Java Planner

Inspiration

I am fortunate enough to be part of my school district's Center for Advanced Professional Studies (CAPS) program, which allows students to "test the waters" of potential careers. As part of my Software Development CAPS course, my teammates and I have been struggling to find a clean way to read and write to files, as well as how to format that text. I decided that for my weekend at Hack K-State I wanted to solve this problem. The more I considered how to implement this issue into a larger project, I realized how little the computer science classes at my school truly teach. They mostly focus on Java, yet they don't cover any of the more complex Java classes that are available. The more I dug, the more I found that the Java Time class might be most applicable to future projects. Thus Java Planner was born, a perfect way to combine the need for data storage with the Java Time class.

What it does

Java Planner allows for a user to plan for an event as far in the future as the Java Time class will allow - that is, around 300 million years in the future. While that won't be necessary for most users, it is impressive that this functionality is even possible. Java Planner ensures that the user is aware of when every event is occurring, right down to the last second.

How we built it

Java Planner was built using Java classes and text files. The user is able to assign each event a description, month, day, hour, and minute in order to ensure that they are never late. Additionally, Java Planner allows for multiple events per day. If the user enters events in non-chronological order - no problem! Java Planner automatically sorts the events by date before displaying them to the viewer.

Challenges we ran into

Admittedly, Java is not the right language for this project. The goal was not the product necessarily, though, the goal was the learning. That established, I definitely had to get a little creative with my code. For example, I was looking into creating a clean GUI with Java Swing, but a lot of the formatting was janky and looked strange so unfortunately, to submit on time, I had to drop the GUI and settle for the program running in the terminal. However, my goal was not to create a flashy product; it was to cement my knowledge of these tools and utilize them properly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The goal for this project was not to build a stunning application with all the fancy bells and whistles; the goal was to deepen my own personal understanding of Java classes and text files. I feel incredibly proud of my accomplishments this weekend. I cannot wait to go to my CAPS peers on Monday and explain the solution I've found to our problem.

What we learned

I learned an incredible amount about Java classes and text files (duh), but also a lot about myself and my own limits this weekend. I have never experienced an environment like this one before, and developing a product in it has surely prepared me for future opportunities. I don't often stay up past 2am, but as I found myself coding until 3am, then 4am, and even 5am, I realized how much I truly love programming and how excited I am to pursue it for the rest of my life.

What's next for Java Planner

In the future, I hope to finally figure out the formatting with the GUI. With more time, I think I could do it. I will likely continue to work in order to prove to myself that I am capable of it.

Built With

• java