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An Oracle White PaperJune 2009

Oracle WebLogic Suite 11 g TechnicalWhite Paper


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Oracle White PaperWebLogic Suite 11g Technical White Paper

Introduction........................................................................................ 1

Packaging.......................................................................................... 3

WebLogic Server .............................................................................. 3

Enterprise Grid Messaging.............................................................3

ActiveCache with Coherence ......................................................... 4

Oracle TopLink .............................................................................. 7

Java EE Standards Support........................................................... 7

Web Services.................................................................................9

Raw Performance ........................................................................ 10

High Availability ............................................................................... 11WebLogic Server Clustering ........................................................ 12

Server and Service Migration....................................................... 12

Side-by-Side Deployment ............................................................ 14

Rolling Upgrade........................................................................... 14

Full Lifecycle Development Support................................................. 14

Lightweight Application Server ..................................................... 14

Development Agility ..................................................................... 15

FastSwap for Rapid Development and Testing Cycles................. 15

WebLogic Server Ant Tasks......................................................... 16

Automation of Development and Test Environments....................16

Application Classloading .............................................................. 16

Development Tooling................................................................... 17

Management and Operations...........................................................17

Lowest Cost of Operations........................................................... 17

Real Operations Insight................................................................18

Real Operations Automation........................................................ 19

Proven to Outperform .................................................................. 24


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Best for Oracle................................................................................. 26

Summary ......................................................................................... 26


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IntroductionOracle WebLogic Suite 11 g is a significant new release of the core application gridinfrastructure foundation underpinning Oracle Fusion Middleware. It has been designed

to provide a standards-based, mission-critical platform for organizations that deploy

application grid and service-oriented architectures.

Three key business goals have shaped the WebLogic Suite offering:

1. Businesses must align priorities to survive the global economic downturn. There

is increased pressure to increase profitability through in cost reduction initiatives,

without sacrificing the parallel desire to improve service levels to ensurecustomer satisfaction. New applications are being developed and deployed to

meet new needs and to be better able to compete.

2. Businesses must respond to the increasing burdens on their IT infrastructures.

Newer application types such as service-oriented architecture (SOA), Web-

oriented architecture (WOA), software as a service (SaaS), rich internet

application (RIA) and mobile applications are placing new demands on the

infrastructure to deliver better levels of performance, scale, and availability than

ever before. Businesses are re-addressing business continuity requirements and

disaster recovery scenarios to ensure long-term viability.

3. Business IT organizations must efficiently accelerate the time to deployment for

all applications to meet these new cost reduction and infrastructure demands.

WebLogic Suite 11g delivers features and functionality that focus on all three of these key

business goals:

Reduce operational costs

Improve performance

Best for Oracle


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Specifically, WebLogic Suite introduces a number of new features:

GridLink for RAC: Advanced facilities in the WebLogic Server data source layer thatintegrates with Oracle Real Application Clusters for a complete active-active high

availability deployment of applications.

Enterprise Grid Messaging: Provides essential features for advanced messaging

applications including distributed destinations, unit of order and unit of work. Provides

an integrated messaging infrastructure for existing Advanced Queuing (AQ) and middle

tier JMS customers. AQ customers continue to benefit from RAC's scalable high

availability architecture.

ActiveCache: Brings relief to data bound applications by providing high performance

access to frequently used data. Specifically, ActiveCache in WebLogic Server11g

provides support for HTTP Session Management and storage of TopLink JPA entities

within Coherence.

Real Operations Insight: A set of facilities providing allowing for rapid diagnosis of

problems and root cause analysis, resulting in simpler and quicker time to resolution:

Real Operations Automation: Provides a suite of facilities and tools designed to reduce

administrator overhead through automation of mundane and repetitive tasks as well as

provide automatic self-adjusting configuration of otherwise complex server sub

systems.

SmartUpgrade for WebLogic: Tooling, processes and best practices that makes the

upgrade process to WebLogic Server from Oracle Containers for J2EE (OC4J).

The design philosophy of WebLogic Suite 11 g is makes the environment simple, open,

and easy-to-use within heterogeneous middleware infrastructures while remaining the

industrys most hardened infrastructure for mission-critical application deployments.


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Packaging

In Fusion Middleware 11g, Oracle provides a single integrated Java infrastructure packaged asWebLogic Suite. WebLogic Suite contains three major server side runtime components: 1.Oracle WebLogic Server - the best-of-breed, proven mission critical capable Java serverinfrastructure; 2. Oracle JRockit - the worlds highest performing low latency Java VM; 3. OracleCoherence the industrys most predictable, reliable, scale-out in-memory data grid.

This infrastructure increases application performance and improves application efficiency due toa highly optimized integration of the components, enables predictable and reliable applicationscale out with the deep integration of the Coherence In Memory Data Grid and providesunmatched quality of service for custom and packaged applications deployed to thisinfrastructure. WebLogic Suite comes with a choice of highly productive development toolsbased on Oracle JDeveloper or Eclipse (Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse) and a fully

integrated management infrastructure for large-scale administration and operations withEnterprise Manager.

WebLogic Server

For 11g, WebLogic Server moves the bar for application server providers even higher byextending its performance lead and offering new innovation for enterprise applicationdevelopers. WebLogic Server has again set new world records in the industry standardSpecJAppserver2004 benchmark. New features such as GridLink for RAC and Enterprise GridMessaging provide new capabilities for mission critical applications.

At all levels of WebLogic Suite, capabilities are provided that drive toward solving our customersproblems, including need for performance and product integration.

