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A software system for teaching programming to beginners, BlueJ, developed and maintained at the Computing Laboratory at the University of Kent, has received widespread attention last month at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco. JavaOne is a conference for computing professionals and relates to the Java Programming Language and related technologies, one of the most widely used programming languages in education and industry today.

BlueJ was one of only a few products explicitly named by Sun Microsystems CEO, Scott McNealy, during his keynote speech, one of the main events of the conference. "BlueJ is a cool project. If you don't know it, you have to look at it", McNealy said in front of an audience of more than 12,000 computing professionals at the world's largest Java conference.

A dedicated session presenting BlueJ to the conference audience was well attended, with more than 500 audience members filling the room, and feedback was very positive.

The BlueJ project designed and developed a free, educational programming environment aimed at teaching programming to beginning students. Started in 1999, BlueJ is now firmly established in the computing education community as the most used educational Java environment worldwide. BlueJ users include hundreds of universities and schools around the world, as well as professional training institutions. The BlueJ package was downloaded approximately half a million times last year, and use is still growing.

BlueJ development and maintenance continues as a co-operative academic project, led by Ian Utting and Michael Kölling at the University of Kent, in collaboration with Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. The project is ongoing, and aims at continuing to provide a free, high-quality software tool to educational institutions around the world.