Question: What has me going is the degree of web application development we are talking about.

There are different levels of web application development. For example, if I was asked to develop a web application to deal with housing customer information for a small mom and pop bakery (definitely not a enterprise situation), is there anything wrong with using Java EE as opposed to Java SE if I really want to.

I know you might say that it would be overkill, and I can understand that, however, am I going to run into development issues that I would not run into using Java SE? In other words, I am trying to determine when does a small business web application turn into a enterprise web application. It seems to me that I should be able to use Java model that I want.

Am I wrong in my thinking here?

Need clarification here if you can help me.

Answer: 
There seems to be some confusion over the usage of Java EE and Java SE terminologies. Just because EE expands to Enterprise Edition, it does not mean that it is used only by enterprises.

Java EE happens to be a set of specifications that are bundled together to form a platform. The moment you need to write a web application, you need to use the Servlet + JSP specifications at a bare minimum, which is a subset of the Java EE specification.

Java SE, on its own is usually used to write standalone applications. It is better to refer to Java SE more as an API or a library, rather than an as specification, in contrast to Java EE. It can be considered as a platform for the "*non-enterprisey*" applications.
Theres nothing wrong with using a full Java EE container. However this usually comes at the cost of complexity.

The minimum you need is a servlet container which is a subset of the Java EE specifications.

Full Java EE containers tend to have more to configure in them than simple servlet containers which may add overheads that are not worth it.

The other thing to consider is If you do use just `javax.servlet` to compile .war files then these are compatible with full Java EE containers so there is nothing to stop you upgrading at a later point.

Another point to keep in mind is JBOSS / GlassFish which implement the full Java EE stack use more memory and may have longer startup times than say tomcat.

If however you know that you will be using more of Java EE at a later point such as EJB; then I would start out with the full Java EE container.

**To Summarise**

Personally I would start out using just a servlet container. (not full Java EE). If and only if I needed a full Java EE stack then I would move to a full Java EE container.