09 March 2009, 10:23

BlueJ and Greenfoot open sourced

Wombats, an example of the Greenfoot environment BlueJ and Greenfoot, the education oriented Java development environments have been open sourced. The project, hosted by University of Kent and the Deakin University, after "many requests from users" has changed the licence of the tools to GPL2 with the Classpath exception. Previously, both tools were under a "free for non-commercial use" licence.

The projects are also supported by Sun Microsystems and the new licence brings the two applications in line with the licence of Sun's NetBeans development environment. BlueJ is aimed at higher education, teaching programming by allowing the user to interactively create object diagrams and see the interaction between the design and the code. Greenfoot is based on BlueJ, but abstracts the code and objects further away into a child friendly graphical space that is more akin to a game than a development environment. Examples of the graphical spaces can be seen on the Greenfoot site.

The developers are committed to continue updates and release of the environments and hope to see the community generating future additions and improvements.

(djwm)

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