I am interested in some research questions but as far as I can see I won’t have the time to do the research. If you have the time feel free to pick a research question. I would be happy to get feedback if someone did some work on the research questions. Then I can publish references to the results on my web site.
Open-Source tools for Java development have reached a maturity that often goes far beyond commercial tools. A lot of Java projects doing business applications can come along with Open-Source tools. Here is a list of my current favorites.
XDoclet - generates data from Java meta tags; used for Hibernate, JBoss and others
Libraries
log4j - for logging (more powerful and widespread than the logging facilities of JDK 1.4
Struts [web frontends] - framework for web applications
Eclipse Plugin Model [client side code] - the Eclipse plugin model can be used without the Eclipse IDE to implement a client side component model for Java
Hibernate - OR mapper with transparent persistence (requires XDoclet); if an existing database schema has to be used, Torque with its code generation approach may be more suitable
Application-Server
Apache Web Server - if a lot of static web pages exist or non-Java application logic has to be executed at the server
Jakarta Tomcat [web frontends] - if only a web interface is required
JBoss [server side code and desktop frontends] - if a desktop interface is required and server side code is neccessary (I recommend to use XDoclet to generate most of the EJB stuff)
MockEJB [server side code] - a local container for session beans; supports testing session beans and allows the execution of the system stand alone without an application server