For the past few days, I have been working on my new program. The idea is to feed it all the data about which courses are offered an when at a school, and they you tell it the classes that you want to take. It will then give you all the permutations that are valid. So far I have it reading in the data, putting it in memory, getting it back out, generating lists of possible schedules based on a list of classes you want to take, and validating that list by trimming out the schedules that contain conflicts. It decided the schedule that I’ve been living for the past 8 weeks is valid, so things seem to be working quite well. Maybe my school would be interested in it after I get finished.
The next big step though, is to make the GUI. I have it set up so that I can draw a schedule, and that works fine. But all the courses that one wants to take at the moment is currently hardcoded into the program for testing. The GUI parts of selecting which classes, which of the various schedules that you want to look at, and all that all needs to be created. I’ve never done any real GUI programming in Swing so that will be a challenge.
But now I have a question for all of you out there reading this. You ARE reading this, right? Ok. I need a way to debug Java. If anyone knows a good (or even decent) debugger I can use (that’s FREE as in $$$) I’d love to know about it. I’m on OS X and due to a bug in the preview release of Java 1.5, anything that uses sockets to attach to the process won’t work (that mean JSwat). I can’t get DDD to work (it opens and all, but doesn’t seem to attach either). I am looking for anything besides jdb. I’m not using X-Code, if that makes a difference, just the command line. Any help would be greatly appreciated as I have run into at least 2 problem that took me a long time to solve that I could have gotten though in a few minutes with a debugger.
