Overview
BlueJ is a development environment that allows you to develop Java programs quickly and easily. Its main features are that it is:- Simple BlueJ has a deliberately smaller and simpler interface than professional environments like NetBeans or Eclipse. This allows beginners to get started more quickly, and without being overwhelmed.
- Designed for teaching BlueJ is deliberately designed with good pedagogy in mind. There is a popular textbook designed for teaching introductory university/college courses with BlueJ, and a site full of teaching resources.
- Interactive BlueJ allows you to interact with objects. You can inspect their value, call methods on them, pass them as parameters and more. You can also directly invoke Java expressions without compiling. Thus BlueJ is a powerful graphical shell/REPL for Java.
- Portable BlueJ runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other platforms which run Java. It can also run without installation from a USB stick.
- Mature BlueJ is over fifteen years old, but continues to be updated and supported by a full-time team. We aim to respond to all technical support requests within one working day.
- Innovative BlueJ has several features not seen before in other IDEs. Its object bench, code pad, and scope colouring were all original BlueJ features.
Features and Screenshots
BlueJ's editor features unique scope highlighting, where the background of each code block is coloured to allow you to visually scan the code much faster. It also helps in spotting misplaced curly brackets.
Objects can be inspected while the program is running. The contents of fields are displayed to aid understanding and debugging.
As well as allowing inspection of objects while the program is running, objects can be dynamically created, and their methods can be invoked.
You can also invoke Java code directly, without compilation, just by typing it in. The result is printed out, and can then
be inspected, manipulated, or passed as a parameter to another method call.
History and Team
In the late nineties, Michael Kölling developed a pedagogical language and environment called Blue as part of his PhD work. BlueJ is a port of Blue to Java, and was first released in 1999. Thanks to generous support from Sun Microsystems (and more recently Oracle), BlueJ development and support has continued since then. Initially based just in Australia, the team spread to the UK and then to Denmark when Michael moved there. First the Danish team, and then the Australian team, moved to the UK where they all now work in the Computing Education Research Group at the University of Kent. The current staff includes:- Michael Kölling
- Ian Utting
- Davin McCall
- Neil Brown
- Amjad Altadmri
- Fabio Hedayioglu
- Phil Stevens
- Marion Zalk
- Poul Henriksen
- Cecilia Vargas
- Bruce Quig
- Damiano Bolla
- Andrew Patterson
- Clive MilleR
- John Rosenberg