jGrasp IDE

We used jGRASP in a recent Introduction to Coding with Java class. It is not a production type IDE such as Netbeans or Eclipse but we have found it a good tool for introductory classes aimed more at casual users, beginning computer science students, etc. It has a lot of interesting features such as generation of UML diagrams, an interactions pane like the Visual Basic immediate window, object viewers, side by side columns for editing multiple class files, etc. It is lightweight and very quick to load. It will also handle Python, C, etc. But we have not yet explored that in any depth. Although we have used it for simple Python scripts. On the downside it does not have a "smart editor" with intellisense type capabilities beyond simple syntax highlighting.

jGrasp and Python

In the course of working on our new Python class we discovered you can run Python as well as Java from jGrasp. While I am not recommending this one way or another it did have a nice side effect. You can develop and test Java programs in parallel with their Python versions right in the same session. By the time we are done developing our new Python training material we should have a lot of side-by-side comparisons of the code for the same tasks. So far it has been running about 1/2 the code in Python vs. Java. While that is a substantial reduction it is not as dramatic as I thought it would be. I may do another parallel stream in pseudocode, mostly for use in college classes.