Re: Mounting filesystems and such

Thanks for your reply Tim.

I'm leaning toward one of two IDEs; NetBeans and BlueJ. I just stumbled 
across BlueJ last night while browsing java.sun.com while looking for 
something else. I'm very impressed with both of the IDEs; I'm growing 
more and more disenchanted with the whole commercial software thing, 
especially for educational use.

One of the features of BlueJ that attracted me immediately is it's use 
of a simple UML front end as the primary component of the user 
interface. In my experience, students coming into object oriented 
programming have a very difficult time making the shift to thinking 
about objects. The fact that BlueJ makes this an integral part of the 
user experience is, I think, a major improvement in pedagogical approach 
to the problem.

OTOH, it's a relatively simple environment without the wealth of 
professional quality features that NetBeans has. I may start the class 
using BlueJ and switch to NetBeans as the complexity of the s/w grows. 
In any case, I will be recommending both environments to my students.

One thing that I've found about CS teachers, especially in my school - 
they tend to be very quite. I've set up numerous lists to facilitate 
communication amongst my fellow faculty, but it seems like I'm the only 
one who's participating. Sigh.

So this list is for those teaching Java and not just NetBeans? Cool. 
I'll be here a lot, I image.

Thanks for your feedback.

    Sean



Tim Boudreau wrote:

> Sean Kirkpatrick wrote:
>
>> Hi all.
>>
>> I'm new to Java, new to NetBeans, and have been assigned the Java 
>> Programming course at my JC this semester. I'm excited about teaching 
>> Java - have been looking for an excuse to learn it for a while (in my 
>> real life, we don't use java at all for performance reasons - I'm a 
>> programmer for Agilent Technologies).
>>
>> I'm working my way through Thinking in Java, and have loaded Eckel's 
>> code onto my machine for experimentation. I've mounted a subdir 
>> called "code" as a filesystem, and want to be able to open each 
>> chapter subdir and compile/run the code from there. However, I think 
>> I have a path problem that is causing the following error.
>>
>> I'm trying to run some code ~/code/c03/VowelsAndConsonants.java, but 
>> when I compile, it gives me the error
>>
>> Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: 
>> c03/VowelsAndConsonants (wrong name: VowelsAndConsonants)
>
>
> Hi, Sean,
>
> Since this list is geared toward teaching Java, you will probably reach
> a wider audience for general java questions on one of the forums at
> http://java.sun.com/ or newsgroups like comp.lang.java.*  - but thanks
> for posting nonetheless!
>
> As for your current problem, probably your class and file names don't
> match (look for typos) - for example, if you create an unpackaged java
> source Foo.java with a main method, and then inside you have
>
> public class Goo extends Object {
>   public static void main (String args[]) {
>      System.out.println ("Hello world");
>   }
> }
>
> it will compile fine, but it will produce a runtime error.  Note that
> if it is in a package, it will work.
>
> It is also possible to mispackage something (e.g. have a package 
> statement in source that doesn't match your actual package structure) 
> and have it compile but not be runnable.
>
> So are you going to be using NetBeans in the classroom, or recommending
> it?  One of the purposes of this list is to create a forum for people
> teaching Java to congregate.  So far, it's been less than a wild 
> success, but we also haven't had a lot of resources to through at
> making it successful, which is the primary reason.
>
> Best regards,
>
> -Tim
>
> .
>