From .Net Webdevelopment to Java Web Development

At my work I'm using C#, Microsoft SQL Server, Windows Server and Microsoft Visual Studio. As you can see I'm totally in the Microsoft world.

But i want to broaden my development knowledge and start with java again. I had java classes at school, but my first development job was in .Net VB and till then I'm stuck in the .Net world. It's not that I don't like .Net. I开发者_开发技巧 love Visual Studio in combination with R#, and the SQL Management Studio is also very easy to use and very comfortable.

I have good knowledge of ASP.Net Webforms and started with the release of ASP.NET MVC 2 creating intranet applications using this platform.

I want to create small web applications at home with java and want to know, what tools you, as an experienced java developer, can recommend me.

For the IDE: I've used eclipse in version 3 i think and it was around 2004. Is it still a good free IDE or are there now some better ones? Or would you recommend NetBeans or the community edition of IntelliJ for web development?

Is the equivalent of Asp.Net MVC the Spring Framework in Java?

What else do I have to look for, for a smooth switch from java to .net?

Thanks in advance to everybody...

I would go with Intellij, but that is a personal preference.

As for Spring, it definitely is a useful tool to have in your back pocket or on your resume. It provides most of the stack you'll need to develop an application. The biggest missing part is persistence. It interacts with all the popular persistence frameworks out there, Hibernate being the one I would use, so that isn't really an issue.

If you don't like the Spring web framework, you can with others like Struts2. You can use Struts2 with Spring instead of their own MVC framework. Also, there's Guice, which is a dependency injection framework like Spring, which I like better than Spring.

There's also the Play! framework, which attempts to be a full stack like Rails. I've only looked at it briefly so I don't know too much about it. It looks good, though.

Just my 2 cents.