Object Oriented thinking has consistently placed the inheritance relationship as a key feature of its approach. We review how this relationship is realized in Java. As you will see it is a complex relationship, and we will return to the difficulties it can cause in a later topic.

All programming languages will have support for a range of common data structures. Unlike typical dynamic programming language, collections are implemented as a standard library in Java (as opposed to being built in). We will survey the major features of this library, focusing on the principle interfaces and implementations. There is considerable more to collections, which should be investigated independently.

Extend the pacemaker application to include Activity and Location classes + associated commands. Once these are in place, incorporate a serialization mechanism to enable users & activities to be persisted to a file. We will then try to generalize this mechanism, which will enable us to experiment with alternative serialization formats.