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CST 338 - Week 5

This week, we wrote an extension of our card game application and made it GUI based by implementing Swing, a classic Java framework designed for building GUI applications.

 GUI Programming comes late in learning Java for a good reason - programmers working with GUIs must understand event-based programming, how to implement interfaces and abstract classes, and how to deal complex files such as images graphics instead of just primitive data types. I don't think that learning all of this late is harmful since it requires a pretty good understanding of a lot of Java concepts, and learning event-based programming is somewhat difficult the first time around since everything is quite abstract. 

 Swing, from my experience this week, seems like a primitive way to make GUI based applications, and the hardest part for me was adding each GUI element and getting it positioned and working correctly. I've worked with more modern GUI development platforms and they make creating a window, adding media/elements/buttons to it much more streamlined. A big advantage of these modern tools is allowing the user to design a GUI without writing a single line of code. 

 I felt like this week's assignment was quite tough, but it was good preparation( and a refresher for me) for the upcoming Android module, as Android took many of the same concepts from Swing and event-based programming during its development.

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