Sam Pullara

Wow. That's what I have to say when I look back at where WebLogic began and where it has gone since then. When I started working at WebLogic, the only core people there were the founders, the president, an administrative assistant, and a lone sales person. Of course, back then our big moneymakers were the JDBC drivers. We always said, "You know, in two months, Oracle/Sybase/Microsoft is going to come out with a great native database driver and we won't be able to make any money in this business. We have to start selling our server." Fortunately for us, we're still able to sell those JDBC drivers, although they're a very small fraction of sales. WebLogic has come a long way in becoming a standards-based, fault-tolerant, scalable platform for building enterprise Java applications. Even our tag line back in those days was prophetic: "WebLogic, Elevating Java to the Ent... (more)

Using JMX

The Java Management API (JMX) has been integral to managing the WebLogic Server since WebLogic 6.0. Through this API you can search for management beans (mbeans) within the application server and query them for both configuration information and runtime monitoring information. In addition, this API can be used to actually change the configuration of the server. In fact, this API is used internally by the console and other administration tools to do their work and report their data. This API can be a powerful tool for monitoring. Let's look at an example. In this application, you... (more)

Caching

Application server performance. Database performance. Hardware performance. These are numbers measured in the popular press, although in most situations they have little to do with your application's real-world performance. The number one way to increase performance, the thing that gives you the biggest boost, is caching. Caching in every tier is becoming more and more prevalent. On the front end, we have caching proxy servers like Squid and AOL. On the back end, we have databases and file systems that are caching our data. This month, I'm going to talk about caching in the Web a... (more)

WebLogic Platform 7.0

Development and deployment. These are the foci of the WebLogic Platform 7.0 release. Don't get me wrong, it's not like we haven't been working on the container itself, we still have J2EE 1.3 compliance and some really high ECPerf numbers. We have, though, released with the product three tools that try to simplify the development, deployment, and administration of WebLogic Server applications. The first tool, WebLogic Workshop, can be thought of as a Visual Basic­like tool for building Web services, complete with a debugger for those services. It's standard, too ­ underneath the ... (more)

Integration via Web Services

WebLogic Server 7.0 contains the most advanced, performant, and standards-compliant Web service stack of any application server. With an additional download (until the JAX-RPC specification goes final - it may by the time you see this article - see http://jcp.org/jsr/detail/101.jsp) you get a Java standards-compliant Web service stack that also passes the SOAP interoperability tests. So you might ask how easy is it to use this system to call existing Web services and to build new Web services? The answer is: almost trivial. Let's look at a concrete example to demonstrate a coupl... (more)