Bluej as the NetBeans Plugin

Abstract

One of the best IDE for introduction courses of object oriented programming is the BlueJ IDE. This IDE was developed with respect to needs of the absolute beginners. It offers almost everything what we need for teaching according the Architecture First methodology. However later, when the students go over to some professional IDE, they lose many of the BlueJ excellent features, especially the ability to design the program and its architecture in the interactive mode. The paper shows, how the BlueJ IDE was modified to work as fully functional plugin for NetBeans IDE and which new possibilities we obtain with it.