Jeff and .NET

A lot of people use Xcode. It's a pretty good, all around IDE.

i think most of the hardcore Java people use Eclipse though. It has a Ruby plugin that's really nice. The IDE has come a LONG way from the 1.x version I tried a long time ago.

I second Eclipse. It's a wonderful IDE and you can find a plugin for almost anything.

Third for Eclipse. I use it on Windows at work doing SWT/JFace/RCP development, and on my Mac & FreeBSD boxes at home for my side work in...just about anything. Just about the best Java IDE ever. I'd actually say it was the best, but I'm sure there is some feature that product X has....

What about IntelliJ?

Good luck.

We use JBuilder at work and it's a dated piece of crap compared to Visual Studio 2003...let alone VS 2005. Designing forms just doesn't "feel" as nice as it does when using MS IDE form designers like Visual Basic, VBA or VS. I prefer to write my code by hand.

Also, Java for the web is so far behind ASP.NET in my opinion. You can write Java class files at about the same speed as you do in C# but when creating the UI glue the Java framework just does not have the rich set of classes and controls that ASP.NET framework offers. And with Java there are a ton of competing implementions--all offer a limited number of tags...Java Server Faces, Struts, etc. Nothing though that matches the richness of the .NET framework. It can take a new Java team a long time to gear up.

And then deploying a Java web site is yet another cheesy process. Tomcat web server on UNIX. Yuck. And when you get a site running on Tomcat...it ain't gonna work on Websphere.

A team can build a powerful web site using either framework but they'll spend 2-3 times longer if you do it Java. Where's the cost savings there? Anyhoo to answer the question, JBuilder (for the debug support) or hand code in your favorite editor.