machine language. Programs written in other
languages must be translated into a computer’s machine language before they can be
executed by that computer.
main memory. Programs and data can be stored in a computer’s main memory, where
they are available to the CPU. Other forms of memory, such as a disk drive, also store
information, but only main memory is directly accessible to the CPU. Programs and data
from a disk drive have to be copied into main memory before they can be used by the
CPU.
map (data structure). An associative array; a data structure that associates an object from
some collection to each object in some set. In Java, maps are represented by the generic
interface Map<T,S>
map (stream operator). One of the fundamental operations on streams, defined as part
of Java’s stream API. A map operator applies a function to each element of a stream,
producing a new stream consisting of the values output by the function.
member variable. A variable defined in a class but not inside a method, as opposed to a local
variable, which is defined inside some method.
memory. Memory in a computer is used to hold programs and data.
method. Another term for subroutine, used in the context of object-oriented programming. A
method is a subroutine that is contained in a class or in an object.
method reference. A notation for a lambda expression that represents a method that
already exists in some class or object. A method reference uses the :: operator, such as
Math::sqrt.
module. In general, a component of a larger system that interacts with the rest of the system
in a simple, well-defined, straightforward manner. In Java 9 and later, a module is a
collection of Java packages, allowing explicit control of dependencies between different
modules, and the standard Java packages have been divided into q set of modules.
multitasking. Performing multiple tasks at once, either by switching rapidly back and forth
from one task to another or by literally working on multiple tasks at the same time.
multiprocessing. Multitasking in which more than one processor is used, so that multiple
tasks can literally be worked on at the same time.
mutual exclusion. Prevents two threads from accessing the same resource at the same time.
In Java, this only applies to threads that access the resource in synchronized methods or
synchronized statements. Mutual exclusion can prevent race conditions but introduces
the possibility of deadlock.
MVC pattern. The Model/View/Controller pattern, a strategy for dividing responsibility in
a GUI component. The model is the data for the component. The view is the visual
presentation of the component on the screen. The controller is responsible for reacting
to events by changing the model. According to the MVC pattern, these responsibilities
should be handled by different objects.
NaN. Not a Number. Double.NaN is a special value of type double that represents an undefined
or illegal value.
node. Common term for one of the objects in a linked data structure.
Glossary 761

null. A special pointer value that means “not pointing to anything.”

numerical analysis. The field that studies algorithms that use approximations, such as real
numbers, and the errors that can result from such approximation.
off-by-one error. A common type of error in which one too few or one too many items are
processed, often because counting is not being handled correctly or because the processing
stops too soon or continues too long for some other reason.
object. An entity in a computer program that can have data (variables) and behaviors
(methods). An object in Java must be created using some class as a template. The
class of an object determines what variables and methods it contains.
object type. A type whose values are objects, as opposed to primitive types. Classes and
interfaces are object types.
observable value. A value that generates an event when it is modified, so that observers of
the value can be notified of the change and can react to it.
OOP. Object-Oriented Programming. An approach to the design and implementation of
computer programs in which classes and objects are created to represent concepts and
entities and their interactions.
operating system. The basic software that is always running on a computer, without which
it would not be able to function. Examples include Linux, MacOS, and Windows Vista.
operator. A symbol such as “+”, “<=”, or “++” that represents an operation that can be
applied to one or more values in an expression.
overloading (of operators). The fact that the same operator can be used with different types
of data. For example, the “+” operator can be applied to both numbers and strings.
overloading (of method names). The fact that several methods that are defined in the
same class can have the same name, as long as they have different signatures.
overriding. Redefining in a subclass. When a subclass provides a new definition of a method
that is inherited from a superclass, the new definition is said to override the original
definition.
package. In Java, a named collection of related classes and subpackages, such as java.io and
javafx.scene.control.
parallel processing. When several tasks are being performed simultaneously, either by
multiple processors or by one processor that switches back and forth among the tasks.
parameter. Used to provide information to a subroutine when that subroutine is called. Values
of “actual parameters” in the subroutine call statement are assigned to the “dummy
parameters” in the subroutine definition before the code in the subroutine is executed.
parameterized type. A type such as ArrayList<String> that includes one or more type
parameters (String in the example).
parsing. Determining the syntactical structure of a string in some language. To parse a string
is to determine whether the string is legal according to the grammar of the language, and
if so, how it can be created using the rules of the grammar.
partially full array. An array that is used to store varying numbers of items. A partially full
array can be represented as a normal array plus a counter to keep track of how many
items are actually stored.
pixel. A “picture element” on the screen or in an image. A picture consists of rows and
columns of pixels. The color of each pixel can be individually set.
Glossary 762

