Get to attend IBM training again these few days. It's always nice to break out of usual work routine.
Technical stuff:
Java EE is very complicated. EJB3, JPA, SOA, ESB, BPEL... Yea, they are "open standards" backed up by Sun and IBM. But there are open source libraries tools that try to scratch the same itch too. Personally, I would use whatever that works and cost me less time to learn and setup.
Being too high level and abstract means it would be a nightmare to troubleshoot when errors occurred. It's definitely nice to generate entity POJO and input forms in JSF with a few clicks though.
Setup clustering is as easy as typing a few commands. That's the difference between a free and paid solution I guess.
