WebLogic Suite Reviews

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.

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.

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 like that fact that it is the most scalable and the best-of-breed application server for hosting any kind of an application. One of the best things about WebLogic Suite is that the enterprise customers we work with have a broad spectrum of Oracle products that they use, from BPM to E-Business Suite to whatever. One thing common to all of these solutions is the fact that they're all on WebLogic server.

It's multi-tenant, is highly available, and I believe it's the best-in-class application server for Java. Most of Oracle's products are in Java, so they are all supported on WebLogic Server. That is one of the biggest aspects. It's very reliable, it's enterprise-grade, so we get great support from Oracle as well.

Technically, there's absolutely nothing that you cannot get from a WebLogic Server in terms of availability and scalability. It is very easy to maintain, and if you look at other JMX process based servers, they don't give you a great console. But WebLogic Server gives you a console for administration, creating resources, managing those resources, troubleshooting, diagnostics, and everything else all in one place.

In an enterprise, a solution is not delivered by a single system but a lot of them. You would often find that to achieve a particular business function, you're using ABS, you're using Server Suite, you're likely using several other solutions. So WebLogic Server provides one common platform for deploying all of these applications, and you don't have to invest in five different application servers for five different applications that you're using. It helps consolidate your systems, especially your middleware servers.

Multi-tenancy is needed. It is starting to come in the latest releases, but it is a very basic multi-tenant feature at the moment. I would like a more enterprise-grade multi-tenancy feature coming into WebLogic. Many organizations use WebLogic for all of their applications, but what we also have to think about is that each application wants to share the platform, and they want some sort of isolation from other tenants or other business units in an organization. How WebLogic addresses that challenge is by having multiple tenants that share the same infrastructure without disturbing each other.

I've been using WebLogic since v5.0 to v12.2, where it is right now.

We've had no issues with deployment.

Stability is not necessarily dependent upon WebLogic, but it depends upon the type of application that you deploy. It's a common platform where you can put pretty much everything. Most often than not, what we see is a combination of WebLogic and the application that you deploy on top of it which causes stability issues, not just in isolation.

For example, you know that you have Java and that Java has memory leaks. But it's not just Java that's causing memory leaks, it's the application and Java in combination that can cause this problem. The same thing with WebLogic, so it's not just WebLogic alone. It is almost always your application as well as WebLogic Server together that causes a problem. But as a platform, it is very stable.

We can scale it to thousands of users without a problem. We've had no issues at all with scalability.

The initial setup is very easy and very straightforward.

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 managed server and deployment architecture.
• Being able to isolate or combine applications at various levels whilst taking advantage of load balancing and clusters.
• The web interface is fairly easy to use, but for those who want it, the majority of commands can be executed via scripts WLST.
• Being able to create deployment templates for use on other hosts.

It's allowed us to contain and administer the WebLogic environment as a managed service. We support and manage our customer environments onsite and remotely by using the web GUI.

There is little to improve, but I would say the deployment process could be more user-friendly. Using staging to secure your deployment environment does bring its problems. They are easy to solve but require access to the drive space.

I've been using it since 2009.

We have come across some issues with clustering, but it was the third-party application that needed the change and not WebLogic.

We have found that on the odd occasion of a host shutdown, the services and Node Manager wouldn’t start the deployments as specified. Manual intervention was required.

We've had no issues scaling it for our needs.

It's very good as Oracle support has always been useful. It's a bit painful to fill out all the details and provide all the logs, but it works so I’ll keep using it. The people on the other end are usually very experienced and resolve the issues relatively quickly.

It's straightforward and easy to install and set up. There is plenty of documentation and online experience to follow and learn from.

We are the vendor and implement the solution for our customers. My advice would be to get yourself on one of the administration workshops that Oracle provides or self-teach on YouTube. Talk to a partner in your area as they can provide you with workshops and training.

Oracles prices/licenses are painful to deal with. Understand the architecture and application requirements up front, i.e. number of users or hardware available.

WebLogic has been first choice for us numerous times.

If you are unsure about your decision, run a POC with authorization from Oracle through a partner like NEC. Trial and test it for 30 days and see if it meets your requirements. Ensure you have a WebLogic administrator to help guide you through it.

Understand the recommended requirements for the apps and assign the correct memory. This will allow you to achieve a good user experience. The High Availability and high performance provide a solid foundation for application hosting. The apps teams see the benefit and stability when they start using it.

The most valuable feature is the update deployment feature. Update deployment is when you already have an application deployed and you want to handle a new deployment. The feature ensures you don't need to add or remove anything. Rather, you just need to update and the feature will handle everything else, like adding the new features that have been released on the new deployment. It's very simple.

I had issues when I installed the SSL. With WebLogic, it's a very lengthy process.

The solution isn't 100% stable, but it's pretty good. I'd rate it 3.5 out of five in terms of stability.

Scalability on the solution is great. It's very very easy to scale.

I've never had to reach out to technical support.

The initial setup is very simple. 

If you have everything ready from the OS side, it requires one to two hours to deploy.

The licensing for the solution is pretty expensive. It may be the most expensive solution, if you were to compare it to the competition.

I'd suggest those considering implementing the solution to move to the cloud. It's very simple and easy.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

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.