Any Java development tool can be used to develop EJBs, though some tools provide specialized facilities for creating and debugging them.

Some popular Java development tools

• JDeveloper (Oracle)

• JBuilder (Borland)

• Forte for Java (Sun)

• Visual Cafe for Java (Symantec)

• VisualAge for Java (IBM)

Example of specialized facilities in IBM's VisualAge for Java 3.5, Enterprise Edition

• Automatic generation of "access beans"
  • Include the code necessary to perform a JNDI lookup, create a bean, and obtain the remote interface
  • Access bean is deployed with the application
  • Client object simply instantiates the access bean with new, then calls the methods of the remote object.  No special coding for remote access is required.
• Websphere test environment
  • A set of services that provide JNDI, a Web server, and an EJB container on the local workstation based on the Websphere application server
  • Eliminates the need to deploy EJBs to a separate test server for unit testing. Code in the developer's repository is called directly from the test environment.