weblogic-10.xweblogic11goc4j

What is the business benefit for Oracle Weblogic Server over OC4J?


Apart from Technology support , what are all the business benefits for oracle web logic server. For example in area of security,support etc.

What are all the new features supported by weblogic ?


Solution

  • TL;DR:


    I haven't worked with OC4J but I believe Oracle's roadmap is picking Weblogic as their preferred Java application server. You can see it is the base technology for some of their other products, such as Oracle Service Bus, Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM), and Oracle Line Planning.

    I have opened 3 Oracle tickets in the past month. I was surprised at how fast they answered. For a Severity 3 ticket (medium), they usually have responded in 2-3 days. I can't say the same for their other services (over 2 weeks for a ticket on OEM).

    Security is a pretty broad scope... so you'd have to be a little more specific on some of the topics of security.

    One thing that is pretty awesome is the Dashboard. http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E14571_01/web.1111/e13714/dashboard.htm You can obviously add read-only monitor accounts so other users can get insight to the performance. We add developers to this so that they can validate any settings, or see performance whenever there is a production issue.

    We used Microsoft Active Directory authentication in our Weblogic domains. People are not using the default weblogic administrator user so configuration changes are audited. When someone's account gets disabled when leaving the company, it disables their access to Weblogic similarly. You don't have to change the password.

    Other useful settings I like in it is the ability to automatically archive config changes. Each time someone makes a config change, a backup is automatically created. This allows me to go fix something when developers break their environment without having to majorly reverse-engineer what they did.

    I also like the fact that you can pack and unpack the domains. I've used it to move entire domains from staging to production with some minor changes... i.e. change all stg to prod variables. This should likewise make it easier to 'clone' environments when you want to build out a new one.

    Although not related, I should mention Oracle Enterprise Manager. We are an Oracle shop because they seem to have given us a good deal on licencing. So we get to run Oracle Enterprise Manager, which is a tool slowly becoming more and more useful. The agent also reports how our RedHat Linux hosts are behaving, network input/output, CPU utilization, memory utilization, java heap stacks. We are going to move to defining groups within that has all the targets related to an application stack. This will give our operations team the insight to see where the bottleneck might be... the Oracle Weblogic web layer, network, Oracle Service Bus, or Oracle Database performance.

    Supposedly, you can add jBoss, other JMX monitoring as well to OEM. It's on our to-do list for non-Weblogic instance. We're slowly rolling OEM out.