Homework

Don’t you just love students who send you their homework problems in the hopes that you’ll do it for them? Here’s the latest example I’ve gotten:

Often in reading an article, a book or a document one comes across a word whose meaning is not known to the reader. This problem can be overcome by providing an on-line dictionary so that a reader could look up the meaning of a word. In order to provide help with reading, you are asked to develop a Java Applet with the following GUI interface:

Labels Text Boxes
Word typed Text box A
Word meaning Text box B

Once a user types a word in text box A and presses return, the meaning of the word is displayed in text box B (provided that word exists in the dictionary), otherwise, the message “word not known” appears in Text Box B. Notice that both text boxes are preceded by a label. For the purpose of testing, it is expected that the developed Applet is able to cope with 100 or more English words

That’s actually not a bad problem: takes in applets, GUI widgets, event handlers, data structures, and possibly network communication (if the dictionary is stored remotely). However it’s not too complex to implement in a week. I’ll have to remember it for my own classes.

In the meantime, if any teacher recognizes this as their own assignment and wants to know where I got it, drop me a line. :-)

This entry was posted on Monday, February 5th, 2007 at 10:38 AM and is filed under Java. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Atom feed. You can make a comment, Digg this story, or trackback from your own site.