CSE132 Midterm Review

The CSE132 midterm exam will be held during class on Tuesday, March 4, 2008 from 10:00 to 11:30 in our usual classroom. The midterm and final exams will be weighed equally in the exam portion of your course grade.

The midterm exam will focus on design and implementation concepts that we have discussed in class and used in course projects. The exam may include some multiple choice and short answer questions, and some questions may ask you to write Java code or sketch designs using, for example, class hierarchy diagrams, use case screnarios, module interaction diagrams, or GUI layouts.

The exam is closed book and closed notes. No electronic devices will be permitted. Please bring several sharpened pencils.

How to prepare: The exam is primarily concerned with application of concepts. Be ready to think about design options and come up with clean, elegant solutions to design problems. This is not about memorization... It is about application of the concepts we have discussed to new situations.

The best way to review for the exam is to think about the following design concepts and techniques that we have been discussing and applying this semester. Be sure that you understand what they are, that you are ready to recognize when it would make sense to use them, and that you are ready to apply them to a new problem. You don't need to memorize a lot of details, but have these concepts and techniques in mind as design options so that they occur to you when presented with an appropriate problem. Note that, due to time constraints, you will not necessarily use all of these on the exam.

Class hierarchies, inheritance, and polymorphism
Interfaces and abstract classes
Orthogonality
Composite pattern (example: nested containers in swing, where every swing component is a container)
Plug-ins (examples: layout managers, comparators)
Wrappers (examples: the stream library, collection wrappers)
The publish-subscribe model (example: event sources and listeners)
The model-view-controller paradigm
Inner classes, including anonymous classes implementing interfaces and extending adapters
Streams
Iterators
Exception handling
Threads (basic concepts of creating and starting threads)

The exam questions assume general familiarity parts of the Java API you used in the projects so far this semester. However, you are not expected to memorize the API. If you can't remember the exact name of a method, just write something reasonable and we'll figure out what you meant.