Program written in ProfessorJ Beginner and Intermediate languages can easily be converted to programs that follow the formal specifications of the Java 1.5 or Java 1.6 language and run in one of the commercial level integrated development environments (IDEs). The support for testing and displaying the values of the example data is provided by a tester library.

Programs in Java often consist of several files and libraries that together comprise a project. It is possible to convert a program by hand. All that is needed is to rewrite the syntax of the test cases and add public visibility modifiers to method that implement interfaces. For information how to organize the code for use with the tester library directly, see the tester pages.

To ease the transition to the complex IDE, we provide a simple program that reads a file written in ProfessorJ langugages and write a new file with test case syntax converted to the tester library style. It is designed to work with well written programs and may fail if the code organization for the Examples class is different from the anticipated (i.e. as shown in our examples). However, we find it useful for programs with close to a hundred test cases, even if we need to touch up some places the conveter program missed.

The converter program is a single class Converter with its main method. The Converter reads a ProfessorJ file you select and produces a .java file that you specify. The new .java file(s) are then used to build the project that will run your original code in the new IDE.

A special version of the Converter for BlueJ produces two files, one that contains the classes defined in your program, one that contains the Examples class with the main method that is needed to run your program.

For each IDE you need to download two files, Converter.java, the program that handles to program transformation, and tester.jar the library that supports the testing and displaying of the data values. Depending on your IDE you may also benefit from downloading pre-built projects or compiler scripts.