0.11. Running the AnagramGame with Apache NetBeans

Finally we get to run our Juppies2 project, which consists of a little Anagram Game. It's quite fun and we will modify this game during the course. Good luck trying to figure out all the anagrams - some of them are quite hard to guess!

You will notice that the first time you run it, it seems that dozens of files need to be downloaded from the Internet. The program that is doing this is Maven - a very popular program that installs any other software we might be using in our Juppies2 project. When Java first was released, we did not have tools like Maven and configuration management was really tricky to do. We had to manually download libraries from the internet and put them all on a long line as a startup parameter. This was error prone, because we might have incompatible versions. Maven is a very popular program to take care of that for us; another more modern similar program is Gradle. In this course we will only use Maven. Note that the first time it can take a while to start our game, but after that it should be a lot faster. It is possible to speed up start-up by creating an executable file, but that is beyond the scope of this course.

You will also notice that the window frame that pops up looks unlike anything you would have seen before. It is neither Windows, nor Mac, nor Linux. It is a UI framework called Swing that is used for creating user interfaces. Swing is quite old and for modern projects we might see prettier graphics with JavaFX. However, Swing is still used in real-world "rich client" applications and you might get an excellent job writing such code. Swing is the basis for IntelliJ IDEA and Apache NetBeans.

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