As a part of our plan to re-launch Barnabas-bot next month, I've been making some big changes to the ways that kids and parents experience programming at home when using Ardublock.  

The biggest change I wanted to tackle was to allow Ardublock to run without needing to first launch the Arduino IDE.  After a several weeks of playing with different libraries, I have a build that's working!  

Basically, the java code calls the arduino-cli executable to both compile and upload.

The project is still in process, but I feel that it's at a stage now where I can share it.  Check it out!  

Fork for project here...

https://github.com/edwardbarnabas/Ardublock-standalone

I created installers, which can be found in the "bundler" folder.  It should seamlessly install (I hope) on Windows (.exe) and Mac (.pkg).   I'm still working on a Linux installer, but that shouldn't be too much of an issue.