Introduction to the BEA WebLogic Platform

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Introduction to the BEA WebLogic Platform

• Peter Laird
• Managing Architect
• WebLogic Portal

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About the Speaker

• Has 10 years of server side Java development
  experience
• Leads the architecture team for BEA WebLogic
  Portal, a leading Java enterprise portal product
• Has worked on WebLogic Portal for 7 years as a
  developer and architect
• Holds the following certifications
• Oracle DBA
• Cisco CCNA
• Regular contributor to BEAs developer website
• http//dev2dev.bea.com

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Housekeeping

• Oracle has made a bid to acquire BEA Systems
• Cant be discussed in this venue
• This is a product talk
• Usually not allowed, but was explicitly approved
  by IOUG
• Will cover Java Enterprise Edition, enterprise
  portal, enterprise integration at a high level
• Primarily focused on the WebLogic product stack

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Agenda

• History of BEA and the WebLogic product line
• Components of the WebLogic Platform
• WebLogic Server
• WebLogic Portal
• Workshop for WebLogic
• WebLogic Integration

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History of BEA Systems

• Started in 1995 with venture capital to form a
  middleware company
• Soon after acquired the Tuxedo product
• Mission critical transaction processing platform
• In use by banks, telecoms, airlines, etc
• Based on the C programming language
• Wide platform support
• Positioned BEA as a player in the enterprise
  middleware space

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History of WebLogic

• Started in 1995 with a few engineers
• Began as a middle tier Java database connectivity
  server
• Over time more features were added to the server
• Often first implementations of new Java
  specifications
• Became a general purpose Java application server
• Rode the rise in popularity of server side Java
• Acquired by BEA in 1998
• Java Enterprise Edition specification introduced
  by Sun in 1999 WebLogic was the dominant
  implementation
• Has been a leader in JEE ever since

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History of WebLogic Platform

• In 1999, BEA began to build out the WebLogic
  product line
• WebLogic Portal started as Personalization Server
  and Commerce Server in 1999
• Evolved into WebLogic Portal in 2001 with version
  4.0
• WebLogic Integration began as a collection of
  products
• BEA acquired Crossgain in 2001, a Java tooling
  specialist
• WebLogic Workshop soon followed
• All 4 products combined into an enterprise class
  platform, called WebLogic Platform
• First coordinated platform release was version
  8.1 in 2003
• WebLogic Platform at release 10.2 as of spring
  2008

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History of WebLogic Platform

• WebLogic Server is the foundation of the platform
• Integration and Portal are run on Server
• Workshop provides the platform development
  experiences
• WebLogic Platform is the focus of this talk

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History of the AquaLogic SOA Platform

• In 2005, BEA introduced a new product line to
  complement Tuxedo and WebLogic
• AquaLogic product line is focused on Service
  Oriented Architectures (SOA)
• Some products in the AquaLogic suite
• AquaLogic Service Bus
• AquaLogic Enterprise Repository
• AquaLogic Business Process Management
• AquaLogic User Interaction Portal
• AquaLogic Data Services Platform

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Core Values of the WebLogic Brand

• Commitment to Java
• Standards support
• RASP - Reliability, Availability, Scalability,
  Performance
• Hardware, O/S, and Database independent
• WebLogic Platform interoperability
• Easy upgrades and backwards compatibility
• Support for applications blended with Open Source

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WebLogic Server
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WebLogic Server Overview

• Will focus on differentiated features of WebLogic
  Server
• Feature areas to discuss
• Java Enterprise Edition
• Single Process Architecture
• Rich Internet Appliciation (RIA) support
• EJB 3 and JPA support
• Java Message Service
• Security
• Database Connectivity
• Clustering
• Application deployment

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WLS Java Enterprise Edition

• WebLogic Server (WLS) is a JEE (a.k.a J2EE)
  implementation
• JEE 5 supported in WebLogic Server version 10
• Servlet 2.5
• EJB 3.0 a major improvement
• JSP 2.1
• JAX-WS 2.0 a major improvement
• JMS 1.1
• ...and many others
• Number of other containers in the JEE space
• WebLogic Server provides great implementations of
  the specs
• But talking about the specs is not a good way to
  spend our time
• Will focus on differentiated features

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WLS Single Process Architecture

• WebLogic Server can be deployed as a single JVM
  process
• Does not require a front end HTTP proxy server
• It contains a full featured HTTP stack in Java
• Easy setup for development environments
• For production, clustered configurations more
  common
• Covered later

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WLS RIA Support

• RIA applications are highly interactive
• Implemented with Ajax, Flex, Laslo, etc
• Clients fire many fine grained requests at the
  server
• RIA apps can overload the server polling for
  updates to data being displayed
• WebLogic Server has provided the
  AbstractAsyncServlet for many years
• Client issues a request to the servlet to be
  notified on an update
• Servlet delays fulfillment of the request, no
  thread is consumed
• An application event notifies the servlet that an
  update has occurred
• Servlet sends a response to the client

