My 100th blog post: my Java StringArray class

Learning a new programming language can be very frustrating at first. However, I have a very clear idea where I want to go: make a web development framework on IBM Lotus Notes/Domino using Java on the server side. So I have to adapt the core things I've programmed in LotusScript to fit them into the Java world. The first thing I did however is adding the Java language to my Syntax highlight tool.

Installing Eclipse

This was really simple: I went to Eclipse.org and installed the Eclipse Classic 3.3.1.1 edition for Windows. Very cool features: Eclipse does not change or add any Windows registry settings. It does not require setting up the classpath. You just unzip Eclipse to a directory and it works. You can have many versions of Eclipse working with different Java versions.

Hello World

My first Java class. I used it to test my syntax highlighting as well:

package dworks.test;
public class HelloWorld {

    public static void main() {
        String myString="Hello World!";
        System.out.println(myString);
    }

}

Remember my StringBuffer class in LotusScript?

In fact, it is nothing at all like the Java StringBuffer class. The ArrayList class comes more near. However, it does not have a "join" method. So I decided to make my own class StringArray based on the ArrayList class:

package dworks.web.util;
import java.util.ArrayList;

public class StringArray extends ArrayList<String> {
    private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;
    
    public String join(String delim){
        StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();
        Object[] tmp=this.toArray();
        for( int x = 0; x < ( tmp.length - 1 ); x++ ){
            sb.append(tmp[x] );
            sb.append(delim );
        }
        sb.append( tmp[ tmp.length - 1 ] );
        return sb.toString();
        }
}

And voila: I have a class that has the same behaviour as my LotusScript StringBuffer class. I'm not sure if I have done the right thing here: maybe there was a class in Java that did exactly what I wanted. If so, I'll be glad to hear.