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In reply to myself above, to satisfy my own curiosity, I just spent an hour researching this company. Seems they began as EJB Solutions in 1998 with one Rod Cope as co-founder. 2003 finds them headquartered in Highlands Ranch, Colorado. They were specialized in Java, J2EE, XML, and web service technologies, and without doubt the "EJB" in their name refers to Enterprise Java Beans which were all the rage back then. EJB Solutions changed their name to Open Logic sometime around June 21, 2004. They released the BlueGlue 3.2 Open Source Stack July 13, 2005. They launched Indemnification for their Certified Library of Open Source Products on October 17, 2006, but at least one blogger was not too impressed with that

Rod Cope of OpenLogic explains what this is all about in a nice video at JavaOne 2007 where he really seems to be a nice guy who perhaps deserves our support as they have been involved in Open Source and promoting it for a long time. Its just this thing about their Indemnification offer that has touched off a raw nerve here. I hereby invite Rod Cope to contact me and I will ask him about this, do a little interview with him, and report back.

I used Java for web development for quite some time, and I did it all. JSPs, JSTL, Struts, Spring, Hibernate, etc. I tried just about everything it had to offer. But then I read Matt Raible's blog, which at the time had a post about Ruby on Rails. I decided to download it and give it a whirl. This was back when it was Rails 0.8.0.

I was shocked by the simplicity! It was so easy to get started and have a simple working app in a very short time. This was using Rails' nice scaffolding, which at that time couldn't be generated (it was all created dynamically, so you couldn't edit it). I knew, of course, that scaffolding would never work for a real application, so I tried branching out a little bit and started creating controllers and views and models, and found that Rails made it easy.

In response to the above post, I don't think ActiveRecord lacks flexibility of Hibernate. I think it has more flexibility if anything. Have you ever tried created a tree-structure for a table with Hibernate? Have you tried it in ActiveRecord? The difference is huge. That's not the only way ActiveRecord outshines any other ORM solution I've ever seen.

I have used Hibernate on the last two J2EE projects I've worked on and can attest to its simplicity and power. Although it'll take you a few weeks to really get the hang of how things work under the hood, it's well worth the learning curve. And it's ridiculously simple compared with EJB - that's for sure. My latest project even involved storing CLOBs to an Oracle Rack cluser - it took a bit of tweaking and research, but we saved ourselves hundreds of lines of codes and it performs without a glitch.
Okay, I haven't RTFA, but the poster should also have made mention of Spring, which works hand in hand with Hibernate. Spring basically is an Inversion Of Control (IOC) framework, that allows you to define Hibernate transaction and session contexts. Spring also offers a great MVC layer, but one does not have to use that. If one chooses to just use Spring as an addition to Hibernate, one can look at Spring's additional functionalities as needed. Spring also offers Oracle BLOB/CLOB support by offering a customized OracleClobHandler - Oracle ONLY supports its propietary CLOB objects and won't accept java.sql.Clob objects via Hibernate.
Generally, Hibernate is very non-intrusive and gives you the opportunity to write JDBC code alongside with your Hibernate code (which is super-elegant and abstracted the way it should have been done a long time ago). So, it can be slowly folced into an existing project without having to refactor any legacy code.
The Hibernate user group is a bit rude to be quite frank - I've tried to post some questions in the dev group and got pretty angry replies. The 'beginner' group was not very helpful, so I had to google for answers. Of course there's the book, and I would strongly recommend to get it, since it is one of the major revenue sources for those Hibernate contributors. We want open source, but we can't expect to get everything for free, right? ;-)
My first exposure to Hibernate was through the Appfuse framework, which is an excellent J2EE kickstart project, complete with ant built, Xdoclet, Hibernate, Spring, the works. I was even able to use XDoclet tags inside my Java beans, relieving me of having to write my Hibernate definition files by hand! It really doesn't get much easier than that. For anyone wanting to give Hibernate/Spring a try, I recommend to download the latest version of appfuse and give it a try - it's a liberating experience. The biggest kick I got was being able to seamlessly switch my project from Oracle over to MySQL by simply changing a few environment variables - I mean, how cooler can it get? :-)

According to this guy, Tomcat 5 is faster than Resin 3 and Resin supposedly has some compatibility issues. Resin 2.x turned in a mixed performance.

