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Old 08-31-2010, 01:51 PM   #6
Gatz
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Re: Any Experience with BlueJ (BlueJay)?

Just to clear things up, BlueJ isn't a language or a variant of Java. BlueJ is an IDE, like Eclipse or NetBeans or Visual Studio. You can write Java in any of those IDEs or with Notepad and just compile it on the command line. An IDE will help you with things like Intellisense, which can show you method definitions and such.

However, all that said, BlueJ is great to -learn- Java with and specifically, learn object oriented programming with. It provides a very nice UML diagram like setup to show you how classes interact with each other, but once you have the basics down you are better off using something else, Eclipse is pretty popular with most Java devs, myself included, use it.

BlueJ won't offer you really any assistance in creating a MUD. The best thing it can do is show you what a template Java class is, and once you get slightly more familiar with Java, you'll be deleting 99% of what it auto-generates anyway and putting in your own code. When I used BlueJ, it didn't offer the level of customization that I wanted and that is why I switched to Eclipse. It sounds like your head programmer might be learning Java herself and so for awhile, BlueJ might prove useful, however MUDs are complex beasts and eventually the tools BlueJ offer you are not very useful to you.

I'm not trying to knock BlueJ, in fact I really love it as a teaching tool for beginners but I feel the average person grows out of it and the help it offers isn't needed anymore. Depending on the skill level and comfort level of your head programmer, she might want to check out CoffeeMUD, which is a MUD engine implemented in Java. When I checked it out last, it was really amazing, but was so big it was daunting. I also know Sun (pre-Oracle buy out) was working on a special game framework for MMOs called Darkstar, which was supposedly used for the Star Wars MMO (before it got shut down). I know you want to make a MUD, but really there is no reason why an MMO framework wouldn't work for a MUD.

Good luck with your endeavors, I think Java is a good language for MUD Servers, hopefully this doesn't start a flame war, and I hope you and your head programmer enjoy working on a MUD together!
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