Kurt Christensen (me) is an independent software developer from St. Paul, Minnesota (USA), working under the auspices of The Bit Bakery (http://www.bitbakery.com).
For no particular reason, here's a listing of tools that I like:
- IntelliJ IDEA (http://www.intellij.com/). The best Java IDE around, period. I know you think Eclipse is as good or better, but... you're wrong. Really. I know that sounds harsh, but it's true. Unfortunately, the only way I can prove this to you is to make you use Eclipse, and then make you use IntelliJ for a couple months, and then go back to Eclipse. And then you'll know what I'm talking about.
- Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org/). Not quite as sharp as IntelliJ, but pretty darn great. And Eclipse is free!
- Argo UML (http://argouml.tigris.org/). Freeware UML modeling tool. It will generate UML diagrams off of your code, which is all you should really need, anyway...
- Clover (http://www.thecortex.com). A swell unit test coverage for Java.
- Araxis Merge (http://www.araxis.com/merge/index.html). Not free, but a *very* nice diff/merge tool for Windows.
- DBVisualizer (http://www.minq.se/products/dbvis/). A very nice freeware database tool, a la TOAD
- FIT (http://fit.c2.com). I don't know if this is what I've been looking for all my life, but it's darn close...
- JUnit (http://www.junit.org/). Well, duh.
- Ant (http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/). Well, duh, again...
- Textpad (http://www.textpad.com/). A great little generic text editor for Windows.
- XML Cooktop (http://www.xmlcooktop.com/). A very nice freeware XML/XSL/DTD/Schema editing tool
- Test