Overview of WebLogic Server

WebLogic is a Java Application Server, a server-side Java program that provides a number of enterprise services for the benefit of the various applications and components running on the server. These services include the HTTP service, session handling, distributed naming and lookup, database access, persistence, transaction management, caching, concurrency, messaging, security, and much more. Server-side applications can use these services to implement their application logic, while external clients can either use the published services or directly interact with the applications. Once installed, WebLogic provides various command-line scripts for starting up the server. In fact, many of the WebLogic tools are Java programs that run within a console or as a GUI-based Java application. For this reason, stable releases of WebLogic Server are available on a wide range of platforms, including Windows 2000 Server/Professional, Windows XP, Solaris OS, Red Hat Linux, Tru64, HP-UX, IBM AIX, and other Unix variants.

WebLogic is designed to operate in a distributed environment. This means that you can easily set up an environment where multiple WebLogic instances are running on separate machines within the network, each configured with its own set of applications and services. Alternatively, you may need to design a "cluster" of WebLogic instances distributed across multiple machines over the network, each configured with the same set of applications and services. If you're blessed with powerful, multi-CPU machines, you even may opt to host multiple servers on a single machine. Moreover, WebLogic provides tools that enable you to set up these different scenarios and effectively manage the applications and other resources spread across all the servers. The ease and flexibility with which you can adapt your WebLogic configuration to suit your performance and scalability needs make WebLogic Server a very attractive platform for building real-world enterprise applications.

WebLogic provides a rich set of client options it can interact with web clients that use HTTP, Java clients that use RMI-IIOP, JAX-RPC clients for web services over SOAP, and mobile devices that use WAP. It also provides comprehensive support for enterprise Java technologies. In fact, WebLogic is a fully certified J2EE application server. It means that you don't need to live under any illusions about the capabilities of WebLogic Server. At the very least, WebLogic will continue to support the full J2EE technology stack and adhere to all of the constraints that it imposes on interoperability. But WebLogic offers more and implements enterprise services that go beyond the J2EE standard, anticipating future trends in the enterprise Java application server market.

Effectively managing the applications and services deployed across the various servers on separate machines can prove to be a formidable challenge. WebLogic rises to the occasion by providing a rich, robust management infrastructure for administering the applications, resources, and other services running on separate WebLogic instances. As we shall see, WebLogic relies on the notion of a "domain" to sketch out a region of servers, WebLogic services, network and application resources, and security policies. All resources that lie within the scope of the domain are under the central control of the Administration Server. All domain administration tasks are routed via the Administration Server, which is responsible for the entire domain configuration. The domain can rely on Node Managersone on each machine that is responsible for the health of all servers running on it. In addition, the domain may include a number of clusters, where each cluster is composed of multiple servers, possibly running on different physical machines.

Security is another important consideration when planning the system architecture for an enterprise application. WebLogic is capable of handling security issues at various levels of your setup at the JVM level through JVM-specific policies, at the connection level through filtering and the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), at the application level through application-specific policy constraints, and at the server level through security providers that let you transparently change various aspects of WebLogic's default security implementation. Restricted access to particular services (read ports), firewalls and demilitarized zones (DMZs), and database access privileges further reinforces the security within your application setup and makes it less vulnerable to malicious attacks and unauthorized access.

1.1.1 The WebLogic Platform

Before we take a closer look at WebLogic's features, let's examine how WebLogic fits in the larger scheme of things. As we mentioned earlier, WebLogic Server forms the core of the WebLogic Platform. Other WebLogic technologies, including the Portal, Integration, and Workshop, are built on top of WebLogic Server. Figure 1-1 depicts the conceptual layout of the technologies that make up the WebLogic Platform.

Figure 1-1. The WebLogic Platform

Clearly, WebLogic provides a range of enterprise technologies that cater to different business problems and solution paradigms:

WebLogic JRockit

JRockit is BEA's high-performance JVM optimized for server-side performance and scalability.

WebLogic Workshop

Workshop is a visual development environment that allows you to build enterprise-class applications on WebLogic Server.

WebLogic Portal

WebLogic Portal is an enterprise portal platform that allows you to develop and manage custom portals that support various business processes such as commerce, content management, and interaction management.

