Relearning Java Part 1
But why?
So I’ve been taken away from coding in my career. I’ve always enjoyed it, but it’s not the path my career has gone. I’ve decided I’m going to get more involved in work. I need to get myself up to speed with Java again and fast. So let’s dig into a way to learn it again and what that entails.
Where do we start?
Many people will feel like the websites that have challenges will do the job. And for some, they might well be right. However I find the likes of LeetCode and HackerRank are not great. The challenges they set are very academic. I’m not planning on working in academia.
A quick look for Java projects gets us a link to hackr.io and their Java projects. Time to start at the start.
The chat app
The first project I’ve decided to tackle from here is the chat app. I’ve put the code up here if you want to take a look. It’s a pretty straight forward client server project. Seems like a good place to start.
As I say in the ReadMe, I’d guess it took me half a day to a day to complete to the end of the blog post’s code. This gives you a fully functioning GUI based app. It was fun. They use features I’ve never used before in Java. Llambdas are the one I’ve never used before. They are interesting. I’m still not sure what they’re doing, although a good friend has explained them as “Like objects, but you’re passing functions instead.” I’ll have to read more into them and make more sense of them in the coming weeks.
I’ve enjoyed this, and following along has really helped put my mind back in the “I’m a coder/programmer/dev” headspace.
What’s missing?
The finished project does leave a little out though. The first thing they call out at the end of it all is tests. As with many of these though they just say “You should write some tests.” I’ll level with you, I’ve always done manual testing or automated test cases that run in other tools to test software. I’ve never written tests that run in the same projectspace. So that’s an area I’ll be investigating and learning about.
The other big thing missing is documentation. There is the ReadMe of the project as a location for documentation, but there’s so much more to it than that. I do plan to create a Docs folder for the project with specific docs for engineering and other for users. It’s definitely overkill but it could be a worhtwhile exercise.
So why aren’t you writing the test?
As I said, I’m not up to speed with writing test in Java. I’ve been writing them all along in my rust studies, but that’s a different thing to me. I don’t know how to set up test frameworks in Java. So we do a search online. JUnit pops up. Simple, plenty of tutorials. So I launch myself into a video on that. And they make it all sound so simple. Yet the first step is glossed over. “Alter your dependency management tool to include JUnit….” I’m sorry… my what? I’m writing plain Java. I’m not using a dependency management tool… okay… so what’s this and how do I use it?
Well, there are options. Maven or Gradle. Is there a difference? Probably not. But I don’t know yet. I’ll have to look into them. And suddenly I’m miles away from coding and not a step closer to writing test cases…
This… this might become a problem you know.