Enterprise Grid Messaging

Enterprise Grid Messaging (EGM) has been designed and developed to provide all the featuresnecessary for the most demanding messaging applications. EGM works across the Oracle stack,and beyond, offering support for .Net applications for interoperability and integration with manyOracle applications. Above and beyond the Java Messaging Service (JMS) specification, EGMincorporates important message scoping facilities including:

Unit of Order: Processing messages out of order can be disastrous to the integrity of an

application. This feature guarantees that all messages are processed sequentially in the orderthat they are placed on the destination. While configurable, the default Unit of Order is first infirst out.

Unit of Work: Where applications require an even more restricted group than that provided bythe Unit of Order feature, Unit of Work can be used to group messages as a unit allowing


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message consumers to process the collection of messages as a unit. A message within a Unit ofWork does not become available for processing by the recipient until all messages scopedwithin the Unit of Work are all available.

Other important features that are omitted from the JMS specification but are required to buildadvanced messaging applications, are included in EGM:

Store and forward messaging: This construct removes significant complexity from thedevelopment of message-based applications by having the framework address reliabilityconcerns. A messaging client should have the option of sending a message once and only once,even if the associated message provider is down. The store and forward messaging feature willstore messages destined for a system that was unavailable at the time they were sent until thesystem becomes available, at which time the messages will be forwarded.

Distributed destinations: A distributed destination is a set of destinations (queues or topics)

that are accessible to clients as if they were as a single, logical destination. Distributeddestinations are typically used in high availability environments or where message processingmust be load balanced across a set of compute resources.

Enterprise Grid Messaging also includes the Oracle AQ JMS implementation based on theexceptionally reliable Oracle Database, which is in wide production use today across many ofOracles customers. Oracle AQ JMS is the standard JMS API applied to the Advanced Queuingstreams of any Oracle database with messages persisted to the Oracle Database.

Benefits of Oracle AQ JMS come from integrating key features from the Oracle Database withthe JMSstandard:

Failover and clustering capabilities of Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) are

inherent. Messages are guaranteed to be delivered and recoverable in the event of failure.

Messaging applications can leverage Database features such as triggers and stored procedures.

Oracle AQ JMS also enables migration as well interoperability with other Oracle AQ JMSapplications. Just like the WebLogic Server JMS implementation, Oracle AQ JMS fully supportsJTA transactions.

ActiveCache with Coherence

ActiveCache, based on Oracle Coherenceand included in WebLogic Suite, is an in-memory data

grid solution that enables applications to predictably scale by providing fast, reliable and scalableaccess to frequently used data. The key to the linear scalability of Coherence is the partitioning ofdata across the nodes in the data-grid. In other words, each node does not cache a complete setof the data yet to external users it appears as a single coherent clustered cache.


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ActiveCache is thedirect integration of WebLogic Server and Coherence. Two areas have beenimplemented within WebLogic Server 11g

1. Support for JPA applications using TopLink to store JPA entities within Coherence; and2. Support for WebLogic HTTP session management within Coherence

This integration is seamless declarative integration rather than requiring rewrites of yourapplication. Developers are also able to fully program to Coherence directly but ActiveCachesimplifiesthe integration substantially.

JPA and Coherence

Figure 1 below, illustrates the difference between the traditional approach of data access and dataaccess in the new model using the ActiveCacheintegration of JPA and Coherence

FIGURE 1: COHERENCE DATA GRID: GET

Rather than using the typical local cache infrastructure provided by JPA implementations, theActiveCache implementation within WebLogic Server enables TopLink based JPA applicationsto seamlessly take advantage of Coherence as a high performance shared cache for JPA entities.The JPA programming model is augmented by a number of Coherence aware annotationsenabling developers to easily and quickly put their JPA applications on the grid. The end result is

dramatically increased performance and increased scalability for JPA applications.

Coherence*Web


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Designed to extend and improve the performance of Java EE Web applications that make use ofHTTP session state, Coherence*Web offloads session management from the application serverinfrastructure. There are several scenarios where offloading session state management from theapplication server makes sense. Applications making use of large sessions will quickly limit thescalability of an application, as there are limits to a Java heap on a 32-bit operating system. Evenon 64-bit systems, a large heap comes with other trade-offs that must be made, including garbagecollection latency. In these cases, Coherence*Web can be used to store session state in the datagrid. This still allows for very fast access of session data in a high availability solution, whileproperly leveraging the middle-tier for the work for which it was designed.

Coherence*Web works equally well in cases where session state must be shared across multipleapplications, as in the case of composite applications. Coherence*Web does not require anycoding changes to the underlying application.

GridLink for Oracle RAC

In Java EE application servers, database interactions are typically handled by the middle tiersdata source implementations. In Oracle WebLogic Server, configuring JDBC data sources andmulti datasources exposes database connectivity. These JDBC resources are then deployedtargeting to servers or clusters in a WebLogic Server domain. Each data source that is configuredcontains a pool of database connections that are created when the data source instance is created,deployed, or targeted, or at server startup. This data source capability and its integration withOracle Real Application Clusters is called GridLink for RAC.

Oracle WebLogic Server multi data sources together with Oracle RAC manage pooledconnections for high availability and provide the following features:

Planned outages: Oracle WebLogic Server provides support for planned outages, wheredatabase maintenance or other activities must be performed at a known point in time. OracleRAC supports this, as service can be gracefully shutdown. I n such scenarios, any borrowed orin-use connections are not interrupted and closed until work is completed and control of theconnection is returned to the pool. This feature provides an extremely efficient way in largeheterogeneous customer environments to manage planned outages.

