WebLogic Server

In the last few months since the acquisition of BEA, WebLogic product management have been seeing many WebLogic Server and Oracle Internet Application Server (Oracle iAS) customers and a very natural question that arises, after they understand the strategy laid out by Oracle here on July 1, is which version of WebLogic Server should I work with?

I generally answer this question with a question and then some detail from the resulting answer. The question is: What application server are you using right now and what version?

If the answer is WebLogic Server and the release is 8.x through 10.x, the answer is pretty simple. It may seem gratuitously simple but I will give the concrete reasons why it is so simple. The answer is WebLogic Server 10.3 - the latest release put out in August.

Why you ask? The answer is not only because it is the latest release and most mature (a non dot zero release) but additionally WebLogic Server 10.3 has these characteristics:

a. Fusion Middleware 10gR3 Support. All of Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM) 10gR3 pre-BEA-aquisition is in the midst of being certified on WebLogic 10.3. The end result intent is by first half calendar year 2009 (and many pieces before end of year 2008), to have almost all of OFM 10gR3 certified on it. This generally will mean that all of OFM 10gR3 is certified on both WebLogic Server 10.3 and Oracle iAS 10gR3 and Oracle WebLogic Server 10gR3

b. BEA Product Line Support. All of the AquaLogic (Service Bus, Enterprise Repository, User Interaction etc) and WebLogic extended product lines (WebLogic Portal, WebLogic Integration etc) are being certified on WLS 10.3. This is part of the 100 day plan outlined in the Oracle broadcast noted above.

c. Fusion Middleware 11g R1 Planned Support. The intent for Oracle Fusion Middleware 11gR1 which now is primarily a major release of the layered components (SOA Suite, WebCenter and others), is for it to be certified on WLS 10.3 with a patchset (Oracle vernacular for what BEA called a Maintenance Pack - had BEA remained, it would be WebLogic Server 10.3MP1)

d. Ease of Upgrade. As WebLogic Server 10.3 is a mature release of the 10 product line, there is significant support for the upgrade itself both in tooling within the product itself and also within the documentation set. Check out the upgrade guide from our documentation for a tour of this.

e. Tooling Support. Not only does WebLogic Server 10.3 have great new support from WebLogic Workshop 10.3 (major new features for Java EE 5.0 and WebLogic Server 10.3 development), the new Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse, we also have just released JDeveloper 11g and TopLink 11g which both have full support for the WebLogic Server 10.3 and very substantial new features (ADF 11g and TopLink JPA on the Coherence Grid)

Independent of technological advances in WebLogic Server 10.3 that are compelling in their own right -- lightweight installer (lay down a WebLogic Server that only is 179M), holder now of all the SPECjAppServer performance world records, new HA features like automatic service migration for JMS, updated Spring support, better Eclipse integration and more -- the centralization of certification of the entire Oracle line of layered products from OFM 10gR3, WebLogic/AquaLogic and OFM 11gR1 on the 10.3 release means it will be a common platform base for many customers. Customers will have a platform upon which a goodly portion, if not all of the combined BEA and Oracle product lines certify on.

If the answer to my question is Oracle iAS 10gR2 or Oracle iAS 10gR3, my response is a little more nuanced. The answer still is WebLogic 10.3, however, my recommendation is to let Oracle do the upgrade for you when OFM 11gR1 come out.

As most know from the Oracle broadcast above, there are two characteristics of iAS 10gR2 and R3 to be aware of:

a. iAS 10gR2 and R3 will continue to have releases going forward of the respective versions. Both patches and enhancements will continue. Most recently Oracle iAS 10.1.3.4 was released covering updates to the core application server and the layered OFM products running on it. In the 10gR2 release, Oracle iAS 10.1.2.4 and 10.1.4.4 are the most recent patchsets. The policy on these releases support is outlined is pretty clear detail in the lifetime support policy statement on Oracle.com

b. OFM 11gR1 will be a based on a core of WebLogic Server with components from Oracle iAS 10gR2 and R3 certified to run on WebLogic Server - think of components like Oracle TopLink, Oracle Coherence, Oracle Forms, Oracle Reports, Oracle BI Discoverer, Oracle HTTP Server and Oracle Web Cache (amongst others).

What do I mean by "let Oracle do the upgrade for you?" What I mean is when OFM 11gR1 comes out, Oracle will have a rich set of upgrade tooling, documentation and best practices designed to help the upgrade both iAS 10gR2 and iAS 10gR3 to OFM 11gR1 just like any other major release of any product we produce. The goal should be to run these versions like you would have pre-BEA - these are proven, supported and continuing to be enhanced releases in their regular lifecycle - and then Oracle will, as part and course of the normal OFM 11 R1 release, help you do the upgrade with proven tooling, documentation and best practices.

