Please, what is the common way for java development under debian sarge? Is it better to develop under solaris and simply run and test it under debian ?netbeans and eclipse are both open source, so they should qualify for debian.
Eclipse 3.1 is already in Debian Unstable. I was pretty sure that Eclipse 2.1 was included in Stable, but it seems that it was not.
You could try using Unstable packages, but chances are they will not work on Sarge. You might also want to look at Anjuta. It is a rather simple programmers editor and requires some manual configuration to make it Java compatible (Google is your friend), but it works.
Of course you can download Eclipse from eclipse.org and it should work just fine.