The WebLogic PlatformA Single, Unified, and Extensible Application Infrastructure

The WebLogic Platform”A Single, Unified, and Extensible Application Infrastructure

In today's very competitive economic climate, it is inconceivable to think that large, global organizations rely on application infrastructures that are composed of multiple layers of incompatible technologies to power their mission-critical enterprise applications. However, this scenario is very common. For example, if your organization

• Develops, deploys, manages , integrates, and secures its enterprise applications using a disparate range of technologies

or

• Faces tremendous complexity, extensive delays, and enormous expense to develop, extend, or integrate legacy, packaged, and custom applications

it unfortunately suffers from an application infrastructure problem, which will undoubtedly prevent your organization from achieving technical agility when required. There are numerous reasons that an organization can have application infrastructure problems, and probably the most common is that the technology areas prevalent in most enterprise solutions to power business solutions, as illustrated in Figure 9.1, are addressed and implemented as disparate and autonomous islands of technologies (Business/Technology silos ).

Figure 9.1. A common scenario of using technology infrastructure in an organization that is not technically agile.

To address this application infrastructure dilemma and the increasing need BEA customers have for a unified , simplified , and extensible application infrastructure platform, as illustrated in Figure 9.2, BEA introduced WebLogic Platform 7 as the first application infrastructure offering represented through a single product”one documentation, installation, configuration, deployment, management, and security framework.

Figure 9.2. The unified, simplified, and extensible requirements satisfied by WebLogic Platform 7.

As illustrated in Figure 9.3, WebLogic Platform 7 is uniquely built around WebLogic Server , which integrates seamlessly with the functions of the following components :

Figure 9.3. The WebLogic Platform 7 technology stack.

• WebLogic Portal , an award-winning portal framework.

• WebLogic Integration , which offers comprehensive integration services.

• WebLogic Workshop , an application development framework for Java, Web services, and XML application development, which is designed so that both Java development experts and corporate application developers can easily create, test, and deploy Web services, regardless of their programming experience.

The Featured Benefits of WebLogic Platform

The benefits of adopting WebLogic Platform as your application infrastructure include the following:

• WebLogic Platform provides a single, unified architecture that reduces the number of products to support, maintain, and integrate, as follows :

  • The unified integration, portal, and application server components included in WebLogic Platform provide a single set of core services, components, and enterprise-class capabilities for application development and integration.

  • WebLogic Platform uses a single installation program to install all its components. This unified installation approach ensures that all software components and examples are placed in the appropriate directories so that the platform works immediately upon installation and without additional configuration steps.

  • The presentation and consumption of Web services is supported through the platform's portal framework (WebLogic Portal).

  • The orchestration of Web services around business processes is supported by the platform's integration framework (WebLogic Integration).

  • The reliable, scalable, and highly available Web service runtime environment is supported by WebLogic Server.

  • The integrated development framework (WebLogic Workshop) provides developers with a means to easily build, deploy, and test Web services.

  • WebLogic Platform uses one security framework for the WebLogic Server, Portal, and Integration products, which unifies security for enterprise applications.

  • WebLogic Platform is supported as one single product offering, which implies that all its technology products are tested for complete interoperability before release.

  • WebLogic Platform provides one application management infrastructure for administering and monitoring portal, integration, and application server components.

  • Because WebLogic Platform is built on WebLogic Server, all WebLogic Platform applications take full advantage of the world-class reliability, availability, and scalability services of WebLogic Server.

  • WebLogic Platform uses a unified Java Messaging Service (JMS) across its technology products.

• WebLogic Platform increases productivity through simplified application development, deployment, and management, as follows:

  • WebLogic Platform provides integrated development tools for portal, integration, and Web services development efforts. For example:

    • EBusiness Control Center (EBCC) simplifies the creation, customization, and administration of portals.

    • Integration Studio provides a visual environment for integration specialists to develop workflows between business processes.

    • WebLogic Workshop provides developers with an intuitive graphical environment for creating Web service applications and a runtime framework for deploying these applications to WebLogic Server. The Workshop framework also provides further infrastructure to make sophisticated Web services architectures easy to implement. Examples are the ability to develop asynchronous, loosely coupled , and course-grained architectures with a few clicks of the mouse”critical requirements for developing enterprise-class Web services.

  • Because WebLogic Platform is built on WebLogic Server, it is fully J2EE compliant; hence, you can leverage the best J2EE enterprise development tools (for example, TogetherSoft's Together Control Center and Borland's JBuilder) to custom-build your J2EE applications.

    Note

    Because Borland just purchased TogetherSoft, look for a Together JBuilder product that unites the best features of each of these products.

    
    

  • The new Domain Configuration Wizard simplifies the generation of new WebLogic domains, reducing any initial setup errors for a WebLogic Platform domain.

  • The WebLogic Platform QuickStart and Product Tour provide developers with an end-to-end working tutorial and features guide on how to develop applications on WebLogic Platform.

  • The WebLogic Builder tool provides a graphical interface for assembling and deploying a J2EE application to WebLogic Platform, including full editing capabilities of the respective deployment descriptors.

  • The Smart Update agent unites all platform component updates into a single update package, reducing the effort and risk of upgrading WebLogic Platform 7 to future versions.

  • WebLogic Platform 7 provides open extensibility to your application infrastructure functionality, thus future-proofing your technology investments, as follows:

    • WebLogic Platform is supported by the world's leading operating systems and databases and supports cross-platform deployments.

    • WebLogic Platform's resources are fully configurable to the architectural standards required for organizations.

    • WebLogic Integration's framework provides standards-based application integration as well as support for B2B and data integration.

    • The WebLogic jCOM product provides bidirectional functional interoperability between WebLogic Platform and Microsoft's Distributed Common Object Model (DCOM) infrastructure.

    • WebLogic Platform provides leading support of Web services standards (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI), integration standards (J2CA, JMS, JDBC), and emerging standards around portal functionality (JSRs 94, 127, 168, 170, and WSRP).

    • WebLogic Platform includes the ability to communicate with enterprisewide management systems using Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), which enables you to integrate the management of WebLogic Platform solutions into an SNMP-compliant management system that gives you a single view of the various software and hardware resources of a complex, distributed system.

    • WebLogic Platform fully supports the Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS), thus providing an open infrastructure for plugging in third-party security solutions.

The following sections describe the BEA technology products that constitute WebLogic Platform”WebLogic Server, Workshop, WebLogic Portal, and WebLogic Integration.