WebLogic Suite Reviews

Support custom developed mobile applications while retaining middleware compatibility with other on-premise Oracle systems such as AP Imaging, eBusiness Suite 12.2, and SOA Suite.

Provides a uniform technology platform between multiple application installations, whether Enterprise Resource Planning or Customer Relationship Management (ERP/CRM) based systems, Imaging ingestion and integration, or document content management. Administration techniques are consistent with only minor UI changes between versions, providing relatively seamless upgrade integration for future deployments and upgrade of the web platform.

Ease of scalability through both asymmetric and symmetric clustering; ease of integration with existing and potential future Oracle product technologies; leverages many industry-standard technologies for application support (JSON, REST, SOA, JavaBeans, J2EE); continues to evolve towards a fully-integrated solution designed to front-end enterprise applications, whether related to transactional websites, dynamic content management solutions, or acting as an intermediary service provider between other web/URI data sources.

Cloning and replication (detailed below) could be much more flexible and standardized. WebLogic out-of-the-box installations are only templated and automated for Oracle-packaged applications. For independent installations, answering the myriad WebLogic setup parameters can be quite confusing as to what are the correct parameters, other than the defaults (some of which are not provided).

WebLogic tends to be extremely stable once appropriate memory and CPU requirements have been determined for a particular application under production load conditions. When given insufficient resources, like any web application platform, we have had our share of out-of-memory errors or exhausting a Java virtual machine's capacity.

Being extremely scalable is one of WebLogic's best features. If you anticipate dramatic upward changes in capacity, one of Oracle's Universal License Agreements might be the best approach as it decouples the CPU-based license costs from the costs to scale. In our case, we often use the same WebLogic servers for multiple applications to reduce overall licensing and maintenance costs. As long as the application is compatible with a particular version, they can co-reside (multi-tenant) on the same WebLogic cluster, keeping in mind that the additional CPU and memory resources need to be accommodated.

Customer Service:

Service with Oracle tends to be directly related to your amount of new product purchasing. This can be a disadvantage to mature and stable installations that don't tend to expand much (i.e. don't expect weekly follow-up calls.) A significant improvement will be experienced by customers who adopt one of Oracle's emerging technology products (such as Cloud-based WebLogic Services) wherein the success of your implementation often becomes the next customer reference for Oracle. That doesn't last forever, but it's nice to experience during the often rocky start-up stages of new technologies.

Technical Support:

My Oracle Support takes a little getting used to for new customers used to more narrowly focused technology vendors. The vast number of different products Oracle supports has created a bit of a maze of how to get connected to the technology group best capable of answering a particular question, or dealing with an issue. For example, what starts as a "My application isn't available" issue might stem from access management, database, middleware technology, the application group, or because some third-party plugin failed causing a cascade failure. Oracle does attempt to support all of its products with alacrity, but it helps a lot for you, as the customer, to know how it all fits together. Your perception could range from 4 to 9/10 depending on your experience level with the products.

We use a half-dozen different application server technologies - which one is used depends more on application compatibility than choosing one specific one-size-fits-all solution. These include Microsoft IIS, LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP), InfoSphere, and many smaller vendors.

One major pre-installation question that catches you unaware is the question of a "standalone" versus "single node cluster" installation style selection. Single-node clusters can be scaled up and out. Standalone installations are single-node only, and would have to be re-installed to enable clustering. This is an old throwback to the original licensing model, and tends to be a source of odd frustration if you choose the wrong one inadvertently. Most of the modern upgrade releases are now out-of-place upgrades (meaning they install to new installation file system bases, and not overlaying an existing install). This change was designed to maximize uptime, but does mean you'll need the extra storage available to have the side-by-side software reside during the upgrade process.

This depends on whether we have experience configuring the new application being hosted, or not. WebLogic by itself is simply an application hosting architecture. But most application deployments are not as simple as visiting an online store and clicking an Install button. WebLogic is not what I would recommend for quickly standing up a proof-of-concept beta application. But when architecting a solution for hundreds, thousands or millions of users, it's perfectly suited.

