Today's rich IDEs make a lot of tasks easier...usually. With Java and its IDEs you often end up spending more time than you anticipated to just set up a project, especially when dealing with the complexities of J2EE: there are multiple versions of the specifications 1.3,1.4,5.0), each one with multiple implementations by different vendors plus extensions (richfaces, struts, seam, spring..). You have also to choose the container (tomcat, glassfish, jboss...). Last but not least, you can also pick different building tools (abt, maven...).
