The IBM DataPower Gateway is a security and integration platform.
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Oracle WebLogic Server
Score 6.6 out of 10
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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.
WebSphere DataPower Gateway is really beneficial if you are trying to integrate two or more systems. It provides you with comfort and peace of mind by creating a DMZ zone for the services which are going out of the intranet to hit external clients APIs. It is greatly recommended if you have a very high volume service or API which is being used by a majority of clients because it has a dedicated physical box present which takes care of memory, CPU and all such stuff. So, all your transactions happen at wire-speed.
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.
The most obvious thing that DataPower does exceptionally well is security. All the built-in supported security capabilities allow us to isolate most security tasks to DataPower and as a result "protect" down steam services/systems to have to deal with security.
DataPower is very good at protocol conversion and as it is usually used on the edge allows you to narrow down the protocols used between the companies public and private networks.
The appliance concept makes maintenance, recovery and, management so much simpler.
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
The old interface is being really missed by our team as the new WebUI interface is not that intuitive or easy to work with. It takes a lot of time to load. There should be an inbuilt wizard for creating a Rest service as well like there is for an XML based service.
IBM support is very knowledgeable but it's not that easy to reach them. They don't release the fix patches very soon which also becomes a big issue in certain situations where critical projects are involved.
Lastly, DataPower has its steep learning curve and it requires time and effort on your end to gain full control and make the most of the advanced features which it offers. Finding the right resource in the market is not that easy.
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.
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.
It has really taken our business to the next level. We have expanded and integrated with so many new vendors and for all those integrations DataPower is serving as our security gateway.
We don't have to depend on any other tool for doing the load balancing of the incoming requests as that is also taken care inside the WebSphere DataPower Gateway box itself, thereby distributing the load equally.
It has made our platform much more secure, uniform and robust to deal with any kind of incoming message format or threat as well due to its latest security mechanisms and huge processing power.
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.
