I like Eclipse and BlueJ.

Eclipse offers a smörgåsbord of features and is really powerful. It does take up a bit of memory and sometimes takes a little bit to load the first time you run it after booting up windows, but that is to be expected from a Java-based IDE.

BlueJ is a simple IDE which doesn't have nearly the feature count as Eclipse, but it does have UML diagrams. The diagrams are good for seeing the correlation between classes, showing inheritance, dependence, etc. I used this during my first Java class and it worked well, and then I switched to the more powerful Eclipse.

NetBeans is another option, but I haven't played with it much.

TextPad is a text editing software that has some basic Java compiling and running functionality, if you want really basic, but a step up from command line.

I'd recomend using NetBeans IDE 5.5, it is a free professional Java IDE. It also has extra addon packages that will add support to more features like AJAX.

Seems, Eclipse is the best and the most popular open-source IDE today.
(it is used not only for Java projects, but also for PHP).
The idea of creating new view perspectives with new plug-ins is very cool!!!

I worked also with many commercial tools, including IDEA Intellij, JBilder, CodeCharge Studio.
They provide some additional wizards and views.
For example, CodeCharge Studio provides an infrastructure for creating active Web pages (JSP) over co-named codecharge.jar, wich is not open-source...
But we have to keep in mind, there are some commercial solutions with the same functionality, provided by MyEclipse. These plugins are commercial, but they support open-source technologies like Struts, Spring, Seam etc.

I just wanted to add another vote for Eclipse. I've been programming in Java for about 5 years, I've tried a lot of IDEs, and its easily the best one I've used. I use it for most development I do now, thanks to all of the great plugins available for it.

But, for beginners, I'd recommend Dr.Java. Its lightweight and simple to use, but isn't nearly as powerful as Eclipse. I used it in a 1st year Java course in my CS program, which is a good place for it.

I've used both NetBeans and Eclipse. I pick NetBeans over Eclipse due to its exceptional functionality and support. It solves all of your java needs with professional quality for no cost whatsoever.

When you first open it up, it looks a bit scary. It takes some time to figure out, but it's worth stumbling around for a bit.

I really like the Web feature. Once installed it auto set up my Tomcat directories just like it wants it. You know how picky Tomcat can be. Anyway say goodbye to re-compiling servlets and moving their class files into the correct directory with any edit you make, all of that is taken care of for you by NetBeans. You can write and test your jsp's and servlets on the fly.

There are several IDEs on the market, but Eclipse and NetBeans are open source and so this is my choice

In comparison to Eclipse from NetBeans is that NetBean is really platform independent. That means you can use the same files for windows and Linux. But that’s not all: all platforms has the same support (unlike Eclipse).

Talking about NetBeans 6.1

NetBeans is easy to install and to use. There are several download-bundles so that you don’t need to go into the plugin hell, like in other IDEs. Simply download the Java bundle and get the rest later through the plugin manager. The NetBeans folks offer even a version for php development, where you can debug the code.

I think the most important feature of all IDEs is code completion(After all this is the reason we use an IDE). In NetBeans you can do this via CTRL+SPACE. This will complete a variable, class or method name for you.

I can accept that there are a lot more plugins for Eclipse than NetBeans at the moment.

But the NetBeans community has some really cool plugins. If you didn’t download the full bundle you can add the plugins easily. And they will work, I never failed to install a plugin. In Eclipse this was not always true.

Well I think that with this I had make my point that NetBeans 6.1 is a very good IDE, and why I prefered over Eclipse.

Greetings, Shotgun.
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