JavaDUCK -- Building a Software Engineering Tool as a CS2 Project

You can download the SIGCSE paper,
and slides from the presentation as Powerpoint or as PDF 6up

In the Spring term of 1998, I taught Cornell's CS2 course, CS211. As a course project, the students were asked to create a tool much like the javadoc tool that comes as part of Sun's JDK. That is, the tool they were to create would:

1. examine Java source code, and extract the basic structural information about each desired class (its member and static variables and methods, what packages the class imports, etc), and then
2. create an HTML page for each class that summarizes this information.

We called the tool JavaDUCK (Java DocUmenter of Code, oK?).

We gave the students a scanner generated using the tool JLex from Princeton University. We gave them a simplfied grammar for Java (e.g, no arrays, no initializing expressions) plus a simple interface to conform to (so that we could write a common test suite), and we turned them loose!

We think that the results were very impressive (we received some nice email from the javadoc folks at Sun). The winners of the coveted Golden Duck Award can be found here. Keep in mind that these pages were generated from test suites that the students did NOT get to see beforehand.

The course page on the project (i.e., the one the students saw) can be found here, and the project handout can be found here.

JavaDUCK was originally conceived by me (Mike Godfrey) ... but two of my TAs did most of the work. Max Khavin generated the JLex scanner and wrote up the preliminary version of the handout. Dan Grossman did just about everything else, including the development of a set of test files (which we kept secret).

Dan and I wrote a paper on the JavaDUCK experience, which I presented at SIGCSE '99 in March of 1999 in New Orleans.

If you are interested in using JavaDUCK for your course, please go ahead.
I would appreciate hearing about it, 'tho.

Last modification: Sunday January 11, 2015 at 19:51:01 (EST)