We have taken a quick look at some of the new language features we will be using. We have also seen a quick overview of the projects we will be building. One final question remains: what tools will we be using to do our work?
The Java ecosystem suffers from an embarrassment of riches when it comes to development tools, so we have much to choose from. The most fundamental choice facing us is the build tool. For our work here, we will be using Maven. While there is a strong and vocal community that would advocate Gradle, Maven seems to be the most common build tool at the moment, and seems to have more robust, mature, and native support from the major IDEs. If you do not have Maven already installed, you can visit http://maven.apache.org and download the distribution for your operating system, or use whatever package management system is supported by your OS.
For the IDE, all screenshots, directions, and so forth will be using NetBeans--the free and open source IDE from Oracle...