Grom's Homepage

I strongly suggest that you use Sun's Java 2 platform. I hate seeing people developing java applets for version 1.1 because of Microsoft's JVM. Provide IE users with links to download the Java Plugin, its the same as making people download Flash and Shockwave plugin.

The Jakarta project has a number of high quality open source projects for the Java platform. I believe Ant is a must have if you need a Make tool. XML Jakarta also has some java projects, in particular a SAX and DOM java parsers are available.

To ease testing have a look at Junit, a testing framework for java. Add-ons for GUI testing can also be found. To see the benefits of using a test framework see the test first articles.

A brief overview of Design Patterns including GOF (Gang of Four) and GRASP (General Responsibility Assignment Software Patterns). GRASP patterns help decide which object to assign responsibile of a method to and GOF help make your Object oriented designs more flexible.