BlueJ - Installation Instructions

Duke Resources Home Duke Course Home Coursera Course Home
BlueJ For Duke's courses, we will be using a custom version of the BlueJ Development Environment to develop our Java code. This environment has been used successfully by millions of programmers over 15 years and has been designed by educators at the University of Kent for teaching people new to programming. It does not require a lot of disk space (~200Mb) or processing power (~128Mb RAM) so it should run comfortably on any machine. University of Kent
Mac OSX

Mac OS X

On the Mac, BlueJ comes bundled with a Java Development Kit, JDK, so only a single download is needed.

  1. Download the Duke/Coursera specific version
  2. Expand the downloaded ZIP file
  3. Move the BlueJ application from the resulting folder to your preferred location
Windows

Windows

On Windows, BlueJ comes bundled with a Java Development Kit, JDK, so only a single download is needed.

  1. Download the Duke/Coursera specific version (choose Save instead of Run)
  2. Double-click the downloaded install file and follow the wizard to install it in your preferred location
  3. By default, the installer will place a shortcut to BlueJ on your desktop
Linux

Linux

On Linux, BlueJ does not come bundled with a Java Development Kit, JDK, so you will need to make sure it is installed as well. You must use version 1.8.x for this course. The instructions below assume you know how to use the command line and package manager.

  1. Download the Duke/Coursera specific version
  2. Check to see if a JDK is currently installed on your machine using the following command (again, any response that starts with 1.8 or higher is fine):
    javac -version
  3. If not, install Oracle's Java 8 JDK by following these instructions for Ubuntu/Debian or Fedora/RedHat
  4. Install xdg-utils using the package manager for your version of Linux (such as apt-get for Ubuntu/Debian or yum for Fedora/RedHat)
  5. Finally, run the following command in your shell to run a standard installation
    sudo dpkg -i BlueJ-linux-411-duke.deb
  6. The installer will install the application /usr/bin/bluej
 

Course Code Packages

These are included by default in our Coursera specific version of BlueJ, but in case you need them, you can also download just our code package files for Java (the code is compatible with any Java versions 6 or greater):

BlueJ is open source software, meaning you can also download the source code. The copyright for BlueJ is held by M. Kölling and J. Rosenberg.
BlueJ is available under the GNU General Public License version 2 with the Classpath Exception.

Creative Commons License
Material accessible from this webpage developed by the instructors at Duke University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.