
This is pretty much off topic for this forum, being more of a question for the Newbie forum a little further down.
You are getting a little confused here by the distinction between an
IDE, which is a program that helps you type code and offers you tools for formatting, maintainance, visual design and so on, and a
compiler, which takes your code files and makes them into the applications your system can run.
There are various
compilers around, the reference implementation is the one from Sun which you can download
here but there are others from IBM and elsewhere.
In pretty much any language you can write your code in a simple text editor like notepad, save it with the right filename and then compile it directly with a compiler. You don't need JBuilder, Visual J++ or whatever. If you want a more full featured text editor there are a whole lot around, many of them offering some degree of integration with your compiler as well. My personal favourite is
jext but different people use different ones. I find this useful for editing all the accompanying files you will start using as you get further on. There comes a point where a text editor becomes an IDE- I would say something close to
Jcreator lite and beyond that you get into the really big compilers like
Forte and
eclipse. All the products I have mentioned can be downloaded for free.
To start with, do some downloading, try stuff out and see how it suits you. You don't need to spend any money to start with, and you may not need to spend much later on. There are many disputes about what is the best IDE but it comes down to what you like using in the end. Get started, give it a try and decide for yourself.
Good luck with it.