polymorphism. The fact that the meaning of a call to an instance method can depend on
the actual type of the object that is used to make the call at run time. That is, if
var is a variable of object type, then the method that is called by a statement such as
var.action() depends on the type of the object to which var refers when the statement
is executed at run time, not on the type of variable var.
pointer. A value that represents an address in the computer’s memory, and hence can be
thought of as “pointing” to the location that has that address. A variable in Java can
never hold an object; it can only hold a pointer to the location where the object is stored.
A pointer is also called a “reference.”
pragmatics. Rules of thumb that describe what it means to write a good program. For
example, style rules and guidelines about how to structure a program are part of the
pragmatics of a programming language.
precedence. The precedence of operators determines the order in which they are applied,
when several operators occur in an expression, in the absence of parentheses.
precondition. A condition that must be true at some point in the execution of a program,
in order for the program to proceed correctly from that point. A precondition of a
subroutine is something that must be true when the subroutine is called, in order for the
subroutine to function properly. Subroutine preconditions are often restrictions on the
values of the actual parameters that can be passed into the subroutine.
predicate. A function that outputs a boolean value. Predicates in Java can be represented
by the parameterized functional interface Predicate<T>.
priority queue. A data structure representing a collection of items where each item has a
“priority.” A priority queue has operations add and remove. Items can be added in any
order, but the remove operation always removes an item of minimal priority. (Some
version of priority queue use maximum instead of minimum priority.)
postcondition. A condition that is known to be true at some point in the execution of a
program, as a result of the computation that has come before that point. A postcondition
of a subroutine is something that must be true after the subroutine finishes its execution.
A postcondition of a function often describe the return value of the function.
primitive type. One of the eight basic built-in data types in Java, double, float, long, int,
short, byte, boolean, and char. A variable of primitive type holds an actual value, as
opposed to a pointer to that value.
priority of a thread. An integer associated with a thread that can affect the order in which
threads are executed. A thread with greater priority is executed in preference to a thread
with lower priority.
producer/consumer. A classic pattern in parallel programming in which one or more
producers produce items that are consumed by one or more consumers, and the producers
and consumers are meant to run in parallel. The problem is to get items safely and
efficiently from the producers to the consumers. In Java, the producer/consumer pattern
is implemented by blocking queues.
program. A set of instructions to be carried out by a computer, written in an appropriate
programming language. Used as a verb, it means to create such a set of instructions.
programming language. A language that can be used to write programs for a computer.
Programming languages range in complexity from machine language to high-level
languages such as Java.
Glossary 763

protocol. A specification of what constitutes legal communication in a give context. A protocol

