For anyone that has been reading my blog it must be obvious that I like the Netbeans IDE. I'm not religious about it, like some people can get about these things, but if I'm starting work on a project that I need to get going quickly I just open Netbeans and start typing. IMHO is the easiest IDE to start things with overall because it takes no time at all to configure and start working on a project with it.

Anyway, I wanted to write a post about the new relationship Netbeans has with BlueJ. I've mentioned in the past in my Kids Learning to Program articles (part 1, part 2 and part 3), which I got a large number of page reads on in the past and still do today. Back then I tried the BlueJ IDE to see how easy it was to use and how useful I thought it would be to help those learning Java or object oriented programming overall. The bottom line was and still is that it is pretty cool. Programmers are presented with a UML based graphical representation that help them visualize the classes they are building and how they relate to one another. It also shows user when they run their project what objects are instantiated and how they may interact. Again, this is neat stuff and an easy way to learn Java.

With that said I think the announcement that Netbeans and BlueJ are working together is really interesting for new programmers. Once people reached a level where they have learned all they can using BlueJ they can easy, based on the reading of the press release, start working with Netbeans on real world projects. If I'm ever responsible for mentoring someone or some group of fledgling programmers I'm going to point them to Netbeans now.