WebLogic Developer Experience and Java EE 6

Editor's Notes

• #5: Oracle WLS is also the strategic platform for FMW and Oracle Applications. The entire FMW suite of products is built on WLS 11g.All of Oracle’s packaged app either support or are in the process of certifying on WLSFinally, Fusion Applications – the next generation of applications from Oracle – is being built on FMW 11g and therefore on WLSSo, as you can see, WebLogic is the platform for almost all of Oracle’s higher-level application portfolio. This is good in some ways, for example it means that the level of scrutiny for performance and stability, but it also means the number of tests we have to run for a WebLogic release is enormous. This can push out the release cycle in some cases.
• #7: The primary package that Oracle offers WebLogic to the marketplace is Oracle WebLogic Suite. WebLogic Suite combines WLS, with complementary technologies from Oracle like:Coherence, which is the World’s leading distributed data cache technologyThe JRockit and HotSpot JVM’s with extended features in JRockit like:JRockit Real Time for mission critical applicationsVirtual Edition for virtualizing an application server container to run on a hypervisor with no Operating systemWLS is also made available in other offerings, but we believe WL Suite with all the components:Provides the most complete platform for building private cloud applicationsDelivers the #1 infrastructure in terms of performance and delivering apps in to prod quicklyAND Provides the best integration with the rest of the Oracle stackWebLogic Suite includes a choice of development tools – JDev and Eclipse, and many other IDE’s support developing applications for WebLogic.WebLogic Includes native management functionality with the:WebLogic Admin ConsoleWebLogic Scripting ToolWebLogic Diagnostic frameworkAnd in addition, Oracle’s Enterprise Manager provides support for managing WebLogic domains including cloning domains and scaling out domains/clusters to include additional managed servers.
• #8: Both GlassFish and WebLogic remain strategic products for Oracle.Our strategy going forward, together with the GF team, is to provide high levels compatibility between GF and WLS. To maximize reuse and sharing of code and in order to enable WL to benefit from some of the innovation that has been driven and delivered by the GF team.WebLogic is the world’s #1 Application server in terms of Market share and we lead the industry in terms of messaging performance and high availability. WebLogic Server is the best choice for running mission-critical applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Fusion Applications. WebLogic offers the best integration with Oracle Database and RAC for the best high availability of a combined application server and database and a very low operations cost.GlassFish will be offered in two formats: an Open-Source Edition and as Oracle GlassFish Server which includes support from Oracle. GlassFish will continue to remain the reference implementation of the Java EE spec and can be delivered to market faster due to its shorter release cycles. In addition, it is certified to interoperate with Fusion Middleware
• #10: We believe that WLS offers a developer friendly and productive platform for building applications.We have early support for standards including some of the Java EE6 standards. With our latest patch set, 11gR1 Patch Set 3, we have added support latest specs for JPA, JSF and JAX-RS, in addition to maintaining full support for Web Services. We expect to deliver full Java EE6 in the next major version, and we’ll cover that in the roadmap section shortly.We also have a history of providing support for other Open Source technologies including technologies like the Spring Framework. WebLogic now supports Spring 3.0. Spring applications are not only SUPPORTED on WebLogic, they run great on WebLogic and allow you to take advantage of the advanced features that WebLogic offers.We have also added new development options like a zip distribution and we now offer Mac OS Support.We provide rich server tools for configuration and deployment automation - including integration with common build tools like ANT since the early versions of WebLogic and now Maven as well with the latest release.Also, in the latest release we offer a New Classloader Analysis Tool which eases the configuration of WebLogic’s filtering classloaders. This allows you to identify and resolve class conflicts due to Choice of IDE: Oracle is the #2 committer of code for the Eclipse project and we provide our own Eclipse Plugins – OEPE in addition to Jdeveloper and NetBeans. Together, we believe this provides a very powerful platform for developing applications to leverage the #1 application server on the market...
• #11: WL supports standards including Java EE standards. WL 11gR1 is fully Java EE 5 compatible. This provides compatibility with prior WL versions supporting EE 5 and prior EE releases.WL is compatible with other Java EE implementations at the API level and we also leverage reference implementations of certain APIs within our own implementation.We are continually looking to evolve WL to support new standards as they emerge and as they are required by developers. For example, WLS now supports TopLink as the strategic persistence provider. TL and the underlying EclipseLink technology are the reference implementation for JPA as used in EE 6 and in GlassFish.In WL 10.3.3 we added additional API support including optional support for JSF 2.0, again using the JSF 2.0 reference implementation. JSF 2.0 is an important part of the EE 6 specification and simplifies page authoring through new technologies such as facelets and use of templating. It also supports AJAX which supports dynamic updates of Web Applications.