specifies the format of legal messages, when they can be sent, what kind of reply is
expected, and so on.
pseudocode. Informal specification of algorithms, expressed in language that is closer to
English than an actual programming language, and usually without filling in every detail
of the procedure.
queue. A data structure consisting of a list of items, where items can only be added at one
end and removed at the opposite end of the list.
race condition. A source of possible errors in parallel programming, where one thread can
cause an error in another thread by changing some aspect of the state of the program
that the second thread is depending on (such as the value of variable).
RAM. Random Access Memory. This term is often used as a synonym for the main memory
of a computer. Technically, however, it means memory in which all locations are equally
accessible at any given time. The term also implies that data can be written to the
memory as well as read from it.
record. A simple data structure containing several data items, or fields, that are identified
by name. The fields can be of different types. Java has record classes to represent
(immutable) records.
recursion. Defining something in terms of itself. In particular, a recursive subroutine is
one that calls itself, either directly, or indirectly through a chain of other subroutines.
Recursive algorithms work by reducing a complex problem into smaller problems which
can be solved either directly or by applying the same algorithm “recursively.”
reduce (stream operator). One of the fundamental operations on a stream. A reduce
operation combines all the elements from a stream in some way, such as by summing
them or finding their maximum, producing a final result.
RGB. A color system in which colors are specified by three numbers (in Java, integers in the
range 0 to 255) giving the red, green, and blue components of the color.
reference. Another term for “pointer.”
return type of a function. The type of value that is returned by that function.
reserved word. A sequence of characters that looks like an identifier but can’t be used as an
identifier because it has a special meaning in the language. For example, class, public,
and if are reserved words in Java.
resource. An image, sound, text, or other data file that is part of a program. Resource files
for Java programs are stored on the same class path where the compiled class files for
the program are stored.
robust program. A program is robust if it is not only correct, but also is capable of handling
errors such as a non-existent file or a failed network connection in a reasonable way.
scene graph. In JavaFX, the hierarchical data structure that contains all the GUI components
that are shown in a window.
set. A collection of objects which contains no duplicates. In Java, sets are represented by the
generic interface Set<T>
scope. The region in a program where the declaration of an identifier is valid.
semantics. Meaning. The semantics rules of a language determine the meaning of strings of
symbols (such as sentences or statements) in that language.
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sentinel value. A special value that marks the end of a sequence of data values, to indicate
the end of the data.
setter. An instance method in a class that is used to set the value of some property of that
class. Usually the property is just the value of some instance variable. By convention, a
setter is named setXyz() where xyz is the name of the property.
signature of a method. The name of the method, the number of formal parameters in its
definition, and the type of each formal parameter. Method signatures are the information
needed by a compiler to tell which method is being called by a given subroutine call
statement.
socket. An abstraction representing one end of a connection between two computers on a
network. A socket represents a logical connection between computer programs, not a
physical connection between computers.
stack. A data structure consisting of a list of items where items can only be added and removed
at one end of the list, which is known as the “top” of the stack. Adding an item to a
stack is called “pushing,” and removing an item is called “popping.” The term stack also
refers to the stack of activation records that is used to implement subroutine calls.
standard input. The standard source from which a program reads input data. It is represented
by the object System.in. Usually, standard input comes from text typed by the user, but
standard input can be “redirected” to read from another source, such as a file, instead.
standard output. The standard destination to which a program writes output text. It is
represented by the object System.out. Usually, standard output is displayed to the user,
but standard output can be “redirected” to write to another destination, such as a file,
instead. There is also an object System.err that is meant for writing error messages.
state machine. A model of computation where an abstract “machine” can be in any of some
finite set of different states. The behavior of the machine depends on its state, and the
state can change in response to inputs or events. The basic logical structure of a GUI
program can often be represented as a state machine.
step-wise refinement. A technique for developing an algorithm by starting with a general
outline of the procedure, often expressed in pseudocode, and then gradually filling in the
details.
stream. In Java 8, an abstraction representing a stream of values that can be processed. A
stream can be created from a Collection, an array, or some other data source. Java’s
stream API includes many predefined operations that can be applied to streams. The
term “stream” also refers to I/O streams, which are used for input and output.
stroke. A drawing operation that applies a color (or other type of paint) to pixels along the
boundary of a shape.
source code. Text written in a high-level programming language, which must be translated
into a machine language such as Java bytecode before it can be executed by a computer.
subclass. A class that extends another class, directly or indirectly, and therefore inherits its
data and behaviors. The first class is said to be a subclass of the second.
subroutine. A sequence of program instructions that have been grouped together and given a
name. The name can then be used to “call” the subroutine. Subroutines are also called
methods in the context of object-oriented programming.
Glossary 765

subroutine call statement. A statement in a program that calls a subroutine. When a

subroutine call statement is executed, the computer executes the code that is inside the
subroutine.
super. A special variable, automatically defined in any instance method, that refers to the
object that contains the method, but considered as belonging to the superclass of the class
in which the method definition occurs. super gives access to members of the superclass
that are hidden by members of the same name in the subclass.
syntax. Grammar. The syntax rules of a language determine what strings of symbols are
legal—that is, grammatical—in that language.
TCP/IP. Protocols that are used for network communication on the Internet.
this. A special variable, automatically defined in any instance method, that refers to the object
that contains the method.
thread. An abstraction representing a sequence of instructions to be executed one after the
other. It is possible for a computer to execute several threads in parallel.
thread pool. A collection of “worker threads” that are available to perform tasks. As tasks
become available, they are assigned to threads in the pool. A thread pool is often used
with a blocking queue that holds the tasks.
top-down design. An approach to software design in which you start with the problems, as a
whole, subdivide it into smaller problems, divide those into even smaller problems, and
so on, until you get to problems that can be solved directly.
type. Specifies some specific kind of data values. For example, the type int specifies integer
data values that can be represented as 32-bit binary numbers. In Java, a type can be
a primitive type, a class names, or an interface name. Type names are used to specify
the types of variables, of dummy parameters in subroutines, and of return values of
subroutines.
type cast. Forces the conversion of a value of one type into another type. For example, in
(int)(6*Math.random()), the (int) is a type-cast operation that converts the double
value (6*Math.random()) into an integer by discarding the fractional part of the real
number.
Unicode. A way of encoding characters as binary numbers. The Unicode character set includes
characters used in many languages, not just English. Unicode is the character set that is
used internally by Java.
URL. Universal Resource Locator; an address for a resource on the Internet, such as a web
page.
variable. A named memory location (or sequence of locations) that can be used to store
data. A variable is created in a program, and a name is assigned to the variable, in a
variable declaration statement. The name can then be used in that program to refer
to the memory location, or to the data stored in that memory location, depending on
context. In Java, a variable has a type, which specifies what kind of data it can hold.
wrapper class. A class such as Double or Integer that makes it possible to “wrap” a primitive
type value in an object belonging to the wrapper class. This allows primitive type
values to be used in contexts were objects are required, such as with the Java Collection
Framework.
XML. eXtensible Markup Language. A very common and well-supported standard syntax for
creating text-based data-representation languages.