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VIII Preface
Pedagogical Structure
As authors, we assume that you, our readers, might be scientists and engineers
who have learnt “a bit of Java” and who wish to teach yourself enough
to program Java (or C# TM or other, similar languages) for your own work.
You might be students who are converting to information technology from
a science or engineering background or you might be information technology
students who wish to learn about e-Science applications. You might even be
computer science professionals who wish to learn more about e-Science from
a requirements perspective. We think that this book is ideally configured for
self-study. If you follow the text in, roughly, sequential order and you attempt
to code each revision of the software before looking at our “answers”, then
you will pick up some good programming skills and you will really understand
the patterns that we have used.
Substantial parts of the material in this book have been used to teach
courses in e-Science since 2001. It is positioned as a second programming
course for graduate, conversion students which is roughly equivalent to a second
year course for information technology majors. But, in fact, the material
can be used quite flexibly depending on the interests, and programming background,
of students. The overall structure of a course would comprise two
parts:
• Part I:
Students learn relevant parts of the Java TM API and build up a GUI interface
to a server which contains waveform data. Chapters 1-6 of the book
provide a number of (hopefully) entertaining examples and exercises which
all work towards constructing this initial code, which we call PreEScope.
We aim to provide enough background to enable students to build the
software on their own. It is best if several of the steps in this part of the
software process are completed by students in laboratory sessions. Additional,
small laboratory exercises are suggested in order to inspire students
to experiment creatively with new parts of the Java API. Several classes
need to be provided as “black boxes” to connect and send information to
the MDSplus database. Some of the graphics classes, particularly to draw
and annotate the graph axes, would be best provided to students rather
than being written from scratch. In the past, the step roughly equivalent
to that from PreEScope3 to PreEScope4, has been set as a programming
assignment.
• Part II:
After a theoretical introduction to software engineering and design patterns,
students then proceed to refactor their code from the first part of
the course. The refactoring steps are described in Chapters 8-19 of this
book. There is much more material here than can be fitted into a single
semester course together with Part I, so a judicious selection is needed.
It is very important that students understand the initial refactoring into