Borland's JBuilder 2005 Many editions, enabling trade-off of capability versus price (www.borland.com/us/products/jbuilder)

The Eclipse Foundation's Eclipse 3.1 An ecosystem of plug-ins that's becoming the foundation of many commercial developer offerings (www.eclipse.org)

Oracle Corp.'s JDeveloper 10g 10.1.3 Enables tailoring of technology portfolios and deployment platforms; as of June, free to all developers (www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/)

Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Java Studio Creator 2 Still in Early Access release, JSC 2 combines a NetBeans 4.1 shell with usability improvements and impressive GUI and data components (developers.sun.com/prodtech/devtools)

This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.