Jenuity: a lightweight development environment for intermediate level programming courses

Authors:
Martin van Tonder;Kevin Naude;Charmain Cilliers
Affiliations:
Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Port Elizabeth, South Africa;Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Port Elizabeth, South Africa;Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Port Elizabeth, South Africa
Venue:
Proceedings of the 13th annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
Year:
2008

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Abstract

The complexity and resource requirements of professional IDEs mean that they are unsuitable for use in intermediate level programming courses. Jenuity is an efficient development environment for the Java programming language. Efficiency is essential as students often have outdated hardware unable to run mainstream development environments. This is of particular relevance in the context of a developing country. Jenuity provides advanced features usually associated with more resource intensive tools. It provides a simple and intuitive interface, which is well suited to intermediate level programming courses. Jenuity has been used successfully in the teaching of these courses at the authors' institution since 2004. The requirements, development and optimisation of this tool are discussed. Techniques used to optimise Jenuity for low specification student hardware, some of which are novel, are presented. Experiences using Jenuity in a university environment are also reported. The efficiency of Jenuity is also demonstrated by means of a comparison to mainstream development environments.