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.

Microservices

Integration

AppDev

Mobile

Supply Chain automation

CRM (Salesforce and Dynamics integrations)

A lot of times customers really have to consider 'do I want to use a solution like WebLogic or do I want to look at an opensource solution and what kind of app server container do I want to begin to look at.' Some of the great features that we see with WebLogic is obviously it's coming from an Oracle brand so you're going to have a lot of good support when it comes to that.

That could be product support when there's issues, implementation support or whatever the case may be. We always know that Oracle is going to be putting out a lot of new features and stay in somewhat close to where the industry is going as far as getting their features out the door. Some of the other great features in addition to application development is doing content management because obviously in the Oracle WebCenter Suite which is part of the Oracle WebLogic Suite you can begin to do things like building portals, building contact management, building collaborative integrations to social and cloud and whatever the case may be.

WebLogic is and has always been a leading application development platform even going back to the BEA days, so some of the great features that WebLogic provides is scalability, the ability to build very robust applications that can support many simultaneous transactions, many users and the ironclad and robust enough to be enterprise level as well as user facing for the broader public community.

Some of the application features that are out there are the ability to build rich applications using frameworks on WebLogic such as Oracle Application Development Framework or Oracle Mobile Framework or whatever the case may be but a lot of these are very feature rich plugins into WebLogic in order to develop and build user facing applications.

Probably some greater ability to support API management and some greater ability to do things like supporting Node.js. Obviously they have some of that already in there but just basically getting some additional programming languages so that you can build some application consumption patterns a lot easier. Maybe the ability to create more lightweight containers so you don't have to always create a very heavy WebLogic instance. We've seen WebLogic in the cloud and it works but obviously some more investments into that. The ability to work on Amazon EC2 to be able to scale up provision, de-provision on virtual cores within the Amazon environment and be able to do that quickly and seamlessly for customers. We'd like to see some more features in the future around that.

WebLogic is a really robust platform for scalability. They have a lot of features in it around clustering, disaster recovery, elasticity to be able to provision and de-provision instances of WebLogic pretty quickly. We feel scalability is actually one of the sweet spots for WebLogic, the ability to ramp up for concurrent transactions, concurrent users and so forth. We've done a lot of performance testing on it. We've ramped it up through some of our performance testing tools and seen really good results. The key is to be able to maintain a good solid level of performance even though the number of users is increasing or the number of concurrent transaction is increasing and we've seen really good metrics come out of WebLogic. Still the ability to do things like supporting ten seconds or less transactions or click times for end-users and that's really the key is can this still have the same level of performance as you're increasing the volume in the load?

Some of that comes from experience because obviously we've done a lot of implementations. We've had to do things such as open support tickets, call in to support, it can obviously range from low priority to high priority production downtime systems. If you're not an Oracle customer and you haven't had that experience yet, you can actually ask one of the Oracle partner such as us what's been your experiences of support.

We do things as well where if Oracle support isn't moving fast enough for a particular issue, we'll actually sometimes provide that level of support to a customer as well. It's not to replace Oracle support by any means but certainly, it's an ability to support the customer and their applications but Oracle being a very large company, they do a lot of R&D investment in the support so we've seen pretty good results from that. Sometimes folks are always concerned that the person working on their support ticket doesn't have the knowledge. We've noticed Oracle has done a pretty good job at doing escalations from their Tier One support to their Tier Two and Tier Three in order to get the software engineers working on patches or fixes and so forth.

Overall, the support has been pretty good. If you've been an Oracle customer in the past, you would expect the same level of support but if you haven't had that chance, then you would try to ask some questions, do some references with other Oracle customers, talk to their partner community and so forth in order to do that level of evaluation.

Information to consider when choosing a vendor:

Scalability, capacity planning and growth. Can the infrastructure support what the customer's needs are? Can they create applications faster? Is this a framework or a tool or a product set that will make our customers, our IT engineers work faster and more efficient?

