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
Friday, 7 March 2008
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
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 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 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
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
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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
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
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