Interesting. My short experience of both JBuilder and Together has been very positive. They have struck me as very heavyweight tools with enormous functionality. JBuilder I enjoyed as it provides a lot of tools to take away chores, but doesn’t enforce a particular style of development (i.e. build methodology, source control) but rather seems to support everything. Borland always were the kings of the IDE and compiler. (Actually that link is not far enough back – my first experiences were of Borland C and Turbo Pascal waay back) Together is a memory and CPU pig, but I love the round-trip engineering.

What am I using now? I toyed with IntelliJ IDEa for a while – very nice refactoring support, nice and quick too, I’d buy it if there were no alternative. NetBeans is a disaster, what a bloated pig. Eclipse rocks! It runs fast, has the most ‘comfortable’ editing environment I’ve worked in for years, and has an excellent and expanding level of community support.

Check out http://eclipse-plugins.2y.net/eclipse/index.jsp for a comprehensive set of plugins for eclipse. I’m using:

I’m still looking for a decent JSP editor though – I just want an editor with syntax highlighting and basic code completion. No joy yet.