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bassplayinMacFiend
Banging the Bottom End
 
Join Date: Jun 2004
 
2005-02-28, 20:55

Quote:
Originally Posted by ast3r3x
Brad, I'm a freshman in college majoring in Management Information System major, so if that is worth anything.

I go to a penn state campus, and I'm taking CmpSci 203, which is a 'business oriented computer programming class.' This means we learn how to work with functions in excel, minitab (although I just copied this lab), Visual Basic (I just used REALBasic to the lab, figured it was the same), and then after we are done with visual basic, we are going to start working with MS Access.

We didn't really work with memory management in c++ because we never made programs that were big enough or ran long enough to need it.

So I guess there is no interface builder while writing Java huh? Why is it so bad to build interfaces with Java? Can Java programs run at the same speed as cocoa apps can?
If you're going to be working in Excel & Access, then spend the time to learn Visual Basic. Both of these programs are extendable through Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) which is basically VB6. Once you have the basics of VB down, you'll be able to use the object models in Excel & Access to programmatically manipulate data, so you'll want to be familiar with VB's syntax and how it works with objects so learning to use the Excel & Access object models will be that much simpler.

I've found that both Netbeans & Eclipse provide a drag & drop Java GUI builder, but I've already run into issues trying to group buttons & such using these IDEs. At this point I'd say that coding the GUI would probably be easier for me then it would be to use these GUI builders.

Java apps won't run as fast as Objective-C Cocoa programs because Obj-C is compiled, while Java is run through a Just In Time (JIT) compiler at run time. This is why Java can run on multiple platforms. The code is compiled into byte code, then this byte code is compiled at run time. As long as a JIT is available for an OS it can compile the byte code. So, think of the byte code as an intermediate level of compilation.

VB/VBA is also compiled at run time (although I believe you can compile VB apps but not VBA) so it will run slower than RealBASIC since RB is compiled as well.

Hope this helps.

[edit]
For my CS Major related classes I'd say 90+% was in Java because they wanted to drill OOP into our heads. Two classes dealt with C & one class was in ASM. The database programming classes were the only ones that didn't have any Java or C programming involved cuz that's all SQL.

Last edited by bassplayinMacFiend : 2005-02-28 at 21:00.
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