Tile Studio is a complete development utility for graphics of tile-based games. The application contains a bitmap editor for creating tiles and sprites and a map editor for designing level maps. http://tilestudio.sourceforge.net/
Array Painter is a powerful tool for making 2D arrays fast and easy ready for copy pasting into your own code. This utility is a nice simple solution for making your map background easily. http://www.arraypainter.com/
Library for saving and loading data to and from XML data type. The mechanism is like serializing objects to XML and get it back again. Perfect for saving/loading map data, game data, animation, etc. http://xstream.codehaus.org/