Weblogic Spring Java Hibernate Power Team Available now to Blitz your project!

I have access to a very capable team based here in a office in
Docklands, Central London.

The Weblogic Gurus Development Team are now avaiable for invitations for
new development projects
after successful completion of a major security referencing project.

The Weblogic Guru's development team can take your J2EE project and use
Spring & Hibernate and develop your project coding requirements quickly
productively and to high standards.

Benefits are:

Reduced costs

Experienced Team with proven track record

Well connected with industry experts

Short development Times

Re-Use of existing spring objects

Banking Experience & Best of Breed Technologies

And lastly of course Backed by the Weblogic Guru's certified quality
assurance guarantee.

Please drop me a email at guru.weblogic@gmail.com

Spring & Hibernate Increase Development Productivity by 30%

Yes its a fact, utilising these tools within your development framework and procesess
will improve productivity in your development project.

UK's Largest Payment Processing Company Migrates to Weblogic

Voca ( BACS ), UK's largest payment runs Weblogic

Voca process money transactions they have built a successful system based on weblogic
and migrated from old IBM AIX & Tandem / Mainframe Systems (taking up masses of space in North West london) over to Newly Architected Web Infrastructure and 100% Java solution what is a increasingly complex business with tight SLA's and huge responsiblity
including meeting standards inposed by Bank of England, their system comprises:

BEA Weblogic 9.2

JDK 1.4 / J2EE 1.4

Spring

Hibernate

Oracle 10 RAC

Oracle AQS

Deliverables Successes :

80 Million + Transactions / Day

100% Data Integrity ( Never lost any data )

Power to handle 100 Million Transactions in under 4 Hours ( to meet tight SLA's)

The messaging of transactions utilised totally new solution of 'competing consumers' and overcome the challenge of existing BEA messaging by utilising Oracle AQS message Queing, Local Transactions now this is all part of BEA Weblogic since the merger with Oracle Corporation.

Watch the full video presentation of how they done it here:

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/qcon-voca-architecture-spring

Weblogic Portal 10.2 (WLP 10.2)

Has finally arrived and what a fantastic package it is,
Bea have adopted unifying open standards compatiblity with 10.2 and
can confidently say yes to web 2.0 and many of the technologies in
previous version.

Including Xtreme Progamming, Agile methods, Service Orientated
Architecture, compatibiliy with
Eclipse via Workspace Studio, JSF, Spring , Struts , WYSIWIG, and Web
Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP)
WSRP is a interesting one allowing .NET Apps to run well in WLP. Mashups
is something you will hear more of and this is
the ability to re-use something that is already published to a web site
or portal in your new portal but rather than having to re-create the wheel
you just adopt in your new portal using WYSIWIG and mashup feature.
SSO - single sign on although not new in WLP has matured in this
version to something rather more usable (rather than just a fudge in
together in previous versions), improved deployment mechanism (zero
downtime ) make this a must have version of WLP.

I am now taking on migration work to the new version and I recommend
users of previous versions to get in touch if this is something your
looking to move towards.

Weblogic Portal 10.2

Has finally arrived and what a fantastic package it is,
Bea have adopted unifying open standards compatiblity with 10.2 and
can confidently say yes to web 2.0 and many of the technologies in
previous version.

Including Xtreme Progamming, Agile methods, Service Orientated
Architecture, compatibiliy with
Eclipse via Workspace Studio, JSF, Spring , Struts , WYSIWIG, and Web
Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP)
WSRP is a interesting one allowing .NET Apps to run well in WLP. Mashups
is something you will hear more of and this is
the ability to re-use something that is already published to a web site
or portal in your new portal but rather than having to re-create the wheel
you just adopt in your new portal using WYSIWIG and mashup feature.
SSO - single sign on although not new in WLP has matured in this
version to something rather more usable (rather than just a fudge in
together in previous versions), improved deployment mechanism (zero
downtime ) make this a must have version of WLP.

I am now taking on migration work to the new version and I recommend
users of previous versions to get in touch if this is something your
looking to move towards.

goodbye BEA.Com hello OTN

As of 5 December 2008 bea.com website is no longer being updated,
instead for the latest weblogic info you will need to be a subscriber to
oracles Oracle Technology Network ( OTN ).
As you may well know, this is going to ruffle a few feathers in the
weblogic circle. However Oracle have had reign of BEA for over 6 months
and have slowly adopted the approach to integrating into their core.

