BOB LANG

This little Java UI application was created to help me learn French and can be used to help learn any language.

It is programmed using the Java Swing library and reads an lang.xml as input: -

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
 
<language name="french" specialchars="àâçéèêëîôùû">
    <course name="Level 1">
        <lesson name="Week 1">
            <topic name="Conversation (Introducing yourself)">
                <item a="Bonjour Monsieur" q="Hello (to a man)"/>
                <item a="Je m'appelle" q="I am called ..."/>
                ...
            </topic>
            ...
        </lesson>
        ...
    </course>
    ...
</langauge>

The structure is as follows: -

• <language> - top level element with name attribute (e.g. french) and a list of special characters which can be access via the UI. This contains one or more ...
• <course> elements - contains a name attribute e.g. Level 1. These contain one or more ...
• <lesson> elements - contains a name attribute which could be each week of the course (e.g. Week 1).
  These contain one or more ...
• <topic> elements - contains name attribute describe topic of learning e.g. Conversation (Introducing yourself). There could be 3 or 4 of these for each lesson.
  These contains one or more ...
• <item> elements - contains q and a (question and answer) attributes.

The application reads this XML file and provides the user the ability to quickly test what they learned.

GET STARTED

If you are only interested in running BobLang (and not developing it) then simply download the latest release of boblang.jar to a folder on your computer.

BobLang GitHub Releases

If Java is installed, BobLang can be run as follows: -

java -jar boblang.jar

NOTE: BobLang won't work unless there is a valid lang.xml at the same location.
You can either create your own or use the lang.xml which is included with boblang.
A GitHub link to the latest version is available
here.

DEVELOP

Ensure you have the following: -

1. GIT - used for downloading and contributing new source
2. Java JDK - is required to build the BobLang project. and Maven are installed and setup properly.
3. Maven - required for dependancies.

Once these are downloaded and properly installed you can download the code via a git clone, perform a maven build and run the Java self-contained-jar boblang.jar which maven builds in the target folder.

1. GIT Clone

# Change to a folder of your choice
cd workspace

# Download source from boblang repo on GitHub
git clone https://github.com/bobmarks/boblang.git

2. Maven Build

# Build project using Maven
mvn install

# Run boblang
java -jar target/boblang.jar

You can also run the application through your IDE of choice e.g. Eclipse.

CONTACT

Any questions email the author (Bob Marks) at [email protected]