Java Power Tools: Principles, Structure, Highlights

The Java Power Tools is an extensive pedagogical toolkit that is designed for rapid development of graphical user interfaces, for robust IO with automatic error checking, for graphics display of mutatable shapes, images, and text, and for quick construction of all associated data structures. The Java Power Tools includes a framework, Java Power Framework, that is designed for efficient experimentation and testing. User methods defined in a derived class of the JPF class will automatically give rise to buttons in the framework that will execute the methods. This article will summarize the pedagogical and design principles at the heart of the Java Power Tools, will discuss the structure of the JPT that permits these principles to echo throughout the various classes in JPT, and will highlight the most important JPT features of interest to faculty and students. The Java Power Tools are built directly on pure Java and so may be used as a library within any Java development environment. In addition, JPT is 100% open source and so may also be used as a design model in upper-level courses on object-oriented design and software development. With the recent creation of an ACM Task Force to consider a standard for pedagogically oriented APIs[51, 52], it is an especially good moment to review what JPT has attempted and accomplished.