US universities adopt Monash's BlueJ Java Teaching Environment

15 August 2000

On Saturday, 18 August, version 1.1 of BlueJ, an integrated development environment developed specifically for introductory teaching of Java will be released. BlueJ provides an ideal medium for beginners to learn about object-oriented programming and offers a unique interaction style that lets users experiment with objects directly without the need to write any test drivers. This encourages experimentation and facilitates an understanding of important concepts.

BlueJ 1.1 adds a variety of new features and improvements. In addition to the features which have made it such a success in the past (such as providing a diagram view of the application structure, the ability to interactively create objects and call methods, and its easy-to-use interface) it now also supports UML (unified modelling language) notation for the diagram, integrated documentation generation with javadoc, and much more.

UML is the internationally accepted standard for object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD). Its integration with BlueJ now provides a seamless migration path from using BlueJ in early programming courses to advanced OOAD courses.

The BlueJ system was developed by Michael Kölling and John Rosenberg of Monash's Faculty of Information Technology and is the result of a research project supported by Sun Microsystems.

BlueJ has been a great success since its version 1 release in August last year. Since then, more than 40 universities worldwide have started using it in their first year teaching, and the number is steadily growing. (A list of universities known to be using BlueJ follows.)

Last year, one of the authors (Michael Kölling) won the Inaugural Victorian Pearcey Award (awarded by the Australian Computer Society for "Innovative and pioneering achievement and contribution to research and development in IT") for the work on BlueJ.

This Australian-developed system is now also promoted by Sun in the USA as an ideal entry to teaching and learning Java and many US universities are starting to use it.

BlueJ is in fact so simple to use that it is possible to bring the teaching of Java even, further down in the curriculum-into high schools. The plan for the immediate future is now for the developers at Monash to work with IT teachers of secondary schools to start using BlueJ at Victorian high schools.

BlueJ is free, an attribute which provides a major benefit for all of the institutions teaching with it. Students can install a copy at home at no cost.

BlueJ is written in Java and has full cross platform capabilities. It runs on every system that has a Java 2 implementation (including all Windows versions and most Unix dialects).

BlueJ can downloaded at http://bluej.monash.edu.au

For further information contact Professor John Rosenberg on (03) 9903 2406 or Dr Michael Kölling (03) 9904 4170.