InterSystems Ensemble (legacy product) vs. Mirantis Kubernetes Engine vs. Oracle WebLogic Server

• Best suited for fast development with a fundamental emphasis on object orientation
• Prohibitive costs for very small integration projects

[Mirantis Cloud Native Suite (Docker Enterprise)] is the most advanced tool till now, which works as a VMs
and separates any single application from the dependencies. Also, this tool is
helping me in the agile development of the processes. It is strongly recommended to
almost all major organizations.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Easy to use: The simplicity of its programming language allows fast learning. Visual environment to generate complex code.
• Robust: A fall of the system will not be a problem. Never again will information of the transactions in progress be lost. Never more messages lost.
• Connect to the world: The most popular connection is possible to implement quickly. FTP, File folder, TCP, SMPT, REST.... all method are ready to use. Only define "where" and "how"

Incentivized

• Containers - Docker is the go-to when using Containers, which are super useful if you need an environment that works both for Windows and Linux
• Efficiency - Docker is very lightweight and doesn't demand too much from your CPU or server
• CI/CD - Docker is excellent for plumbing into your build pipeline. It integrates nicely, is reliable, and has an easy set up.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Given that Ensemble and Cache are one of if not the only true fully object orientated database/development technologies for massive transactional data systems its customizability is extensive and it just comes down to the creativity of the developer to get the products to pretty much do whatever they want to do with it. However, this is not necessarily obvious to newcomers to the technology.
• The developer community could do with greater participation from the software developers/application specialists and engineers within InterSystems.
• More extensive documentation and greater access to proven working solutions particularly in the realm of some of the lesser known or new and upcoming technologies.

• Containers are often opaque - if a container doesn't work out of the box, it's messy to fix.
• Logging is complexified by the multiple containers and logs are often not piped to places you expect them to be.
• Networking is complexified due to internal port mapping between containers, etc.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

Docker's CLI has a lot of options, and they aren't all intuitive. And there are so many tools in the space (Docker Compose, Docker Swarm, etc) that have their own configuration as well. So while there is a lot to learn, most concepts transfer easily and can be learned once and applied across everything.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Oracle WebLogic Application Server is great at security, performance and features.

Incentivized

I have yet to raise an issue with InterSystems WRC that they have been unable to resolve to my satisfaction in the 20+ years that I have worked with their products.

The community support for Docker is fantastic. There is almost always an answer for any issue I might encounter day-to-day, either on Stack Overflow, a helpful blog post, or the community Slack workspace. I've never come across a problem that I was unable to solve via some searching around in the community.

Incentivized

The Oracle support is not great sometimes. They take a long time and need a lot of data over and over to resolve issues.

Incentivized

Mirth is another integration platform that we have used but its development, in Java, made us always create new methods every time a new product was integrated. Every connection process had to be developed from the beginning and it was not easy to reuse code. Nor did it allow us to have an extensive catalog of HL7 messaging, having to perform the validation of each and every one of its fields manually.

Incentivized

We've used XAMPP, PHPmyAdmin and similar local environments (our app is on PHP). Because of how easy you can change the configuration of libraries on PHP and versions (which is SO painful on XAMPP or other friendly LAMP local servers) we are using Docker right now. Also, being sure that the environment is exactly the same makes things easier for developing.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• We have integrated 5 laboratories in a treatment monitoring system in less than a month of development. Being able to integrate the following in a period no longer than a week.

Incentivized

• Docker has made it possible for us to deploy code faster, increasing the productivity of our development teams.
• Docker has made it possible for us to decentralize our build and release system. This means that teams can deploy on their own schedule and our dev ops team can concentrate on building better tools rather than deploying for the teams
• Docker has allowed us to virtualize our entire development process and made it much simpler to build out new data centers. This, in turn, is significantly increasing our ROI by providing a path forward for internationalization.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized