ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES: Again, the tag line is intentionally misleading. I use and recommend the Eclipse consortium's namesake IDE (that's Integrated Development Environment for you non-techies who've made it this far in this post without realizing there's really no reason for you to bother.) As of this writing, release 2.1 has been out for several days and I've been itching to get my hands on it. I can't, because Eclipse and its lone mirror site are apparently overloaded. Albeit annoying, I suppose this is a good indicator of Eclipse's popularity. The rival NetBeans project is also a fully featured IDE, but it's too sluggish to be useful on my PC. For those of you who don't understand the significance of the competition between the two IDEs, this article is a a great read on why specific design decisions (aka politics) were made for each application. In short, NetBeans has a beautiful, highly configurable and flexible UI that is remarkably consistent across multiple platforms, but pays a performance penalty for this design elegance. For now, this penalty is one that I cannot bear.