Author: Gareth Barnard

In recent years, I’ve been creating a calendar using images that I’ve taken. Back in 2002, I created a small Java program that prints out the calendar for the next twelve months. In my themes and on the MoodleBites eLearningWorld theme courses I have code that arranges the Moodle blocks horizontally, this is partly facilitated through the employment of column CSS classes that are based upon the ideas implemented in the Bootstrap framework. Combine all of these thoughts, and add to my recent posts with Java then I thought ‘Why can’t I get Java to create a calendar just like the one I have printed?’. And that’s what this month is all about, where we will additionally see how pre-processing of HTML output can be designed and implemented from scratch.

As a follow on from ‘A little bit of Java’, I thought that we’d progress into something a bit more complicated. The thing is with software creation is that the initial learning curve is steep, but once you’ve gotten over that then things do become easier. One way of climbing that initial curve is to have a defined goal with an outcome that you strive to reach. The program also needs to have a purpose so that it does something useful for us. Then we will be motivated to attain the goal of achieving our solution when things get tricky. Therefore our program will take text that we enter and apply a ‘Substitution cipher’ and tell us the result. That result we can then enter again and get what we originally typed back.

Life is all about learning and maintaining the skills you have. I started off writing software in procedural languages, then moved on to C++, being object orientated, then Java came along and I fell in love with it. I found it much easier not having to worry about memory management and having so much ‘out of box’ components, especially graphical ones. So let us learn and revisit the language and discover it.