And the TDD book by Kent Beck shows how the evolution of an application can be driven by unit tests.
Fwiw - I'd suggest that a large project is _not_ the best way to get to understand how unit testing works - there is likely to be way more detail than you need or want. Matt Raible shares some code (esp. AppFuse) which includes unit tests, and describes them in his wiki on Appfuse tutorials.
His "Struts Resume" demo application contains some pretty interesting unit tests of a real-world application.
Now, here's the skinny for me : using testing as an integral part of your development cycle helps you to separate the layers and components in your application. Every time you find yourself thinking "how am I going to test this - it's too difficult/intertwingled/dependent on other stuff", you have identified a design deficiency. Making the software easy to test will make it easy to understand, and easy to work with in future. By architecting the application to make it easy to test independently of the database, you make it resilient against changes in the underlying database technology, and - oh, yeah, you have some self-documenting code to show others how to call your api.
Good place to start reading is Robert Martin's "Agile Software Development".

And the TDD book by Kent Beck shows how the evolution of an application can be driven by unit tests.
Fwiw - I'd suggest that a large project is _not_ the best way to get to understand how unit testing works - there is likely to be way more detail than you need or want. Matt Raible shares some code (esp. AppFuse) which includes unit tests, and describes them in his wiki on Appfuse tutorials.
His "Struts Resume" demo application contains some pretty interesting unit tests of a real-world application.
Now, here's the skinny for me : using testing as an integral part of your development cycle helps you to separate the layers and components in your application. Every time you find yourself thinking "how am I going to test this - it's too difficult/intertwingled/dependent on other stuff", you have identified a design deficiency. Making the software easy to test will make it easy to understand, and easy to work with in future. By architecting the application to make it easy to test independently of the database, you make it resilient against changes in the underlying database technology, and - oh, yeah, you have some self-documenting code to show others how to call your api.
Good place to start reading is Robert Martin's "Agile Software Development".

Actually, the issues they have under Windows are legal and nothing else. In fact, it works just great (if you don't believe me, compile Apache with SSL under Windows (you'll need Visual C++ 5 and up)... Apache Software Foundation even gives you detailed instructions on how to do it!)!

Since Apache 2.0.x is the first version of Apache for Windows that is largely considered a Production release they are debating the legal issues of releasing a BINARY version of Apache 2.0.x for Win32 compiled with OpenSSL libraries. This is especially the case since they are not SELLING the software to do it, so they can not really control who would use it. They will figure something out, but in the meantime, do not release it in their binaries.

As a matter of fact, Apache 2.0.4x Win32 can easily be setup to use OpenSSL and ModSSL! This is thoroughly explained at this web site. It even explains to you where to get binary distributions of it (not directly from Apache as discussed above).

In fact, on a single Pentium II or III with Win2k (even workstation) you have plenty of horsepower to use SSL and Apache 2.0.x. I would like to mention a couple of things, I use it in an academic environment and it has been running stable and secure for almost half a year now.

It has a commercial SSL certificate on it. Apache 2.0.x on Win32 is quite a bit tricky to get your private key and public certificate to work if it is PEM encoded. If it is not PEM encoded, it is a snap! That right there is one thing that can save you hours of head banging on wall! Make sure your key and certificate after you've received them are not PEM encoded for less aggravation. You can always run them through (at least the cert) OpenSSL to remove the encoding.

Also, your certificate chain must be put together the right way, but you should get instructions for that from your certificate authority.

I agree, Apache on Win32 is a much better choice than IIS. IIS can be a relatively secure product if administered properly. There are, of course, numerous security holes that have been publicized, and it should be mentioned that most were left open by the administrators who should have known better. They got IIS to work and didn't bother with security! Most of the reasons to NOT use IIS are the fact that you need at least NT Server 4, 5, 6, etc. (the workstation version of IIS is too limited for production usage) and the steep licensing that costs, and the fact that it has much more features than 99.9% of websites will need!

Apache, on the other hand, gives you a relatively secure environment from the get-go that makes you ADD the features you need. After working with Apache it should become apparent that this is clearly the way to go. Intelligent administration of servers can really make almost any modern OS relatively secure. Perhaps if Apache on Win32 catches on it may encite people to port more great open source server software to natively run on Win32 as Apache does (does not use Cygwin... though you CAN of couse, use the Cygwin version of Apache which won't perform as well as the Native Win32 version does). Plus, Apache can run just fine on NT workstation (saving plenty of money on the NT server licenses)!

Interestingly enough, Apache Win32 in our setup outperforms other departments at our institution using IIS on Win32! Perhaps benchmarks in this area should be publicized a bit more!