Exercises for the Reader
The following is a list of potential programming exercises
that you can do to update, modify, or improve the Player or
Game programs.
-
Completely rewrite the Player application
to have a customized user interface and
customized features do what you want it to do.
-
Write a GUI that allows a Player to
create their own BINGO cards. You will have
to modify the Game so that it simply
signs the card when the Player joins a game
(instead of creating it).
-
Allow a Player to remember cards
they like and reuse them.
-
Set up a message center that lets Players send
messages to each other through the Game.
-
Implement a "boss" button so that the Player
turns into a spreadsheet or word processing
program when the boss shows up at your computer.
-
Provide the Game with the ability to
select a different "BagOfBalls" to generate
the announced balls.
-
Use the new sound APIs to announce the balls
with a voice.
-
Convert the Player application into an applet.
Applets cannot use MulticastSockets so you would
have to figure out a way to get around that.
One option is to write a companion application
that listened to the MulticastSocket and passed
the information to the applet.
[PENDING: check next statement]
A second option is to use a DatagramSocket in
the applet to listen. However, DatagramSocket's
don't have groups so the applet would have to
listen to everything that comes across the socket
and glean just the information that it needed.
-
Write a third score keeper application that listens
to the game and keeps track of who won each game,
the number of games won by each player, the
average number of balls announced before someone
one, and so on.
