Aaron's Java Blag 5: In which I make something actually useful

Today I made a program that might actually be useful! Shocking, I know.

The program I made will MLA cite a website for you if you give it all the information it needs. It also happened to use a lot of things I’ve learned for other programs (such as if statements and scanners) plus a few new things, so I thought it’d be nice for this final post.

The first thing that you might not recognize are the strings. Although I’ve been using them, I was mostly just copying what the book told me to do until now because I wasn’t quite sure what type of data they were, so I didn’t talk about them. According to the book, they are technically objects, but can act somewhat like primitives (Bryant The Special Type: String). That means although they aren’t one of the three types of primitive data I’ve been using since the second post, they’ll act similar in some ways, such as defining them in the same way (String name = “string”) and adding them together (just use stringname + otherstring to put them together, like adding two numbers). However, they do have a few differences, which I needed to understand in order to use them effectively.

The main difference is how I can use them in if statements or loops. With primitive data such as ints you would just need to do if (myInt == 2), but that won’t work for a String. I looked it up in the book, and it said that “To compare objects (including instances of the String class), Java programmers use the equals method. Any object whose instances can be compared to each other should implement the equals method (which is defined in the Object class)” (Bryant Operators). The equals method is the equivalent to using the == for primitive data, and it is written as string.equals("string that you want to check for"). I used string.equalsIgnoreCase() in this program, which is the same thing but ignores capitalization.

Another thing I learned was the null data. The book had a long explanation on null data, but in summary it just said that null data is essentially “empty” data (Bryant The Non-Existent Type). I set any information that the user can’t provide to this so that it doesn’t just put the word “none” in their citation.

With all that said, I think I’ve explained how this works well enough. Here’s what the program ended up looking like:

It’s a bit long, since there were multiple strings I needed to define. I decided to cite this blog post as a test of how it works. Here it is:

Pretty cool, huh? I came into this barely knowing any programming, and now I can make programs to help me in school. I’ve had fun using all these programs, and even the process of making them has been fun. That being said, here’s my final Surprisingly Insightful and Thought-Provoking Question^TM:

Which do you enjoy more: The excitement of working on a project, or the satisfaction after its completion?

I’ve found that for a project that is related to something I enjoy doing, I enjoy the process of creating it more than the accomplishment afterward. I suppose it’s like reading a good book in that regard- once it’s over I just don’t want it to end, no matter how good the ending was.

What do you think?

Bryant, Jay. Java 7 for Absolute Beginners. Berkeley, CA: Apress, 2012. Books 24/7. Web. 22 Jan. 2015.