An integrated development environment (IDE) provides facilities for software development and typically consists of editors for editing source code, a compiler, project management tools, build automation tools and debugging tools. IDEs help in increasing the productivity by automating many tasks and often provide one-step process for creating a ready to use binary from source code. Eclipse and NetBeans are two of the most popular IDEs. IDEs that enable Java EE development also provide integration of Java EE Server runtime environments so that the developer can quickly see the effect of the changes being made to the application without having to create the binaries explicitly.

The Apache Geronimo Development Tools project is aimed at providing a rich set of development tools for Geronimo, focusing on application development, migration and IDE integration. The two major tools available currently are Geronimo Eclipse Plugin (GEP) and JBoss to Geronimo Migration Tool (J2G). Also, a Geronimo NetBeans Plugin is under development in Geronimo Sandbox.

This section provides guides for installing development tools, setting up the development environment, and server runtime configuration changes. This article is organized as given below:

• Development options and tools
• Installing Eclipse — This page provides a guide for installing Eclipse and WTP.
• Configuring your development environment — This page describes various options to configure your development environment.
• Defining Geronimo server runtimes and servers
• Installing Geronimo Eclipse Plugin