WebLogic is still a good J2EE full stack container solution
October 12, 2019

WebLogic is still a good J2EE full stack container solution

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Oracle WebLogic Application Server

Weblogic Application Server had become the corporate standard for more than 10 years, it is widely used in our IT department, for dev, test and production environment. It is majorly used to host the full J2EE stack web application and back-end solutions (JSP, JSF, EJB). We use many features of the Weblogic, which includes Clustering, Deployment, Environment management, Monitoring, DataSource, JMS, etc. We even deploy a lot of SOAP-based web service and some Jersey-based REST service endpoints in Weblogic. Those applications support the core business from many domains. Even today, our EJB is gradually replaced by microservices and our monolithic web application is replaced by SPA, we still use Weblogic environment to host some legacy but very important core applications.
  • Easy to use and configure
  • High availability, very reliable and stable (can configure self-healing strategy)
  • Very well integrated with the other Oracle product family
  • Deployment in the cluster is quite handy
  • 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.
  • Oracle Weblogic Application Server helps us deliver a very stable hosting environment to deploy web applications and services.
Oracle Weblogic Application Server gains its reputation from the performance, easy of maintenance, to be compared with the competitor solutions. However, Weblogic is "all-in-on" solution, sometimes it is too fat for some business needs that only requires part of the full feature set. Also, its license cost is too high.
Weblogic will become your choice if you desire complex, important, high available business applications which is tightly coupled with some resources (database, JMS, for example). If you are looking for a light container (especially when you don't need EJB), and also if you have financial constraint, you should choose another open-source product like JBOSS or Tomcat (embedded in Spring Boot also), Jetty (for responsive service).

Oracle WebLogic Server Feature Ratings

IDE support
8
Security management
9
Administration and management
9
Application server performance
9
Installation
9
Open-source standards compliance
7