Hello All,

I am interested in playing around with some java again. About 3 years ago, I took college CS classes and introductory java was one, most else was theory/logic. (Think I managed a B). Other than that, little experience outside of tinkering.

I have a game that I play (Eve Online) and I thought it would be a fun hobby to create a related program that may help me.

The goal I have set is for me to be able to create a quick list of words (separated by spaces or return characters) and have the program return a string corresponding to those words. (Ship names >>> Ship Race and Class). e.g. Caracal (a Ship Name) >>>>> Caldari (an in-game race) Frigate (a ship class)

Example using animals:

Input:

Bob Sally Greg

Output:

Bob: Brown Dog
Sally: Grey Cat
Greg: Red Cat

My questions:

Can someone approximate how much time (hard to estimate, I know, but assume beginners skills that may come back to me as I refresh) it would take to create something like this?

How would this program best be implemented? (The list of ships is approximately 225 long)

Is it hard to take it from a simple executable program and turn it into something with a window? (I will be writing in Eclipse but dont want to execute the program in eclipse)

I seem to remember projects being similar to this in my classes (given a string, search a set of data and return the corresponding string/s...matrices I think), but I never had to take it to something that dealt with a data bank of this size and I never had to make it "slick" (in a window, with maybe a submit button and a way to reset the program)

Thank you for your time.

Ash