Netbeans

I was skeptical; JSP is a monstrous enterprise app building monster that is legendary for being slow and the very top of the arc on the un-fun scale. I was quite surprised to find Netbeans makes writing these supposedly difficult JSP applications quite fun. It builds the shell pages for you, and JSP itself is turning out to be quite a bit more sensible than I expected. I was able to get a simple form up and running even more quickly than I could with PHP or Perl.

I need more time with these new tools before I can evaluate where they will fit in my toolkit, but it definitely looks like they will have a place in the very near future.