WebLogic: The Definitive Guide

Preface

WebLogic™ Server is one of the leading J2EE-compliant application servers, produced by BEA Systems. It implements the full range of J2EE technologies, and provides many more additional features such as advanced management, clustering, and web services. It forms the core of the WebLogic Platform, and provides a stable framework for building scalable, highly available, and secure applications. You can gauge the extent of its acceptance by exploring the list of customers who have embraced WebLogic Server from all segments of the industry. A number of partners also are collaborating with BEA to build a diverse range of products that integrate with WebLogic Server and the WebLogic Platform. This information on customers and partners involved with WebLogic is available on BEA’s web site, http://www.bea.com/. Clearly, WebLogic Server has established a strong presence in the market.

BEA is serious about WebLogic Server. It is one of the influential members on the various committees that decide on the future direction of the J2EE revolution. It has invested much financial and intellectual capital toward making WebLogic Server the leading Java© application server in the industry. Its dev2dev web site and newsgroups bring together developers, architects, and experts from different domains, all collaborating to make WebLogic Server as popular as it is. Over the years, two factors have determined the growth of WebLogic Server. First, WebLogic has consistently maintained compliance with the J2EE standards. Second, BEA has always been committed to ensuring that WebLogic meets and exceeds the needs of its customers, and provides a feature set that delivers a viable platform for building enterprise solutions. The combination of both of these factors has contributed to the widespread popularity of WebLogic Server.

WebLogic continues to maintain its edge by offering robust implementation of current and upcoming J2EE technologies. It also offers a lot more, extending the base platform with features that let you build real enterprise solutions with cutting-edge technologies. A quick preview of some of its features will convince you that WebLogic is a force to contend with.

• Support for a wide range of platforms, including Windows 2000, XP, and 2003, Solaris, Red Hat and SuSE Linux, HP Tru64, HP-UX, IBM AIX, and other Unix flavors.

• A rich set of client options: HTTP clients, Java clients over RMI/IIOP and the native T3 protocol, and web service clients that support JAX-RPC or SOAP.

• A robust implementation of standard J2EE APIs, and support for the standard J2EE components such as servlets, JSP pages and custom tags, EJB and RMI objects, JMS producers and consumers, J2EE connectors, and more.

• An innovative strategy for deploying J2EE applications across multiple servers.

• The ability to interoperate with industry-strength HTTP servers, LDAP servers, relational DBMS products, messaging software, enterprise information systems, load balancers, firewalls, and more.

• An easy, flexible way to configure the different J2EE containers, and the ability to benefit from practical extensions and optimizations.

• Designed to operate in a distributed environment with extensive support for failover and load balancing through clustering.

• An intuitive framework for organizing the different WebLogic resources in a domain, with an emphasis on performance and scalability.

• A stable, production-ready JMS server that supports distributed JMS destinations, configurable delivery options, extended acknowledgment modes, and much more.

• A comprehensive suite of security features that help protect the various applications and resources deployed in your WebLogic environment.

• Rich support for XML features, including a streaming and XPath API.

• A distributed management infrastructure that can be configured dynamically through JMX, and integrated into a larger SNMP framework.

• A distributed logging framework and support for i18n and l10n.

• A rich implementation of web services for building standards-compliant web services over existing J2EE components, with features such as SOAP security and reliable SOAP messaging.

• An integral component of the WebLogic Platform, over which other technologies such as WebLogic Integration and WebLogic Portal are built.

Finally, WebLogic Server also comes bundled with an IDE, WebLogic Workshop. This IDE provides a fast route to implementing J2EE and web service components, featuring automatic code generation and graphical component composition.

With these kinds of ingredients, we believe WebLogic Server has realized the perfect recipe to deal with other competing J2EE application servers. As you read on, we’re certain you, too, will be convinced.