NetBeans Meets BlueJ

Read the whole story here. Ok, I know, this is a press release... :) So to explain what we are doing: we are building together with authors of BlueJ from the University of Kent a special version of NetBeans. It will support BlueJ projects and thus make it easier for people who use BlueJ to open their projects in NetBeans. This is quite easy to do because as you know everything in NetBeans is a module - thus we will choose a subset of NetBeans functionality (including Matisse) and add several features e.g. to show files in the project in the BlueJ way.

Why should you care? Well, BlueJ is great for learning Java - no surprise it is so widely popular on universities. Once you learn enough you become ready for a full-blown IDE such as NetBeans to work on bigger Java projects. Then the transition will be easy - you will be able to try the BlueJ edition of NetBeans on your BlueJ projects and start to learn all the advanced features (refactorings, CVS, etc.).

ref: Roumen's Weblog