Course syllabus

• The object-oriented paradigm, introducing objects, messages, methods, classes, interfaces, class hierarchies and responsibility-driven design.
• Information hiding, abstraction, programming to interfaces, and enforcement of design intent using language features such as visibility qualifiers, constructors, constants, sealed classes, abstract classes and interfaces.
• Data typing in object-oriented programming languages, subtypes vs subclasses, the principle of substitution, method overriding and overloading, polymorphism, dynamic binding, generic types.

 Theme (B): frameworks, illustrated by a contemporary GUI framework, covers:

• Inversion of control principle.
• Application of fundamental OOP concepts, introduced in theme A.
• Event handling
• Model/view design

 Theme (C): application-level concurrent programming covers:

• The lightweight threads programming model and thread lifecycle.
• Synchronisation, mutual exclusion, and liveness.
• High level concurrency primitives, language dependent but to include abstractions like locks, executors, thread pools, and concurrent collections.
• Concurrency issues in GUI applications: the event dispatching thread, worker threads and background tasks, tasks with interim results.

 Theme (D): software quality comprises:

• Fundamental testing techniques: unit testing, black box testing, white-box testing, equivalence partitioning.
• Source code inspection.
• Documenting and commenting source code 

Expected Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of this course the students will be able to:

• Describe the features typically offered by an object-oriented programming language, including support for classes, visibility, inheritance, interfaces, polymorphism and dynamic binding.
• Explain key principles and best practise associated with object-oriented software development. These include abstraction, information hiding, programming to interfaces, resilience to change, and reuse.
• Put into practice object-oriented programming knowledge and develop a relatively large, with respect to software developed on pre-requisite courses, object-oriented software application.
• Describe the principles of application-level multithreading: threading, condition synchronisation and mutual exclusion; and primitives associated with these.
• Develop a multithreaded application that uses threads appropriately and correctly.
• Describe and apply contemporary techniques that can be used to help develop software that meets its specification. These include source code inspection and basic software testing techniques: black box, white box and unit testing

• Final Exam: 65%; Test: 15%; Assignments: 20%.
• COMPSCI 230 is a "practical" course, which means you must pass both the practical (assignments) and the theory (test and exam) sections, separately.
• The pass mark is likely to be 50%, but might be lower. If you have not achieved 50% in the practical part, you are still advised to sit the exam.