For our installations, we've recovered our initial procurement costs within the first five years of operation, simply by re-using existing excess capacity to host additional applications. Once configured for production load, there is very minimal day-to-day administration required, and integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager monitoring allows full transparency to all processes and targets within the WebLogic technology stack.

As an application platform, you will need to carefully forecast your overall user and process load, and service-level agreements (SLA) in order to purchase an appropriate CPU count licensing, and host licensing for clustering, if needed. If your growth and capacity requirements aren't easily determined, you may want to consider Oracle's hosted Cloud options which have more of a capacity on-demand pricing model (especially the Public Cloud version.)

As mentioned, we purchase based upon application-focus, and not for custom development. As a result, choice of application hosting technology is driven according to compatibility and certification, rather than technical feature sets.

Cloning and replication of WebLogic instances isn't exactly a rote science. Because the stacks become secured against the hosting environments, encapsulating and re-configuring a working installation into a new set of hosts (with differing names and IP addresses) involves several procedures to re-secure, re-encrypt and reinstate the software to hardware trust certificates. While this process is relatively encapsulated for WebLogic in eBusiness Suite, sometimes it's faster to simply re-install WebLogic on the new hosts, than attempting to re-configure from a backup from a different host set. This is differentiated from the process of scale-up or scaled-down of a cluster, which is a well-defined process by comparison (and automated as an Oracle Enterprise Manager provisioning process.) Once deployed, most change management involves the deployment of application services between instances, and not replication of the WebLogic environment itself.

I use the tool for hosting.

I am satisfied with the product. The product is reliable. We can depend on it.

A supplier installed the solution. They were managing the solution, and then the contract ended. Then, we faced issues because we did not get the necessary training to use the solution. I had to train myself to use the product. The product is not easy to use if we do not have proper training.

I have been using the solution since 2016.

The tool is very stable.

The tool is scalable.

The support is not good. In countries where Oracle is not available, Oracle gives licenses to third-party companies to sell their product. They are called FDPs. Oracle does not make sure that the FDP engineers are competitive and that they can handle things. Most of the time, we need to raise SRs to Oracle. I don't think the model I'm using works well because I have to raise SRs with Oracle repeatedly.

It would be better if the FDP engineers were skilled. Even if we have a service level agreement with them, we do everything ourselves. That is the reason I ended up doing a lot of things myself. I read a lot of things and trained myself. We cannot rely on FDPs.

Neutral

I have used Microsoft most of my life.

I'm running the tool from Oracle Private Cloud Appliance. Since I have some training, I can easily deploy the solution.

We pay for Oracle Premier Support. The product comes bundled with Oracle Premier Support.

People who want to use the solution must research the tool and get trained to benefit from it. I am not familiar with all of the features of the product yet. I do not know whether the solution is platform-dependent or platform-independent. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

Our organization uses Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) for managing our operations and deployments. We also utilize WebLogic and ADF in conjunction with ODI.

We utilize WebLogic to deploy all of our web-based programs using Java and all of our Oracle web services.

The most valuable feature of WebLogic is it has excellent performance and stability compared to the previous solution we used. 

I have been using WebLogic Suite for approximately 10 years.

The stability of WebLogic Suite is good.

WebLogic Suite is highly scalable.

We have approximately 500 people using the solution in my organization.

I rate the scalability of WebLogic Suite an eight out of ten.

I have not used another solution similar to WebLogic Suite.

The solution is easy to set up.

I have received a return on investment using WebLogic Suite.

I rate WebLogic Suite a nine out of ten.

I like that it's industry tested and available on various platforms. I'm not sure we use any specific features of it, other than it’s a robust web server; the services, the database pools, good integration with Oracle database 12c, which is another product that we have.

Having the Oracle support has improved how my organization functions. We have a support contract for it 24/7. That's a huge thing, having the support.

