Lab 8: Serialization

Program to write

1. Read in any address data from a binary file of your choosing in the current working directory, if the file exists;

2. Display the number of addresses stored within the book;

3. Provide the user a menu with options to
   • Add a new entry,
   • Delete an entry,
   • Search for an entry or entries by last name, and
   • Show all entries.

4. Provide the user a way to exit, and, upon that selection,

5. Serialize the entire address book to a file in the current directory.

Do not be overly concerned with what data fields you choose to represent in your book. First name, last name, and street address are sufficient for our purposes.

Do implement Serializable in whatever class you write to implement an individual entry in the book. (Vectors themselves are already serializable.) You might want to read this tutorial to familiarize yourself with serialization in java.

Also, create a sample database for your program that has at least five names, of which at least two have the same last name. Include this with your submission in your lab8 directory.

Design Advice

• Allow your program to take a single command-line argument which is the name of the database to use; if none is provided, the program should start a new database. If one is provided, the program should load up that database at the beginning of the program run.

• A text-based interface is sufficient for this lab, though you may find it more natural to build a simple GUI. If you choose the latter, you may find some or all of these classes to be useful:
  1. The JTextField class for entering values (also see this tutorial).

  2. The JTextArea class for displaying data (also see this tutorial).

  3. Alternatively, you can use the JTable class for both entering and displaying data (also see this tutorial).

  You should also browse the Java Swing tutorials to see what other graphical classes (often known as widgets) are available. Feel free to use any that are useful to you.

  WARNING! It is extremely easy to get carried away when designing a GUI application and end up writing a much bigger program than you intended. If you have the time to do this, great, but if not, don't worry about it. Using JTables effectively, in particular, is a lot of work. The GUI should be functional, but it doesn't have to be beautiful.

• We are deliberately not telling you what classes to write or how to organize your program. In addition, the above specification doesn't describe every detail of how the program should work (because real specifications never do either). This lab should therefore be thought of mainly as a design exercise. Designing programs well is one of the most important aspects of programming. A bad algorithm can usually be fixed by modifying only a small amount of code, but a bad design often can't be fixed without completely rewriting the program (which is why software project failures are often so spectacular).

  Keep these things in mind:

  • Write your program to behave in a reasonable and useful manner given the rough specification given above. Ask yourself what kind of behavior you would want if you were the user of the program, then implement that behavior.

  • Handle errors in a reasonable manner. Don't just catch them and ignore them. In particular, don't just have the program die with e.g. an uncaught NumberFormatException if invalid input is entered.

  • Break your program up into classes in a reasonable manner, with each class performing a well-defined function. Don't stuff all the functionality into a single class.

Question to answer