About BlueJ


Overview

BlueJ is a development environment that allows you to develop Java programs quickly and easily. Its main features are that it is:

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: Previous team members include: