Continued working with the GUI development for set theory today - Professor Rodger met with us in the afternoon, and I'm hoping to send her what I have as of Wednesday. Today was also Julian's last day; he's been great to work with and learn from during the past month, especially with his enthusiasm and helpfulness.
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More GUI along with modifying or fixing the model and working on the controller as needed. A couple of challenges with deciding how to implement action listeners to be mostly view without "knowing too much" about what the model and controller should be handling. I'm trying to keep a list of the active sets, both "behind-the-scenes" as as a JList displayed to the user; unfortunately I didn't think everything through as well as I should have and ended up with an infinite loop due to two constructors, each of which initialized a static instance of the other. Oops.
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GUI development continued; worked on trying to find a more elegant fix to the static variables problem. No noteworthy breakthrough to report yet, although from a more reflective perspective, I feel like I must not be approaching this optimally given how much each of my classes or methods depends on other ones, resulting in significant back-and-forth incremental work. Lunch today featured Abrita Chakravarty as the weekly undergraduate lunch series speaker; her presentation was actually two-part, first focusing on her previous research and then her current project, but both were related to biology and genetics. To be honest, although she provided a good high-level overview, I still find it harder to understand the finer details of computational biology motivated talks - maybe it's time to take an introductory biology class, given how often that field has been discussed this summer?!
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Since we needed more direction on how to proceed, particularly with regards to the user interface and events, Ian called Julian and we received the go-ahead to start working directly with the new GUI code that Julian has been working on. I haven't had a chance to browse deeply, but from a moderate glance through, it looks like he has a solid but more complicated framework in place. I'm working on finishing up miscellaneous loose ends with the GUI components that I've already created just to develop a better intuition for how things work and perhaps more importantly, to understand what does not work so I can improve what I'm doing. Started refactoring and adding various things to my own classes to hopefully fit in with Julian's...
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After taking some time this morning to closely read through Julian's new GUI code, I'm glad to finally have a much better and intricate understanding of how things seem to work. I started with the very beginning - launching the main menu, and then traced various call hierarchies and declaration hierarchies to better see how everything interacted or related. By the end of it, I was able to pretty easily figure out how to begin integrating my sets materials. Although it was pretty straightforward to add a line of code here or create a new subclass there, part of it involved using a specific constructor parameter (though slightly reluctant at first, once I figured out how I could change things to accommodate this and improve my code, I appreciated it more) or subclassing EditingPanel (doing this doesn't impact anything I'm doing per se, but the problem is that the superclass isn't really relevant for what I'm doing, so I just set editable to false and ignored it for now...), for example.
Professor Rodger met with us after the Alice workshop finished up in late afternoon to discuss our progress and what to work on next, as usual. She'll be out of town for the next week and then holding the follow-up Alice workshop the week afterwards, so I'm really hoping to make speedier progress in the meantime now that I think I have a much better grasp of everything.