BlueJ

The BlueJ environment was developed as part of a university research project about teaching object-orientation to beginners of the java programming language. Also it gives a good feeling as the IDE is totally made in Java.

All research and developments on the platform are maintained by a joint research group at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia, and the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK. And above all, the project is supported by Sun Microsystems.

As the name goes, the IDE is based on the ‘blue’ system. This system was developed at The University of Sydney and The Monash University for providing a GUI with the Java back-end.

Advantages:

• Helps understand concepts of objects, allowing users to run and test individual classes, functions in a graphical interface.
• Code snippets can be tested without a main() function!(very helpful)
• The project editor can create projects easily and the iheritances can be graphically added.
• In case of a hang, or a freeze, the java virtual machine can be reset to initial state.
• Allows inspection of multiple objects

The downside would be the comparatively slow execution, but the UI and the features of individual class and function testing compensates for all the drawbacks.

bLUEj homepage: www.bluej.org

Download BLUEj: www.bluej.org/download/download.html