Ok, spent some time today playing with Oracle's JDeveloper. Interestingly, a free, no limit, no expiration version is available from Oracle's website ($999 for commercial use). A lot of interesting features, including a nice JSP visual form designer AND a UML tool, all in one integrated package. Felt like I was using a version of Eclipse, missing a few features (notably, refactoring) but with a TON of additional features. Lots of support for Struts, as well. (Although Str

Good news, even works nicely with Tomcat/MySQL, not just Oracle technology.

Here's the thing - I really would like to use Hibernate with one of these visual tools. It's surprisingly hard to get them to integrate. JDeveloper seems to insist on using a framework such as TopLink or EJB - simply binding ordinary JavaBeans doesn't seem to work very well.

I wonder how long it will be before we start seeing Struts/JSP/JSF tools with support for Hibernate? Drag'n'drop bindings, automatic master/detail page generation, that sort of thing. With EJB 3 and Hibernate looking more and more similar in the near future, maybe by this time next year, it'll be a question of choosing which tool (Creator, NetBeans, Eclipse, JDeveloper, JBuilder), not when... crossed fingers, and looking forward to pestering folks about this at JavaOne.

Oh, and BTW, if you're going to be at JavaOne and want to grab a cup of joe and talk shop, feel free to drop a line.