The NetBeans IDE / BlueJ Edition, which I wrote about in an earlier post, has now been officially released. You can download it from the NetBeans web site.
This environment gives you a great option for your second IDE, once BlueJ becomes too small for you and you’re ready for the serious stuff.
Once you’re in NetBeans, try out Matisse, the new NetBeans GUI builder. It’s nice. Believe me, worth a look.
Java has undoubtedly been the most popular language of the last decade.
It has taken over large parts of the educational and professional sector. It is its use as a language for programming teaching that I want to talk about today.
Java has been dominating introductory programming teaching at universities for years now. But is it time to throw it out?
Many of you will have seen the icon we use for the BlueJ project: the head of a Bluejay.
But what does the rest of the bird look like? My daughter (Feena, 6) provides an answer.
Some of you have heard that the BlueJ team is working with the NetBeans folks on the “NetBeans IDE / BlueJ Edition”. Some clarification may be in order: what is it, and – as importantly – what is it not?
Some thoughts on auto-completion and auto-formatting.
At the BlueJ team, we regularly get requests for new features. Two of the most requested features are auto-completion (of method names, imports and fields) and auto-formatting (a.k.a. “pretty-printing”) of code.
We have had these discussion since the very first release of BlueJ. So far, I have always refused to include these features. Is it time to re-think?
So, I promised some updates on BlueJ development plans. Let’s see whether I can keep my good intentions at least for a day, and tell you something about what’s going on.
The most interesting new bit of functionality that we are working on for BlueJ is team work support. When this is done, student teams should be able to cooperate easily by using BlueJ.
Some people occasionally ask what we are planning to add or change with BlueJ in the near future.
Currently, we have no channel for sharing this information, so I might try to use this blog to keep interested people up to date and, at the same time, possibly get your feedback and ideas about what we are doing or should be doing.
Syntax colouring – the annotation of source code with different colours for keywords and other syntactic tokens – has become standard in just about all development environments. Yet, it often does not make sense.
I don’t mean to say that it does not make sense at all to use colour to annotate source code. On the contrary. What I am saying is that almost all syntax colouring systems colour the wrong things.