Application Servers to consider:
Weblogic from Bea
Websphere from IBM
jBoss from jBoss and Tomcat Web Container
Oracle Application Server from Oracle
iPlanet from Sun
IDEs for application development:
Eclipse from eclipse.org --- Free Download
JBuilder from Borland
Oracle JDeveloper --- Free Download
netBeans --- Free Download
Most Useful EJB Patterns:
1. Session facade
2. Message facade
3. EJB Command
4. Domain Data Transfer Objects
5. Data Transfer Object Factory
6. Business Interface
7. Business delegate
Top items for J2EE development:
1. Design your data/value objects carefully. This area can give you the most headache.
2. Isolate the database specific code. Eventhough Java is 'write once..', your SQL code may not be universal.
3. Isolate the database access code(either CMP or JDBC) from the main code so that you can re-write that layer anytime. Standards are still evolving in the database access area.
4. Do consider CMP for database access.
5. Select a proper JDBC driver as some of the JDBC drivers are buggy.