I am thinking about a platform for study application (it is team work). I mean standart JEE 5 (or maybe try raw JEE 6) and Spring. What is your choose? (I don't mean Spring MVC but Spring Beans and EJB3.0)
Also i would like to know whar app server you use? (now i use glassfish v2)
Thanks, WBR, Den Bardadym.
I would recommend Spring without EJBs.
My favorite choice of Java EE app server is WebLogic, but I don't know if Oracle is as generous as BEA was about making it available to developers.
I'd recommend using Tomcat as your app server. If you need JMS, add ActiveMQ.
As duffymo says, look at Spring without EJBs. Spring is very powerful, regardless of how much/little you use. I don't know of anyone using EJBs now. Having said that, EJBs have changed dramatically over the years, and now resemble ORMs such as Hibernate (which is worth checking out in itself).
For app servers, check out JBoss. It's free/open-source, and you can choose the web component between Tomcat and Jetty. It's JMX backbone allows you to easily monitor its state and to integrate your own JMX beans into that backbone (if you're using Spring, you can JMX-enable any bean with a simple configuration).
If you want Java EE 6 then the choice appears to be either Glassfish 3 or the beta of JBoss 6. As some of the others have said, I also prefer Spring to Java EE's EJBs.
I don't see much point in looking at Java EE 5, unless you think you will be working with it in the future (possible as some companies are conservative in using newer versions of technology).