The BlueJ project has been around for several years now. The best tools tend to focus on doing a few things well and BlueJ is a good example of that. Its focus is on teaching object-orientation and the Java language to beginners. The NetBeans IDE BlueJ Edition is the result of a recent collaboration between the BlueJ and NetBeans teams. The goal was to provide a bridge between an instructional tool (BlueJ) and a full-featured professional Integrated Development Environment (NetBeans).

To do that, the NetBeans team added support for some of the features that BlueJ users are accustomed to seeing. To prevent "feature overload" the J2EE capabilities of the standard NetBeans IDE were removed. Further, of the remaining NetBeans features, some of them are turned off by default. The most noticeable of these is code completion, which does not pop up automatically as you type - you have to request it by pressing Ctrl-Space. To get the default IDE behavior, change the settings in the Options dialog:

This allows students to move at their own pace - as they are ready for additional features they can turn them on and start using them. For more information, check out the new tutorial by Dana Nourie. And for even more, tune into the Sun Developer Network channel - the October episode features stories on the NetBeans IDE BlueJ Edition.