A variety of more or less evolved Java IDE's and environments are available out there. While it's probably impossible to keep up a complete list, feel free to tell us about your positive experiences here.

Emacs, with Ant#

• Good old emacs, and a nifty make tool. My favorite. --ebu
• F5 to build, C-x ` to jump to the next compil error... OK, emacs is not for everyone. ;)

IntelliJ#

• A commercial Java IDE.

JSwat#

• A graphical debugger (not a full IDE!) with JPDA capability
• A nice, light-weight option for server-side debugging instead of something like JavaOne Studio.

Sun ONE Studio#

• Previously Forte; a full-fledged IDE with CVS binding, ant binding, editor, debugger, http server, ...
• Resource intensive
• The GUI is very different from your average MS IDE - may be a usability factor for some developers. Not an insurmountable thing for old unixy types.

Eclipse#

• An extensible IDE developed by IBM and released into the Open-source community.
• Includes IBM's excellent Java development environment.
• Many plugins available for other tools/languages -- some free, some commercial
• IBM's WebSphere Application Development environment consists of Eclipse with a large number of proprietary plugins.
• Putting Eclipse into the open-source world was IBM's way of recruiting other organizations for a coalition of the willing to compete with Microsoft's Visual Studio.

Borland JBuilder#

• Borland's excellent Java IDE, available in several versions ranging from free to highly expensive depending on the features and license.
• Very strong two way development of Swing code
• Excellent code generation provides code that could almost have been written by a human being
• Good integration with databases (JDBC) and several J2EE servers including SilverStream (Novell) and Borland)

I've created DebuggingJSPWikiOnTomcatWithEclipse. It's a short overview on how to install and debug JSPWiki on Apache Tomcat using the Eclipse IDE. Shell and batch scripts are included.

--FlorianHoleczek, 09-Apr-2008