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Welcome to the QuickCup on-line guide.
The information in these pages aim to give an overview of how to use the QuickCup Java Integrated Development Environment.
As the product develops, these pages will be expanded to give further specific information, tutorials, and details of common processes that you may perform in day-to-day use of the application.
Please note that QuickCup relies on the availability of the Sun Java SDK set of utilities being present on your computer, which are downloadable from the Sun web site from http://www.java.sun.com/j2se for the standard edition (sufficient for most purposes), and http://www.java.sun.com/j2ee for the enterprise edition (more geared towards large-scale business projects).
QuickCup is designed to be an easy-to-use environment from which you can create your own Java programs.
It was primarily designed to be an environment from which you can easily learn about the principles of Java, and try things out for yourself, without having to commit yourself to the learning curve of a fully-fledged commercial-scale IDE (Integrated Development Environment).
However, it is also extremely useful for smaller-scale projects, such as Applet development (i.e. Java on the web page - the grey boxes that appear on your web pages and eventually do something fancy!)
The principle of QuickCup is that you create a project file with a few basic details - e.g. the name of the project, author details, and a few comments about its purpose - and then add new (or existing) files to the project - for example, source code files (.java files) and web page files (.htm or .html files).
You can then use the in-built editor to amend these files from the project, without having to open them individually from an external text editor.
Once you are happy with the program / web page you have written or amended, you can compile it at the click of a button. Any errors will show up on the 'console window'.
This produces bytecode files (ending with .class) which can be used on any computer that runs Java (i.e. has a copy of the Java Virtual Machine or Java Plug-In).
You can click on a button the run the program from the web page, from the appletviewer program, which allows you to test applets without the overhead of a web browser, or directly if the program is an application rather than an applet.
Once you are happy with your work, you can package the program and any accompanying files (e.g. graphics or sound files) into a single compressed JAR file - meaning less time to download the program for your web page visitors.
You can then send your JAR file (or any of the project files) to your web site using the inbuilt FTP facility. The details are stored with your project, so if you need to change your program again, it's a single click to update your web site with the latest changes.
You can also print off your project details, and the source code from within your project if you wish to keep a hard copy of your programs.
Finally, there are the usual editing facilities you would expect to find - Goto a line number (great for navigating whilst in a teaching environment), and Find / Replace facilities.
For more technically-minded users, QuickCup also gives you the facility to change the class-path and which version of the JDK you wish to use, in case you are wanting to test out the latest toolkit, without committing yourself.
QuickCup was designed to be an aid to teaching - specifically for the author's purposes whilst teaching a Java course at his local college. For this reason, it is geared towards ease-of-use, and simplicity. However, over time, it has evolved into a useful development tool in its own right.
Following the philosophy of Java being available freely to all, it seemed reasonable to make QuickCup equally freely available. Thus, read the copyright agreement carefully, but essentially it costs nothing to download QuickCup and use it on a day-to-day basis, whether you are using it for educational, recreational, or business purposes.
It is an ongoing development, so if you have any suggestions, they would be welcomed - send them to quickcup@simonhuggins.com and you'll get a reply soon after.
(c) Copyright 2001-2 Arctan
Computer Ventures Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
If you have any issues regarding this on-line help, please contact the
author by clicking here.
This Page was last updated: 26 April 2002 16:58