CS 204: Software Design

Due 5:00PM Monday, 22 November 2010
You may work with a partner for this assignment.

Goals

For your final project, I want you to write a program that is complex enough to exercise some of the important ideas from this class, simple enough to complete by November 22, and interesting enough for you that you might want to keep working on it after the term.

Your program should have the following properties:

• A GUI that serves beginners very well (easy to learn) and intermediates reasonably well (not a pain to use once you get started).
• Internal structure that implements at least one design pattern among those we have studied (or others you find in the textbook).
• Well-designed function/method interfaces.
• Clean separation of concerns via the appropriate use of classes, inheritance, etc.
• Good style: naming, comments, layout, etc.
• Thorough error handling, including exceptions and assertions where appropriate.
• Extensibility. Think about the three or four features you would add to the program next if you kept working on it after the term. Would it be easy and natural to add those items, or would the program require a complete rewrite?

You may use either Java or Python for this project.

What to hand in

• On Friday, November 12 in class, give me a short project plan (no more than 3 or 4 pages), including:

  • a brief description of your project from the user's point of view (i.e. what will the user's interaction with the program consist of, and what results will the program produce for the user)
  • UML diagrams or textual descriptions of your core classes and functional interfaces
  • a brief explanation of the design pattern(s) your program will make use of
  • a list of any expected data files or network data sources
  • anything else you consider important for me to know about your project.

  I will provide feedback on by November 15.

• By 5:00PM November 22, submit a folder entitled "final" via the Courses system. This folder should include all your source code, any relevant data, and documentation (ideally a readme.txt file) describing the status of the program (e.g. what works and what doesn't) as well as how to run it.

Project ideas

Having trouble coming up with something? Here are a few ideas.

1. Games

   • Text adventures.
   • 2D arcade like Tetris or solitaire or Donkey Kong or Minesweeper or...
   • Word games like Boggle, TextTwist, etc.
   • ...

2. Viewers of data (typically data that changes over time and is available on the network.

   • Stock market.
   • News feeds.
   • Sports scores.
   • Multi-viewed viewers of static data that's rich enough can be OK too. For example, there are tons of ways to slice a season's worth (or many season's worth) of baseball statistics or data from the US census.

3. Utilities

   • text editor
   • A programmer's calculator
   • A graphing calculator
   • ...