June 2001: Initial development began, led by Bryan Stoler. The Generic Java compiler was used for development and supported by the IDE. Code was maintained in a CVS repository, hosted by SourceForge.

July 2002: First stable release.

June 2003: Made a first release of the DrJava Eclipse plug-in.

Summer 2003: Added a Javadoc feature, comprehensive JUnit testing, global find and replace, and Interactions scripting via histories; provided the Interactions pane with access to local variables during debugging; began supporting Java 5 (then JSR-14) features in DynamicJava.

February 2004: Began directly manipulating and testing the DynamicJava code within the DrJava source tree.

March 2004: Ended support for Java 1.3; began supporting compilation with Java 5 (in beta release).

Summer 2004: Added persistent Projects with a tree-based file browser; introduced Language Levels, developed as a separate SourceForge project (javalanglevels); significantly improved support for Java 5 features (generics, boxing, varargs, static imports, for-each) in DynamicJava.

August 2005: Restructured the source tree into separate CVS modules (drjava, dynamicjava, eclipse, etc.), each independently-buildable, with a revised build script and libraries at the top level of each tree. Began using Retroweaver for clean backwards-compatibility with Java 1.4.

September 2005: The number of monthly downloads exceeds 10,000 for the first time, with a final monthly count of 16,621.

March 2006: Migrated the sources from CVS to Subversion (both hosted by SourceForge).

March 2006: Added Java 6 compiler support.

June 2006: Introduced the PLT Utilities subtree as a repository of general-purpose code.

June 2006: Migrated the Language Levels code from a separate SourceForge project to a subtree in the DrJava repository.

Summer 2006: Added "Find All", "Go to File", and "Bookmarks"; greatly improved the tools.jar search, generally preventing the need to locate it manually.

Fall 2006: Another year of dramatic growth in the number of downloads led to two 20,000+ download months, a peak SourceForge ranking of #62, and the top ranking among IDEs.

December 2007: Reimplemented most of the DynamicJava interpreter in order to support correct type checking of generics and to fix a variety of other bugs. Old code remained in the "koala.dynamicjava" package, while new code was placed in "edu.rice.cs.dynamicjava".

April 2008: Changed the project file format to an XML-based syntax.

November 2008: Stopped supporting Java 1.4, eliminating the use of Retroweaver to produce backwards-compatible class files.