Unplanned outages - Oracle WebLogic Server provides support for the area of unplannedoutages. Depending upon your configuration, when an Oracle RAC node fails, in-flighttransactions are redirected to another node in the cluster either by Oracle WebLogic Server orby the Oracle THIN JDBC driver.

Failover: The connection failover with Oracle WebLogic Server and RAC can be handled usingOracle WebLogic Server multi data sources by pinninga transaction to one and only one OracleRAC instance when an Oracle RAC instance becomes unavailable. Oracle Databaseconnection failover and the Oracle JDBC Implicit Connection Cache feature of Fast


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Connection Failover can also be used to detect dead connections, clean the connection pool,and fail over the connections to another instance.

Load balancing: Load balancing is supported through the use of Oracle WebLogic Server andJDBC multi data sources used with Oracle RAC nodes. The set of data sources that form themulti data source is accessed using a round-robin pattern. When switching connections, OracleWebLogic Server selects a connection from the next data source in the order listed. In aconfiguration without a multi data source, Oracle WebLogic Server relies on the connect-timefailover feature provided by the Oracle JDBC thin driver to work with Oracle RAC.

New in WebLogic Server 11g GridLink for RAC is support for Oracle 10g and 11g OracleServices. Oracle Services are a recommended pattern for Oracle RAC administrators tomanage RAC infrastructures and are now fully supported by Oracle WebLogic Server.

Oracle TopLink

Oracle TopLink 11 g (TopLink) is fully integrated into the Oracle WebLogic 11 ginfrastructure.TopLink, based on the open source Eclipse Persistence Services Project (EclipseLink), is anadvanced object-persistence framework that provides runtime capabilities that reducedevelopment and maintenance efforts and increase enterprise application functionality. TopLinkis designed for use in wide range of Java EE and Java SE architectures. TopLinks most popularpersistence services include:

Relational: For persistence of Java objects using the standard Java Persistence API (JPA)specification to a relational database accessed using Java Database Connectivity (JDBC).TopLink provides advanced features for all leading databases with specialized support forOracle Virtual Private Database, XML DB XMLType, flashback, and stored procedures andfunctions with Oracle Database.

Grid: For integration with Oracle Coherence that supports scaling JPA applications up ontolarge clusters and leveraging the processing power of the grid to parallelize queries forCoherence cached objects.

XML: For conversion between Java objects and XML documents using Java Architecture forXML Binding (JAXB) and Service Data Objects (SDOs). EclipseLinks provided SDOsolution, a core component of the Oracles SOA infrastructure, is the SDO 2.1.1 referenceimplementation.

TopLink supports all leading Java EE servers including Oracle WebLogic Server as well as

integration with support for JMX based management, standard logging, and security policies.

Java EE Standards Support

In order to maximize productivity and reduce risk in the usage of middleware infrastructure, fulladoption of standards is key. Standards also help to effectively leverage developer talent, provide


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interoperability support, and prevent vendor lock-in to proprietary technologies. Oracle investsheavily in supporting of the latest technology standards to retain its hot-pluggable goal.WebLogic Suite supports the latest standards not only for the foundational application servercomponent, but also for the other components including Oracle Coherence, TopLink, andJRockit. Table 1 below summarizes the supported standards by product.

PRODUCT SPECIFICATION SUPPORT

Java SE 6.0

Java EE 5.0

JSP 2.1

JSF 1.2

Servlet 2.5

EJB 3.0

JAX-WS 2.1

JAX-RPC 1.1

JMS 1.1

JNDI 1.2

JCA 1.5

JTA 1.2

JMX 1.2

Java EE Deployment 1.2

Java EE Management 1.1

JAAS 1.2

WEBLOGIC SERVER

JDBC 3.0

COHERENCE Servlet 2.5 (Session Management)

CommonJ Work Manager

JCA 1.5

JCache (JSR 107)

Java 1.5

JVMDI1

JROCKIT

JVMPI 2

1 Java Virtual Machine Debugging Interface2 Java Virtual Machine Profiling Interface


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Java Persistence API 1.0

Java Architecture for XML 2.1

TOPLINK

Service Data Objects 2.1.1

TABLE 1: WEBLOGIC SUITE STANDARDS SUPPORT

From a developers perspective, support for the latest standards and specification ensures thatskills are effectively leveraged and are transferrable to future projects.

Web Services

WebLogic Server has a comprehensive and fully standards compliant Web services infrastructurethat is available across the Fusion Middleware product portfolio. The primary Java programmingmodel supported is the developer friendly annotation based JAX-WSstandard however for

backwards compatibility JAX-RPC is also supported. For quality of service a complete set ofWS-* standards including WS-Policy, WS-PolicyAttachment, WS-Security, WS-SecureConversation, WS-SecurityPolicy, WS-Trust, WS-ReliableMessaging and more aresupported. Table 2 provides a comprehensive summary of the Web services standards supportedin WebLogic Server 11g. Complementing this implementation is rich support of Oracle WebServices Manager for policy management and policy enforcement for both WebLogic and non-WebLogic Web services.

