Michael Birken

If you have a bounty of creative energy and way too much time on your hands, why not explore the new Java 1.4 APIs by creating a video game. That's exactly what I did when I produced a parody of Street Fighter II called Meat Fighter (see Figure 1). "Meat Fighter" is a side-scrolling one-to-one fighting game featuring anthropomorphic hot dogs and sausages. You can choose from six possible players and battle through seven stages of intensive meat fighting. So be prepared to meet the wiener warriors: Sal Lammee, Rat Dog, Oscar M. Wiener, Hot Doug, Cornelius Dog, and Oliver. In this article, I present a simple framework to enable you to quickly take advantage of full-screen animation, music, and sound effects without learning all the intricate details of the new APIs. (The ... (more)

Coding with Java Swing

Even for many seasoned developers, Swing code can be notoriously difficult to organize. Where is the right place to put parsing and validation logic? How do you prevent those threading issues that cause lockups or repainting glitches? Is it possible to unit test GUI logic? Can the code somehow be shared with other user-interfaces, like a web front-end? If these questions sound familiar, ... (more)

Restoring the "Delegate" Concept To Java

The function pointer, a powerful concept in the C and C++ programming languages, has no direct equivalent in Java. No syntax exists to pass the address of a method to a JButton, for instance, that links it with pressing the button. Instead, Java promotes the use of anonymous inner classes, like this one: okButton.addActionListener(new ActionListener() { public void actionPerformed(Actio... (more)

Delegates Reloaded: Walking the Path

The function pointer, a powerful concept in the C and C++ programming languages, has no direct equivalent in Java. No syntax exists to pass the address of a method to a JButton, for instance, that links it with pressing the button. Instead, Java promotes the use of anonymous inner classes, like this one: okButton.addActionListener(new ActionListener() { public void actionPerformed(Action... (more)