Skip to content

Lab 4b: Simulator 2.1

Submission deadline: 2359, Friday, April 6, 2018.

Prerequisites

This lab assumes that students are

  • familiar with the monads Stream and Optional;
  • familiar with using lambda expressions as higher-order functions.

Learning Objectives

After completing this lab, students should:

  • be comfortable with replacing loops with streams.
  • be comfortable with replacing variables that could be null with Optional
  • be comfortable with using lambda expressions to customize the behavior of a class (instead of using polymorphism)
  • be able to write more general methods by passing in lambda expressions

Setup

You will build on top of your Lab 4a solution. To setup Lab 4b, do the following:

  • copy ~/lab4a to ~/lab4b.
  • rename LabFourA.java to LabFourB.java
  • rename the class LabFourA to LabFourB

No new test data nor skeleton code is given.

Task

For Lab 4b, you are as several specific changes to make in the Lab 4a solution.

Replace Polymorphism with Lambda Expressions

As you have seen in Lecture 9, we can simplify the code written in OO-fashion, by replacing polymorphism with lambda expressions.

In this lab, your first task is to replace ArrivalEvent and DoneEvent with lambda expressions that you can store inside the Event class as a field.

You may find that you need to use variable capture to carry around variables that are used in the lambda expression. You need to do this carefully since the objects in your program are now immutable, so a reference that your lambda expression captures might not be referring to the latest version of the object!

Replace Loops with Streams

Your second task is to replace all while loops and for loops (and possible loops that disguised as recursion) with stream operations (including that in LabFourB.java). The only loop that can exist in your code after this lab is the while loop inside run of Simulator: 

1
2
3
    while (p.first != null) {
      :
    }

In doing so, you may notice that the methods findIdleServer and findServerWithNoWaitingCustomer in Shop can be refactored and simplified, if you abstract out the common parts of the code and represent the difference part with a Predicate. Go ahead and change that as well.

Hint

Remember to replace the loops in LabFourB.java as well. The Scanner class has a tokens() method that returns a stream of delimiter-separated tokens from a scanner.

No More null! No More null!

Your final task for this lab is to use Optional for all variables that could be null. Such variables include those representing a customer, a server, an event, the scanner, etc.

As we mentioned, the get() method of Optional in Java defeats the purpose of Optional since it could raise an exception. As such, you should use get() (and the corresponding isPresent checks) sparingly.

Coding Style and Documentation

Remember that you should still

Grading

This lab contributes another 6 marks to your final grade:

  • Making every class immutable and side-effect free (1 marks)
  • Replacing polymorphism with lambda expression and using variable capture correctly (1 marks)
  • Use Optional for any variable that might be null (2 marks)
  • Replacing all loops with streams (except run() in Simulator) (2 marks)

You can get up to 1 mark deduction for violation of style; up to another 1 mark for lack of javadoc documentation.

Submission

When you are ready to submit your lab, on cs2030-i, run the script 

1
~cs2030/submit4b

which will copy the files matching *.java (and nothing else) from your ~/lab4b directory (and its subdirectory cs2030/simulator and cs2030/util on cs2030-i to an internal grading directory. We will test compile and test run with a tiny sample input to make sure that your submission is OK.

You can submit multiple times, but only the most recent submission will be graded.