Bubbles for Java

A number of folks have been tweeting about a fascinating IDE currently in closed beta out of Brown  University, called Code Bubbles.  The visual paradigm is very compelling - it lets you organized related snippets of code into "bubbles" - building them up easily as you navigate through a particular thread in your source tree.  So rather than having everything organized by package name, it's organized by a path that groups a set of source files based on a given scenario (for example a particular method invocation and its effects). From the site:

A quantiative user study indicates that Code Bubbles increased performance significantly for two controlled code understanding tasks. A qualitative user study with 23 professional developers indicates substantial interest and enthusiasm for the approach, despite the radical departure from what developers are used to.

Hard to really explain, the best thing to do is watch the video, embedded below...

Code Bubbles is built on the Eclipse platform, so can be run on top of your existing Eclipse environment (although the integration sounds pretty light). It's in closed beta, so you can sign up and they'll get back to you. At some point it will open up for a public beta...

Cool stuff!