The project you do will be quite important. It will count for 30% of your grade. There will be about twenty different projects, each worked on by a team of about three students. The projects will be assigned, through a lottery, based on your preferences, on Wednesday, June 25th.
A detailed explanation of how to set up your web pages and program directories can be found here.
Patterns and other aspects of OO design.
In keeping with the focus of your textbook and the theme of this course, Design Patterns, each project should explicitly incorporate at least five design patterns. It will be important to implement these yourself whenever the complete solution is available in the Java library (which is a large, rich library). An example is my implementation of an Iterator as Factory Pattern.
In a project, you may choose to create a "static" description of the items in the project, with just data structures and methods for describing structure, initializations, alterations and actions. You have the option of choosing a more "dynamic" implementation in which you take the elements of your static description and place them in a time-based "harness" that triggers events in time, using Java's util.Timer class. You can also inject randomness into the choice and timing of the various events, using util.Random.
Some of the projects focus on a single entity, but all projects should introduce others to round out the design.