The NetBeans 6.0 Visual Web Pack looks promising: ability to visually edit web pages, wire in navigation, etc. Basically, automating a lot of JSP web application configuration and supports fast creation of JSP pages. I had problems with it however, and from searching the web, it looks like other people have problems also. I am going to make a note on my calendar to check for updates in a couple of months. Rails is my preferred web framework, Django looks good, but it would be naive of me to think that as a consultant I will not also have to write JSP/J2EE based web applications (since I have spent years doing this, and this technology is not going away). I would like a more agile development setup than my old approach of model classes, off the shelf tag libraries, my own custom tag libraries, and hand edited JSPs.

I have been loving the Ruby/JRuby support in NetBeans – that was my motivation for looking at other good NetBeans plugins.