CS230 Data Structures, Wellesley College, Fall 2008

Lab 8: Working with GUIs

Creating a GUI using Java Swing

Some useful links about GUI Layout Managers:

CS230 lecture notes
Sun's on line tutorials on using Swing

To start, download the files in the directory download/GUILab, into your local working directory.

Get their input, give them your feedback

JOptionPane makes it easy to pop up a standard dialog box that prompts users for a value or informs them of something. Read the on-line tutorial for more on it. Use the following static methods in the JOptionPane

JOptionPane.showInputDialog()
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(), and
JOptionPane.showConfirmDialog()

to create a dialog with the user, as follows:

Pop up a dialog window to ask the user to input an integer.
Reply in another pop up window, telling them whether the number was even or odd.
Pop up a new window, and ask them if they want to do one more test, and act accordingly.

If you need a starting point, look at the EvenOdd.java file, which contains some starting code.

TicTacToe Game

Run the class TicTacToeGUISample in the GUILab/RunSample, and play the game, to see how the program is working. Your goal is to write a JAVA class to reproduce this GUI (or a better one!). The functionality of the game is implemented in a separate file, named TicTacToe.java. Please study this file carefully, to become familiar with it to the point that you are able to build a communication between this file and the one that will contain the GUI, i.e the one you are writing.

We will define two .java files:

TicTacToePanel.java to the set the Panel with the game's GUI, and
TicTacToeGUI.java that only contains a main() method, to set up the frame and add the game panel to it.

The file TicTacToeGUI.java is given to you. You only need to add a couple of lines of code there. A starting version of the TicTacToePanel.java is given as well. You need to add you GUI code to it, as well as the mechanism to make it responsive to the user's actions.

Some useful things to keep in mind when coding TicTacToePanel.java:

Think which variables should be instance variables and which can be local variables. In general you want to have as few instance variables as you need. If a certain variable is used within a certain method, make it local to that method. That way you hide the details, and your code becomes cleaner.
In the TicTacToePanel.java initial version, that is given to you, you will find the definition of the createImageIcon() method. You can use this method to create an ImageIcon instance, out of a graphics file (jpg, or gif). Then you can add the ImageIcon to a label. (Check the on-line Java documentation for the available JLabel() constructors.
The GUI shown above is just a sample. Feel free to make your own design for the components.