Having worked on a broad range of IDEs for many years when I was at Borland, I'm always interested in seeing the latest developments in this area. To a large extent, I think IDEs and programmer's editors are largely a matter of personal taste. One man's emacs is another's poison, so to speak. Passions run nearly as high in picking development tools as in programming languages. Which makes sense. The tools and la Having worked on a broad range of IDEs for many years when I was at Borland, I’m always interested in seeing the latest developments in this area. To a large extent, I think IDEs and programmer’s editors are largely a matter of personal taste. One man’s emacs is another’s poison, so to speak. Passions run nearly as high in picking development tools as in programming languages. Which makes sense. The tools and language are where programmers live and influence what they can do; or at least the ease with which it can be done.I was pleased to see Red Hat has announced an Eclipse-based IDE for JBoss, building on some great work done at Exadel. Exadel has always been a bit ahead of their time with powerful visual tools for the latest Java frameworks, so it’s great to see their tools get wider exposure.Red Hat’s JBoss Developer Studio provides a lifecyle development tool with support for Java Enterprise Edition, Hibernate, Struts and Spring all within a single environment. Frameworks like Struts are notoriously complex to use and maintain, and so having a visual representation is key to making it work. You can visual develop the user interface of your application and the underlying interaction model. And when you want to get to the code, it’s all there. JBoss Developer Studio is available for both Linux and Windows for $99 as a subscription with updates. If you’re looking for a way to streamline J2EE development and the associated frameworks, this is worth looking into. Open Source