CS 241 Lab 1: Clicking on Windows

This first assignment is intended more as a warm-up exercise, to bring you back up to speed on Java from last semester (or perhaps even earlier, for some of you). If you find it especially difficult, see me: it may be that you are mis-interpreting my intent, or that I can help out in some other way.

The assignment is a little simulation of a windowing system: you will draw some over-lapping rectangles on the screen, representing windows in a modern GUI, then allow the user to click on them. When a window (i.e., a rectangle) is clicked on, it should be brought to the front (and all windows re-drawn). In order to make the window layering easier to see, you can use random colors for the windows or just draw frames around them (this would allow the overlap and layering to be discerned in most cases).

To get the original window data, you can read the lines of a text field or file, whichever you are more comfortable with. (If necessary, you can even "bake" the window data into the code, although it's preferable if you can find a way to read it in dynamically.) Let's agree to put four positive integers per line, with the first two representing the upper-left coordinate (x and y) of the window and the next two its width and height), in the order x-y-w-h. Let's also agree that there will be exactly ten windows.

So your program should proceed as follows:

• phase 1: read in the window coordinate data and draw the windows;
• phase 2: take user clicks on the windows, bringing each selected window to the front and leaving the others in the same relative order. (This phase continues indefinitely, until the program is closed.)

Of course, some windows might remain completely obscured, and thus not selectable, or even visible. Oh well.

Regarding implementation:

• think in terms of classes: a window class, a point class, a rectangle class; perhaps even a "collection of windows" class;
• if you read window data dynamically, you'll need to separate out integers on a line: you can use the StringTokenizer and Integer.parseInt, or see the book for tips on using the Scanner class.
• if you use a text field for initial input, you might want to de-activate it after the first phase (i.e., once input is read).