I see lots of development teams bind their development tools with application server vender, such as VisualAge for Java/Websphere, Oracle Jdeveloper/Oracle application server.
Since BEA itself doesn't provide development tool for Weblogic, what's the best development environment for it? I found that on BEA web site, in the products category, they have a link to Webgain studio. BEA try to sale WebGain products?

One of the good things about Weblogic, is that there are several tools that can work with it depending on the version of Weblogic you are using. For example, I beleive that Visual Cafe, JBuilder will work with Weblogic 5.1. I think it is generally a good idea to use the development tool that goes with the application server. Visual Age is probably has the tightest integration with Websphere more than any product, almost to the point it becomes uncomfortable. I would prefer more control over what is going on in development. I have also got so frustrated with the development tools that I have done all my development outside the tool.

just my .02 cents worth

Probably whichever one you are most comfortable with.

I'm working for a client, who have had success using Forte Community Edition with WLS 6.0, including supporting debugging within EJBs. Having just switched from Visual Cafe to JBuilder, I have held out against learning yet another IDE and have succesfully used JBuilder.

Anyone tried KAWA? It is very light weight ide and requires only a few megs of RAM to run. Does not have the Swing drag and drop component toolbox etc unlike other ide's and is not very flashy.i have used it a lot and prefer it just because of its speed especially on lower end machines like laptops.And its cheaper as well plus the enterprise version has a plugin for weblogic though i never used the plugin.U can setup any appserver to run within the KAWA JVM and debug easily.In fact i integrated it with ATG and Weblogic as well.
U can download and try out an evaluation at
http://www.allaire.com/products/kawa/index.cfm
Unfortunately its available only for windows platforms.!

Thanks
Venkat

Well, on the VAJ side of things, the VAJ integration does not support Weblogic 6. This is because Weblogic 6 demands JDK 1.3, and VAJ has yet(!) to support JDK 1.3.

On the Netbeans/Forte side you can do great debugging but I find connecting to a running weblogic server with JPDA is incredibly slow. If anybody knows how to speed that up I would be happy. There is no integration kit per se for forte (imo).

Regards,
Jon