TVT Sanasto

The TVT Sanasto Java/Swing app aims to help in learning the basic terms in the area of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in Finnish and English. TVT (Finnish) means Tieto- ja viestintäteknologiat (ICT in English).

The terms are arranged in categories. For example, terms in the category of "Basic computing" list terms such as bit, byte, CPU, etc. For each term, there are link(s) to further information about the term. Another category on "Data structures and algorithms" could describe terms like linked lists, graphs, and heap sort, for example.

The app fetches an index of term categories from a server. This index file is in JSON format. The list of categories in this index file contain links to the terms for each category, a file in JSON format.

App fetches each of the categories and terms listed in the index file, parses the JSON files and stores the categories and terms in the user's computer in a SQLite database. The terms can then be studied without network connection or consuming the network bandwidth. User can later fetch updates (if any) both to the index and the categories of terms by using the menus in the app.

User may also sort the terms by language and search the terms. App then lists only those terms containing the searched word.

Installation

If you just want to use the app, go to Releases and download the .jar file to your computer. Make sure you have the latest Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed. It is required to run Java apps. If you are into development, you may also install the Java Development Kit (JDK), which includes the runtime required to run Java apps.

You have to have also the following installed on the machine running the app using the jar:

1. SQLite runtime https://www.sqlite.org
2. JRE/JDK 20 or newer.
3. Optionally if you wish to use the feature that generates a graph image showing dependencies between the terms, you need to also install https://graphviz.org/ so that it can be executed from the command line. The app works without it, but the feature that generates the graph does not.

Dependencies

For building the app you need the following Java version 20 features and components:

• Java SE JDK version 20 or newer from https://openjdk.org/install/
• Maven for project configuration from https://maven.apache.org/install.html
• SQLite runtime. If not already installed, get it from https://www.sqlite.org,
• AWT and Swing for the user interface (included in the Java JDK),
• org.json for parsing JSON content (installed by Maven automatically),
• org.xerial JDBC driver for SQLite (installed by Maven automatically),
• Apache log4j for logging (latest version with fixes to the recent vulnerabilities found, installed by Maven automatically),
• com.github.rjeschke txtmark for converting markdown text formatting to HTML in Swing JEditorPane (installed by Maven automatically).

Project is managed using Maven, so the dependencies that are configured in the pom.xml are automatically installed and compiled into the app. Your Java development IDE should be able to use the Maven pom.xml to open the project.

You can find a rough class diagram of the app in structure.png file.

Building and running

After making sure all the dependent tools are installed, build the app from the command line in the project root directory:

mvn package

and then run it:

java -jar target/sanasto-1.1-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar

Obviously you can also run the app from your IDE.

The first time the app is executed, it will download the index and term JSON files from a remote server and saves the categories and terms in the local database it creates. This may take some seconds, depending on the speed of your PC and network. Later, the app launches much quicker since it only needs to read the categories and terms from the local database.

Use the app menus to check if there are new term categories or terms in a category in the remote server.

Terms and categories

As mentioned, terms and categories are server hosted JSON files. If you are interested in contributing to the existing terms JSON files or creating new ones, please contact me.

If you wish to support other languages than Finnish/English, feel free to fork the project (it is MIT licensed) and modify it to your needs and create the necessary JSON files for your preferred languages.

Configuration

The app reads configuration options from settings.properties file. Some of these are managed from the app itself, like the GUI language and sort order (sortorder property) and when the terms index file has been updated from remote (indexupdated, milliseconds from the epoch of 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z).

If you cannot find the configuration file, launch the app and either change the language or try to fetch the index file. This will create the settings file, if it didn't exist before.

By default, the app fetches the term category index file from https://gitlab.com/sanasto/index/-/raw/main/index.json. You may change this by adding a indexURL property to the settings file, e.g.:

indexURL=https://your.server.net/your-term-category-index-file.json

And then launch the app. The app will then read the index file from your url and attempts to fetch term categories described there. See the JSON structure in gitlab and build the index file based on that example, as well as separate term category files for different types of terms.

See settings.properties and Settings.java for more details.

Learning topics

For students, there are some things you might learn from this project:

• Model-View-Controller architectural style.
• Using the Observer design pattern.
• Using a SQLite database from your app.
• Fetching remote content using HTTPS.
• Parsing JSON to objects.
• Implementing a GUI using Java Swing/AWT.
  • Menus, handling menu commands.
  • Structuring the GUI using JPanels and Layouts.
  • Separate list data and list view to ListModel and ListView classes.
  • Implementing list row renderers.
  • Localization using resource bundles.
  • Change GUI language on the fly without needing to restart the app.
  • Using image resources in menus and panels.
• Handling app settings using a properties file and Properties class.
• Logging using Log4J.
• Using external components in the app with Maven dependencies.
• Generate a GraphViz dot file to be able to generate graphs from app data.
• Run external apps and commands using Process.

License

MIT License, (c) Antti Juustila, 2022-2026.

See the LICENSE file included.

The copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

Dependent components are copyright of the respective license holders. For details, see components' documentation.