Setting corporate standards for development tools can be a lot like herding cats. Most software developers are quite particular about which tools they use. Some developers prefer coding with a text editor, such as VI or Emacs on Unix or WordPad on Windows. Others like the productivity boost provided by the aids available in IDEs.

The good news is that there is a wide variety of development tools available today that can fit most any budget. Thus business leaders do not need to confine developers to one tool. In fact, providing a smorgasbord of aids often helps developers do their best work.

Many development tools can be downloaded and test-driven for a trial period. If your developers try a tool and determine that it's useful, then adding it to the corporate toolbox is probably a good idea. Naturally, the same goes for the many fine tools available free of charge.

We recently test-drove two leading IDEs: Sun Microsystems' Forte for Java 2.0 Internet Edition and Oracle's JDeveloper 3.2. We found the two environments to be very useful for creating Java-based business applications and that each allowed us to load and work with existing code with ease.

To measure our success with these tools, we decided to build the same e-commerce applications using each environment. In addition, we created the same set of applications using a text editor to determine the possible productivity gains that developers might find by using the Sun or Oracle IDE.

Sun's Forte for Java

We loaded the Internet Edition of Sun's Forte for Java on a Windows 2000 machine to create our e-commerce applications. We also loaded the Community Edition of Forte for Java on Solaris and Linux machines to examine how development on these platforms might be performed with Forte. The basic interface experience is the same regardless of the platform on which you use Forte.