ClockSystem

This is a gradle-based Java project for a Clock with Swing GUI and JUnit5 unit tests. It has been created and used by Tom Mens for educational purposes at the University of Mons.

The application includes a watch, with timer, stopwatch and alarm functionality. Its implementation is based on a statechart, using the state and singleton design patterns.

Build automation

The application uses the gradle build automation system to build, test and exexute the application. To build the application, use

gradle build

To run the unit tests, use

gradle test

To execute the Java application by opening a GUI (graphical user interface) you can interact with, use:

gradle run

Development Environments

To run the application correctly, you can either use a manual setup ensuring you have the correct version of Java and Gradle installed locally on your machine.

But you can avoid this by first setting up an isolated development environment, for example using DevContainer or Nix that will ensure that all correct versions of all tools and libraries required for the application are installed.

Using Nix

This approach will setup a development environment using the Nix package manager. No containerisation is used, and the development environment will be installed on your local machine, in total isolation from your current system packages.

1. Install Nix package manager: curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh
2. Go to the project root folder
3. Run nix develop to enter the development environment
4. Start using the gradle commands for building, testing and executing the application and interact with it through its GUI.
5. Once you are done, exit the development environment by running exit

Using DevContainer (Container based)

DevContainer is a feature available for VSCode and Jetbrains IDEs that allows you to develop seamlessly in a containerised environment. This approach will setup your development environment using containers.

Due to the graphical nature of the Java application, running the GUI may not be possible within DevContainer. However, you can still use it to build (compile) the code, run the tests, and generate the JAR file.

1. Ensure you have Docker installed on your machine. It might work with **Podman(( too, but it is not tested yet.
2. Install the DevContainer extension
   1. For VSCode: Dev Containers extension (documentation)
   2. For Jetbrains IDEs: nothing to do, it is supported by default (documentation)
3. Open the project in your IDE, and you should see a notification to reopen the project in a container, click on it.
4. Once the project is reopened in the container, you need to wait a bit for the container to build and start, and then you can start developing, all the tools and dependencies are already installed in the container.