WebLogic Integration

WebLogic Integration provides a unified platform for developing, deploying, and integrating enterprise applications and business processes in a collaborative framework. It provides business process modeling tools, data transformation tools, a message broker, and integration adapters for a wide range of applications and formats.

This book focuses on WebLogic Server, which serves as the foundation for higher-level WebLogic technologies. A good understanding of WebLogic Server will help you appreciate how other WebLogic technologies operate. The next two sections survey the extent of WebLogic's support for the J2EE standard, as well as how WebLogic augments these features in interesting and useful ways. We also examine the enterprise features WebLogic offers on top of the existing set of J2EE features the features that distinguish WebLogic from the rest of the crowd.

1.1.2 WebLogic as a J2EE Product

The Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (or the J2EE Platform) defines the specifications for an open environment that enables you to build scalable, robust, and secure enterprise Java applications. Any J2EE-compliant application server must provide a number of enterprise services that can then be made available to the applications and components hosted on the server. These services include transaction management, persistence, security, naming and directory services, and more.

In addition, the specification outlines the behavior of various components that reside within an application, such as servlets and EJBs. It lays down the typical life cycle of these server-side components, a standard mechanism for packaging these components, and guidelines for maintaining portability across other compliant application servers. Central to the J2EE specification is the notion of the container-component model. Server-side components run within the context of a container, an abstract entity within the application server that manages the lifetime of the component and provides access to a host of available services. Like a cocoon, a container nurtures and protects the various components deployed to the server. Servlets and JSP pages typically run within a web container, while the EJBs run within an EJB container.

Versions 8.1 and 7.0 of WebLogic Server embrace the J2EE 1.3 specification. Because the J2EE 1.3 specification is backward-compatible with J2EE 1.2, you can run J2EE 1.2-compliant applications on WebLogic Server 8.1 and 7.0 as well. Remember, the J2EE standard defines only the minimum set of enterprise services that any compliant application server must implement. WebLogic also offers a whole lot more. We'll look at these additional exciting enterprise features of WebLogic Server in the following section. Let's first inspect the standard J2EE features that are part of WebLogic Server.

1.1.2.1 Servlets, JSPs, and the web container

WebLogic Server is equipped with a full-featured servlet engine that complies with the Servlet 2.3 and JSP 1.2 specifications. This means that you can build web applications that contain HTTP servlets and JSP pages for generating dynamic responses to web requests. You also may configure multiple filters that process a web request before it has been handled or after the web response has been generated. You can incorporate custom JSP tags into your JSP pages, where each tag encapsulates a well-defined, reusable piece of functionality. Clearly, these components have access to other J2EE services as well, such as JNDI lookups, JDBC API calls, distributed transactions, remote EJBs, and more. Of course, you can deploy multiple web applications to WebLogic Server, and utilize third-party tag libraries in your existing web applications.

WebLogic offers several enhancements to the web container. During development mode, WebLogic supports automatic reloading of servlets and JSPs. It provides different ways of caching the response to web requests, and how and when the cached responses ought to be refreshed. You may choose to configure WebLogic's cache filter for specific web requests, or rely on WebLogic's custom JSP cache tags to cache specific portions of the JSP page. WebLogic also provides advanced session-handling features with support for failover, whereby a user's session data can be replicated to another WebLogic instance or persisted to a file or a database. This mechanism guarantees high availability for web applications deployed to a cluster. WebLogic also provides an "EJB-to-JSP" tool that lets you automatically generate a set of JSP tags from EJBs that you've already developed.

So, WebLogic has an established framework for handling dynamic HTTP requests. But WebLogic is also a robust, mature HTTP server, which means that you can use WebLogic to serve requests for the static content in your web applications, such as HTML pages, images, text files, and more. You even can configure virtual hosts, HTTP tunneling, and SSL for WebLogic's HTTP server. You also can set up the HTTP server to act as a proxy server so that it proxies dynamic requests for servlets and JSPs to another WebLogic instance. The same behavior can be achieved using commercial web servers. WebLogic provides custom proxy plug-ins for popular web servers such as Apache, Microsoft's Internet Information Service (IIS), and Netscape's Enterprise Server (NES). These plug-ins ensure that only specific requests for dynamic content are forwarded to a WebLogic instance. In this way, you can continue to use your high-performance web servers, while your backend WebLogic instance(s) are responsible for handling all the dynamic web requests.

