NetBeans 5.5.... EE5... BlueJ... Oh my!

I was out last week (it was winter break here in the US: most schools had a holiday) and ended up on a beach with no internet connection playing endless games of "Marco Polo" with my 8 year old. Such a hardship.

I missed out on last week's excitement of the preview releases of NetBeans 5.5 and Java EE 5.

This week is a little quieter, but I'm pretty charged up by the recent progress of the BlueJ project. It's a very specialized IDE for teaching people to program who have never programmed before. There's a textbook for it. It's been a pretty popular tool for teaching introductory computer science courses. They've had a bunch of stuff going at at SIGCSE this week. Friday evening there will be a reception where (among other things) folks will be showing off the interconnections between BlueJ and NetBeans so that as students become proficient they can easily migrate up to more sophisticated professional tools.

March 2, 2006