Can I have some inspiration please?

[Rosie Vogel]

I'm a relatively inexperienced java programmer and I'm currently lazing around the office because my employer can't find a project for me. Instead of boring myself to death with these lame e-learning courses they have, I would like to write a program.
Now, this may sound ridiculous but I don't know what to write! I'm not really a wildly creative person. Does anyone have an idea? Maybe you've found yourself in a similar situation and thought of something. I don't have to come up with a useful, ready-for-shipping application, what matters is the learning experience. It could be a game or something else, doesn't matter.

[Karthik Guru]

i find myself in a simlar situation for the past 1 week.
Just finished a hectic one..so in my case it c'd be a well deserved rest :-).
Anyway check out www.javaworld.com.
It has so many articles which take up a topic and show the complete implementation steps. These are normally short ones but u end up learning quite a lot.
I saw an interesting article (with code) regrading converting XML files to objects using a sax parser.
i found this one today,
http://gethelp.devx.com/techtips/java_pro/10MinuteSolutions/Gabhart10min04/Gabhart10min04-1.asp
at a different place though.
karthik.

[Val Dra]

Or you can try to go gor SCJD they give you a project and you must complete it.

[Sean MacLean]

Hey, there's alway the cattle drive!
[insert shameless plug here]
Sean

[Cindy Glass]

Absolutely try the Cattle Drive (if they have room).

[ione walker]

Even if the cattle drive dois not have room
you can still do the projects.
I did the first 3 & 1/2 befor I sent
any of them in.
It is really good paratice.

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Ione Walker
[e-mail]
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[Rosie Vogel]

Yes, of course I should do the cattle drive, I don't know why I didn't think of that. In order to save room I might have one of the gurus in the office look at my code instead of the already overworked Javaranch people. Karthik, the links look interesting too. Thanks all.

[fred cook]

Where I work there is a lot of Java programming that we put up on the web. You might want to look at the sites and see if you can program one of the applets yourself. Here are the two sites:
http://www.shodor.org/cserd/misc_desk/index.html

http://www.shodor.org/interactivate

These two sites you ought to look at anyway because the applets are really cool, and there is a lot of stuff to learn.

[Julia Reynolds]

Those applets are beyond cool. I don't suppose there is any
chance that the source code is available?
Julia

[Cindy Glass]

You can get source for applets at www.javaboutique.com

[Dale DeMott]

If you are looking for things to do, why don't you write some classes that would help you out in future projects. Things like some helper classes for the Sting class. Maybe some classes to help you connect to databases, retrieve records, format data. That way when you do your programming later, you can use these classes to help speed up your development. I know that is what I do when I want to be constructive. I may create a class to traverse through records. It would return a list of elements from my query and give you the ability to return a given number of elements starting from a given point.
Example: The method name might be
Vector getElementsFromQuery(int startingPoint, int numberElementsOnPagem);
Something like that. So if you called this method like this...
Vector myVector = getElementsFromQuery(30, 10);
it would start from element 30 in the query, give you the elements from element 30 to 40 and put that into the Vector called myVector.
What do you think??
-Dale

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What's this H2SO4 doing in my fridge?? ( thud )
[This message has been edited by Dale DeMott (edited June 14, 2001).]