Java Crash Course For System Integrators

JavaCrashCourseForSystemIntegrators is a JavaTwoEnterpriseEdition centric page, aimed at educating developers who have awareness of products and capabilities of MicrosoftWay, BigIronWay, etc., but with limited or no awareness of:

CeeLanguage
UnixCulturalAssumption
JavaScript is not JavaLanguage
JavaLanguage skills is not comparable to JavaTwoEnterpriseEdition skills
- analogous to comparing VbClassic to VbDotNet, language is only a tiny percent of the total domain
ComponentDesignPatterns, in particular EjbDesignPatterns
MigratingToJtwoee
Significance and applicability of the JavaLinks in real-life situations

What is needed is AshortCupofJava type of LearningJava without having to wade through SyntacticSugar meant for the JavaProgrammer.

HELP!!!

Technology vs products

To an uninitiated developer, it is hard to tell the difference between a feature (spec?) of J2EE, vs a product offering (by a vendor like Sun) to complement their J2EE product line, which may not be compliant to existing specs.

So how do we get educated quickly?

Technology comparison with MS

Looking for how the various Java building blocks are mapped to equivalent technology and products from MS. For example, is JiniTechnology comparable to DotNetRemoting?

Interoperability amongst various J2EE products

Sometimes there were stories floating around that two J2EE compliant implementations cannot communicate, possibly a result of using different low level implementation protocols (or other reasons). Are there serious integration problems in a mixed vendor J2EE shop?

Where do we go get briefed on BestPractices?