1.1.2.2 JDBC and distributed transactions

Most Java applications use the JDBC API to interact with backend relational databases. Because WebLogic supports the JDBC 2.0 specification, you can configure a ready pool of database connections on WebLogic using any JDBC 2.0-compliant driver. The connection pool provides access to the backend DBMS you would be hard-pressed to find a DBMS for which a JDBC driver isn't shipped. Server-side applications and external clients then can transparently access the connection pool using configured data sources. WebLogic also supports distributed transaction-aware (XA-aware) data sources, in which case connections obtained from the data source can participate in distributed transactions. If the data source is attached to a pool of non XA-aware connections, WebLogic can still emulate the two-phase commit protocol, and ensure that the data source can participate in distributed transactions, albeit with some limitations.

Besides making JDBC connection pools accessible to both server-side applications and external clients, WebLogic allows you to set up a multipool where a number of connection pools can collaborate to achieve load balancing or high availability for JDBC connection requests, even in a single-server environment. You can then transparently access the multipool through each connection pool's configured data sources. Furthermore, WebLogic can optimize JDBC access by supplying a statement cache with every connection pool. WebLogic can then cache a number of prepared statements (or callable statements) used by clients of the connection pool. Statement caching can offer a significant performance boost if the most-often used statements fill the cache. You also can configure application-scoped JDBC resources. As these are packaged with the application, they make it easy to duplicate the configuration on different application server instances.

In addition, WebLogic's multi-tier drivers provide clients with direct access to server-side connection pools, automatic enrollment in distributed transactions, and clustered access to connection pools through their data sources. Multi-tier drivers enable connection requests to a data source that is targeted to a cluster of WebLogic instances to fail over to another connection pool if one of the servers fails.

The Java Transaction API (JTA) provides the higher-level client access to distributed transactions. Clients need to explicitly initiate distributed transactions when multiple EJBs are needed to fulfill a client request or when the default container-managed transactions are inadequate to implement the business logic. WebLogic extends the capabilities of the JTA by enabling clients to access the current transaction associated with the thread or to obtain a reference to the transaction manager. Moreover, WebLogic allows you to monitor, log, and recover transactions through its transaction recovery service.

1.1.2.3 JNDI and RMI

Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI) provides the standard way for interacting with naming and directory services. J2EE applications use the JNDI API to access various resources that have been configured for the server, including data sources, user transactions, Remote Method Invocation (RMI) objects, EJB home objects, mail sessions, JMS connection factories, JMS topics/queues, and much more. WebLogic's JNDI framework extends over an entire cluster, across all its available members. The cluster-wide JNDI tree manages the JNDI bindings for all clusterable objects. These bindings are automatically replicated across all WebLogic instances in the cluster. Each server maintains a local copy of the global JNDI tree holding replicas of all JNDI bindings in the global JNDI tree. In addition, the local JNDI tree holds bindings for any server-specific resources that must be made available only to the particular WebLogic instance.

The RMI specification initiated the wave of distributed Java computing. It established an intuitive framework for enabling Java method invocations across JVMs. WebLogic's RMI is a highly optimized implementation, incorporating high-performance serialization logic and avoiding the overhead of marshalling and unmarshalling when both the client and the server-side RMI objects run within the same VM. WebLogic's RMI usually relies on its native transport protocol, called the T3 protocol. However, WebLogic also supports RMI clients that need to talk over Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP), a protocol that allows interoperability with CORBA objects.

Moreover, WebLogic's RMI Registry is a thin veneer over its JNDI service. In fact, RMI objects can be published directly over WebLogic's JNDI tree. WebLogic's JNDI service and clusterable RMI stubs collaborate to provide failover and load-balancing facilities to clients. WebLogic lets you compile and bind RMI objects into this clustered environment. Any client that looks up the RMI object from the JNDI tree obtains a cluster-aware stub a stub that is aware of all its replicas on all available servers in the cluster. Thus, WebLogic's implementation of JNDI and RMI provides a transparent and elegant way for supporting failover and load balancing of RMI objects in a clustered environment.

