What's the ideal development environment setup?

[darkstar1]

I work with netbeans 7.3 and I have a few issues with my workflow as I find it cumbersome.
First of all I'd like to find an extensible way to develop from within the ide as most changes I make I make it to the core code in the expanded share war file then if/when it works I can copy it to the local tomcat shared directory. Two issues with these are when I modify the extending files I have to restart the server to see any effect and it slows me down as sometime I forget that the file I have now later come back to is extended.
Now I have a feeling I've got a wrong working setup, can someone advise otherwise?

P.S. Does anyone have a freemarker plugin that actually works in netbeans (7.3)?

[abarisone]

Hi,
to build a developing environment on NetBeans check this http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Alfresco_on_NetBeans and, in general, this http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Developer_Guide
About a freemarker plugin check this http://freemarker.sourceforge.net/editors.html

Regards,
Andrea