WebLogic Server 7 Editions

WebLogic Server, which is the nucleus of the BEA WebLogic Platform, is a very scalable, performance-proven and battle- tested J2EE 1.3 “compliant application server. To scale to your business needs and also address the features of the J2EE specification you need to leverage, BEA provides three editions of WebLogic Server ”WebLogic Express, WebLogic Server Advantage, and the WebLogic Server Premium Edition.

Because each WebLogic Server edition is targeted at supporting different types of J2EE applications, selecting which WebLogic Server edition is best aligned with your needs should be a prerequisite to any WebLogic Server evaluation/test-drive or final purchase.

Deciding which WebLogic Server edition you need requires a due diligence exercise on your part, which should begin with and be driven by understanding your business solution requirements and then transforming them into technical/integration design and operational requirements. For example

• Business solution requirements ” Does your solution purely involve serving dynamic content and data from a repository to Web and wireless applications?

• Technical design ” Which J2EE components does your solution really need to leverage ”Servlets, JavaServer Pages, or EJBs?

• Integration requirements ” Does your solution require bi-directional interoperability with other information systems within your enterprise?

• Operational requirements ” How reliable, highly available, or scalable does your solution need to be?

Because there is a high degree of probability for business requirements and technical design to evolve throughout a project lifecycle, you will have to ensure your deployment platform (WebLogic Server edition) can accommodate that change. This can be validated through reviewing the J2EE application support each WebLogic Server edition provides, which is discussed in the following sections.

The WebLogic Express

BEA WebLogic Express is primarily a platform suited for supporting Web and wireless applications that only require dynamic content presentation with database access support.

The core features of the WebLogic Express include the following:

• A built-in high performance Web server to manage HTTP(S) connections.

• Third-party Web server interoperability, which is supported through WebLogic plug-ins (Apache, iPlanet, and Microsoft IIS).

  Note

  The WebLogic plug-ins provide a means to leverage existing investments in Web server technologies. For example, if you have an iPlanet Web server that you use to serve static content, the WebLogic plug-ins can be used to redirect or even load balance those incoming HTTP/HTTPS requests bound for the WebLogic Server, thus enabling you to preserve your existing Web infrastructure.

  
  

• A fully certified J2EE 1.3 application runtime environment for JavaServer Pages and Servlets, also known as the Web Container .

• Support for all leading operating systems and databases.

• A Web-based extensible management console.

• A new security model where you can easily plug in third-party security solutions.

To implement a scalable and load-balanced deployment architecture, WebLogic Express can alternatively be utilized to front-end the presentation logic for a WebLogic Platform deployment model.

The WebLogic Server Advantage Edition

The Advantage Edition is primarily positioned for business solutions that require a standalone, fully J2EE-compliant application server. In addition to the features present in the WebLogic Express edition of WebLogic Server, the Advantage Edition also includes support for EJBs, enterprise messaging via a unified Java Messaging Service (JMS) , distributed transaction management using the two-phase commit transaction protocol, multi-channel client support, and Web Services.

The WebLogic Server Premium Edition

The flagship of the WebLogic editions is the WebLogic Server Premium Edition, which is the most powerful and functional J2EE application server on the market. This infrastructure platform is designed to service enterprise mission-critical, large scale, distributed applications that demand the highest levels of availability. The Premium Edition also provides sophisticated clustering, caching, enterprise messaging, and distributed transaction management, which can optimally scale to any high-volume real-time transaction processing and large-scale messaging demands.

The core features of the Premium Edition offer all the features found in the Advantage Edition, plus the following:

• Clustering across multiple homogeneous or heterogeneous hardware servers or large multi-CPU servers

• Full administration of a distributed WebLogic cluster

• Load-balancing and failover capabilities on the Web tier

• Component load-balancing and failover

• Component, JavaServer Page results and page caching

• High throughput and highly available messaging (JMS)

• Distributed transaction management ”Two-phase commit (2PC)