So after finishing the TIC TAC TOE game I decided that I was going to go out and try and find a list of coding challenges that other developers thought would be good to test your skills with. I found several lists and the one I stuck with listed Conway’s Game of Life as a next step. I learned about the game and looked at a bunch of code but I came to the realization that I did not have the strength in GUI’s to be able to complete and understand the code. So, I decided to take on a few basic GUI challenges in hopes of building my strengths here. Below is a simple code that utilizes several packages such as awt and swing. As I am still in my infancy as far as understanding the capabilities of these packages, I attempted to put some good documentation for the reader in the code.
//BTG 1.29.14
/*
*This is a simple program that displays a JFrame canvas and uses a MouseListener
*to implement changes. A red box will display and upon user Mouse click, the box changes
*to green and gives the exact location of the user click.
*See code for detailed comments .
*/
//Abstract Window Toolkit uses components and containers to display GUI
import java.awt.*;
import javax.swing.JFrame;
import java.awt.event.MouseListener;
import java.awt.event.MouseEvent;
//This code extends the main so that the new class(mouse) inherits from class Canvas. Canvas
//provides a blank rectangular area that can trap user input
public class mouse extends Canvas implements MouseListener
{
private Color currentColor;
private String currentMessage;
private String clickLocation;
//initial variable settings
public mouse()
{
addMouseListener(this);
currentColor = Color.RED;
currentMessage = "The square is red.";
clickLocation = "Click for location.";
}
//Initial graphics settings
public void paint(Graphics g)
{
g.setColor(Color.BLACK);
g.setFont(Font.decode("sansserif-ITALIC-BOLD-10"));
g.drawString(currentMessage, 100, 100);
g.setColor(currentColor);
g.fillRect(250, 100, 100, 100);
g.setColor(Color.BLACK);
g.setFont(Font.decode("sansserif-ITALIC-BOLD-10"));
g.drawString(clickLocation, 100, 115);
}
public void mouseClicked(MouseEvent evt)
{
currentMessage = "The square is green.";
currentColor = Color.GREEN;
clickLocation = "You clicked at (" + evt.getX() + "," + evt.getY() + ")";
//calls the paint method again with the new above variables
repaint();
}
public void mousePressed( MouseEvent evt )
{
}
public void mouseReleased( MouseEvent evt )
{
}
public void mouseEntered( MouseEvent evt )
{
}
public void mouseExited( MouseEvent evt )
{
}
public static void main(String[] args)
{
// You can change the title or size here if you want.
JFrame win = new JFrame("MouseDemo");
win.setSize(400,300);
win.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
win.add( new mouse() );
win.setVisible(true);
}//main
}//class
