WebLogic Suite Reviews

The solution's ease of use is its most valuable feature.

The solution needs to share more information in terms of training. There needs to be more documentation involved to help those who are completely new to the product.

The solution is stable.

The solution is very scalable. It's easy to add processes even if you are new to the solution.

We haven't had much interaction with technical support, so I can't speak to any direct experience.

We didn't set up the solution ourselves. Rather, we hired our vendor to handle all of the implementation details for us.

A vendor set up the solution on our behalf.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

It's a good product. I'd recommend it to others. 

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

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.

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.

It performs well.

It is connected with our systems, and our systems run on Oracle. It is beneficial because it integrates with our internal systems. This resolves half of our problems for our internal system integration, data retrieval, and subscription to specific events.

A valuable feature is its integration with Oracle Database. We have another system running Oracle Database which can be easily updated from the database and pushed to the middleware. Also, it easily connects to other Oracle products and services.

We need to have more adapters and connectors, especially healthcare system adapters. This solution doesn't have connectors to other external applications. We connect with other vendors' and other companies' systems, therefore we have been asking Oracle for specific interfaces because we have been unable to integrate with these systems using any adapters.

It is stable.

Scaling is costly. 

Technical support is very costly.

We tried to connect our healthcare systems with Oracle, and it needs a lot of support. We would needs to hire a consultant, and the consultant would cost us $4,000 a day. Therefore, it's very costly to integrate with the other systems, which is why we are looking for other alternatives.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

In general, it is a costly solution.

Microsoft.

I rate this solution as a seven out of 10, because it is not fully satisfying our needs. It is good in specific areas, but it's not satisfying all of our requirements. It is not a one stop shop.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• It is affordable.
• Easy to use.
• Ready documentation, training, and examples.
  

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.