Secondarily is do they have robust scalable things like enterprise logging. Is their enterprise logging sufficient so that customers can have full auditing and traceability of all their run time transactions. Analytics is always important as well. Version control and continuous integration and DevOps, the ability to support these features are very important now to today's customers.

If a customer has a couple of hundred instances of WebLogic, how quickly can they support those environments whether they're cloud or on-prem, the customer needs to be efficient. The ability to be able to support environments very quickly is a key criteria as well.

I don't give anyone a ten but from an app server perspective, WebLogic is definitely going to be a 9 to a 9.5 because they've been in my opinion one of the leading app servers on the market today. They've been around for so long, they're proven. I shouldn't say all but a great majority of all the Fortune 2000 have either worked with WebLogic in the past. Because they have such a large footprint, such a large adoption path, they've got dedicated teams, product engineers that are working on a lot of great features. A lot of customers have been very pleased with WebLogic.

The only improvements we'd like to see is a little bit more enablement on the cloud stuff because obviously like we said, WebLogic works in the cloud but we'd like to see things like enablement in the Amazon EC2 cloud where a lot of customers are working very heavily in those environments.

The most valuable feature to us is its user friendliness as well as its admin features, which are much better then the previous versions of Oracle.

First of all, what we do is, we have some products which run on WebLogic. They're really great, in the sense that we have never found a bug or the like. It's just very easy to implement. It's been going great. There are really no issues at all.

I am not a very techy guy, though I know how to use the product. Areas for improvement should come from my developer.

It's pretty stable.

It has scaled well to our needs over time.

When you open a ticket it is resolved in a timely fashion, absolutely. Obviously Oracle has a an advanced process with these things, like the priority of the service request. Based on that it is resolved. We're happy with how it gets prioritized and the service we're getting.

The previous version was called Oracle Application Server. That was the one we used. That used to have a lot of issues. 

After Oracle started pitching on WebLogic, things were really great. 

We didn't consider any other vendors along the way. We are Oracle partners and we are very happy with this. We will continue with them.

I would say out of the servers that we have used - one is an Apache Tomcat which is Open Source, which we typically use for demos and other things; and then the WebLogic, and then the Oracle Application Server. These are the three things we have used. I rate WebLogic at least a nine out of 10.

I would say I'm very happy with it and I would recommend using this product. However, if you want to use Oracle Apache Tomcat, that is also something which works great. The only thing with Open Source is, as long as long as it's working great, it's great. But, there is a possibility that if something goes wrong you will need support. The support will cost as much as buying WebLogic.

It's always better to go with Oracle, where you know what you are getting and you will get good support. That way, I would recommend WebLogic.

We have JBoss, too, and it's far better than JBoss. It’s more powerful, in terms of the number of sessions you can run on WebLogic, compared to the other product.

Our transactions, our business runs smoother. It provides greater efficiency and performance.

The patching is painful; if they wouldn’t release as frequently. Every time you have a patch, you have to upgrade. I’d like to see them improve the release of the patches; instead of monthly, maybe every three months; or specify which patches are critical, which everyone should have, and which ones are optional, like how the OS patches are.

We haven’t had any stability issues; it's pretty stable.

We haven't had any scalability issues.

We have seen good ROI on Oracle compared to JBoss.

We looked at JBoss. We decided to use the Oracle product because our Oracle stack is pretty stable. We have SPARC and we have Oracle databases. It makes sense in terms of getting better ROI.

If you don’t want any outages, you want peace of mind, and your application running smoothly, I would say go for WebLogic. Why would you want a painful experience? It's smooth.

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.

Ease of scalability through both assymetric 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.

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.

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.)

While many seasoned DBAs like to attribute how Oracle's 3-click Weblogic "Typical Install" type is easy-peasy, what doesn't meet the road requirements is that 90% of current WLS installs are to support purchased Oracle applications (OBIEE, EBS, SOA Suite, Identity and Access Management, etc.) and not the historic period of when companies bought BEA as an enterprise alternative to Apache.

