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ANT – A worked example

Imagine we have a small JavaFX application.  We are building this application in Eclipse, although this should not make any material difference, you could build it in using any IDE or simple command line tools.

This application has some java files under the “src” folder.  There is also a “resources” folder which contains some none java files which the application will reference.  Added to this we are using some 3rd party JAR libraries.  Finally, we have a text-based properties file for our application.

Our project structure looks like this:

The sample Ant project structure

We are going to use ANT to produce a Windows executable application.  The steps we need to take to do this are: – Continue reading “ANT – A worked example”

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Having learnt the language now what?

Lots of people set out to learn a language, take a course and then at the end of it don’t know what to do next. They don’t feel they are a coder, they still can’t do anything of substance. We all go through this. There is a chasm between knowing a programming language and being able to do things with it. The next step is to learn to write an application. Continue reading “Having learnt the language now what?”

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Why do you want to be a programmer? The raw ingredients

I see lots of posts around the web about people who are interested in learning to program.  From the questions they ask you can tell they have aspirations to be the next best thing since sliced bread.  While all of this unharnessed enthusiasm is great we all need a sense of reality.  So, what does it take to be a programmer?

Compass and map – Photo by Himesh Kumar Behera on Unsplash

Continue reading “Why do you want to be a programmer? The raw ingredients”