1.1.2.4 EJBs

EJBs are reusable server-side Java components that usually encapsulate the business logic of an enterprise application. EJBs typically interact with backend databases and almost always participate in distributed transactions. WebLogic fully supports all the different EJB component types defined in the EJB 2.0 specification: session beans, message-driven beans, and entity beans.

J2EE applications can use these EJB types to implement their business logic. Even though WebLogic Server supports EJBs that are compliant with the 1.1 standard, most developers find it inadequate for their needs, and eventually need to deal with business requirements where it is just as convenient to upgrade to the EJB 2.0 standard.

Typically, your EJB components form the "object tier" of an enterprise application that services requests from other servlets and JSP pages, or even external clients. You can even choose to deploy only your EJB components separately to a cluster of WebLogic instances. This division of labor between WebLogic instances one set of servers that handles the web/presentation aspects of the enterprise application, and another set of servers that manages the EJB components lets you benefit from WebLogic's load-balancing and failover features. The flexibility of options that are available to you when designing a WebLogic-based architecture also adds to its appeal.

WebLogic's EJB container provides many additional enhancements. WebLogic supports a free pool of EJB instances for stateless session beans, message-driven beans, and entity beans. It also provides an in-memory cache of EJB instances for stateful session beans and entity beans. The WebLogic-specific deployment descriptors allow you to adjust the size of the free pool and the EJB cache. A properly configured free pool and EJB cache can significantly improve the performance of your EJBs. Most importantly, EJBs can operate easily in a clustered environment. Client requests to the EJB home object or method calls on an EJB object can be load-balanced across all available servers in a cluster. Failover on method calls also can be achieved under certain conditions. In addition, WebLogic supports failover for stateful session EJBs that have been deployed to a cluster. Just like HTTP sessions, WebLogic achieves this behavior by replicating the state of the session EJB onto another server in the cluster.

WebLogic dedicates a whole array of optimizations to entity beans. For instance, WebLogic's EJB container supports value-change checks to ensure that only those persistent fields that have been modified are written to the database. This can improve the performance of your EJBs if their persistent fields map to long-valued columns (large chars, varchars, blobs, clobs, etc.). It also supports read-only entity beans where the in-memory state of the EJB can be refreshed at regular intervals. In this way, WebLogic's EJB container can avoid persisting the EJB's state to the underlying database. In addition, WebLogic incorporates a multicast invalidation framework, whereby an EJB update can invalidate all cached EJB instances on other servers. This mechanism avoids unnecessary loading of EJB data. You even can configure WebLogic's EJB container so that all updates made during a transaction are deferred until transaction commit.

WebLogic's CMP engine is equipped with a rich set of features. Its RDBMS persistence framework allows you to map an entity bean's container-managed fields to columns spread across multiple tables. You can specify precisely when the in-memory state of the entity EJB is written to the database. In addition, WebLogic supports an "optimistic concurrency" strategy for entity EJBs, which ensures that no locks are held by WebLogic or the database. Instead, the EJB container performs a smart update by checking that the data hasn't been modified since the start of the transaction. In this way, optimistic concurrency allows you to dramatically improve the concurrency of your entity EJBs. Other features, such as batching and fetch groups, provide you with extreme control over when and how the database is accessed.

WebLogic also implements a superset of the standard EJB QL. It allows you to define EJB queries that provide ordering and aggregation, and that remove duplicates from matching EJB instances. These extensions are identical to their SQL counterparts: ORDER BY, GROUP BY, and SELECT DISTINCT.

1.1.2.5 JMS

Java Messaging Service (JMS) equips you with a powerful programming model based on asynchronous, decoupled communication. It allows you to build J2EE applications on top of existing message-oriented middleware. WebLogic's JMS implementation is compliant with the 1.02b release of the JMS standard, and is chock-full of practical enhancements. For instance, WebLogic enables producers and consumers to exchange XML-formatted messages. The message filters can be specified using XPath expressions that can then filter out any message whose body doesn't match the given XPath query.

