Likelihood to Recommend As an open source rule engine and product suite, Drools is well suited for the small and middle scale business to manage and integrate the rules to build the rule-driven system which can process the business-critical data and events to produce the automated decision. It is better to use Drools in the well-secured environment (back-end behind the DMZ), not putting it on the customer-facing front or exposing it directly the to public where may bring direct security risk in the enterprise environment. Drools still needs a lot hardening on the security side.
Read full review If you need to have complex options in place you can count on Weblogic to be a robust Applicational Server you can rely on. But you would need to keep an eye on maintaining the framework updated quite frequently to avoid security breaches and subsequent severe situations. If you don't have other infrastructure for test purposes, I wouldn't advise you on having devs and QA installing this heavy application in their local machines, there are other lightweight solutions that would be a better fit for that.
Read full review Pros Writing rules with business focus Rules evolution and maintenance separate business logic from program code Read full review The brand relation between Java and WebLogic Application Server usually provides a quicker access to programming features and their availability for the applications deployed. The access to centralized configuration both from console and command line WLST eases the implementation of changes major or not in an organized and expedite way. The maturity of the product is also visible in the available tools provided by the product itself, for both monitoring of resources and alerting for availability and thresholds Read full review Cons Fusion doesn't support persistence of working memory, which brings some extra high availability risk to our business. Guvnor still has a lot room to be implemented, it is not so user-friendly for non-technical people, so a lot of business users complain it is hard to master. Rule execution server doesn't even have JMX implemented, hard to be monitored. Drools is still lacking support for key Web services standards. Read full review The Admin UI should be further simplified, the UI design was not too user-friendly— too many options and clicks required, difficult for the new beginners to figure out what they are looking for. The admin server becomes the single failure point, although Oracle suggested some workarounds by setting VIP and VHost, it was not quite easy and straight forward. Domain replication is hard, requiring a lot of knowledge and scripts efforts. Admin will hang if the node manager communication encounters some issues for one or some nodes in the domain/cluster. Not able to kill/terminate the stuck thread, the only way is to restart the managed server (JVM) License cost is too high, for small businesses. Read full review Usability I would have given it a 10 but sometimes the hogging threads become a issue and needs server bounce. Except that, we are very pleased with the product.
Read full review Performance Oracle WebLogic Application Server is great at security, performance and features.
Read full review Support Rating The Oracle support is not great sometimes. They take a long time and need a lot of data over and over to resolve issues.
Read full review Alternatives Considered I did not participate in drools choice. I can only compare drools with the previous situation which was using nothing.
Read full review I believe the Oracle WebLogic Suite is probably a better all encompassing suite of development tools for the IT department. [It] is probably a bit more expensive than other competitors like
Apache Tomcat or
NGINX , but is worth the investment if you consider the savings from time to get code into production.
Read full review Return on Investment The IT department quickly adopted Drools as it is a very good java-based rule engine, which saves a lot of time to meet the project timeline and balanced our business requirements. Recently we start considering the OpenRules, which may be more business user-friendly. Read full review WebLogic Application Server definitely had a positive ROI since all the applications are deployed on a single platform and making maintenance extremely cost effective. Since all major cloud vendors support and maintain WebLogic, it gives us an opportunity to explore possibilities to move the organizational infrastructure on to the cloud without too much effort. Sirish Vadala Applications Developer Information Technology Specialist
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