Sun Microsystems has announced the availability of NetBeans IDE/BlueJ Edition, the latest version of the NetBeans integrated development environment. This is a free, open source IDE and is an educational tool which offers a migration path for students transiting from educational tools to a full featured professional IDE.

Developed at Deakin University, Melbourne and University of Kent, United Kingdom, BlueJ is a programming environment meant for helping beginning programmers in Java. This platform offers educational tools such as visualization and interaction facilities which help developers in learning object oriented programming concepts. It was in 1999 that BlueJ was released and now more than six hundred universities and colleges are using it worldwide. You can download it by clicking here.