Free Java competitor to .NET and MS Visual Studio

Lately I have made a quick research on the latest free Java technologies and tools for a visual web development. The obvious solution is a JSF technology with AJAX support. But I have noticed there are many component sets and not so many free visual tools. A pretty good comparison about JSF AJAX components can be found here.

There is easy to notice that the best free (the price, IDE support and distribution license) components are ICEfaces and RichFaces. Unfortunately there are a few advantages and disadvantages over each other:

• JBoss RichFaces is more modern, more flexible and has a better support, especially in relation with such technologies like Hibernate or JBoss Seam;
• But there is a some danger of that it will become less flexible, stuck to Redhat/JBoss commercial products, e.g. already there is no official support/project for the "competitive" Netbeans IDE and JBoss IDE has already became commercial-only JBoss Developer Studio (JBoss Tools is still free but there is no guarantee it will keep the same functionality like JBoss IDE/Developer Studio)
• ICEfaces is less modern but not that bad competitor to RichFaces and it has a support for Eclipse, Netbeans and a few more IDEs;
• Unfortunately Eclipse WTP Web Page Editor is poor in the visual design mode and perhaps that's why JBoss Tools has got own, better JSP/JSF editor, so currently the tools win over ICEfaces' "standard" plug-in for Eclipse;
• However JBoss Tools with RichFaces Visual Page Editor for Eclipse Ganymede is still in a pre-release stage, while the ICEfaces has already got fully working plug-in for Ganymede;
• ICEfaces' plug-in for Netbeans is well supported and well working with Netbeans' Visual Web Designer.

So, the final decision - which free component set and which free IDE - is not easy to make. Nowadays I would give the credit to Netbeans + ICEfaces because they are well working with each other and because Netbeans has a support from Sun, the Java creator and one of the Java leaders. Just I dont like some feature of the Netbeans' Visual Web Designer. I mean the size-fixed grid layout of the web page. Fortunately it seems the size-fixed mode can be switched off. :-)

But If I would have more time and I could make a decision in a few months, maybe I would think more about Eclipse + JBoss Tools (the final release for Ganymede), because the Eclipse is a bit faster, gets a more support from the Java community and JBoss products are very modern and well supported too.

Tomek