ContentsBetter ToolsCommercial vendors (don't take the candy)

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Finally, I want to assure you that you have plenty of commercial options when it comes to tools. Some of these vendors will give away their development tools in order to get your company to pay when your application is deployed.

Most of these are really fine tools. Unfortunately, since they were developed in a commercial vacuum formed by the vendor, they often are less reliable than and are technically somewhat less mature than their Open Source counterparts.

You may be able to get your job done quicker by using commercial tools, but there may be issues that make their use less desirable over the course of time. If you do end up using a commercial tool, make sure that it meets these two criteria in addition to those you may already have:

• it is truly cross-platform - if not, you might as well not be using Java
• you get the source code for the exact version you are using - escrow won't help, and the size of the company is often deceptive about their reliability when it comes to maintenance of "out of date" versions down the road

Rather than provide you with a laundry list of vendors, I would simply suggest that you check your favorite Java programming periodical and the web to get a review of what's available.

Besides a search engine (such as Go), you might also want to check out IBM's AlphaWorks and JARS.

ContentsBetter ToolsCommercial vendors (don't take the candy)

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