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WLS RIA Support

• WebLogic Server 10.3 adds on to the
  AbstractAsyncServlet
• Provides an HTTP Pub/Sub server
• Useful when implementing applications such as
  chat
• Uses the Bayeux protocol

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WLS JMS Support

• Full support of JMS 1.1
• The additional features of WebLogic Server fall
  into the following high level categories
• Enterprise-grade reliability transaction and
  fail-over features
• Enterprise-level features manageability, life
  cycle, resource pooling
• Performance memory and disk IO optimizations
• Tight integration with WebLogic Server works
  within the same process space
• Interoperability with other versions of
  WebLogic Server, with Tuxedo

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WLS JMS Reliability

• Full participation with transactions, including
  XA
• File and Database backed persistent message
  storage
• Store and Forward (SAF) protects against message
  loss when remote destination is unavailable
• Advanced clustering and failover features
• Transparent failover
• Whole server migration
• Load balancing

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WLS Security Service SSPI

• Every enterprise has different requirements and
  existing security systems
• WebLogic supports a pluggable model for security
  (SSPI)

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WLS Security - Authentication

• Uses Java Authentication and Authorization
  Service (JAAS) as the foundation
• Supports multiple user repositories concurrently
• Use boolean flags (AND, OR) to define how they
  relate
• Most popular authentication stores have an
  Authentication Provider implementation already
• Database
• LDAP
• ActiveDirectory
• SSO vendors
• API can be implemented for custom repositories

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WLS Database Connectivity

• WebLogic Server has its roots in Java database
  connectivity

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WLS Database Connectivity

• Advanced connection pooling
• Dynamic sizing
• Connection testing
• Statement caching
• Multi Data Source
• Wraps multiple actual Data Sources
• Provides load balancing and fail-over
• Data Source aliases
• Maps the same Data Source into multiple JNDI
  names
• Certified with many databases, including Oracle
  RAC

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WLS Clustering

• Recall a core value of the WebLogic brand
• RASP - Reliability, Availability, Scalability,
  Performance
• Achieved primarily through WebLogic Server
  clustering

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WLS Clustering

• Application is deployed to the cluster machines
• Client requests are load balanced across the
  cluster
• Plugin to Apache, IIS or hardware load balancer
• Session affinity supported by the load balancer
• Application state replicated to one other member
  of the cluster
• HttpSession and Stateful Session EJBs
• Primary and Secondary design
• Cluster heart beat detects downed nodes
• Clients of the affected node are sent to the
  secondary on next request

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WLS MAN and WAN Clustering

• Application is deployed on multiple clusters in
  multiple data centers
• MAN and WAN clustering options handle HttpSession
  state
• Metropolitan Area Network (MAN)
• Low latency assumed between the data centers
• Synchronous Http Session replication

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WLS MAN and WAN Clustering

• Wide Area Network (WAN)
• High latency assumed between the data centers
• Asynchronous Http Session replication
• Uses a replicated database as the transport

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WLS Application Deployment for Devs

• WebLogic Server supports quick development round
  trips
• Change-Aware Classloader
• Replaces the affected modules classloader to
  achieve a focused redeployment
• Fast-swap
• Uses an advanced form of Java class redefinition
• Prevents any application redeployment after
  changing a class
• Supports many edits, including adding and
  removing methods and changing method bodies

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WLS Application Deployment for Prod

• WebLogic Server supports advanced Production
  application management
• Offers the following options
• In-place redeployment immediately updates the
  application in the server, existing users are
  interrupted
• Partial redeployment allows only a subset of
  the application to be redeployed
• Production redeployment existing clients
  continue to use the old app, and the new app
  serves new clients
• Can optionally bring application online to
  administrators only
• For final testing purposes

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WLS Virtualization

• Key data center technology for reducing operating
  costs
• Better hardware utilization by allowing servers
  to be consolidated into a virtual computing cloud
• WebLogic Server supports virtualization efforts
  through its Virtualization Edition (WLS-VE)
  release
• WLS-VE deploys on top of a special Java Virtual
  Machine, LiquidVM, that does not require an
  operating system
• Liquid Operations Console manages application
  deployments into the WLS-VE cloud

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WLS Virtualization
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WebLogic Portal
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WebLogic Portal

• WebLogic Portal (WLP) is an enterprise portal
  product
• Built on top of WebLogic Server
• Deploys as a JEE application composed of many
  components
• Too much to discuss, so will focus on the primary
  features
• Primary feature areas we will discuss
• Portal Framework
• Portlet Container
• Portlet Federation
• Portal Services

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Enterprise Portal Products

• Enterprise portals consolidate many web
  applications into a single web application
• Achieves a number of goals
• Efficient application management and deployment
• Consistent user experience
• Centralized security
• Common infrastructure
• WebLogic Portal is a product offering that
  supports these objectives.

