Links
Below we've listed a few of our favourite tools and sites. You might notice the majority of them are free and Open Source, which isn't by accident. Rarely have we come across a problem in Java for which there wasn't a readily available Open Source solution, and one which was at least comparable if not superior to commercial alternatives. The reason for this we think is that Open Source tools tend to be built by developers, not by marketing departments.
If you've any queries regarding any of these tools, please don't hesitate to contact us.
Java/J2EE
Java
and J2EE,
the official Sun websites.
Struts
Jakarta Struts is an
Open Source project, hosted by the Jakarta project, which provides an MVC based
Web Application Framework for use in java-based web applications.
Tomcat
Jakarta Tomcat is
the servlet container that is used in the official Reference Implementation for
the Java Servlet and
JavaServer Pages (JSP) technologies.
JBoss
JBoss is a full implementation of the J2EE
stack, available as a free, Open Source, application server. It has become highly popular,
with over 4 million downloads, and is comparable to most commercially available
J2EE servers.
Ant
The Apache Ant build tool is the most widely
used build tool for Java projects. Its cross-platform extensible, simple, fast,
and scales from the smallest to the largest projects.
Log4J
Log4j has become
the de facto logging framework for the java language, allowing developers
to control which log statements are output with arbitrary granularity. It is
fully configurable at runtime using external configuration files.
JUnit
JUnit is an Open Source, de facto
standard regression testing framework, intended for use by developers who
implement unit tests in Java. It encourages the rigorous testing of software, and
is arguably one of the major contributions to modern software development.
IntelliJ
IntelliJ IDEA is undoubtedly the
best Java IDE available. Having tried a number of IDEs, this is the best we've
come across. Its incredibly easy to use, but with a huge number of features,
most of which we actually use. (And no, we're not getting commission.)