For better scalability, WebLogic provides fine control of message delivery and handling. For instance, you can delay the delivery of messages or configure specific time periods during which the messages are delivered. WebLogic's support for message paging gives you additional control over resource usage by moving messages out of main memory under predefined conditions. It also provides flow control mechanisms that let you throttle the production of messages during peak message load conditions. All these features ensure WebLogic's JMS server cannot degrade the performance of other WebLogic services.

Depending on your message delivery needs, WebLogic lets you choose from a range of acknowledgment modes, from guaranteed to unacknowledged message delivery. If no acknowledgment is required, WebLogic relies on multicast broadcasts to deliver your messages. WebLogic's JMS service is integrated with its clustering services. It lets you transparently masquerade multiple JMS destinations that reside on separate servers behind a virtual destination name. This feature yields seamless failover and load balancing when delivering messages to the "distributed" JMS destination. The messaging bridge tops off all these features by allowing you to integrate WebLogic JMS with other JMS providers.

1.1.2.6 JCA

Java Connector Architecture (JCA) provides a standard framework for connecting J2EE application servers to enterprise information systems. Server-side applications and external clients can use the configured resource adapter to interact with the enterprise information system (EIS). Just like JDBC drivers, WebLogic lets you set up a pool of connections to the underlying EIS. These connections may participate in distributed transactions, along with other transaction-aware resources. WebLogic also can reliably detect connection leaks by relying on the garbage collector and an idle timer setting. This ensures that the pool doesn't run out of available connections, in case clients of the resource adapter aren't properly releasing their connections. You'll also find that WebLogic's security infrastructure extends to resource adapters.

1.1.3 Additional Enterprise Features of WebLogic

We've just looked at some of the standard features that are compulsory for any J2EE-compliant application server, and how WebLogic's implementation enhances these features. Beyond this, WebLogic provides a slew of additional functionality that enhances your experience of developing and managing applications in a WebLogic environment. You'll find that these enterprise features of WebLogic Server enable you to build more secure, manageable, and scalable solutions.

1.1.3.1 WebLogic's security framework

WebLogic provides a comprehensive suite of security features with which you can protect your domain resources. For instance, WebLogic augments the security of your network by letting you set up connection filters that can deny access to connections according to custom criteria. In addition, WebLogic supports the use of SSL, which can be configured to use mutual authentication. Plus, you can programmatically rely on SSL to communicate with other systems. At the server level, WebLogic lets you set up fine-grained control over access to resources such as JDBC connection pools, EJBs, web services, and specific branches of the JNDI hierarchy.

WebLogic's security infrastructure is based on a modular, extensible set of security service provider interfaces (SSPIs). A domain can use either the default implementation of the security providers, or custom security providers that extend the default providers according to your needs. For instance, WebLogic's authentication framework allows you to store all authentication information to a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) or to a JDBC-based repository. In fact, WebLogic comes with its own embedded LDAP server. The traditional J2EE role-based security also relies on a role-mapping provider. WebLogic lets you transparently plug in a custom role-mapping provider and thereby benefit from an alternative implementation.

1.1.3.2 WebLogic in a clustered environment

You can easily set up a cluster of WebLogic instances, all working together to provide support for load balancing and failover. Your applications and related resources can be deployed homogenously across all the servers in the cluster. External clients can interact with any member of the cluster, and fall back on another server in case of a failure. WebLogic's support for clustering provides an intuitive way for enhancing the scalability of your architecture. New servers can transparently join the cluster and grab their share of the overall load on the cluster. Your applications continue to be highly available because other servers can take over in case a peer server fails.

Clusters are especially relevant when designing a multi-tier architecture for an enterprise application. Client requests for a web application can be distributed across a bank of WebLogic instances. EJB method calls from a servlet or JSP page can again be distributed across a cluster of WebLogic instances that host all the EJB components. This division of labor is vital if you have differing performance constraints for your web applications and your EJBs, and therefore need to ensure your application tiers can scale independently.

