CS 117: Writing your own classes

In the programs that you have written so far, you have used the Canvas class to draw pictures. While you undoubtedly had a lot of fun coming up with different drawings, the problem is that you have to "hard code" whatever you want to draw. In other words, every time you want to change your drawing, you have to change the code and recompile it. Perhaps you find yourself drawing the same things over and over again, and you'd like to specify a way to just draw, say, a car, simply by calling a method that you've written to do so. This can be done by defining a Car class, and then creating multiple objects from that class.

In this lab, you will take a very small class called Car and gradually add new capabilities to it. By the end of the lab, you'll have a picture of a bunch of cars on a road, plus a bit more knowledge about the structure of Java classes.

The Car and Road classes

Create a directory named lab4, and copy Car.java, Road.java, and Canvas.java into it.

Take a look first at Road.java. What do you expect to see when you run java Road? Notice that it uses objects from the class Car that we are creating. Take a look at Car.java to see how to set up a class that we can create objects from.

Compile all of the java files. Does the picture look like you expected it to? If not, take a closer look at the code.

A Car of a different color

You may have noticed a tragic uniformity in the color of the cars. Let's fix that.

  1. Add a Color object variable (call it bodyColor) to the Car class. The variable should be declared near the top of the class, right along with the declarations for the other object variables.
  2. Add a setColor method to the Car class. This method should begin with "public void setColor(Color newColor)", and it should simply assign a new value to the bodyColor instance variable.
  3. Change the Car constructor to set the bodyColor variable to the default value (red).
  4. Change the draw method to use bodyColor instead of red.
  5. Add a line to main in Road to change the color of one of the cars to ecru or beige or tan or eggshell or something.
  6. Recompile and run.

SUVs and subcompacts

Now that you can control the color of your Car, let's try changing the size of the car. You can start by following instructions like those in the previous section: add a width instance variable to Car, add a setWidth method, initialize width in the constructor, and change main in Road.

The tricky part will be changing draw. In the original version of draw, you'll see numbers that depend on the width of the car being 100. But now you'll need to change those numbers to expressions that vary depending on the value of width.

You'll know you have gotten it right if you can modify the widths of your cars and get different-colored cars of different sizes on your road.

Writing a Class from Scratch

Let's make some foliage in a similar fashion to cars. Using the ideas from the Car class, start from scratch and create a Tree class that allows you to control the height of a tree. Use the Car class as an example. Don't get too fancy with your drawing—a brown rectangle plus a green circle make a lovely tree at this stage. Add a class called Landscape that serves the same purpose as Road on the Car part of the assignment: Landscape should draw a landscape with several trees of different sizes, all created as separate instances of a single Tree class. If you feel like it, put some cars into your forest of trees, too.

Wrapping it up

Hand in your entire lab4 directory, including Car.java, Road.java, Tree.java, and Landscape.java by Sunday, 16 April 2006, at 11:59pm.

Have fun.

Written by Jeff Ondich, Dave Musicant, Amy Csizmar Dalal, and David Liben-Nowell.