Not quite on topic, but well worth considering: “If I were sitting down to design a course today, I’d put at the top of my paper: What can I do to make them curious and interested? What can I do to get them to where they can be creative? And finally, What can I do to help them feel like THEY kick ass, as opposed to thinking that I kick ass?

Found this simple UML tool Violet on Cay Horstmann’s web site. Thanks to Frank Carver for starting a thread on tools for Java teaching on JavaRanch and Marlene Miller for suggesting Voilet.

I have a plan to refactor the lab exercises for EG-140 in readiness for automated submission and marking. The first step was to put the BlueJ projects that students upload into a new repository. However I wanted the repository to be such that all the projects would be within the eg-140-laboratory project but different subsets could be delivered to various audiences. For example, students starting a week’s work should be able to get hold of just a single project as in

I’m currently reading the free beta chapter of Version Control with Subversion from the forthcoming O’Reilly open book. Given that subversion can apparently use simple web technology, it may have more potential for use in a teaching situation than CVS — provided that the plugins for ant and eclipse are as good as the CVS ones! Watch this log for experiences on CVS versus Subversion.

Added g2swaroop.net – A Byte of Python – Free Python Book / Free Python Tutorial to my to read list. Thanks to Daniel Ayers for the heads up!

Refcards.com is a site where you can get handy reference cards for numerous open source tools and technologies. They can be printed double sided onto card (or paper) and fold into a three-column, easy-to-carry quick reference. Brilliant! The site had apparently disappeared for a while but is now back. Its author Andrew Ford has produced a new refcard for Template Toolkit. He has included some cards on Web technologies (very useful as handouts for my students!

Added this tech talk to my to watch list. Tech Talk: Scott Ambler on Agile Modeling and Development It’ll be interesting to hear the man!

New addition to my to read list ONJava.com: Template-Based Code Generation with Apache Velocity, Part 2 [Jun. 02, 2004] published yesterday. Here is Part 1.

Version 1.0.0 jMock – A Lightweight Mock Object Library for Java has been released. jMock is a framework that uses refelection (I assume) to programmatically define mock objects for unit testing. Tutorials and source code ready for downloading.

Adrian Colyer has tried to describe AOP without using the buzzwords. An attempt to answer a challenge thrown down at the last TSS symposium in The Aspects Blog. It boils down to DRY (don’t repeat yourself). So what we’ve really got in any non-trivial software application is not the ideal 1-to-1 mapping between concept and implementation, but an n:m mapping. No wonder software gets so hard to maintain, and so hard to understand, and so complex.

Daily trawl through the java.blogs feeds picked up a reference to ONJava.com: SSS (Small, Simple, Safe) [May. 26, 2004]. SSS is apparently a simple tool that allows you to instantiate and play with Java objects. It is apparently used and useful in teaching. I simply had to make a comment to the effect that BlueJ has had this feature for ever! Here’s my reponse in full: BlueJ is a simple Java IDE (avalable from www.

Lot of traffic on the blogosphere about the new Milestone 9 release of Eclipse. Here’s a memo to self to check this out later.