Clearly, there's little point in considering these architectures if WebLogic services cannot adapt to a clustered environment. Fortunately, most J2EE services can benefit from WebLogic clusters. This includes load-balancing and failover support for HTTP requests, method calls to EJB home objects and EJB objects, JDBC connection requests, JMS distributed destinations, and much more. Stateful services also can operate in a clustered environment. For instance, WebLogic supports in-memory replication of HTTP sessions and stateful session EJBs. As discussed earlier, the interplay between the cluster-wide JNDI tree and clusterable RMI stubs is crucial to the support for load balancing and failover. For singleton services such as JMS, WebLogic allows you to migrate the service to another peer server in the cluster, thereby ensuring high availability.

1.1.3.3 XML support

XML has become all-important in the J2EE world, and WebLogic provides extensive support for these technologies. First, WebLogic is bundled with Apache's Xerces XML parsers and Xalan XSLT implementations. WebLogic also includes an optimized nonvalidating SAX parser, ideal for small to medium-size documents such as those that occur in the world of web services. All of these parsers can be used through the standard JAXP interface, which provides better control over the XML parser that is used under a given situation. WebLogic also lets you configure particular XML parsers on a per-server and per-application basis.

On top of all this, WebLogic includes an XML Streaming API, which allows you to parse XML documents using a pull-based approach. Under the right conditions, pull-based parsing can be more optimal than event-driven SAX parsing or the DOM-based approach. WebLogic 8.1 also provides an XML XPath API, which can integrate with the Streaming API.

1.1.3.4 Web services

A web service is a distributed, interoperable, web-based interface that transparently wraps some well-defined piece of functionality. Clients can locate the desired web service from a registry and then invoke the web service. The actual implementation behind the web service can manifest itself in various ways. For instance, WebLogic makes it very easy for you to create web services that wrap ordinary Java objects, stateless session EJBs, and JMS destinations.

Support for web services is going to be an essential requirement in the next release of the J2EE specification. WebLogic has preemptively implemented a rich set of facilities that enable you to easily create and deploy industry-strength web services. Its GUI-based tool, WebLogic Workshop, is dedicated to building and deploying web services on WebLogic Server. WebLogic relies on the standard SOAP 1.1 protocol with attachments message format for delivering data during web service invocations. Descriptions of web services deployed to WebLogic Server adhere to the WSDL 1.1 standard. Moreover, WebLogic lets you automatically generate these descriptions, along with HTML pages that allow you to test your web services. You can publish the web services on WebLogic through the UDDI service that runs within WebLogic. Clients can locate desired web services by questioning the UDDI 2.0 registry.

WebLogic 8.1 also supports a reliable SOAP message transport, which allows clients to use guaranteed SOAP message delivery. In addition to this, you can invoke web service operations asynchronously. With this style of invocation, you can either periodically poll for a result, or create a listener that will receive a notification when the operation's result comes in. WebLogic 8.1 can secure SOAP message exchanges through token-based identification, digital signatures, and data encryption. Finally, WebLogic supports the JAX-RPC standard for invoking web services running on either WebLogic Server or any other compatible platform. The combination of these features makes WebLogic's web services implementation quite formidable.

1.1.3.5 Management features

The Java Management Extensions (JMX) specification defines the architecture, services, and Java APIs for the distributed management of resources. WebLogic's built-in MBean server provides access to a host of JMX MBeans that enable you to programmatically fiddle around with the static and runtime configuration settings of various resources of a WebLogic domain. You can use these MBeans to build your own management and configuration tools, or simply use them to monitor the performance of the different WebLogic services.

The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is used to monitor many different types of managed resources, from hardware to software products. JMX services also serve as inputs for WebLogic's SNMP agent. WebLogic's SNMP agent allows you to seamlessly integrate a WebLogic domain within a larger network management framework of your enterprise. In this way, your WebLogic domain can be treated just like any other network resource. Both JMX and SNMP give you exceptional control over the overall management of a WebLogic domain.

Both of WebLogic's JMX and SNMP systems can interact with the distributed logging infrastructure. This allows you to centrally manage all logging activity and create advanced components that listen and react to error situations.