Getting to Grips with Weblogic? Start Here

Some fast start tips to get you going quickly.

download the software from Http://www.bea.com

Get yourself a copy of the weblogic bible from amazon. Ok this is quite dated now but
this is the best weblogic guide I have ever come across and is the best place to start.

Read this cover to cover.

use the edocs.bea.com to assist you further.

Application Monitoring Roadmap

Out of the box J2EE app servers (in our case weblogic) has some monitoring and fantastic logging mechanism however there is not much in the way of monitoring that can be used to really pinpoint what is happening with your applications and or your EJB's servlets database connections etc.

There are some things that can help you here these tools are:

Wily Introscope (as used by BEA internally) by Computer Associates
Quest Jprobe

There are some others out there but these are the main 2.

Other ways to monitor is to use JMX this is a purpose architected system inbuilt in J2EE model
that is effectivly a structure for writing a system to monitor your apps.

JMX is implemented using Mbeans


or drop me a email at guru.weblogic@gmail.com

Struggling with Weblogic ? Free Hands on Advice and Support

Watch this space....for free hands on advice and support.

or drop me a email at guru.weblogic@gmail.com

Load Balancing or Clustering?

To Cluster or not to cluster that is the question?
Weblogic Server lends itself very well to clustering, all the components are available, all the specifications are there and it has had clustering capability long enough through the versions to make this a viable solution, questions is do you want to cluster?

Advantages are:

Resiliance no more single point of failure in the application tier

Session Replication, if a server goes down your session will carry on just by another server node in the cluster.

Disadvantages are:

Complexity - more complexity means more risk of it not working(down more to configuration or human error than the software)

Need more Server resources - more disk , more cpu , more network traffic etc...

Your applications will need to use the clustering services in the container and so they need to be coded to be made 'cluster aware'

Load Balancing is a much simpler setup to implement

Advantages

Quicker and easier to setup

No need to re-engineer your apps.

or drop me a email at guru.weblogic@gmail.com

Weblogic Portal 10

Watch this space....

or drop me a email at guru.weblogic@gmail.com

Weblogic Portal 9.2

Watch this space....

or drop me a email at guru.weblogic@gmail.com

Weblogic Portal 8.1

Portal 8.1 was a great release this had support for JDK 1.4.x and had a lot of stability and feature enhancements.


Watch this space....

or drop me a email at guru.weblogic@gmail.com

Weblogic Portal 7.0

Watch this space....

or drop me a email at guru.weblogic@gmail.com

Performance Tuning Weblogic

Watch this space....

or drop me a email at guru.weblogic@gmail.com

Weblogic Automated (unattended) Installation

Watch this space....

or drop me a email at guru.weblogic@gmail.com

The Importance of a Well designed Architecture

This goes without saying that is well worth having the intitial design laid out by a experienced web J2EE architect before going ahead with things, computers nowadays allow people to get into amazingly complex dissarrays of mess that cause grief and loss of productivity and performance on so many levels.

I therefore recommend if you have a high user base and want to go down the J2EE route to find yourself a decent J2EE architect.

This will save you weeks of valuable time and potentially tens of thousands in ongoigng costs.

Of Course if its Weblogic your using then your looking at a Weblogic / Weblogic Portal Architect right here.

I can be hired for London Roles or Telecommute to give my expertese to clients Globally.

My rate is £600 / day on site and less if telecommute working via phone/internet/email.

I try and advise upfront what best course of action will be and the likely cost.

Star Team (or as we used to say Star Tomb)

By this point various projects were underway and many of these web systems were starting to be used heavily with the rapid growth of internet usage, the demand for content went sky high,
and so verious content management systems were utilised and devising plans of managing content became almost as important as the plan of keeping the performance.

One of the big commercial products out there was Star Team which at the time was proving difficult for users to get to grips with although no doubt now it is probably a much better and more refined product.

If content management is still not something that you really understand then the following may help:

What is a CMS? A content management system is specifically designed to manage a website. It is installed by the web designers, but intended to be used by you.

It provides you with a simple, non-technical way of updating your content. This is typically done via a web-based interface that works much like Word does.

Just point-and-click, type in the new words, and hit save. Your site is instantly updated.

Equally easy is adding new pages, deleting old ones, or restructuring the site to match your new business model.

The CMS also automates menial tasks, such as applying the same page layout and appearance across the site. Menus and other navigation are also automatically produced.

Along with the many other administrative tools, this leaves you to concentrate on the words, and not on the technology.

