Java Jelly Fish

January 27, 2015
Drawgramming

This month I enrolled in a “Fundamentals to Programming Java” class for the semester. Of course I still think Processing is A-mazing and don’t want to stop learning how to use it, and have lots more projects to make with it, but teaching yourself stuff for extended periods of time can be tiring (especially with other jobs on), and so I enrolled onto a programming course for a few hours a week to help the process of learning.

The course is at the Computer Science department of City College San Francisco, and they run online and face-to-face courses. I chose the city college because causes are good value, and don’t demand that you take 10 whole weeks out of work like some courses in SF. Instead you spend 3-4 hours a week in class, and a bit more out of class, for a semester and learn incrementally. There was a choice to study Java or C++. With all the Processing I’ve been learning I chose Java, as they are closely related.

(image from Getting Started with Processing)

So far so good. I have a female teacher who likes to use fun analogies (–> check), today I used the command line to make a program (eeek! and then –> check), and I drew a jelly fish for the first assignment (many –> checks).

Screen Shot 2015-01-26 at 21.42.38 PM

This program is an applet -which means it is not a stand alone program, but can be viewed on a web browser as part of an .html file. I had to use the terminal and command line to make the program, which was incredibly scary but also very insightful.

(doh)

The code I’ve written is HORRIBLE and I know this (123 godamn lines for that lickle wickle jelly fish). There are things I wanted to do to make it less horrible that I knew I could have done in Processing, but I couldn’t work out how to do them in Java. Yippee! this means I’ve actually learned some processing this past year!

Another thing: when writing the program I noticed that you have to refresh your browser LOADS before it makes changes to the applet. (kind of like: jelly fish eyes ctrl r ctrl r ctrl r ctrl r ctrl r ctrl r ctrl r ctrl r ctrl r ctrl r ctrl r ctrl r ctrl r ctrl r ctrl and yay jelly fish eyelashes).

Oh, and one more thing: I made actual pictures with actual crayons first.