Overview
Intellij IDEA is a popular alternative to the Eclipse IDE for Java (and other language) Development. while there is a free Community Edition the full fat version is paid, though there are deals and free licenses for academics and open source projects.
In this tutorial we will set up a basic web app on Mac, though Windows and Linux user should be able to substitute the relevant parts.
Download and Install Intellij IDEA
Choose from free, paid and trial versions here.
Install a Web Server
Intellij does not come with a web server so you will have to install one and add the path to the relevant project setting which we shall do later.
For this project I will instal Glassfish using brew:
brew install glassfish
Take note of the installation directory, on my mac Glassfish installed here: /usr/local/opt/glassfish/libexec and is at version 4.1.2 at time of writing.