- Author: Nolan Stetz
- Class: CS361 Section 2
- Semester: Spring 2024
This Java application is essentially a simulation for a DFA. This allows you to create a start state, final state and any number of 'normal' states. As well as transitions on a certain character. We can show if the string is accepted or not by using our accepts method and we can perform swaps on a transition from a certain state to another. We also have a nicely formatted toString to output the DFA's contents.
There were some definite struggles during this project. We had a really tough time implementing the swaps method. It doesn't work properly even up to now. I will continue to work on it in my free time to eventually get it but for now I have to stop working on this project and continue on other things. The idea of creating a DFA seemed daunting at first but now once I look back at it I should've enjoyed it more and took advantage of the time I got to work on this. Overall I had a really good time and enjoyed putting it together.
- What worked well and what was a struggle?
- Swap method was a challenge and a recusive approach to 'accepts' was really easy compared to iterative or something else.
- What concepts still aren't quite clear? -I still need to better understand the swap method and how it works with created basically a temporary state to handle the swap.
- What techniques did you use to make your code easy to debug and modify?
- I used to have some println's in my code to see where it was failing but once I moved to IntelliJ it was a lot easier to debug with their suite of tools.
- What would you change about your design process?
- Starting earlier and putting in more hours before the deadline. That was our downfall.
- If you could go back in time, what would you tell yourself about doing this project?
- Start early, and if I encounter a problem, ask for help. As well as communicating with your teammates what you are working on so there are no merge conflicts.
To compile, execute the following command in the main project directory:
$ javac -cp .:/usr/share/java/junit.jar ./test/dfa/DFATest.java
Run the compiled class with the command:
$ java -cp .:/usr/share/java/junit.jar:/usr/share/java/hamcrest/core.jar org.junit.runner.JUnitCore test.dfa.DFATest
This will compile and run the tester with the two lines above. The output will be presented in the terminal.
- No sources used except GeeksForGeeks and Oracle.com to understand and see which dataset we wanted to use: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/HashSet.html https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/hashset-in-java/