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.
I see Oracle WebLogic Application Server being appropriate when an application needs several different data sources and messaging providers configured and accessible, with a configured level of control of resources (connection pools) and timeouts. It is also advisable to create distributed resources that you can configure as always active to provide more processing power, or as failover for situations of availability in case of disaster recovery, for example. An application where the number of required resources configured is very small and almost non-changeable, and no scalability is required, some other options exist in the market with less cost.
I love that the weblogic dashboard allows you to manage applications and see the status of each application.
Oracle WebLogic Application Server simplifies usage periods in the development and production of business applications.
Oracle WebLogic Server allows me to define various aspects of data source entry, including creating a specific multiple connection to facilitate data entry.
Performance and administration are highlighted in weblogic.
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.
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)
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.
Oracle WebLogic Application Server is a leading server side container. It is far superior than IBM's WebSphere application server, JBOSS or Tomcat server. The easiness of using Oracle's weblogic application server is much user friendly and also it has great support and user base globally. I would rate WebLogic to be #1 application server & highly recommend.
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.
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.
