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A dose of Java strengthens WebLogic 6.0

BEA Systems' latest app server release boasts excellent use of J2EE and the potential to scale in stride with your company

By Tim Fielden, InfoWorld, 04/27/01

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Companies looking to decrease their applications' time to market, boost developer productivity, and relieve many of the headaches associated with integrating existing business systems often look to the application server for assistance -- and rightly so. By offering features such as load balancing, security, clustering, and many other basic types of plumbing, app servers have quickly gained popularity as the Cadillacs of middle-tier services.

As such, the list of vendors hawking application servers -- which reads like a who's who of computing -- is ever growing. Although currently ranked No. 1 in marketplace positioning, BEA Systems, with its latest version of WebLogic Server 6.0, faces stiff competition from fast-approaching rivals, including IBM with WebSphere, the Sun-Netscape Alliance with iPlanet, and newcomer Oracle with its Oracle 9i.

The Bottom Line

WebLogic Server 6.0

Business Case
Companies looking to implement an application server should consider BEA Systems WebLogic 6.0 for its ease of use, strong integration, and industry acceptance. Technology Case
Developers will find WebLogic's implementation of the J2EE specification rock-solid and therefore easy to use or extend. Pros
  • Excellent use of J2EE specification
  • Assortment of sample applications to learn on
  • Easy to administer
  • Promising scalability potential
Cons
  • No help offered in installation
  • Passwords shown in clear text when starting server
Cost
0,000 per CPU for Advantage Edition; 7,000 per CPU for Premium Edition Platforms
Windows NT, Windows 2000, AIX, 4.3+, Red Hat Linux 6.1+, HP-UX 11.0+, Solaris 8, Tru64 Unix BEA Systems, Inc., San Jose, Calif.; (800) 817-4232 www.bea.com


Looking to extend its lead, BEA's latest release delivers numerous enhancements, including updates to reflect recent improvements in the current Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) specifications, added support for EJB 2.0, and features such as the Java Management Extension (JMX).

Other new features include an implementation of the JavaMail specification along with a new internationalized message catalog that makes it easier to provide localized error messages for those who do business abroad.

This update of WebLogic also addresses one of the major drawbacks of past releases: the need for a separate Web server. In addition to being compatible with the HTTP 1.1 standard, WebLogic Server 6.0 supports both servlets and JavaServer Pages (JSP). As an added bonus, the server even offers virtual-hosting support, load balancing, and failover capabilities.

For shops considering asynchronous messaging as a means to not only effectively transmit events between applications, but also to loosely couple their systems, this latest release implements the Java Message Service (JMS). In addition to integrating well with the clustering service, the WebLogic Server's implementation of JMS boasts the capability of handling database, file, or even in-memory persistence, giving developers a choice between publish/subscribe and point-to-point messaging.


For more enterprise computing news, visit InfoWorld. Story copyright InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.

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