Java: calculating area of a triangle

Question

import java.lang.Math;
import java.awt.*
public class Triangle implements Shape
{
    java.awt.Point a;
    java.awt.Point b;
    java.awt.Point c;

    public Triangle(java.awt.Point a, java.awt.Point b, java.awt.Point c)
    {
        this.a = a;
        this.b = b;
        this.c = c;
    }    
public double getArea( )
    {
       double area;
       return area = Math.abs((a-c)*(b-a)-(a-b)*(c-a));
    } ...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/f/e/5/fe56529cdaaaa9bb2f71c1ad8a1a454f.png <--area formula

I am trying to calculate the area of a triangle from 3 points (x,y) from a 2D Cartesian coordinate system. I'm assuming that my above formula correctly yields the area of a triangle (if not, please correct me) but my compiler says "operator - cannot be applied to java.awt.Point,java.awt.Point". I'm assuming it's saying this because you cannot subtract points from each other, but each value in the formula is either an x or y value, not a point. How can I fix my code so this would work? Thanks!

Answer 1

According to Wikipedia, you formula is correct. The article contains lots of useful and clear data.
According to the java.awt.point documentation, you should use the getX() and getY() methods, which return the coordinate value of a point.

That is,

Should be expressed as:

Math.abs((a.getX()-c.getX())*(b.getY()-a.getY())-
         (a.getX()-b.getX())*(c.getY()-a.getY()))*0.5;

It is probably not such a good practice to use point.x, because you shouldn't access an object's variable if you have a getter method that does that. This is the one aspect of separation between interface and implementation: the data point.x might be stored in many forms, not just int; The interface method assures that you'll get an int every time you use it.