WEB SERVICE STANDARD VERSION

Web Services Java EE 1.2, 1.1

Web Services Metadata for the Java Plat form (JWS) 2.0, 1.0

Java API for XML-Based Web Services (JAX-W S) 2.1, 2.0

Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) 1.1, 1.2

Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 1.1

Java API for XML-based RPC (JAX-RPC) 1.1, 1.0 (deprecated)

SOAP with Attachments for Java (SAAJ) 1.3, 1.2

Web Services Security (WS-Security) 1.1, 1.0

Web Services Policy Framework (WS-Policy) 1.5, 1.2

Web Services Security Policy (W S-SecurityPolicy) 1.2

Web Services Policy Attachment (WS-PolicyAttachment) 1.5, 1.2

Web Services Addressing (W S-Addressing) 1.0, 2004/2008 member submission


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WEB SERVICE STANDARD VERSION

Web Services Reliable Messaging (WS-ReliableMessaging) 1.1, 1.0

Web Services Trust Language (WS-Trust) 1.3

Web Services Secure Conversation Language (WS-

SecureConversation)

1.3

Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) 2.0

Java API for XML Registries (JAX-R) 1.0

Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAX-B) 2.1, 2.0

Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0, 1.1

SAML Token Profile 1.1, 1.0

TABLE 2: WEB SERVICES STANDARDS IN WEBLOGIC SUITE

Raw Performance

Better performance in the middle tier supports not only delivering the best possible performanceto users, but also enabling a reduced infrastructure investment in hardware resources. WebLogicServer has again set world records in the industry-standard benchmark SPECJAppServer2004 inall categories (single node, dual node and multinode) across a variety of platforms. Figure 2 forcompares the official SPECjAppServer2004 results by vendor. When combined with the superiorperformance of the Oracle JRockit JVM on the same hardware, the overall benefit can be

substantial and measurable in contrast to other application server providers.


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FIGURE 2: SPECJAPPSERVER2004 BENCHMARK RESULTS BY VENDOR

Further, Oracle JRockit has also been the SPECjbb2005 performance benchmark leader for thepast three years providing the best performance for server-side applications and augmenting theoverall performance results that are possible with WebLogic Suite when WebLogic Server is runwith JRockit.

Finally, Oracle JRockit JVM has recently set a new world-record in the SPECpower_ssj2008benchmark, demonstrating superior performance per watt. The combination of achieving bestoverall performance while at the same time keeping server power consumption low isunprecedented.

High Availability

WebLogic Server carries forward its rich High Availability features from previous releases,designed to reduce both planned and unplanned downtime. As a key value for all thosecustomers who use Oracle Database, WebLogic Server 11 gR1 has been integrated with the latest

high availability features of Oracle Database 11 gincluding RAC and provides the most advancedmechanisms for load balancing and failover between the middle tier and the database of anapplication.


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WebLogic Server Clustering

Clustering provided through WebLogic Server consists of multiple WebLogic Server instances

running simultaneously and working together to provide increased scalability and reliability.From a clients perspective, a cluster appears to be a single WebLogic Server instance. The serverinstances that constitute a cluster can run on the same machine, or be located on differentphysical/ virtual machines. A clusters capacity can be scaled by increasing the number of serversin the cluster.

The key benefits of clustering are to provide:

Scalability: Applications deployed on WebLogic Server can be scaled by using clustering andcan be increased dynamically to meet demand. Scaling a cluster in or out does not affectapplication clients or users.

High-availability: Equal in importance to scalability is high availability and is another reason to

cluster applications. The goal of clustering in this context is to continue application processingeven in the event of server failure.

Key capabilities of clustering include:

Application failover: In the event of a failure, WebLogic Server can automatically migrate aclustered server instance from one machine to another. This capability not only ensuresuninterrupted service of an application, but also that application scalability is maintained.

Load balancing: In order for applications to scale properly, work and associated networkcommunications must be evenly distributed across the compute and network resources.WebLogic Server provides load balancing at multiple levels to ensure that the appropriateassignment of work takes place.

WebLogic Server has the ability to cluster the various Java EE application resource includingServlets, JSPs, EJBs, RMI objects, JMS Destinations and JDBC resources.

Server and Service Migration

Todays mission-critical applications require highly available services. WebLogic Suite offersmessaging, transaction, and other system services to facilitate building enterprise levelapplications. These services can operate in a clustered environment to help build scalable andhighly available applications. Previous releases of Oracle WebLogic Server provided support foradministrators to manually migrate highly available services from a failed cluster server to arunning server. Oracle WebLogic Server 10.3 adds support to the clustering infrastructure toautomatically migrate the services for high availability without any administrative intervention. Ifthe application is configured for session replication, the cluster replication service, which runs onall the nodes in the cluster, will replicate sessions to another node in the cluster.


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Singleton services, are services that exist only on one node of the cluster at any given point oftime, so as to offer a specific quality of service (QoS), but most importantly, to preserve dataconsistency. One such example is the JMS (Java Message Service) service, where the service mustensure that only one copy of the application message persists to storage for every persistent sendoperation from the producer. But this high QoS has a cost. I t is obvious that any problems orissues with the node that hosts the singleton service would render the service unusable or make itunavailable until the problem is corrected. This is a concern in an enterprise applicationenvironment.

The current set of singleton services that are currently offered by WebLogic Server to ensuredata consistency can be grouped into the following broad categories:

Persistent store service

JMS-related services

JTA-related services

User-defined singleton services

Singleton services offer one of the highest qualities of service but are susceptible to single pointof failure. To address this issue, WebLogic Server offers a solution called migration.

M igrationin WebLogic Server is the process of moving a clustered WebLogic Server instance or asubsystem component running on a clustered instance, elsewhere in the event of failure.

The process of moving the entire server instance from one physical machine to another uponfailure is called whole server migration(WSM) . Moving only the affected subsystem services fromone server instance to another running server instance is called service migration.

