The BlueJ plugin for NetBeans IDE helps you to "make the jump" from BlueJ to a full-featured IDE, either when your projects have grown too big to fit comfortably into BlueJ, or when you want to use features such as drag-and-drop GUI building or Web Services development which BlueJ doesn't directly support.
The material here will help you to get started using the BlueJ plugin, and explain how it is different from BlueJ, and what it adds to NetBeans. It won't try to describe everything that you can do with BlueJ (or NetBeans). For that, you should check out the information on the BlueJ or NetBeans main web sites.
The BlueJ plugin adds two significant features to NetBeans :
- It allows NetBeans to open, work with and create BlueJ projects in the BlueJ-native format (without converting them to-and-from NetBeans standard projects), so that you can do some of your work in NetBeans and some back in BlueJ, wherever you feel comfortable.
- It adds a BlueJ View tab to the NetBeans Project Window which gives a familiar view of your BlueJ projects.
This brief tutorial consists of three sections:
Or there's an extended version of the brief tutorial by Dana Nourie
There is also a more extended introduction, in the form of a Laboratory Exploration, describing how a BlueJ project can be manipulated in detail using NetBeans. |
