I did some JSP development a few jobs ago (7 years ago) and remember having the toughest time with jsp debugging especially. I used JBuilder back then. I'm getting some jsp stuff going again in this job and was wondering if you could give me opinions on the best tools available now for jsp development. Please hit both the free side as well as pay side. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Eric

Eclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ IDEA

Difficult to judge performance. In these days it is more matter of personal preferences.

For the past 6 years, I've been doing development work with C# and loved Visual Studio (probably a bad word around here). Intellisense is good, smooth debugging is good. With jsp, there was talk of tools working on better debugging facilities last I developed on jsp. Did any of those concepts come to the surface? I'm ok with free or pay tool, I just want quality...

For the past 6 years, I've been doing development work with C# and loved Visual Studio (probably a bad word around here). Intellisense is good, smooth debugging is good. With jsp, there was talk of tools working on better debugging facilities last I developed on jsp. Did any of those concepts come to the surface? I'm ok with free or pay tool, I just want quality...

Peter already hit you with the most popular suggestions for both sides:-

Free Stuff:-
Eclipse, NetBeans

Commercial:-
IntelliJ IDEA, MyEclipse, Dreamweaver*

*Dont know if I can call Dreamweaver an IDE but it does provide some good bundle of stuff for Web designing.

Thanks for separating them. That will get me started at least. Any opinions on what's best regarding debugging of jsp pages?

All 3 IDEs that I mentioned are very good. My preference is IntelliJ and I do not like Eclipse (GUI seems to be messy and configurations are over done, too many options equals too many chances to get something wrong). NetBeans is somewhere between these two...

commented: I agree. +11

Thanks Peter!

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