• #14: Lets take a look at some of the new features we delivered with WL 10.3 which are specifically focused on development. These represent enhancements from prior versions of WLS and by and large were focused on improving developer productivity and turnaround time in development use cases. Some examples of improvements we have made – WL 10.3 console is much faster now. For those of you who are using 9.2 or 10.0, when you move to the 10.3 console you should expect to see a big difference in performance – both in startup and page navigation times. We would expect you to see roughly a 2-3x improvement in the performance, which would make you more productive in scenarios where you are using the WL console.We also made an investment in improving WL 10.3 deployment and startup times. These covered a wide set of capabilities in the server – EJB compilation improvements, for example. We placed a significant focus on the time it takes to develop, compile and deploy EJB’s to WLS instances.We also provided options for starting up subsets of the server as appropriate for your applications. In particular, we provided a startup option which enables you to start up those containers in WL that are specifically required by web applications without starting up other containers like the EJB, JMS or JCA containers.Finally, we delivered a capability called FastSwap which is specifically targeted at developer productivity. Effectively it leverages some capabilities delivered in Java SE 6 to enable modified code in your applications to be recognized immediately after a recompile – so for supported API’s within WL that are being modified using FastSwap – no Reboot, no redeploy, no loss of application state is incurred when making changes. So, what this enables you to more rapidly modify and fix your applications, and continue your testing.
• #16: We also provide a choice of IDEs, starting with Jdev. Jdev is Oracle’s strategic IDE for building applications across the Oracle product line including all of FMW, Fusion Apps and Oracle Database. Jdev provides a rich set of capabilities and supports the Oracle Application Developer Framework which is a framework for building state-of-the-art web GUI’s throughout the Oracle product line within FMW and in the upcoming release of Fusion Apps. It supports SOA Suite application development, WebCenter apps, development with Oracle Database and it also supports WLS and building Java EE apps on WLS. This is particularly appropriate when you are building full stack apps within your enterprise, that not only include WLS but other aspects of FMW.We also provide OEPE. This is an Eclipse-based development offering which is an Eclipse bundle specifically focused on Java development. It provides a very rich set of capabilities for building WLS applications. We believe that in OEPE we have the best Eclipse-based development offering that WLS has ever had.Finally, NetBeans which came with Sun, provides an OSS development tool which is used as the tooling for the Java ReferneceImplmentations. It supports WLS and other Java platforms such as SE, ME and FX.
• #19: Developer ExperienceSupport for new Java EE API’s: JPA, JSF, JAX-RSMavenActive GridLink for RACNew enhancements in 10.3.4 that augment prior RAC integration capabilities that are included in WLSMessagingWLS provides the leading messaging platform with WL JMS, which provides for very high performance, very reliable and highly available messaging applicationsWe have provided incremental enhancements in 10.3.4 through Partitioned Distributed Topics, which is a new configuration option for deploying distributed topics to a WL ClusterActiveCacheIntegration between WL and Coherence Distributed Cache for session state managementWe have provided Value-Added features in this area since the 11g WL release in July 2009VirtualizationWL Supports differentiated capabilities including JRVE that allows you to run WJ on JR on a HV w/o OSProvides interesting capabilities in terms of the density of JVM’s that you are able to achieve in a virtualized environmentWe also offer Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder which enables rapid and reliable deployment of multi-tier applications to multiple environmentsWL has a breadth of operation tools that support the management of WL environments including native WL admin tools, Support of WL from FMW control, and support of WL from EMGCFinally, a very important announcement was made at OOW which is the delivery of the Exalogic Elastic Cloud. EL is an integrated HW+SW system optimized for delivering maximum MW performance for enabling the deployment of private clouds that can be seamlessly and easily scaled out to meet enterprise requirements and as a HW+SW engineered system we provide a tightly integrated system that allows you to deploy all of your systems into production onto a highly available platform in a rapid timeframe
• #21: In 2010 we also announced a new form of distributing WL via a zip distribution. This is now available today and downloadable from OTN – The Oracle Technology Network. The Zip distribution reduces the download size of WLS by over 70%, thereby making it easier to access and easier to use for developers. The zip distribution contains a complete distribution of the WL runtime so it provides the full set of capabilities. It omits minor tools that we believe are not essential for development usage sceanrios. For example, the SmartUpdate tool that is used for patching WLS. To use the zip dist, you download, unzip and go. It is portable and platform independent. We provide support for automating domain creation upon startup and support the popular platforms for development – not only Windows and Linux, but also OS X syustems.App,ciationsdevelopeed with the WL Zip distributions are fully compatible with standard WL installations, and are therefore fully compatible with deployment to WL production environments.
• #24: Eclipse 3.6 Helios platformSupports new EE6 FeaturesSupports building applications that use CoherenceIncremental descriptor editorIDE for the WLST. WLST is the scripting tool that we include to automate management and administration of WebLogic domains. It is based on Jython. Within OEPE, what we have done is to provide a development IDE for developing WLST scripts. You can define and reuse templates that represent your scripts, There is an MBean explorer that allows you to traverse the WL mbean structureYou can drag and drop beans to simplify the lookup or addressing of those beansWLST console with standard IDE tools for developing and debugging WLST scriptsWLST is a widely used capability, and we are really pleased to offer development support for this in a world-class IDEWe think WL developers will love this new feature.