The whole server migration process was introduced in WebLogic Server release 9.0. In thisprocess, when a migratable server becomes unavailable for any reason, for example, if it hangs,loses network connectivity, or its host machine fails, the server instance is automatically migrated.Upon server instance failure, a migratable server is automatically restarted on the same machine ifpossible. If the migratable server cannot be restarted on the machine where it failed, it ismigrated to another machine. In addition, an administrator can manually initiate migration of aserver instance.

Service Migration provides the necessary infrastructure to manuallymigrate only the failedsubsystem services from an unavailable server instance to an available server instance.

However, manual migration needs human intervention (to detect the server/ service failure andinitiate the migration), which increases overall administration and ownership costs for WebLogicServer customers, as well as potentially leads to unpredictable service unavailability.

In WebLogic Server 11 g, the entire process of service failure detection and recovery is fullyautomated with an improved migration framework. The A utomatic Service M igration(ASM)framework now proactively monitors the health of the singleton services and automatically


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migrates failing services to available server instance in a cluster, thus greatly reducing the timetaken to perform the migration and increasing the overall availability of these services.

Side-by-Side Deployment

Side-by-side deployment, allows for a multiple versions of an application to be deployed at thesame time. This functionality is used to patch or update production applications without serviceinterruption. When employing side-by-side deployment, there are two different policies that canbe used to govern how existing sessions move over to the new version of the application:

Allow the application to finish its current sessions and then retire.

Retire the previous version after a specified timeout.

As dictated by the policy, WebLogic Server will migrate users to the new version of theapplication. After all clients are moved to the new application version, the old application isretired and no longer services any requests.

Side-by-side deployment can be set up in a number of ways, including through the WebLogicServer Administrative console as well as with WLST.

Rolling Upgrade

Rolling upgrade is the process of upgrading a running WebLogic Server cluster with a patch,maintenance pack, or minor release without shutting down the entire cluster or domain, allowingfor uninterrupted service. During the rolling upgrade of a cluster, each server in the cluster isindividually upgraded and restarted while the other servers in the cluster continue to host yourapplication. It is also possible to uninstall a patch, maintenance pack, or minor releases using thesimilar rolling uninstall process.

Full Lifecycle Development Support

WebLogic Server continues to innovate at the design level, providing features that address theneeds of the developer community.

Lightweight Application Server

To allow for a flexible installation that more closely matches the needs of the usage model, as ofrelease 10.3 the WebLogic Server installer now provides the option of installing specific parts ofthe server, minimizing the infrastructure footprint. Figure 3 shows a screenshot of the WebLogicServer installer and illustrates the flexibility afforded during the installation procedure.

The lightweight installation is matched in the runtime by flexible service startup, allowing forspecific services to be started, which provides faster server startup. Server resource consumption


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is commensurate with service deployment capability. Using a pre-installed JDK, the minimumserver installation takes up just 151 MB of disk space.

FIGURE 3: ORACLE WEBLOGIC SERVER LIGHTWEIGHT INSTALLER

Development Agility

Developers have a choice of service startup. Creating a lightweight server without EJB, JMS andJCA is easily accomplished by specifying -DserverType=wls or -DserverType=wlx asa startup system property.

Internal applications, such as the WebLogic Server administration console is deployed upondemand to further accelerate server startup and to minimize resource consumption.

The WebLogic Server administration console disables the change center in development mode aswell as eliminating confirmation dialogs, thereby allowing configuration changes to be madequickly. In addition, console performance has been improved by over 50%.

FastSwap for Rapid Development and Testing Cycles

The traditional Java EE development cycle of edit, build, deploy and test is now superseded by amuch more efficient model of edit and test cycle. Enabled by Java 6 enhancements, the FastSwapclassloading infrastructure allows replacing of the byte code with just the modified methods. Thisenables instance variable and application state to be preserved, allowing for a very quick iterativedevelopment cycle.

FastSwap is automatically disabled in production mode and can be enabled in development modeby adding true to the weblogic-application.xml file.


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WebLogic Server Ant Tasks

WebLogic Server comes with a plethora of Ant tasks that allow for lifecycle, packaging,

build/ compile code, resource configuration and applications operations. These Ant tasks can alsobe used to generate automation scripts, thus simplifying and reducing human error for repetitiveas well as complex tasks.

Automation of Development and Test Environments

WebLogic Server provides a set of tools that allows developers (as well as administrators) toautomate various aspects of the their daily work in order to avoid performing repetitive tasks.

For instance, developers need to be able to quickly reset and re-create test and developmentenvironments. Repeatedly performing theses tasks is costly, boring, and error prone. Using use ofdomain templates, the Domain Template Builder, the Configuration Wizard, and WebLogic

Scripting Tool (WLST), automation scripts (based on Ant) can easily be created for newdomains, and can populate those domains with resources (that is JDBC, JMS, JCA, andApplications and so on).

The WebLogic Server administration console can be used to record actions into a reusableWLST script, which provides a great basis for customization, simplifying the script creationprocess.

Application Classloading

Due to its complexity, classloading is often a misunderstood area of application servers.Fortunately, WebLogic server provides a few mechanisms, which simplify configuration of

application classloading.First, WebLogic Server provides a way of sharing libraries across applications, which simplifiesthe deployment of such applications. This is useful in cases where the libraries themselves evolveat a different rate than the applications. It also removes the need to deploy the libraries with eachapplication.

Next, WebLogic Server provides for application-level libraries. These libraries are deployed witheach application and loaded through the standard Java EE classloading hierarchy. This meansthat these libraries are not shared by other applications deployed on the server, each applicationreceives its own copy of the library. This is useful if applications deployed on the same serverneed to use different versions of the same library.

