I finally got a knowledgeable person on the phone at Oracle and she was very helpful. She referred me to Oracle DB Express version that you linked Roger. Thanks for that.
She said they do not have a free version of WebLogic, but that sales might be able to work out some kind of scheme wherein we could acquire a version for development purposes and use it on a dev machine without purchasing a license for a limited time. To actually purchase it, you have to figure out what kind of license you want. The licensing scheme is byzantine and there are versions supporting unlimited users on a single processor, per-user licenses, provisions for the number of cores on your machine, perpetual licenses, 1 year licenses, etc, etc. Costs appear to start at $200 for a "1 Named User Plus" perpetual license. You can do $40 for the first year or something but that's just ridiculous.
The document from the client literally said JDK 1.5. In additional correspondence, they have requested a "Standard J2EE Application" which is able to work on their WebLogic servers should they decide to host it internally. Roger, I'm not really sure what it would mean to use Java for Business versus Java EE 5 (I assume Java EE 5 is really what they mean when they say "jdk 1.5"). I imagine that what it ultimately means which application server you end up with on your dev and production hardware, right? The sun website says Java for Business is based on Java SE. It's my understanding that SE has fewer libraries than EE. I'm also guessing WebLogic might offer features and functionality (and, sadly, constraints) that would not be present in GlassFish or SJSAS or Apache Geronimo or (Apache Tomcat?) or whatever.
This enormous collection of acronyms and new names for the same old things is something I've always found puzzling and irritating about the Java ecosystem.
If you go to the spring website, there is a very prominent DOWNLOAD button that links to SpringSource tc Server Developer Edition which apparently uses Tomcat. I'm not even sure what this software product includes -- I do know it's not free.
Hibernate appears to be a wrapper for handling data persistence.
I'm fine with the hardware details. I am certain that I'll want to develop on a machine here in my office. It's just too tedious to constantly upload files to a remote server to see if everything works. What I'll probably do is repurpose my desktop as a linux server -- I've been planning to overclock a core i7 920 for some time now. I'm a huge newegg fan.
At any rate, I'm having a bit of trouble picturing how all these disparate parts fit together. At this point I have a vague picture of an ubuntu or debian machine with apache tomcat (or geronimo?) also running oracle db express and possibly also a GUI and Eclipse for linux. But then that gives me problems seeing how spring and hibernate are to be incorporated. Also, I worry about things working when I put my JAR/WAR/EAR/RAR files on the client's weblogic server.
Thanks for the Spring MVC link and the suggestions about design patterns, but I'm not there yet. I'm still confused about the stack and the development process. Any additional comments are appreciated.