This tutorial uses a unique system that allows you to learn the concepts presented in this lesson without struggling with the frustration of coding errors caused by mistakes in typing or formatting.

As the picture (right) shows, the sources are organized logically in several folders:

• Finished Product - This folder contains the .jar file (Java ARchive file where the application classes and resources reside) and a pre-built version of the application. You may want to play around with the application a little to familiarize yourself with its operation.
• images - This folder contains all of the image resources (button images) used by the application.
• SlideShowData - This folder is used by CodeWarrior to store project information and temporary files. If this folder does not yet exist, it will be created the first time you compile your project, or change your project in some way.
• SlideShow.mcp - The Metrowerks CodeWarrior project file used by this tutorial. The project file contains information about build settings, as well as aliases to the files used to build the application.
• Source Clippings - This folder contains a number of sub-folders which contain text clippings (or code snippets) that will be inserted in the source code to complete methods. We will discuss how these files are used in more detail shortly.
• Sources (complete) - These are finished versions of each source file. These are provided for reference. If you run into compile errors, you may compare your version of the source files with these versions.
• Sources (skeleton) - This folder contains all of the “skeleton” source files for the application. The skeleton file contains method declarations and instructions and will be “fleshed out” into a completed version of the source file as we go through the tutorial. We will discuss this procedure shortly.

Now let’s open the project in CodeWarrior and examine it in detail. If you have CodeWarrior 5, you may double-click directly on the project file “SlideShow.mcp”. If you have an older version of CodeWarrior, you will need to use “SlideShow(CW4).mcp” instead.

When you open the project, your project should look something like the picture (left). We have organized the project so that all of the sources are contained in a group called Sources.

All of the image resources are in a group called images, and library files are in a group called Classes.

Before we start examining the source code, we will examine the project settings. Although this project is preconfigured for your convenience, we will examine the pertinent settings that would need to be configured if you were writing a Java application from scratch.

To bring up the project settings dialog, either click on the project settings button:
or click on the Targets tab at the top of the window and then double-click on the line that reads Java Application.

The settings dialog should look like the picture above. If it does not, click on the Target Settings item in the left panel. Go to the edit field labeled Target Name, and change the text to “SlideShow”. This specifies the name of the output file.

Make sure the Linker popup field reads “Java Linker”. CodeWarrior supports many different development languages, and Java is not the default, so we need to make sure that we are using the Java tools to build and link our project.

The Pre-linker and Post-linker popup menus should be set to “none”.

Now click on the Java Target item in the left pane. Your dialog should now look like this:

The Target Type popup menu has three possible values. “Library”, “Applet”, and “Application”. Since our project is a stand-alone program, we choose “Application”. If we wanted our program to live in an HTML file inside of a browser, then we would choose “Applet”. We would choose “Library” if we wanted to make a file that contained some Java routines that we wanted to call from another source code base.

Make sure that the Main Class text field contains the value “SlideShow”. This specifies that the main() routine of the application is in the class SlideShow (contained in SlideShow.java).

Next, click on the Java Output item in the left panel. Your dialog should look like this:

Make sure that “Jar File” is selected from the Output Type popup menu. Make sure that the Name field contains the entry “SlideShow.jar”. The jar format is a compressed format (if you check the Compress checkbox) similar to the .zip file format. It is a storage or archive format that accommodates a virtual hierarchical file structure that may contain both class files and resource files. Since our application has both of these file types, we use this format so that we can place all of our class files and resources in a single file on disk.

Now that we have completed these settings, click the Save button and close the window by clicking on the close box in the upper left hand corner of the window.

Our application uses classes from the MRJToolkit, and also classes from Sun’s built in Java Class Libraries. These library files are in our project in the classes folder: MRJClasses.zip and JDKClasses.zip. If you are starting a project from scratch, or if you do not have them in your project, you will need to add these files manually. To do so, select Add Files from the Project menu. In the standard file dialog, navigate to your MRJClasses folder (in the MRJ Libraries folder in the Extensions Folder of your active System Folder) and add JDKClasses.zip and MRJClasses.zip to your project. This step is vital. If you do not add these classes, your project will not compile.

We can now start looking at how the files are organized. (You may need to click on the Files tab to get back to your list of files).