Java beginner web-development toolkit/environment

Question

I have been tasked to develop an interactive website using java & mysql: using servlets to retrieve & massage data, applets to do special handling of the data client-sid

Answer 1

Tomcat and Jetty are both well-known/supported servlet containers. If you're building a deployable for customers you may want to test on both, if you don't control the deployment.

For testing, check out (along with your normal unit test frameworks of JUnit/TestNG) Watij and/or HtmlUnit. These will allow you to automate the actual web/browser interactions and will save you a world of grief in the long run. The downside is that you'll have to invest some time in setting up your tests.

Related to automated tests, I think you need an automated build / continuous integration system. Numerous abound in the Java world. Two common ones are CruiseControl and Hudson.

For a lot of the above, standard Java/development tooling applies e.g. the 'standard' IDEs (Netbeans/Eclipse/Intellij - Intellij is worth paying for, btw). The same applies for CMS and there are lots of resources on this website about the pros/cons of SVN/Git/Mercurial etc. It's worth checking that your choice of CMS integrates with your IDE.

I would check out Firebug for simplifying development (on Firefox). It makes the front end development a lot easier. LiveHttpHeaders will ease diagnosis of issues relating to HTTP transfer.