One of the ways that WebLogic Server has simplified classloading is through the filteringclassloader. This classloader does not load classes itself; it just prevents classes from being loadedby the parent classloader. In effect, this changes the Java EE classloading delegation model fromparent to child first. This allows applications to override system level classes, which is difficult toaccomplish with other application servers. For instance, your application may need to make use


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of a different version of Xerces, Spring, Ant, or Commons-Logging; to accomplish this the filterclassloader would be configured not to load those classes from the system classpath. I nsteadthose classes would be bundled and loaded from the application libraries.

Development Tooling

WebLogic Suite offers two distinct toolsets for development: Oracle JDeveloper I DE as well asOracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse. JDeveloper, now fully integrated with WebLogic Serveroffers a complete development environment with code editing, testing, debugging, profiling andApplication Development Framework (ADF) support for rapidly building and deployingenterprise grade applications on WebLogic Server. JDeveloper provides support for a plethora ofapplication development environments including Java EE, Java SE ADF and BPEL applications.

For those Java EE developers that prefer the Eclipse integrated development environment,WebLogic Suite offers the Open Source provided Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse (OEPE)providing all of the tools necessary for Java EE development and deployment on WebLogicServer. OEPE is the predecessor to the BEA WebLogic Workshop toolset.

Management and Operations

Lowest Cost of Operations

IT departments have always been constrained by their budgets. In the present economic climate,the efficiency imperative has become extreme. Some of the most important operational costsrelated to application servers are based on the time, complexity, and risk of:

Installation and maintenance : This includes application server installation, upgrade, andpatching.

Configuration and deployment: This includes application server and applicationconfiguration, deployment, instance creation and cloning and moving of applications from atest environment into production.

Performance tuning and monitoring: This includes determining/ setting thresholds forperformance monitoring, ensuring satisfaction of service level agreements (SLA), diagnosingand troubleshooting and correcting performance problems.

Fundamental application server capabilities in these areas have significant impact on operational

costs. A crosscutting concern is automation: The more areas that can be reliably automated, thegreater the reduction in operating costs. Other important operational cost factors are consistencyand synergy across the data center. It is one thing to optimize for a single application or a small,contained project, but to truly maximize efficiency requires exploiting the economy-of-scalebenefits of having consistent infrastructure underlying as many applications as possible. This


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enables the standardization and automation of time-consuming activities such as softwarepatches and upgrades, the leveraging of in-house expertise, and minimizing incremental training.The key WebLogic Suite capabilities that help reduce operational costs are:

Integrated management: This means effective visibility and control, both in a native consoleand in integration with overall infrastructure management tools.

Automation: This means the ability to define rules and set thresholds that trigger automaticresponse; ability to script complicated procedures so that they can be carried out efficiently andconsistently with no user error (which accounts for a majority of outages)

Monitoring, diagnostics, and tuning: This means proactive monitoring and advanceddiagnostics to help administrative staff quickly identify and fix problems; self-tuning tosubstantially reduce configuration complexity and time-consuming trial and error.

Real Operations InsightReal Operations Insight, a new feature for 11g , offers an umbrella of facilities designed toprovide a powerful solution to simplify system monitoring and diagnostics, including:

Sophisticated composite application performance management

Simple yet powerful Java virtual machine (JVM) diagnostics with WebLogic Suite suitable forboth developer, test and production environments.

Performance monitoring and diagnostics for portlets and remote services, and visuallyrepresenting them within the context of an enterprise portal.

Oracle Enterprise ManagerOracle Enterprise Manager provides all management capabilities necessary to deploy WebLogicSuite in an enterprise data center. Enterprise Manager implements monitoring and advanceddiagnostics capabilities to help administrators prevent system failures and other undesirableoutcomes in high load production environments.

In order to simplify diagnostics and management, the diagnostics pack allows for systemmonitoring of multiple WebLogic Server domains as well as Oracle Application Server farmsfrom a single pane of glass.

Key diagnostics functionality of fered by the pack includes:

The ability to trace in-flight transactions from Java requests to database sessions and theconverse.

Viewing request performance breakdowns by application tier (JSP, EJB, JDBC, and SQL)drastically simplifying root cause analysis.

Interactive transaction tracing to diagnose transaction performance problems


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Differential Java heap analysis to detect and analyze memory leaks

Java Virtual Machine Diagnostics

Enterprise Manager provides specialized capabilities, which allow low level monitoring anddiagnosis at the JVM layer. For instance, Application Diagnostics for Java (AD4J) provides lowoverhead monitoring and diagnostic functionality that can be used to improve Java applicationavailability and performance. AD4J enables administrators to monitor application performance,and provides in-depth application details to diagnose problems. Most important, AD4J canperform all of these capabilities without any server restarts, no application instrumentation, andno additional performance overhead, making it a perfect solution for monitoring and diagnosingproduction applications.

In addition, JRockit Mission Control (JRMC), a toolset specific to JRockit deployments providesa developer friendly management toolset. JRMC turns the traditional black box JVM into atransparent runtime, open for inspection. JRMC adds a handful of tools, all useful for diagnosingapplication problems at the lower levels. JRMC operations, such as starting a diagnosticsrecording can be automated and scripted using the JRockit diagnostics command. JRockit toolsand commands do not require restarting the JVM.

