Class 13: Concepts: Dynamic Code

Back to Tools: Project Management with Make. On to tkinter: Simple GUIs in Python.

This outline is also available in PDF.

Held: Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Summary: We consider a variety of recent issues, include dynamically-loaded code, makefiles, and file comparisons.

Related Pages:

EBoard.

Notes:

I've made a few updates to the schedule. I'm also making some updates to the grading policies, since the course has taken a bit of a different tack than I had planned.
Reading for Thursday: Thinking in Tkinter. Send questions.
No BC reading for Thursday.
Thursday will be a headless lab. I'd recommend that you all do it during class time, but you may find it useful to do it at other times.
Assignment for next Tuesday: A preliminary UML architecture for the project.
We may want to look at The source code for DiffMerge.

Overview:

Quick project discussion.
Dynamically loading modules in Python.
Dynamically loading modules in Java.
Fun with Make.
Beautiful Code: Code in motion.

Quick project discussion

We will regularly have three teams of four students, but the particular team membership may vary from subproject to subproject.
The first teams will be responsible for the preliminary UML designs due next week.
How do you want to form the first set of teams?

Dynamically loading code

Friday's CS Table: Why systems that dynamically load modules are better.
Our task: Write a small system that dynamically loads modules.
In particular: We will repeatedly prompt the user for a class name, build an object in that class (if possible), and call the object's run method.
We will try to do so in Python and Java. (Dynamic loading can be a PITN in C.)
Goal: Under an hour.
Step zero: Make sure that we understand the purpose (simple use cases).
Step one: Design unit tests.
Step two: Outline our process in pseudocode.
Step three: Turn the primary parts of the process (other than the actual module loading) into code.
Step four: Figure out how to load a module.
Step five: Hands-on testing.
Step six: Unit tests.

Dynamically loading modules in Python

How might you approach this problem? What techniques do you know? Where would you look for ideas?

Dynamically loading modules in Java

How might you approach this problem? What techniques do you know? Where would you look for ideas?

Fun with Make

We'll go over the assignment for today, considering some of the problems you had (and some of the problems that you didn't know that you had).

Beautiful Code: Code in motion

Primary thesis?
What is beautiful?
What is ugly?

Back to Tools: Project Management with Make. On to tkinter: Simple GUIs in Python.

[Skip to Body]
Primary: [Front Door] [Schedule] - [Academic Honesty] [Instructions]
Current: [Outline] [EBoard] [Reading] - [Assignment]
Groupings: [EBoards] [Examples] [Handouts] [Outlines] [Readings]
Related Courses: [CSC223 2007F (Davis)] [CSC223 2004F (Rebelsky)] Misc: [SamR]

Disclaimer: I usually create these pages on the fly, which means that I rarely proofread them and they may contain bad grammar and incorrect details. It also means that I tend to update them regularly (see the history for more details). Feel free to contact me with any suggestions for changes.

This document was generated by Siteweaver on Tue May 11 12:40:52 2010.
The source to the document was last modified on Mon Jan 25 20:52:44 2010.
This document may be found at http://www.cs.grinnell.edu/~rebelsky/Courses/CSC323/2010S/Outlines/outline.13.html.

You may wish to validate this document's HTML ; ;

Samuel A. Rebelsky, rebelsky@grinnell.edu

Copyright © 2010 Samuel A. Rebelsky. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.