Originally Posted by neo_gr8est1

Can someone please help with this project of mine? I am not really good at GUI...

create a new account, check account status. and make purchase with a credit card.

Create a New Account
You must ask the user to input some information: applicant's name (e.g. "John Smith"), application date (e.g. to make it more user friendly you may want to use combo boxes so that a user can choose the year, month and date), and a password for accessing the account (e.g. you may want to use password fields for security reason, and ask the user to input his password twice for verification).

Type combo box into google and read the Java tutorial that pops up. Modify the example code they give; make sure to cite!

When the application is confirmed (the two passwords match), display a credit card number with four randomized digits (take care that any two credit card numbers of two different accounts must not be the same), an expiration date (set it to 3 years after the application date, need only year and month), and the available credit (US$1000 initially, also, available credit can not be negative).

Use a random function, class: Random for starters, to get the four random digits. Build an integer out of the four digits. Keep an array of "previously used" card numbers. Make sure that the card number you just generated wasn't previously used. If it was, generate a different one and perform the same check. Once you find a card number that is unique, use that as your card number and add it to the array of "previously used" card numbers.

Check Account Status
Your application should prompt the user to input the name and password in order to log into the system. You should show the name, credit card number, expiration date, and available credit if the user name and password are valid.
Look into JOptionDialog. If you don't want to use that, look into building a custom GUI that gets this info. If you want to build your own GUI, read about Event Driven Programming for general things, then to move onto more specific things that will directly help you build the GUI, look into ActionEvent. Basically, read the Java Sun tutorial on Swing.

Make Purchase
Your application should prompt the user to input his name, credit card number, expiration date (also use combo boxes), and the amount of money for the purchase. If the information is correct and there is enough credit, the transaction is made.

Usability
usability of the application is vital. We can divide the usability issue into two aspects.

First, you should make good use of user friendly GUI components such as menus, labels, text fields, combo boxes, password fields and buttons, and arrange them in a clear and logical manner.

Secondly, you should make your application fault tolerant. That is, you should deal with any kind of exceptions as well as you can (such as type mismatching, information error, etc.) You should also give the user a second chance as much as you can instead of exiting the program suddenly. Try to cover as many error scenarios as you can. Remember, the customer is always right.

when a user closes your application, your application should save all the account information into a file named "account.dat". It is recommended to design your dataset class and use object writers but you can use any file format you want.

# You should write a GUI with good usability which is intuitive to anyone using your application.
# You can either write all functionalities in one window using the card technique or write them in separate windows.
# Read in account information from "account.dat" (if exist) when your program starts.
# When your program is being closed, it should write all account information into "account.dat" (overwrite the previous one if a file with the same name exists).

Thank you.