Tools of the Trade 0

When you begin your journey as a developer, either fresh out of college, or as an individual experimenting with technology, you'll soon discover a plethura of tools available to assist you in your development.  I've encountered a lot of tools in my few short years of experience, but few remain in my arsenal today.  Those few have proven to be the best, with the most available features, active open source communities, and fewest bugs.

First and foremost, the IDE.  I've used a variety of IDEs, including Netbeans, IntelliJ IDEA, and many Eclipse-based IDEs.  I've found that for Spring and Grails/Groovy development, the Springsource Tool Suite (STS) is the best free Eclipse-based IDE for my development needs.  Springsource has built a set of custom Eclipse plugins, which come pre-bundled in this download.  The Spring tools are excellent, and they provide a dashboard for Eclipse and Spring news, as well as a custom Extensions tab which makes downloading supported plugins a breeze.

Every enterprise developer will need a good SQL tool.  I've tried SQLExplorer, Toad, and a few proprietary SQL tools.  All fail to match up to the SQuirrel SQL client.  This client is a standalone application, allows you to customize your datasource configurations and select your JDBC drivers.  The features make this tool even better - syntax highlighting, and code completion (press Ctrl + Space on when trying to look up table names or columns associated with that table, and you'll get the full list).

I'll admit I don't have a lot of experience developing WebServices.  I I was introduced to a tool that I can't see myself without - soapUI.  You can point soapUI at any WSDL, and it will produce sample requests, which you can use to test (even load test) your WebServices.  It provides functionality to test both SOAP based WebServices, as well as RESTful WebServices.