In the most recent Netbeans with Glassfish you can pretty much create a new JEE project and start writing POJOs
This is good advice, Netbeans with Glassfish as of 6.7 really pulled ahead of the pack when it comes to Java. It just works and you get to coding almost immediately. Little things like standard ant build and deployment scripts being generated for you from the beginning, good junit integration, good source control integration, good issue tracking integration and the one I love the most good JAX-RS tools. I can set up a RESTful services that does crude with JPA in about 5 minutes start to finish it really is as rapid to develop services in Netbeans, as it is to go to ROR or grails or one of the other "fast to develop in languages". As for configuration, almost everything can be done with annotations and honestly any environmental stuff should be done with JNDI. I was really at the I hate Java point (like so many people are) until I switched to Netbeans. I was really worried about Oracle picking it up given they already have an IDE but they seem to be accelerating development of netbeans and the new release 6.9 is testimony to that.
This is good advice, Netbeans with Glassfish as of 6.7 really pulled ahead of the pack when it comes to Java. It just works and you get to coding almost immediately. Little things like standard ant build and deployment scripts being generated for you from the beginning, good junit integration, good source control integration, good issue tracking integration and the one I love the most good JAX-RS tools. I can set up a RESTful services that does crude with JPA in about 5 minutes start to finish it really is as rapid to develop services in Netbeans, as it is to go to ROR or grails or one of the other "fast to develop in languages". As for configuration, almost everything can be done with annotations and honestly any environmental stuff should be done with JNDI. I was really at the I hate Java point (like so many people are) until I switched to Netbeans. I was really worried about Oracle picking it up given they already have an IDE but they seem to be accelerating development of netbeans and the new release 6.9 is testimony to that.