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WLP Portal Framework

• Core concept to all portal products is the user
  interface
• WLP has a highly scalable and customizable
  framework
• Control tree implementation (like JSF)
• Provides nested customization concepts library,
  admin, user
• Highly tuned caching for scalability
• WLP supports these and other user interface
  controls
• Portal page a logical page that is surfaced as
  a tab or menu item
• Book a collection of pages
• Portlet a small window into an application
  often there are many portlets on a page
• Header and Footer artifacts that appear on the
  top and bottom of every page
• Look and Feel the style of the page

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WLP Portal Framework
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WLP Portal Framework Features

• Dynamically defined Desktops
• Create new portals from existing components in
  production
• Interportlet Communication
• Robust server-side eventing mechanism to allow
  portlets to communicate with each other
• Framework Ajax
• Automatically Ajax enables the portal without
  recoding the portlet
• Framework automatically weaves in Ajax into
  existing portlets
• Client-side JavaScript programming
• JavaScript object model, REST APIs for dynamic
  customization
• Community Framework
• Allow users to organize themselves into
  communities
• Community leaders can define their own Desktop
  without ITs help

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WLP Portlet Container

• WLP officially supports portlet development using
  a number of technologies
• JSP
• JSF (JSP or Facelets)
• JSR 168
• Struts/Pageflow
• IFrame
• Web Clipping
• Workshop for WebLogic provides wizards for these
  types
• Other technologies are known to work
• Velocity
• Spring Portlet MVC

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WLP Portlet Federation

• Portals support SOA initiatives
• Often portlets consume remote data services
• But requires the UI for the data service to be
  implemented for each Portal deployment
• Portlet federation solves this problem

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WLP Portlet Federation - WSRP

• Industry standard for federation is WSRP
• Web Services for Remote Portlets, an Oasis
  standard
• SOAP based protocol for hosting portlet UI as a
  remote service
• Provides rich portlet features modes, states,
  user profile, postback
• WebLogic Portal has been a leader for WSRP
• Expert group participation
• Robust specification implementation
• Features above the specification

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WLP Portlet Federation HTTP

• WebLogic Portal is a pioneer in a different
  federation approach
• Portlet Publishing allows any deployed portlet to
  be a URL addressable widget
• http//myportal.abc.com/portal/customer/orderList.
  portlet
• Can be consumed by any web application via
• IFrame
• Ajax snippet
• Extends the value of developed portlets by
  allowing them to surface on legacy web
  applications
• Targets the long-tail of IT web applications
• Can also easily be consumed using other
  approaches
• WLP portlets as Google Gadgets

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WLP Portal Services

• WebLogic Portal also includes a rich eco-system
  of out of the box services, like Content
  Management and Personalization

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Workshop Studio (formerly Workshop for WebLogic)
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WLW Development IDE for the Platform

• General purpose Java development platform
• Java Web applications
• JEE applications
• IDE for the WebLogic Platform
• Contains additional tools to support Server,
  Portal, Integration
• Based on Eclipse
• Open source IDE platform with a very active
  community
• Hundreds of available plugins
• Workshop is the Eclipse IDE, plus a set of
  plugins

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WLW Features

• Support for multiple web application frameworks
  in one IDE Struts, JSF and Beehive
• Flexible tools for creating and testing WebLogic
  web services
• ORM mapping support via BEA Kodo and Hibernate
• Automatic generation of Spring configuration and
  DAO classes
• Database inspection tools
• WebLogic Platform specific tooling
• App X-Ray sophisticated application analysis

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WLW Features
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WebLogic Integration
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WebLogic Integration

• A single environment to build an integrated
  enterprise application
• Business process integration (from business
  process modeling to integrating enterprise
  adapters)
• Custom application development using robust Web
  services and controls
• Developing an application to provide employees,
  partners, and customers with an integrated view
  of applications and data.

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WebLogic Integration
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WLI Process Engine

• Supports back business process execution
• Based on Java Process Definition format
• Can be exported as a BPEL process
• Can orchestrate a process between Web Services,
  human input, and native adapters

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WLI Worklist

• WLI provides a set of worklist components out of
  the box for users to manage their processes

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WLI Data Transformation

• Integration of multiple systems usually entails
  data transformation
• WLI provides sophisticated mapping tools for this
  purpose

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WLI Adapters

• WLI provides an Adapter framework
• Develop custom adapters for back-end systems
• Use pre-built adapters for popular enterprise
  systems

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Conclusion

• WebLogic Platform is a full featured enterprise
  stack
• Has been shipping for 5 years
• Mature and high quality
• Thousands of customers