Sun Microsystems, the NetBeans community and the University of Kent have announced a version of the NetBeans IDE for beginning programmers. The NetBeans IDE/BlueJ Edition combines NetBeans open source applicaton development technology with BlueJ technology. BlueJ features educational tools such as visualization and interaction facilities to aid in learning object-oriented concepts. BlueJ is a programming environment developed at the University of Kent, UK, and Deakin University, Australia. “This collaboration provides a great advance for the student learning the Java programming language,” said Jeff Jackson, Sun vice president of engineering, in a statement released by Sun. “When a student who knows BlueJ opens this version of NetBeans, there is nothing on the screen that is mysterious or incomprehensible. They will be able to get going straight away. And very quickly they will start to discover and use NetBeans’ more powerful features.” The free IDE is downloadable here. Software Development