Being able to stay on top of the release cycle and having reps that can keep us in the loop has been a major benefit.

I would like to see better integration with some of the cloud stuff that Oracle provides. We just went to an Oracle hackathon; a couple of us, a couple of weeks ago. It's a little confusing how the WebLogic Server, the cloud services and some other services interact; we were just trying to see how that works. What's the vision Oracle has bringing those two worlds together? That's what I'd like to see.

I’ve found it very stable. We haven't really had any issues that are related to the product at all.

We have scaled it. We've had this product several years and kept upgrading it, of course. We started out with, maybe, one server instance, and then two, and now we're up to four. We haven't really had any major issues, as long as you follow the standards. It's been great.

We had some Oracle people that we worked with that came in house. We were doing a major upgrade. People came and helped us day-to-day for a number of weeks. It's been great. As I’ve mentioned, having the 24/7 support, especially from our DBAs’ perspective, has been a real plus.

Back in the day, probably 15 years ago, there were very few application servers. WebLogic was, at the time, the best. Of course, it changed hands a few times. Oracle finally bought it. We were an Oracle shop. We had a database. There just wasn't really any other solution, in terms of having the quality and support that we enjoy. I think that's important.

When you're running a business and you have customers around the country depending on you to get the business done, having the up time, having the server stable, and having that support behind us is the most important thing.

When I’m looking at a vendor, it's important that they follow industry standards, and have very strong support. I keep coming back to the 24/7 support. That's been invaluable for us; to be able to pick up the phone, or have somebody get on site with us because it's a mission-critical type of business we're in. That's the most important; having the Oracle name and standard, following that.

At that time, there were only a few options. At a previous company, we even made sort of a homegrown, homespun version, aspiring to get to WebLogic someday, when we had enough money. This was a start-up.

When I joined the company I'm with now, they had just become an Oracle shop and started with this product. I think we evaluated JBoss at the time. Every couple of years, we evaluate and see what's out there.

WebLogic's still the strongest, with all the suite of products that they provide.

If you are serious about it and you have the money to spend, then spend it on a winner. There's all kinds of open source stuff out there. Stuff is changing constantly. If you're trying to run an enterprise business, it's sounds great, it's great for proof of concept. But, when it comes down to it, you don't want to build your own car. You want to buy something that's got some standards, has a big name behind it. That's what I suggest.

I don't give anything a perfect rating. This is software. It's constantly changing. Again, the breadth of services that are provided, and the support, again, is key to us.

We are using WebLogic Suite for application insurance and consent of a user.

I have been using this solution for approximately 10 years.

The solution is stable. However, the earlier versions of the solution were not as stable. I have used versions 7 through 12.

WebLogic Suite is scalable.

The technical support has been good from WebLogic Suite which is Oracle provides.

The installation was easy, it took approximately one week.

There is a license required for this solution and the price could be reduced.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate WebLogic Suite a nine out of ten.

I work with Telcos, one of the cell phone providers in South Africa, and they use it for their billing infrastructure. 

The applications running on the WebLogic suite are for billing and customer CRM, which goes out to the call centers and the dealers. We maintain the environment.

The feature that I have found to be the most valuable is the ease of deployment. 

In the beginning, you do tend to struggle a bit, but once it's deployed, then everything falls into place and maintaining it is quite simple.

It is difficult to say which features can be improved at the moment, as we are not working with the most current version and I am not aware of the features offered in the new version. 

Once we catch up and move on to version 12C, we need to see what can be migrated to the cloud. 

It might not be suitable to migrate the systems to the cloud, or maybe only portions of it. For example, it makes sense for our web services to go on the cloud, but not the actual application, the CRM system.

If we are considering the version that we are currently working with, then I would say that it's all fairly straightforward when it comes to using it. However, there are some small things, such as being able to restart clusters, where you can choose to restart each server one by one instead of all at the same time.  