Dstributed Systems and Low Cost of Hardware

By the year 2002 the cost of server hardware was falling rapidly and the real beauty of the N-Tier Architecture model was that of not requiring a big expensive server but able to utilise multiple low cost servers and so the term 'distributed systems' was born.

This allowed rapid box replacement and it became cost effective and very flexible and scalable architecture to move to the 3 tier model.

Ant, CVS and the build.xml files

I worked with a bunch of Sun techies in the UK for a while and some of the best tools to help
with building and deploying J2EE application code to weblogic containers was Ant, CVS and the build.xml.

This enabled you to control the complexity of the configuration much better.
CVS was a free source code repository and with these tools became a happier and more rationalised and organised configuration and deployment structure.

IBM VisualAge

Despite BEA Winning the race Big Blue was not far behind.

It had a winning developer tool its name was
VisualAge.

It took bea quite some time to develop a rival product in the market place.

That became Weblogic Workshop despite its initial teething problems it carried on

making the complexity of J2EE rough sea much easier to sail through.

Integrating a mass of new technology and making a web application

Soon after developers started to realise the complexity of the J2EE model and BEA's Weblogic
stood to capitalise on the concept that this model could do so much but people often needed support and guidance.
Much of the hype around Java created confusion and I belive led this to be oversold.
And to sun's discredit there became a large number of failed J2EE projects in the IT arena.
However there wasa shining star in the form of Weblogic Server.
Those that paid for this (at its expensive licencing cost), did stand to benefit from reduced failure risk and,

BEA Customer Support although at a premium cost was a fantastic luxury for those companies that choice weblogic server and could go down this route.

The big advantage here was speed of turning there ideas into reality with the assistance of people that had been through there painful problems before.

EJB, JSP, JDBC, JNDI The Web and its applications

CGI was becoming dated, now everyone was talking Servlets, Enterprise Java Beans (not JAva but hardly a close relative of Java), and getting excited of the possibilities the marketing hype was brilliantly masterminded by sun but the dust was still left to fall.

The 3 Tier Model

One of the most proven and stable Web Infrastructures used over the last few years is the 3 tier model.
This simply comprises of a database tier, a application server tier and a webserver tier.

And for many years this proved quite successful.

One of the best combinations for stability and reliability was:

Oracle Database

Weblogic Server

Apache Webserver

The operating system of choice was normally unix (Sun / HP-UX).

Since Apache and oracle both ran so well on Unix Solaris and the Sun Sparc based Hardware was
to make this a great combination.

Great in such ways as - Uptime was fantastic -- sun boxes almost never need a reboot
Performance - great!

Configuration -- Nightmare!

Race of the Application Servers

The year was 1999.
I worked closely with a IBM Architect at the time, (whom now runs his own very successful consultancy). Where much work was going on in our project on web portals and how best to
architect them, there was a race of IBM and BEA to launch their new application server products and BEA finally won the lead by launching weblogic server and making it fully open standards compliant which at the time websphere was slightly lagging behind.
I worked with both products performing careful evaluation of the two.

http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article.tss?l=State-Of-The-Server-Side

To J2EE or not to J2EE

For all of you that do not know J2EE stands for Java 2 Enterprise Edition, and this was a wonderful release from the geniuses at Sun Microsystems this was released in around 1999 and for me many of the big telecoms companies were spending large sums of money at the time on Mobile Licenses
and preparing there budgets for spend on new and emerging web technologies (the pre-2000 dot.com boom), Java was just taking off and J2EE was the new set of tools that defined the path for using java on the web.

In Brief J2EE brought the emergence of the following:

IIOP/
RMI
JDBC
JTA
JNDI
JMS
JAVAMAIL

Suns official definition is here:
http://java.sun.com/javaee/overview/faq/j2ee.jsp#j2ee

This was a important point as it brought the emergence of new open standards ways of bringing applications to the web.(not necessarily Java.

Welcome to My blog on Weblogic

Hello and welcome to my blog here I aim to give you a little background on me and my focus of working with Weblogic.
Previously in my Technology career I have worked with Weblogic at many companies on varied and interesting projects on many occasions with BEA Systems (UK ) themselves.

I hope to shed some light in a technical but 'down to earth' terminology sure I may come out with a bit of 'geek speak' but as someone that cleverly avoided going too deep into the coder or developer
circle I aim to give a failry balanced viewpoint on the pros , the cons and the wonders and not so wonderful aspects of this amazing product.

Enjoy

:)

Weblogic Guru