Enterprise Manager provides for extensive memory leak detection and analysis tools both at themanagement console level as well as in the diagnosis tooling designed to locate causalinformation. For instance, the memory leak detection tool of JRMC performs this same analysisin real time, where suspected memory leaks are highlighted and can be used for further analysis.The entire Java heap can be walk edand each object instance can be inspected, allowing even themost complex memory leaks to become readily diagnosable. One of the more important features

of this tool is that it can be used in production because associated overhead with connecting to arunning instance of JRockit is very slight and will not materially affect server performance(typically less than 1%).

Real Operations Automation

Real Operations Automation, also new for 11 g, provides a suite of facilities and tools designed toreduce administrator overhead through automation of mundane and repetitive tasks, as well asprovide automatic self-adjusting configuration of otherwise complex server subsystems.

Work Manager

In order for an application server to perform optimally, it is critical that it be configured with thecorrect number of application request threads. Because the number of request threads is largelydependent on hardware, applications, and the underlying JVM, it is difficult to determine theexact number of threads needed in production to achieve optimal application throughput. InWebLogic Server there is a single thread pool, in which all types of work are executed. WebLogic


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Server prioritizes work based on policies defined alongside runtime metrics, including the actualtime it takes to execute a request and the rate at which requests are entering and leaving the pool.

Work managers can be configured at the domain, application, or module level using theWebLogic Administration Console. The various policies and constraints that can be employedare:

Fair-share-request: Specifies the average thread-use time required to process requests, whichthe work manager then uses to ensure that requests for different modules get their specifiedshare of compute time.

Response-time-request: Specifies a response time goal in milliseconds, which the workmanager then uses to throttle different types of requests to prevent starvation of certainrequests.

Context-request: Assigns request classes to requests based on context information, such as thecurrent user or the current users group, which can then have additional constraints applied.

Max-threads-constraint: Prevents the server from scheduling additional requests of this typeuntil the number of concurrent executions falls below the limit. The server then scheduleswork based on the fair-share or response-time goal.

Min-threads-constraint: Guarantees the number of threads the server will allocate to affectedrequests to avoid deadlocks.

Capacity: Causes the server to reject requests when it has reached its capacity.

Combining the preceding policies and constraints make for a self-tuning, dynamically adjustingthread pool. The thread pool will schedule work as well as increase and decrease the number of

threads to achieve optimal throughput, subject to concurrency constraints. The work managermonitors the overall throughput, and uses collected data to determine if the thread count mustbe adjusted. The various policies ensure that thread starvation does not occur in applications thatcomprise both short and long running requests, a problem common in other application servers.

Installation and Maintenance

This category of administrative tasks includes installation, upgrade, and patching of server andrelated management software. Installation in the past tended to be infrequent operations.However, due to increased reliance on virtualization, dynamic server farms, and cloudcomputing, installation has become a more frequent administrative task that must be madeefficient to meet the goal of reducing operational costs.


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Virtualization and Cloud Computing

Oracle provides both an Oracle VM Template as well as an Amazon Machine Image forAmazons Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for WebLogic Server 3. Both packages create for aflexible deployment choice and illustrate the simplicity with which a WebLogic Server can bepreconfigured and deployed to both virtualized and cloud environments. Not only does thisallow for new instances of WebLogic Server to be provisioned in a matter of minutes, couplingthis to Enterprise Manager functionality allows for a dynamic provisioning environment toreduce involvement of administrative staff resulting in higher levels of productivity.

WebLogic Scripting Tool

The mainstay of WebLogic Server automation is WLST; a full-fledged, extensible Jython basedadministrative environment that allows for automation of any task that can be accomplishedusing the WebLogic Server Administration console as well as the Domain Configuration Wizard.

Custom scripts can be created to automate virtually any maintenance task, including serverlifecycle management, configuration, deployment and management.

Because WLST commands execute by invoking methods on WebLogic Server MBeans, WLSTcommands can also be executed programmatically 4 in Java or by using the included Ant task.

To make the script authoring process simpler, the WebLogic Server console has a built inrecording function that records all of the WLST commands that would need to be executed toperform any console actions. This accelerates the script authoring process.

Configuration and Deployment

Configuration and deployment includes a key set of necessary administrative tasks: General application and server configuration

Movement of product specific metadata from test environment to production environment

Instance creation and cloning

Security management (for example, users, roles, profiles)

Schema management (tables, indexes, views, and so on.)

3 For more information about WebLogic Server and Virtualization and Cloud computing, go toOracle Cloud Computing Center: http:/ / www.oracle.com/ technology/ tech/ cloud/ middleware.html4 The WLSTI nterpreter is available in the weblogic.management.scripting.utils.WLSTInterpreterPackage.


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These tasks are made easier through a rich set of tools and features included in WebLogic Suite.

WebLogic Administration Console

The WebLogic Administration console serves as the primary means by which administratorsperform ongoing maintenance and configuration. Because any task that can be performed usingthe Administration console can be automated by recording a WLST script, efficiency andproductivity are greatly increased.

As of the 10.3 release, the JSP based WebLogic Server administration console now provides aradical improvement in performance, which is immediately noticeable. The Console is nowdeployed only on demand (upon first access) to avoid any application overhead of running theconsole even if it is not being used.

Fusion Middleware Control

A new addition to the Enterprise Manager umbrella, Fusion Middleware Control (FMW Control)brings in modern technologies and a fresh look and feel to more efficiently provide monitoring atthe Farm level including WebLogic Server, service oriented architecture applications andWebCenter applications. Figure 4 shows the look and feel of this new console.

