Aims
This module builds on the material covered in CS12230/CS12320 to further the development of participants' programming skills by: introducing more advanced facilities that are available to the software engineer to improve the robustness, reusability and maintainability of software; applying these skills in practice using the Java programming language.

Learning outcomes
The module concentrates on instilling a professional approach to software development. Further programming concepts are introduced in the context of developing more robust and reliable software. On successful completion of the module, students should:

• understand the importance of software design, coding and testing as demonstrated by their own software development;
• be able to analyse a problem and produce high quality software designs as shown by their project work;
• be able to produce more robust programs making full use of Java exceptions;
• be able to make data persist from one program run to another;
• demonstrate how classes can be made more reusable using Java interfaces;
• demonstrate full knowledge of the major facilities within the Java programming language;
• produce high quality software that is robust, reliable, reusable and maintainable.

Syllabus
1. Robust Programming - 4 Lectures
The need for a separate mechanism for handling erroneous code; throwing and catching exceptions. User defined exceptions.

2. Persistent Data - 4 Lectures
Advanced input/output and files. Worked example bringing together file handling and exceptions.

3. Abstract Data Types and Linear Data Structures - 7 Lectures
More on the ideas of abstraction and encapsulation. Java support for their implementation. An introduction to linear data structures: stacks, Queues implemented using arrays and vectors.

4. Enhancing the Reusability of Classes - 5 Lectures
An introduction to Java interfaces: Sortable, Listable and the standard Iterator class. Using interfaces to produce a reusable List class.

5. An introduction to Graphical User Interfaces - 10 Lectures
Building on programming skills, this looks at developing graphical front ends to simple software systems introducing Java's AWT and Swing classes.