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.
BlueJ is currently in a very stable state, where we are very happy with the current functionality. This does not mean, however, that development has stopped, or that nothing is going on behind the scenes. On the contrary.
I’ll try to use this place over the next few months to write about some of the things we are discussing internally in the development group.
Let’s just hope that the updates are a little more regular than on our famous “Tip of the Week” page (which averages about 2 tips per year…). A week can be a long time in computing…
Dear Mr Koelling
I would also be very interested to hear about any new publications you might be bringing out. I have used Objects First with Java using BlueJ to get me through 2 Masters Papers – and I have to say it is the best introduction to OO and Java I have EVER come across (sorry for sounding so smarmy… but this book is a wonder). I was hoping that you and your colleague Mr Barnes might think of collaborating on a follow-on book for those of us who finished the first one. Alternatively if you have any suggestions for other good books – I would be grateful for your advice.
Yours sincerely
Louise
Wow – thanks!
Another book? Well, probably not any time soon. I must admit, I have thought about a follow-on book, and started to think about material that may be in it.
Maybe David would be interested as well. In principle. In practice, I don’t think I have the time right now to write another book. Maybe some time in the future…
Good to know that there may be one potential reader already in case I ever do!
Michael
Greetings,
After using the BlueJ environment when teaching Java at Linköping University, I now find myself “reverting back” to BlueJ for almost any prototyping or demo coding I need to do. It’s the combination of simplicity and providing the unit testing and debugging support one mouse click away, not to mention the interactive features, that I find superior to other IDEs. However, what I do miss – that I also missed while teaching – is the posibility to (1) turn on a presentation of the interface of a class in the class diagram (i.e., show all public parts, or all public and protected, etc) and (2) a good support for working with packages. Well, at least a better support. Things like moving around classes between packages, beeing able to semi-expand a set of sub-packages so that I can view these sub-packages and their public classes and possibly the dependancies in between these public classes and towards classes in the current package…
I do think that such a feature would help in discussing code structure in the slightly larger scale with the students (apart from being usefull for myself when I need to restructure things in my prototypes :-)).
Any thoughts in this direction?
Best Regards,
/Peter
Peter,
I just started writing a reply to your comments, and it got so long (and so general), that I decided to put it up as a separate entry.
Please see “BlueJ features – where do we draw the line?” from the main page.
Michael