FIGURE 4: FUSION MIDDLEWARE CONTROL


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Deployment

WebLogic Server offers great flexibility when it comes to the deployment of application serverartifacts, including shared libraries, connectors and applications (EARs and WARs). First, thereare a number of mechanisms used for deployment, including the WebLogic Administrationconsole, WLST and the weblogic.Deployer tool. Deployment is also possible to accomplishthrough the use of WebLogics deployment ANT task making it simple to script andsubsequently automate.

For added support varying operational policies and procedures, WebLogic Server has threedifferent stages of deployment:

Stage mode: Upon deployment, the administration server copies the deployment archivefiles to each of the targeted managed servers. After completing this initial step, eachserver completes deployment by using the now local copy of the archive. Stage mode isthe default mode when deploying to more than one managed server instance.

Nostage mode: This mode differs from the stage mode in that each managed servertargeted must be able to access the source location of the deployment archive. A localcopy is not created since the archive at the source location is used.

External stage mode: This mode is similar to stage mode, in that target servers deployusing local copies of the deployment files. However, the Administration Server does notautomatically copy the deployment files to targeted servers in external stage mode;instead, files must be copied manually to each target server before deployment.

SmartUpgrade for WebLogic

New for 11 g, SmartUpgrade is introduced to make migration of OC4J based applications toWebLogic Server as simple as possible (see Figure 5). SmartUpgrade for WebLogic is a rule-based system that analyzes the deployment descriptors of OC4J deployed applications and makesappropriate changes to the application readying it for deployment to WebLogic Server.


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FIGURE 5: SMARTUPGRADE UPGRADE TOOLING

Proven to Outperform

Even if todays economy has catapulted cost reduction and efficiency to the number-one priority,maximizing the quality of service is still a close number two. In nearly every business, the qualityof service experienced by the customer is one of the most important differentiators betweensuccess and failure. For I T, maximizing service levels means providing the right data ( reliability) atthe right level of responsiveness ( performance) no matter how many simultaneous transactions orusers ( scalability). Beating competitors on all these dimensions comes at a cost. An enterprise

cannot indiscriminately throw hardware at the problem (elevating costs) or blindly deploy thelatest fad technology (elevating risk, and ultimately cost). The goal of WebLogic Suite is toprovide the leading service level at the lowest risk and cost.

JRockit Real Time

Efficient memory use increases application performance and stability. Garbage collection as aform of memory management greatly inf luences Java application performance. In the process, itperforms two basic activities:

Determines which objects in memory are or are not being used

Reclaims the memory being consumed by inactive, discarded objects

Improper handling of garbage collection inhibits application execution and seriously detractsfrom system performance and reliability. Some applications require the highest-possibleapplication throughput and can tolerate periodic garbage collection pauses. Others cannot; theydemand consistency, sacrificing someamount of throughput to minimize pause times.


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Ideally, garbage collection implementation would be completely invisible: There would be nocollection pauses and no CPU time lost to garbage collection. Unfortunately, there are no idealgarbage collectors, but the deterministic garbage collection functionality in Oracle JRockit RealTime represents a significant improvement over traditional methods.

Deterministic garbage collection is the ability to specify and maintain a maximum pause time forthe memory system with a high level of confidence. Designed to deliver short, predictable pausetimes with minimal manual tuning, it helps in situations where there is a continuous querying ofevents or where it is necessary to find correlations over streams and time periods in real time ornear real time.

Figure 6 shows two graphs that compare the average response time of an application runningwith deterministic garbage collection versus [normal] parallel garbage collection. The long pausetimes for the parallel garbage collector can be fatal for applications that are sensitive to delays,such as real-time trading applications. With deterministic garbage collection, pause times areguaranteed to be kept to a minimum, even when running applications with gigabyte-size heaps.The short, frequent pauses in the deterministic garbage collector ensure that an application willnot experience time out intervals like those of the parallel garbage collection method, whichoccur when the JVM using parallel collection pauses while purging unused items from memory.

FIGURE 6: APPLICATION RUN WITH PARALLELL GARBAGE COLLECION (TOP) VS. DETERMINISTIC GARBAGE COLLECTION (BOTTOM)


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Best for Oracle

WebLogic Suite is the only application server platform certified for all Oracle applications.WebLogic Suite includes foundational technologies beyond Java EE such as Oracle Forms,Oracle Reports, and Oracle Portal that are critical for applications such as Oracle E-BusinessSuite. With Oracle Fusion Middleware release 11g, many cross-infrastructure capabilities such assecurity and configuration are cleanly consolidated into the WebLogic Suite foundation for bothperformance and simplicity. I t is also important to keep in mind that WebLogic Suite is thefoundation for Oracle Fusion Applications, so any existing or new investment in this technologylays the perfect groundwork for these new offerings.

Oracle WebLogic Suite offers unmatched capabilities and benefits for enterprises with stringent

business requirements that demand proven infrastructuresoftware. Figure 7 provides anoverview of WebLogic Suite as the foundation for the upper layers of Oracle Fusion Middlewareas well as for the Oracle application portfolio.

FIGURE 7: WEBLOGIC SUITE, BEST FOR ORACLE

Summary

WebLogic Suite 11 gR1 is a major new release of the core infrastructure underpinning OracleFusion Middleware. WebLogic Suite provides the basis for SOA and application gridinfrastructure used by the rest of the Oracle portfolio of products. This provides for a consistenttechnology foundation designed specifically to support Oracle products, offers the lowest cost ofoperations and outperforms the competition through integration by design.


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Oracle WebLogic Suite Technical White Paper

June 2009Author: Erik Bergenholtz

Contributing Authors: Michael Lehmann

Oracle Corporation

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