Remember all the reasons for aiming at WebLogic Server 10.3 in that upgrade also apply once OFM 11gR1 comes out for Oracle iAS customers. If there are tactical reasons to adopt WebLogic Server early - for example some of your projects have products that only run on WebLogic Server, then the target release ideally would be WebLogic Server 10.3 for the reasons outlined there. There may be reasons - even in the pure WebLogic case where that is not possible - so consider this directional advice versus a firm statement.

Bottom line for advice of this blog -- If you are planning to uptake or upgrade to a version of WebLogic Server: Choose WebLogic Server 10.3 if possible. Try it out. Get an understanding of it as it is the core release we expect and encourage our customers to uptake for current 10gR3 releases and future 11gR1 releases. Of course, depending on your current deployment of Oracle technology, take the path that works best for your business.

More details on this topic as we get close to the OFM 11g R1 release.

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Oct 29, 2008:
Oracle Support have told me they are pleased to announce that the older versions of BEA products are now available at http://commerce.bea.com.
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As many WebLogic savvy folks know Oracle is diligently moving things like dev2dev, its assets like articles and code samples along with other aspects of BEA's public developer presence over to Oracle Technology Network. The process was summarized a few months back in this post from our combined OTN and Dev2Dev team.

Unfortunately, as probably should be expected in such a migration things do not go perfectly. In general it has been pretty good but over the last week and a bit we frankly have had a logistical screw up that is causing some serious pain for customers who need to get older releases of our software. What happened is the software that used to be located on the commerce.bea.com site was taken offline and as a result, those older releases/upgrades/service packages are no longer available publicly for download.

We are working on resolving this shortly but in the meantime the repeat support and customer question we are getting is: Where do I get "BEA Product Version X" or "BEA Product Service Pack Y" or "BEA upgrade installer Z" etc.

To help with this here is where things currently are - and once you know this things don't look so bad but it is slightly more complex to get these older software binaries in the interim while we resolve the issue:

1. Most current releases of the BEA products and re-branded Oracle versions can be downloaded from two places:

a. Oracle Technology Network. Here is where the products tend to be:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/ias/bea_main.html

and for WebLogic Server proper:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/ias/index.html

b. If there are platforms not there as these downloads tend to be aimed at developers, the other major place - in fact where we encourage licensed customers to download from - is http://edelivery.oracle.com.

2. If you do not find the version, service pack, upgrade installer etc you are looking for from the above locations, the best thing to do is log a service request with BEA Support - http://support.bea.com - using your customer account (which anyone typically needing older software should have) and they have full access as you would expect to the repository and can get you the download you need.

Some folks seem to think that this means we have suddenly dropped support for older products because they are no longer available. This could not be further from the truth. Per the post of last week, all products will be supported per the lifetime support policy on Oracle.com and will remain available for download for their lifetime.

I would like to say the fix is imminent but initial reads indicate this could take until the end of the month to resolve. Once this is back, we expect to return to the previous approach where older versions were available for download, we expect through the same mechanism as before.

Apologies in advance for the pain this caused - we were starting to feel pretty good about our record with the migration to OTN so I suppose we were due for some comeuppance :-(

With WebLogic Server 10.3 being out now for close to 3 months it is interesting to see what other folks have noticed about it. In particular, I have been watching James Bayer a top technical sales consultant here at Oracle systematically walk through some of the key new features and highlight his experiences as he tries them out.

He started with testing out the new support of Java EE 5.0 in WebLogic Workshop and did a pretty systematic tour of the tooling with this blog:

Workshop for WebLogic 10.3 JEE 5 Trial and Error

He moved into JMS where WebLogic Server 10.3 introduces a .NET client for its JMS infrastructure and shows how to interoperate across these two worlds with this blog:

JMS with .NET - WebLogic Server 10gR3 Example

He then moved on and checked out the new HTTP pub/sub feature and didn't waste any time building a 3 part series on how interesting this technology is:

1. Real-time Updates on Web Pages - WebLogic Server 10gR3 New Feature

2. Real-time Updates on WebPages - Part 2 - Hello World Comet Application

3. Real-time Updates on WebPages - Part 3 - Dojo 1.2.0 tip and Bayeux Handshake

I myself have been pretty keen to get reaction to the lightweight installer as we have a community of users who have been telling us to "lighten up" which we indeed did with both the network based installer - http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/ias/index.html - weighing in at 39M and then the installer itself letting you choose how much of the full application server distribution to lay down on disk enabling the footprint to be as low as 179M as this screen shot shows below.

There's lots more capabilities that came along with WebLogic 10.3 ... the laundry list of new features is well documented in the new features document that comes along with the release.

Check it out, download and try it out ... a pretty compelling release from our current 10.x release cycle that not only is a foundation release we are recommending to the install base and new customers but feature bearing beyond what I suspect a lot of folks expected.