The ripple start is what we refer to as shutting down and restarting one server at a time in a cluster. In other words, when you kick off a ripple start, and it would go through, it will shut down the one instance, and start it up, then it would move to the next one. It wouldn't shut them all down, and I wouldn't have to manually, stop one, start it up, wait for it to come up and then move down to the next one. This solution would benefit from the inclusion of a ripple start function for clusters.

Also, the cloud integration, which I've heard is very strong with Oracle, it's the shift and lift methodology. 

IBM WebSphere used to do things like that, where you could do a ripple start as opposed to shutting everything down and it would manage each one individually. That would be useful. if it's a live environment we have to ripple start. That's the big one, otherwise, we are pretty happy with everything.

The debugging function is nice on the Weblogic, but one thing WebSphere has, is, that you can apply the debugging permanently, or just until the server is restarted. 

That might also be a feature that would be nice on WebLogic, but not critical because we turned it off afterward.

This solution is very stable.

The only time it's not stable is when the code has a memory leak, or it's heap dumping or the garbage collection isn't fine-tuned. That is not the environment, it's the code. The environment itself is extremely stable.

We have to get caught up as the version we are using is out of support. 

The buzzword right now is cloud, and at some point, we have to see what we can take to the cloud and what we cannot. There are plans to move in that direction.

It is scalable. We have added extra servers and extra instances when it's been required. 

We don't run on VMs, we run on IBM LPARS. We don't run VMs where you can have them firing up, on-demand, but it is scalable for our purposes.

Officially it's not supported, but we do get support when it's required. For example,  approximately six months ago there was that day-zero vulnerability bug that had to be patched. 

The patch that we applied on WebLogic actually broke some environments.

We logged tickets and worked with Oracle and they were able to support us, isolate the issue, and give us new fixes. 

The support was very good and worked very well.

From this experience, I would rate the technical support quite highly. They were able to pinpoint the issue quite rapidly and assist us with a new patch. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Previously, we used the IBM product called WebSphere.

WebSphere and WebLogic are both very similar. They have the same purpose, the same end. I liked the way WebLogic is compartmentalized in the server where you can go and find the configurations, and see it on a file. It's fairly file-based, the data source is everything. 

WebSphere wasn't stored quite that way, so you couldn't work as nicely outside the system. 

There might have been a few other tweaks that WebSphere had which Oracle doesn't. But on the whole, I would say Oracle is far better, it more superior to the IBM product.

The initial setup is complex. We did a migration from WebSphere to WebLogic.

The reason it's complex is it was already running, but it was a very different animal than WebSphere. There were code changes required, which fell to the developers on the development side. On the operational side, things like fine-tuning little things like the data sources work a bit differently, but once you figure one out, then the rest all falls into place.

At the moment the deployment model we use is on-premises, and nothing has been migrated to the cloud. It's a project for the future.

The deployment was approximately just over one year to get it migrated fully to where we were stable enough to turn off the WebSphere.

It was a little bit better than I had expected it to be. We all felt it would be an eighteen-month to a two-year project, and it did come in a little bit less than that. But of course, the business expects it in three to six months. We did try but realized that it was not going to happen unless everything just magically works the first time.

I'm on the operations side, I'm not on the development side. We look after the infrastructure and the upgrading.

The developers are a large team. On the operations team, we have approximately ten people. One person can do a feature release, which is what we call a deployment, in an evening. This is done three times a week.

We do deployments roughly once a week, three times a month. 

We have our own in-house developed deployment manager, which we call the Deployamater, and they set up all the deployments. The manager fetches the EARs, JARs, pages, and JSP files, then it deploys them. 

We don't use the automated deploying via Oracle. We manage it like that, but we do it in an offline environment. 

We duplicate our environments and we go to our offline environment, deploy there, test it first, and then switch the traffic to the new environment that it's being deployed to.

I am a subcontractor to Vodacom, and the company I work for is a vendor, and they are an approved vendor with Oracle.

