Java in the computing curricula

Java as a Vehicle for Computer Science Education The third Java in the Computing Curriculum Conference (JICC 3) was organised by the CTI (Computing) and held at South Bank University on January 25th 1999. There were sixty four delegates including representatives from Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Finland and Ireland. Five papers and three tutorials were presented and commercial talks were given by IBM, Microsoft and Sun. The conference was opened by Chris Clare, Dean of Engineering at South Bank, who noted that the papers covered a broad spectrum of computer science education, including specialist subjects in the second and final year. This theme was presaged in the editorial written after JICC 2 when Fintan Culwin said that "the use of Java is becoming less of an attempt to jump onto a quickly passing bandwagon and more of a considered change, with ramifications for the wider curriculum" [1]. Papers at JICC 3 confirmed this trend with the first two covering Java as an introductory language and the following three addressing its more specialised use. Jiri Danecek, introducing his paper written with Pavel Slavik, 'Teaching Java at CTU Prague', described Java as the Esperanto of computing. In choosing to move from Pascal to Java, rather than C++ or Delphi, his department wanted a language which "has the ability to demonstrate in a systematic manner, very different aspects of programming from computer graphics to realtime, from event-driven programming to networking". After deciding upon a pilot course entitled 'Programming Languages for the Web' (including HTML and Javascript as well as Java) they encountered "huge student interest" and had to recruit extra tutors from their postgraduate students. The authors believe that their experience with running this course will lead to the adoption of Java as the main language at CTU and are now preparing new specialised courses using Java to teach about operating systems, databases and networks. Aoileann nic Gearailt, from the Institute of Technology in Tralee, Ireland, in 'Using Sun Java Workshop 2.0 to introduce Java to second-year Computing Students', described how Java has replaced C++ as the follow-up language to C for technical students. JWS was evaluated and found to be suitable, even on the slower machines although students had problems handling project directories. Other features of JWS were also compared, including error messages, its profiler and its event-handling model (still Java 1.0) in the visual GUI builder. The paper concluded that, on high-spec machines, "Java Workshop 2.0 is a good environment for introducing OO concepts". Following teething problems at the beginning of the course, overall student feedback improved dramatically. One interesting feature in common in both Danecek's and nic Gearailt's papers was the difficulties of identifying a suitable IDE. This issue becomes even more acute when tools such as Borland JBuilder are adopted and 'features' such as the use of proprietary GUI components, auto-generation of class and object names etc have to be contended with. Nonetheless, both papers describe a similar trend to that identified at JICC 2, towards Java as a first language and its potential for specialisation.