WEBLOGIC 12C FEATURES

On December 1st, Oracle has held an online event to launch the new Weblogic Server 12c, the foundation for the future generation of Fusion Middleware products. Along with 200 new features, this release brings cloud computing capabilities, hence the “c” in 12c, an even tighter integration with the Oracle Database and integration with some new Oracle products, that have just been announced. Below you will find some of the new features that were mentioned during the live launch event: •Oracle Traffic Director, is a new released product, that will offer HTTP requests caching, a reverse proxy function and load-balancing based on other algorithms than just round-robin. It will completely replace Oracle WebCache, and while it will also eliminate the need for the Weblogic web server plugins for fronting a Weblogic cluster, the plugins will still be supported by Oracle for integrating with third party web servers such as Apache, IIS etc. However, the Oracle Traffic Director will initially be available only on the Exalogic platform!! •Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder is another new product announced by Oracle which will allow users to package a multi tier application into a consolidated project and move it easily into a virtual box for development, functional testing or just to accomodate a new developer joining the project, without having to build a new system. So for example if an application has a web module, but also uses Oracle Service Bus and Oracle Database, you can assemble all these into one package and use it on an Oracle VM machine. •The integration between the Weblogic server and Oracle RAC database is even tighter in the new release, by the use of the Active Grid Link, which now introduces session/transaction affinity with the RAC node. This new feature will bring a 3x boost in performance. Actually, that is one of the new strong selling points of the Weblogic Server 12c, which promises to bring important performance improvements. •In the new version, there is also a tighter integration with the Glassfish application server, since now Weblogic will be able to recognize Glassfish deployment descriptors. As a consequence an application that has been developed for Glassfish and deployed on that environment can easily be migrated on a Weblogic platform by a simple re-deploy. Of course, this is subject to discussion depending on the application’s security model for example, since that will have to be accomodated for the Weblogic Security Framework. •Another good news for Weblogic administrators and developers as well is an integration between the Weblogic Diagnostic Framework (WLDF) and JRockit’s Flight Recording functionality which promises to be a big step forward in troubleshooting and performing complex diagnostics on the applications. For Developers, there are good news as well, some of the most noticeable are mentioned below: •Full support for Java EE 6, Java SE 7, HTML5 (by fully supporting annotations, the xml lines in an application can be reduced to up to 80%) •Oracle is launching ADF Mobile which brings a consolidated platform for developing applications which are to be consumed from devices running any mobile platform such as Android, iOS etc •Just for Development or testing purposes, Weblogic will now shift in a super lightweight version (only 168Mb) that will download, unzip and start without the need of running an installer. Even more, one will have the option to start the Weblogic server without the EJB, JMS and JCA containers if only a basic functionality is needed, simply by adding -Dservertupe=wlx to the startup parameters. •In the new release, EJBs can now be packaged directly into war files, eliminating the need for them to be packaged into jar files and then ear files. There are no noticeable differences in the look and feel of the Administration console, and all administrative resources remain the same. The domain upgrade from 11g to 12c is seamless, since a 11g domain will run without any modifications on 12c. Weblogic Server 12c will be available for download in the following days on OTN and all other Fusion Middleware products such as SOA Suite, Identity Management, Webcenter etc will follow during CY2012 and CY2013. http://oraclemiddlewareblog.com/2011/12/02/whats-new-in-oracle-weblogic-server-12c/