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.
Comments (5)
Hey Mike,
Nice post. One thing to note is that Cometd and Bayuex are far from standards and are limited to a pub/sub model of development. The HTML 5 community has put a lot of work into developing standards for both push-style and bi-directional communications from the browser to the server, namely server-sent events and websockets, respectively. A couple of folks have already gone the extra mile to make those standards available today--the most notable of which is Kaazing. Thus, it appears that there is a bit of a sunset clause on both Cometd and Bayuex.
--Ric
Posted by Ric Smith | October 24, 2008 1:21 PM
Posted on October 24, 2008 13:21
Thanks for the post Mike. I'm just familiarizing myself with WLS as the replacement for OC4J for JDev 11g development.
Regards the lightweight WLS option, for JDev 11g, have you any comments on the minimal install options we need?
Presumably:
* Config Wizard to install ADF domain
* Weblogic JDBC drivers to connect to Oracle db
...anymore?
Am I correct in assuming that the console isn't needed as there are command line equivalents? I'd be guessing the Config Wizard is also not needed because this could be done from the command line as well?
Thanks & regards,
CM.
Posted by Chris Muir | October 28, 2008 3:55 PM
Posted on October 28, 2008 15:55
Chris, for JDeveloper, they provide as part of the install the ability to configure a WLS server by pointing it at an existing domain. Generally the JDeveloper folks have been doing that install against a full WLS install but you are absolutely right that you could do a more minimal configuration using the lightweight installer approach I note here. I believe that calls for a separate blog entry which I will pursue either myself or get a JDev PM to test out.
Posted by Mike Lehmann | October 29, 2008 10:35 PM
Posted on October 29, 2008 22:35
Ric, as you write in your excellent article - http://ajax.sys-con.com/node/677813/print - Comet and related technologies are solutions that generally are reasonably widely used because they solve the problem today and have a bit of a developer community but like any solution there are always new approaches coming to bear on the space.
The HTML 5 step forward is interesting and offerings opportunities to productize new infrastructure - this is the kind of thing that we also are exploring in WebLogic Server going forward as our customer base learns the pros and cons of solving this issue not only as a tools framework problem but as a server centric problem.
I suspect something that needs to be resolved around HTML 5 is not only the server side of the issue where your company seems to have invested but also browser support - it is unclear to me the pending availability in this space of the major browser platforms.
Posted by Mike Lehmann | October 29, 2008 10:46 PM
Posted on October 29, 2008 22:46
Thanks for the reply Mike, I look forward to reading the future post.
CM.
Posted by Chris Muir | November 3, 2008 4:04 PM
Posted on November 3, 2008 16:04