1.1.4 WebLogic Server Tools

As much as WebLogic's enterprise features may entrance you, you still need the right set of tools to assemble and deploy your applications, manage your WebLogic environment, and monitor the runtime state of all deployed services, applications, and resources. Fortunately, WebLogic takes care of all these needs, and more.

1.1.4.1 System administration console

The Administration Console is a comprehensive, browser-based GUI application for configuring, managing, and monitoring all of the resources in a WebLogic domain. Some of its capabilities include managing the domain configuration, starting and stopping servers, monitoring the performance of the server and application components, viewing server logs, initiating deployment tasks, and editing deployment descriptors.

1.1.4.2 Deployment and development tools

With Java applications, deployment has never been easy. In a clustered environment, it can be even trickier. The Administration Console lets you deploy, redeploy, and undeploy J2EE applications and modules to specific server instances and to all members of a cluster. WebLogic's Deployer utility, weblogic.Deployer, is a command-line tool for managing the deployment of J2EE applications.

EJBGen is another useful tool that can generate the EJB deployment descriptors, and the home and remote interfaces from the source of the EJB's bean class annotated with predefined JavaDoc tags. WebLogic's Marathon utility (DDInit) can examine the contents of a staging folder and generate the standard J2EE and WebLogic-specific deployment descriptors for both web applications and EJB modules. WebLogic also supplies a Client Deployer tool that can extract the client-side JAR from an EAR file to create a deployable JAR file.

WebLogic also provides a number of utility Ant tasks that ease the build and deployment process. For instance, the appc task lets you generate the container classes for your EJBs, as well as generate an EJB JAR that can be deployed to WebLogic Server. It can also be used to precompile your JSP pages. The wsdl2service task takes a WSDL file as input and generates the web-services.xml deployment descriptor, and a raw Java source file that can be used as a starting point for implementing the web service. You'll learn about other Ant tasks provided by WebLogic as you read the rest of the book!

1.1.4.3 WebLogic Builder

Assembling a J2EE application, creating and editing its deployment descriptors, and later deploying it to WebLogic Server is not a trivial task. WebLogic Builder fulfills these requirements. It is a graphical tool used for assembling a J2EE application, creating and editing its deployment descriptors, and deploying it to a WebLogic instance.

1.1.5 WebLogic Workshop

WebLogic Workshop is a tool that deserves special mention and a book of its own. WebLogic Server comes with an IDE, WebLogic Workshop, which can be used to compose web services and other components using a very high level of abstraction.

The IDE lets you create and compose enterprise applications in a graphical way simply drag the components that you want to use onto the same screen and wire them together. All and all, it provides a very quick route to application creation. Here are some of the features of WebLogic Workshop:

• It provides a visual and textual coding environment.
• The code generated by Workshop is annotated with JavaDoc tags indicating behavior. For example, Workshop can be used to create EJBs. These EJBs are annotated using the tags supported by EJBGen, which is described in Chapter 10.
• Workshop provides a framework that abstracts the complexities of the J2EE. Instead of writing J2EE infrastructure code, most of the Java you need to write is simply business logic and a little wiring.
• Workshop offers a component model in the form of Java controls. Controls can be created for almost all J2EE concepts, such as web services, EJBs, JMS destinations, web applications, and databases. You can write your own controls and embed controls within others.
• Because of the Java Control model adopted by Workshop, you can reuse controls from previous projects, download controls from BEA, and even buy controls to supplement the controls distributed with Workshop.
• Workshop integrates tightly with WebLogic Server during development. Deployment, testing, and debugging are made very easy.
• Workshop also can be used to easily construct web applications based on Apache's Struts framework. Visual designers are provided, as well as data-binding tag libraries. Navigation in the web application is controlled by a combination of page flows and controller logic.

It is beyond the scope of this book to discuss how to use WebLogic Workshop in depth. It is a powerful, comprehensive tool that provides a different route to creating applications than that described in the rest of this book. However, Chapter 19 provides a detailed, low-level look at the web services framework supported by WebLogic. Creating web services using this framework requires coding, descriptor files, and Ant build files. On the other hand, you can create web services in Workshop with a few drags of the mouse. Both techniques have their place.