UKOUG Tech 2013 – Weblogic Java and Middleware

Today I attended the Middleware Weblogic stream. It was very interesting to learn a few things about the Oracle view and strategy around Java and Middle-tiers layer.

On the perspective to continue to provide cloud management tools and products, Oracle wants achieve stronger integration between Weblogic and Databases, both in 12c versions about following features:

• Application availability with Transaction Gard
• Multitenant Database integration
• Database Connection Pool
• Global Data Services

Oracle also made a introduction about Oracle Coherence. It is fact It is an intermediate layer between middleware tiers and several kind of data sources. Its main functionalities are:

• Data caching
• Synchronous and asynchronous backups
• Multi-machine loss protection
• Multi data center

Current Weblogic release supports Java EE 6, however support for Java EE 7 will coming during years 2014/2015

Now let me talk about the update and roadmap of Oracle Cloud Services. Goal is to ease Java based applications deployments, by providing Instant accesses and self service into a pre-configured environment.

There are 2 branches:

• Java cloud services: Dedicated platform for Fusion Middleware SaaS extensions
• Java as a service: For every Java EE an legacy applications

In this case Oracle aims to provide hosting services around Weblogic Java application containers. There are three levels of support:

• Basic: Pre-configured, automatically installed Weblogic software.
• Managed: Oracle manages one or more Weblogic domains
• Maximum availability: Managed HA environment, Weblogic cluster integrated with RAC

I asked the question, but answer was not clear if using such services, administrators can keep a direct access into the underlaying Operating System. It seems to be the case for some few uses cases, but obviously, general purpose is to definitely not deal with other software brick than Java and fusion Middleware products. They invited us to have a look at the documentation about this topic.

To ease and speed up benefit interest in their product, Oracle provides a Java Cloud Service SDK plug-in supported by all mainstream Java development platforms (JSeveloper, Eclipse and Netbeans)

Oracle also planned to provide same kind of high level cloud services regarding the development processes. They aimed to integrate development specific tools such as Maven, Hudson, bug tracking, etc.., in a dedicated cloud space set-up for Java application.

To summarize, the impression I had after having attended today’s presentations, is that Oracle’s strategy for the future is to try inviting the Java actors within the market to develop new applications on their infrastructure. And once finished, also to host the results by their own.

In the mean time, Oracle ensured they will continue to support Java Community, around Netbeans and Glassfish for instance, even if they have stopped the commercial support for the last.