Borland Software Corp.'s JBuilder 2005 A family of offerings with versions representing many combinations of capability and price; road map for future versions leads to Eclipse as a foundation for expanded application life-cycle tools (www.borland.com/us/products/jbuilder)

Eclipse 3.1 Not just a free Java development environment but also an ecosystem of plug-ins that's becoming the foundation of many commercial developer offerings (www.eclipse.org)

JetBrains Inc.'s IntelliJ IDEA 5.0 This month's major upgrade eases import of JBuilder and Eclipse projects into its rich environment of productivity tools for development and code quality assurance (www.jetbrains.com/idea)

Oracle Corp.'s JDeveloper 10g 10.1.3 Lets developers tailor technology portfolios and deployment platforms to their needs; it's approachable while being second to none in capability and responsiveness—and it's now free to all developers (www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev)

Technology Editor Peter Coffee can be reached at peter_coffee@ziffdavis.com.

This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.