In the real world of serious applications, developers discover that much of their job is not coding loops and variables, but in dealing with the many mundane facets of the development process. There are many tools to choose from, there are many developers involved, there are lots of files to keep track of, and the application is larger and more complicated than they realized. And there is never enough time.

Java developers spend a lot of time learning programming interfaces and library calls, but spend surprisingly little time on how to create a productive, professional development platform to build their applications. Most become competent with an IDE and learn how to deploy their applications, but waste huge amounts of time on the mundane, yet necessary tasks for serious application development such as debugging, unit, functional, and performance testing, versioning, configuration, and build management. Not planning and automating these tasks ahead of time costs a project time and quality.

While the IDE vendors have made some progress in these areas, there still isn't a unified set of vendor tools to produce serious, well-managed, high-quality software. During the past few years, several open source projects have arisen to handle important development tasks. These open source tools, if properly used and integrated, are capable of providing a comprehensive development platform that can handle even the largest and most serious applications.

This book will show the developer how to go from the simplistic approach of writing lots of code and stumbling through all the other parts of development to creating a complete platform that will handle all the tasks that a developer should be handling. We will prove that time invested in setting up a great development platform will pay large dividends in time saved and increased quality of the application. We will cover tools for all Java applications, then talk about tools for J2EE. By using the material in this book, a developer will be confident that he can handle his part of the project successfully no matter how difficult or high-profile it is.

Beginning developers will buy this book to see how to handle the serious applications the real world demands. More advanced ones will buy it to get the instructions, scripts, and tips for setting up the different combinations of platforms. Any level of Java developer will benefit from owning this book. The material will be useful for developers of both desktop and web-based applications.