Lab: Practice with Static Data Members

Objective

In this lab you will explore some issues related to the development and testing of a class (EmailAccount1) that uses static data members to store state shared by all instances (objects) of the class.

Setup

To get started, import the project for this lab, EmailAccounts, from the EmailAccounts.zip file available at this link. If you don't remember how to do this, see the Setup instructions in an earlier lab.

Method

1. In the src folder, complete the EmailAccount1 class by pasting the code you wrote for the homework.
2. Open the EmailAccountMain.java program in the src folder and make sure you understand what it does. Run it and verify that your implementation results in the expected output. If not, fix any bugs.
3. Modify the main method in EmailAccountMain so that it repeatedly asks the user for a full name on one line, creates a new email account for that name, and outputs all the email accounts created up to that point. This is repeated until the user enters an empty string (i.e., just presses enter at the prompt). You can assume that the full names entered by the user include only first name and last name separated by a single space and that first and last name only contain letters (no spaces).
4. Test your EmailAccount1 implementation by running the program and entering a variety of names, including names that have the same last name, names that have the same last name but spelled with different case (e.g., Scarlet and SCARLET), names that are exactly the same, etc. Fix any bugs that you observe.

Additional Activities

1. Develop a JUnit test fixture to test the EmailAccount1 implementation.
2. What new issues arise in testing as a result of the static variables used in the implementation?