Oracle WebLogic Server is a unified and extensible platform for developing, deploying and running enterprise applications, such as Java, for on-premises and in the cloud. WebLogic Server offers a scalable implementation of Java Enterprise Edition (EE) and Jakarta EE.
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Pricing
Fiorano ESB
Oracle WebLogic Server
Editions & Modules
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Fiorano ESB
Oracle WebLogic Server
Free Trial
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Free/Freemium Version
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Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Entry-level Setup Fee
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Fiorano ESB
Oracle WebLogic Server
Features
Fiorano ESB
Oracle WebLogic Server
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
Fiorano would be a good choice for small-medium businesses that need integration capabilities with clients but don't want to carry the burden of an in-house development team. The software can be used by technical non-developers and the organization offers professional services to get you off the ground. For larger organizations that have an in-house development team and a wealth of internal resources, other "enterprise grade" middleware/ESB solutions may be more applicable.
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.
Fioranio's underlying design is very good. In the event of a sudden shutdown, it would - in theory - be able to recover messages that were in-flight.
The visual design surface is very appealing and provides a very quick and easy way to decipher data flows. It has a definite advantage over traditional develop and document processes where documentation tends to be out of date. With Fiorano, the flow is already visualized in a relatively easy to understand way.
One thing that Fiorano had over some competitors was connections into our AS400 data queues. Not all middleware solutions have that - which is a boon for organizations that still run an iSeries in the back-end.
The support people are generally very well educated and easy to get a hold of if you have a support agreement in place.
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
Fiorano scalability was a problem for us - specifically we were told about a limit of the number of components that could be run on a single server. This was not explained during the pre-sales and is a serious limitation of the platform.
Some of the components in Fiorano are just poorly implemented. For instance, we used the FTP component to download a large multi-GB file. Apparently, that component requires equal RAM to file size. So, if you download a 10GB file, you'll need at least 10GB of RAM to do so.
Stability was also problematic for us - some of the components or entire data flows would suddenly stop for no reason. At time they coudln't even be restarted and we were forced to restart the Fiorano service. Not an ideal situation to be in for mission critical data flows.
Consistency is a problem for the components in Fiorano. There are wide ranges of design variations in the UI between components. Even in the same component, it could be the case that you'd have to switch back to the "old" component UI to view certain important settings. This made development more difficult.
3rd party support doesn't exist - perhaps it isn't popular enough? There isn't a community supporting Fiorano which means that problems require you to go to a support person.
Debugging issues has been difficult sometimes, the documentation is too dense and finding the the root cause for an specific issue takes time.
The Oracle WebLogic Server console UI feels old and gives a sense of lack of innovation even though it provides so much functionality.
I'm not sure if Oracle WebLogic Server supports more modern frameworks, but it feels more like a Java EE specific, maybe there's an opportunity there to appeal to newer application platforms
Oracle WebLogic Server has so many features that sometimes it's hard to find the right place to setup things, I think the dated user interface does not help with that either. This has a direct impact when deciding to use it as your application server, you'd need to have the right people and invest the time needed to master it. If you're application justifies it then it will definitely be a great choice in the long run.
We are evaluating options such as Apache Nifi as a possible replacement for our Fiorano data flows. We've also used PilotFish technologies that has been able to fit the same use cases as Fiorano (minus the visual component). Generally the products mentioned above excelled in areas of stability and through-put compared to Fiorano, but none have been able to consolidate our ESB components into a single platform.
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.
Fiorano added another piece of complexity to our ESB solution but has not pulled its weight as far as ROI. As we started ramping up on the product, it continued to show it's short-comings and we are working now to ramp it down. Overall, it has not been a positive experience.
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.
