FHTW Berlin

FB 4
Internationale Media and Computing
MeSoII: Media Software II
Sommersemester 2002


Media Software II

General information

This semester we will be looking at topics in the area of multimedia programming in Java.

There are two sections to this course, each consists of 4 hours. The first group is Tuesdays from 8.00-11.15 in VG 212 (Linux Lab) , the second group is Thursdays from 12.00-15.15 in VG 207. Since the lab 207 is not yet open, we will not begin until the second week of school. I will accept 20 people in each section, it will be first-come, first-served. I will have the lists available at the project selection meeting. We will start on April 9 and April 11. You only attend one section, please do not jump between sections. You will be working with a partner on the exercises. You may work from home, but this will probably take you more time than necessary. There is no lecture for this course.

The instructor is Prof. Dr. Debora Weber-Wulff. My office is on the top floor of the Verwaltungsgebäude, room 802. However, I tend not to be there when people are looking for me, but I read my email religiously. My office hours are Thursdays from 10-11. Do not hesitate to contact me by email at weberwu@fhtw-berlin.de if you have any questions.

We will be going through some of the Sun Tutorials covering the topics for this course. The tutorials can be found online at http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/onlineTraining/.

You will be do an exercise each week, which consists of working through all or part of a Java Tutorial. It is a good idea to read the exercises before you come to class. In the beginning of the semester we will be doing finger-exercises in Java (application review, Swing) just to make sure that you are back in the "Swing" of things. Then we will be getting into some deep topics such as Advanced Imaging, 2D and 3D programming, Network programming with RMI, JDBC, and Enterprise programming with Beans.

The exercises will be done in groups of two. This means that there can be a maximum of one "loner" per section. For each exercise the group is to submit a written report, including all code that you tried out, and a summary of what you learned, by the start of the next class. The report must be published on the Web, I only want to have URLs in my mailbox. I will publish a list of all reports on the web, so you can see how the others solved the problems.

The exercises are structured so that there is a set of interesting things to investigate. You do not need to do all of the questions posed, but you need to spend at least 4 hours programming. If after 4 hours you still don't have anything working, submit a report explaining what went wrong, and that will be sufficient for you to pass the exercise. If you are already a gung-ho programmer in Java, you can skip the easy questions and show us what experts you are by doing the most difficult question. There are no right or wrong answers in this course!

What To Turn In, or what does a report look like?

Your completed assignments should include:

Lab assignments are due the next week at the beginning of your section. They may, of course, be turned in earlier. Each lab will be worth 10 points. A report that covers all of the exercises posted and is well written will get 10 points. Poorly written reports will tend to have 2 points deducted. If you get nothing to work, but have a well written report, only 3 points will be deducted. Not trying everything and submitting a bad report will result in even less points. Putting any sentence in your report that is not written by you that is not appropriately attributed will get you 0 points. I mean it. If I find you just copying stuff out of the tutorial or some other place on the web, you fail the exercise. If I catch you twice you fail the course.

The following grade table will be used to compute your final grade. Note that this is part of your final Diplom grade.

I hope that we will have fun learning how to do industrial-strength, multimedia programming in Java!


For the super experts: If you have already worked through these tutorials and would be bored to tears, please contact me as soon as possible. If we get 3-4 people, then I will let you do continutation on another little project as MeSo II: Imster


Debora Weber-Wulff (weberwu@fhtw-berlin.de)