Development

• CVS: aka Concurrent Versions System from GNU, an Open Source network-transparent version control system based on RCS and licensed under The GNU General Public License, Version 2 or later.
  
  I use it for developping OthBase as it allows me to develop with file version control and to be able to have always the latest source code revision on any development computer I use.
  
  There are two ways of connecting to a CVS server. If you are a Unix user, the prefered way is to use the terminal abd command line "cvs". Look carefully for the man pages. If you are developping on Windows, you will find WinCVS very usefull and easy to use. There are also some GUI clients for Unix (Linux, MacOSX, ...) but they are not at the same level at the Windows's one.
  
  
• JDK: aka Java Development Kit from Sun. The only way to easily write cross platform applications.
  
  All usefull infos about Java are here. If you want more infos about Java Foundation Classes (aka JFC, the Java GUI framework), please look here.
  
  
• Eclipse: a strong Open Source Java IDE (but can also do C++ development). This IDE is written in Java with SWT library. Lastest 3.1 release is very nice. A must have.
  
  NetBeans another strong Open Source Java IDE from Sun. A must have. Latest 6.0 release really rocks!
  
  
IDEA: an excellent commercial Java IDE from Intellij.


• Ant: from Apache Jakarta Project. The premier cross platform build system based on Java and XML. A must learn and use as it suppress the good old but not portable shell scripts.
  

• Swing / JFC from  Sun's JDK. A very nice library for doing cross platform Dekstop GUI development. Check JavaDesktop.org for latest infos.
  
  
• JUnit: THE unit testing tool for Java. A must have.
  
  
• yGuard: a very good Java bytecode obfuscator from yWorks for encrypting Java classes; it is now fully integrated to Ant build system.
  
  
• Piccolo: a very good speedy and small memory footprint XML parser.
  
  
• JDOM: a very nice Java DOM API for dealing with XML documents.
  
  
• Jakarta Commons: an Open Source Java set of libraires. I use Net for FTP client library.
  
  
• Apache log4j: an Open Source logging Java set of libraires. A must have.
  
  
• ANTLR: aka ANother Tool for Language Recognition; a very nice language tool that provides a framework for constructing recognizers, compilers, and translators from grammatical descriptions.
  
  
• Java Collections library from D.A. Watt & D.F. Brown. The strongest Java collections library ever found. Great work.
  
  
• Looks: from JGoodies.com; a nice Java Look & Feel. Now hosted at JavaDesktop.org.