The OUI templates that come with the packaged applications tend to whizz you through the 27+ pages of the "Custom Install" without guidance as to why you're picking certain options, nor why you should or should not select different options. With most WLS build settings, you can't go back and reconfigure an existing setup once deployed. For example, even though it's the same WLS engine used, I cannot change an EBS configured WLS to run as a SOA Suite shared install. I have to do it again as a separate installation.

Costs customers money and time. Works, yes, but less than efficient.

Installations first went live in 1998 with version 9.x (originally packaged as BEA WebLogic through IBM) supporting Maximo (Enterprise Asset Mgt) and Cognos (BI) and have continued post-Oracle acquisition to support eBusiness Suite R12.2 and Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c.

Generally the only major concerns involve legacy Operating System desupport which has occurred over the years. Platform migrations have been planned ahead of each lifecycle change in order to mitigate application availability issues. Since the binaries between OS's are not compatible, we do have to exercise some level of re-implementation each time a platform (hardware or software) change forces such migration.

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.

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.

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 3rd 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 appliication 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 of you choose the wrong one inadvertently. Most of the modern upgrade releases are now out-of-place upgrades (meaning they install to new installation filesystem 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 applicaiton 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 featuresets.

Cloning and replication of WebLogic instances isn't exactly a rote science. Because the stacks become secured against the hosting environments, encapsulating and re-cconfiguring 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.

One of the most valuable features of WebLogic is that deployment is an easy process. The code can be deployed on multiple instances without rework.

With a huge number of servers for our application, manual deployment would be an extremely tedious, error prone and time- (hence money-) consuming process. WebLogic has assisted us in this aspect.

The initial setup and administration does require expertise. While bigger organizations can afford to have dedicated horizontal teams, I assume smaller organizations may not be able to afford this. The default setup should include more features such as more scripts and more users with different privileges, which could resolve this issue.

I have used this solution for over four and a half years.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability either.

WebLogic was our first choice.

We did not require vendor support. Setup was done by my team and me.

Licensing is expensive but it is worth the cost. If you are going to utilize all its features, then you should go for it. If you do not have enough budget, you could choose for other freeware options and use automation and orchestration tools instead. This will surely have an impact on stability in the initial phases of implementation.

Although, I was not working while choosing it, WebLogic has been the first choice for organization. However, now after many years we are evaluating to look for other freeware options.

You need to consider the licensing and upgrade costs. In addition, it will help to have a dedicated administration team.

I think that the best feature of WebLogic, as far as middleware goes, is that it's very license-friendly. It's a part of the suite of products that our DBA has included, and I trust that because it means the DBA really wanted it. There are multiple products that compete with WebLogic, but it's completely Oracle, which means that the licensing with other Oracle products is great.

Because it's in the middleware layer, I would like to see better scalability for scaling up. Also, they should provide sizing guidelines so that customers can take it and deploy it.

WebLogic has been there for a while. I've had my hands on it since it Oracle acquired the company in 2008.

We've had no issues deploying it.

It's a no-brainer that it’s stable. The only thing you should pay attention to is how scalable it is.

You should run your workload on WebLogic then see if it scales well. Then based on that, you keep on adding the WebLogic server to scale more.

I think technical support is knowledgeable, but in some instances I've seen they are completely focused on one single product, not seeing the whole end-to-end solution of the customer. That's where they get lost.

The most valuable feature of WebLogic for me is that we can host all our web apps on it, HFM mainly.

It's been great overall. We get to host all of our HFM web apps on there, all the business users can log on, and it runs seamlessly. It suits our business needs pretty well.

When you run the WebLogic admin console, it takes a few minutes to come up. Having the admin console come up a little quicker would be an improvement.

It's definitely stable. We have weekly reboots, and it seems to come up after the weekly reboot. We have no problems with stability.

It is scaled to our needs and there have been no issues. We just run a fresh install and the WebLogic sites come right up.

The initial setup was relatively straightforward. Basically, it’s a couple check boxes, a few nexts and then a couple configuration items and connection strings. An amateur computer user could go through it and use it straight away.

Before you configure anything for Oracle, make sure you start the WebLogic admin console on the primary web servers.

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.