Here is THE tutorial on Java EE
The Java EE 6 Tutorial[
^]
A clear explanation of web.xml - a lot of people have been looking for this, including the people involved in writing Java EE servers and frameworks. So deploying on something else than your development platform has traditionally been somewhat painfull. Develop with Eclipse+JBoss and try to deploy on WebSphere. It is quite often an entertaining process.
I would probably go for
Oracle WebLogic[
^] - Studio Edition for Windows; or
NetBeans IDE 7.0[
^] with Glassfish.
Preferably using Oracle as RDBMS - and I'd stay far away from hibernate and spring, which may seem a bit controversial - and use
TolLink[
^] instead.
Best regards
Espen Harlinn