What are some good resources on creating and reading 2D game levels in Java?

Could some resources be listed in relation to the creation and management of simplistic, efficient 2D game levels, that are available for use with Java?

Answer

Have a look at Tiled or OGMO Editor. These editors allow you to create your levels and can also write the level-data to XML. Parsing the XML data in Java should be rather simple. Alternatively you could have a look at the AndEngine which comes with a parser for the TMX format (TMX is an XML format written by Tiled).