Java IDE’s

Development Environments for Java

In the Java tradition, development environments for the language have been "bring your own".  Unfortunately, that leads to a great deal of confusion in the community about what the best tool to use is, or even where to start.

Eclipse is quickly becoming the de facto standard tool for Java development. While Sun and Borland and others are still providing IDE's, the open source Eclipse product is nicely integrated with JUnit and provides a fairly clean, easy to use interface, supporting ant and other plugins such as XML editors and more.

My personal opinion is that until the Java community settles on a tool, it will be difficult to compete with the .NET community, whose tool selection, while not mandated, is pretty universal.  Removing the confusion about where to start is a good first step in keeping Java in the running.