It is difficult to offer advice because every scenario is different, but I would suggest that you use the available expertise. There is a lot of expertise, don't try to do it all alone.

I wouldn't go back to WebSphere and for me, I would say it is the market leader.

I would recommend this solution and I would rate this product a ten out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for the UI (user interface), as a middleware product that communicates between different servers including application servers and databases.

I think the way the managed servers and the load balancing as well as the threading have been distributed is very good.

The transaction handling of WebLogic and the way it is designed is excellent.

Customization is a bit of an issue for us. 

Support could be better. The expertise when we have some Oracle WebLogic issues and challenges is not there. The issues are not being addressed in time. This really needs to be improved going forward.

I've been using the solution for five years.

We've been using the solution for five years and haven't had any issues with stability so far. There haven't been bugs or glitches. We haven't had crashes.

The solution is scalable. This shouldn't be a problem for organizations that need to expand.

We have about 200 people using the product currently. Mostly they are developers and testing teams.

We've contacted technical support in the past. They've been okay, but they could be better. Sometimes it takes a while to get answers and some individuals don't have a clear knowledge base. I'd rate it seven out of ten in terms of satisfaction levels.

We haven't used a different solution. However, we have a vendor who has created a product which is based on the WebLogic.

The initial setup was not handled by myself. We have a separate team that handles the actual installation of WebLogic. However, I didn't see challenges in the implementation and the team didn't raise any issues that I know of.

I don't remember the exact version number of the solution we are using, but it's around version 12.

I'd suggest other companies shop around. There are other competitors. The cost and the actual purpose of the application should be considered before choosing any solution. 

However, we can recommend this solution considering the stability and scalability that we have seen over the last five years.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

The stability of it is probably the most valuable feature for us. We were initially using Oracle Application Server, but found that Oracle advanced quite a lot with WebLogic in terms of stability. We noticed a huge difference and, in comparison, Application Server was really quite flaky.

We've found it to be the most reliable and stable platform for building our Java applications.

What I didn't like about it initially was the fact that WebLogic was a purchase from BEA. It wasn't Oracle's product initially, and I found whenever they initially released the product, it was quite buggy. Hence, we didn't move away from Oracle Application Server immediately. Now in the latter versions they seem to have eliminated all the bugs, but I think if Oracle does take over software or middleware from other companies before releasing their own version of it, I think they should be testing it a little bit more to eliminate any bugs before it goes in the market.

Also, our WebLogic and Oracle Linux are bound together, that's what we were looking for as our High Availability solution. Getting Oracle Linux highly available was difficult, and getting WebLogic highly available was difficult, too. But then trying to put the two products together as well was even more complicated.

We've had no issues with deploying it.

Again, it's very stable, and we've been pleased with it in comparison to Application Server.

It's scaled sufficiently for our needs.

We found Oracle technical support to be very, very difficult to deal with. To eventually get to the right engineer, you have to go through numerous escalations. I think the escalation process probably needs to be revisited by them to provide a better experience for paying customers.

For us, going to WebLogic was the support. Oracle Application Server was out of support, so we went to WebLogic and now we have support on our projects that we're rolling out for many years to come.

The actual WebLogic we're running runs on Oracle Linux, and when we put that on, we found the documentation to get the High Availability running quite complicated as well. Also I would say when Oracle releases these new versions of their products, you find that the support you get isn't probably what it should be. It takes a long while for support to ramp up and to get the knowledge of the new products, so I think a good thing would be for these products to come out unreleased to businesses. Then the support people should be brought right up to speed and be ready for any questions because by the time you get to an engineer who maybe knows the product or knows the situation you're in, it takes an awful lot of escalation time.

For installing or looking at the database, I would say look at the components that you need within the database. What we generally find is that most of the features that we want, or most of the features that are available in Enterprise Edition, we actually wouldn't use. So take time and you might actually see them only by using Standard Edition.