Which should I use, JBoss or the J2EE Reference Implementation (or something else)?
This is a personal choice and depends on your level of experience with the products. However, we recommend using JBoss. It would appear to be used in production environments more frequently and has a more active user base. It is also easier to install on the game/asl lab machines. The J2EE reference implementation is not intended for production use (and, based on anecdotal evidence, seems to put a larger load onthe machines). The more recent versions of JBoss also have Eclipse integration through JBoss-IDE. The JBoss binaries (and source) are available for free download at http://www.jboss.org/downloads. There is a summary of free and open source tools for EJB here. Also, we do not support a common installation of the J2EE reference implementation application server for this class. However, you can download it for linux, windows, or solaris from http://java.sun.com/j2ee/1.4/download.html#sdk. If the linux version fails to install because it thinks that your JRE is invalid, see http://f
