Advanced Java: Collections, Concurrency, and UI

This capstone unit advances students’ Java programming skills with hands-on work in collections and data structures, concurrency and synchronization, event-driven JavaFX user interfaces, and robustness techniques such as exception handling and precision data types. It builds on prior units’ foundations in language syntax and OOP and prepares learners to design responsive, thread-safe game components and tools.

Learning Objectives

• Analyze and implement Java collection types and behaviors (e.g., LinkedList, Stack, Queue, Deque, Map), performing iteration, insertion, deletion, and traversal using enhanced for loops, iterators, and varargs where appropriate
• Apply concurrency and thread-safety techniques by creating synchronized methods, using Locks, handling thread interruptions, and coordinating thread lifecycle for responsive applications
• Demonstrate event-driven GUI development using JavaFX by launching applications, overriding the start method, composing layouts (VBox, TreeView), creating and aligning controls (Buttons), and handling events with lambda expressions and functional interfaces
• Evaluate program correctness and data integrity by implementing exception handling (checked and custom exceptions), using initializers and final semantics, performing type casting and record usage, and manipulating dates and BigDecimal for precision-sensitive computations