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BEA WebLogic Server Bible
There are plenty of examples of setting up your WebLogic configuration, with explanations of what the different parameters are and when to use them for Servlets, JSP, EJB, JMS, and more; just what you need when you are having those configuration problems and a great reference to have around when you get stuck. If you like going from concept to implementation, then this is the book for you.
Unlike some other WebLogic centric books, the Bible's coverage of EJB CMP/CMR was good. Also, the coverage of performance monitoring was really well done. And, the ideas for optimization and the thought process behind it was also really well done. These are just a few examples of a really well written technical manual--the missing WebLogic Manual.
A couple areas of concern (some just nits):
1) A few times the examples were WebLogic centric when they could have been written them in a cross platform manner (wrt J2EE ). (Note: A prerequisite of this book is a working knowledge of J2EE.)
2) The EJB examples hard coded the JNDI parameters instead of using the jndi.properties file in the classpath, which is the preferred approach for cross platform J2EE development.
Granted, at times you have to write things WebLogic centric to utilize WebLogic-specific extensions to J2EE, but the book also did this at times when it was not really necessary to do so. A J2EE veteran will catch the difference, and a J2EE novice will not. Bottom line: you should have a working knowledge of J2EE before reading this book and there will not be any problem.
Another problem with the book is that it covers WebLogic 6.1, while WebLogic 7.0 is already out. However, the material is still applicable to WebLogic 7.0. The book was released this year as was WebLogic 7.0. This in an unavoidable problem with books focused on such a target market. By the time they update the 1000-page book to WebLogic 7.0, WebLogic 8.0 will probably be out.
Also, in the next edition they should cover the Weblogic specific Ant tags in addition to the console and other means of deploying applications. Ant is the de facto method for building, deploying and testing J2EE applications, and a book like this should reflect this reality.
If you are new to WebLogic, I suggest that you get this book. If you have been working with WebLogic since before the EJB .8 spec., I suggest that you get this book. This book is not a J2EE tutorial, but it covers the basics and focuses on WebLogic specific areas of concern.
Consider this book recommended.
Links of note:
- WebLogic Bible website
- Books on WebLogic
- EJB 2.0 Tutorial that deploys examples to WebLogic
- Book on building, deploying and testing J2EE components.
You can purchase WebLogic Bible from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Does it cover Weblogic community known hangups?
Like if you have a large enterprise application running (which is typical if you are running WebLogic), that hotdeploying more than twice tends to cause trouble.
And that its a wise idea to delete the temp directories between restarts, because weblogic likes to keep stuff in memory, regardless if the files/apps still exist?
Stuff like that cause many newbie Weblogic developers hours of confusion. I'd like so see it documented in some weblogic texts.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
There is a plethora of Open Source tools out there now that help you avoid vendor lock-in by providing a common interface to vendor specific settings (XDoclet) or actually give you a full fledged app server to begin with (JBoss). A book covering those tools would have a much more lasting value. Not to mention a book on good enterprise application design...
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
$819.8m revenue in a year is not "niche" in my book. Slashdot editors yet again demonstrate their inability to understand that the corporate enterprise market is a billion dollar industry which contains lots of professionals for whom "cool scripts" "Perl" "PHP" and "MySQL" exist only to cause issues.
The Application Server market is over 2 billion dollars a year.
Niche my arse
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Frankly, with JBoss 3.0 out, if you do need EJB support in an application, that's a great place to start - 3.0 supports clustering using the excellent JavaGroups system, and this was the MAJOR weakness of 2.x vs. Weblogic.
And as somebody with more J2EE experience than I would care to admin, you might really want to think about whether spraying EJBs all over an application is the best architectural solution for the problem at hand. Not every "enterprise class web application" needs EJBs. Can you and will you use CMP? If so, then it's worth it, but REALLY make sure CMP will work for your app (by the way, strong CMP capabilities are one area where Weblogic may still shine more strongly than JBoss). Do you need and will you use declarative transactional boundaries? These can certainly come in handy, though you can take advantage of them with session beans, no need to use bulky entity beans if you don't need them.
By the way - one important thing I should mention - as of 6.1 JBoss was still 2-3x faster than Weblogic 6.1 for all of our applications at my company. YMMV though, depending on the nature of what you are doing, and these weren't formal benchmarks. 7.0 may have finally solved their performance issues - I don't know though, and with my past BEA experiences, I don't think I ever want to know.
That's cuz you haven't tried Websphere yet. That's a piece of junk if I ever so one. Overpriced, overhyped and underachieving. They shipped WS5.0 saying it's a EJB2.0 app server but... they did not implement CMP2.0! I mean give me a goddamn break! The main difference between 1.1 and 2.0 is the new CMP stuff! Eclipse rocks but Websphere app server is a steaming pile of crap.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
I'm actually in the middle of load/performance testing WebLogic and JBoss right now, and I'm suddenly realizing how pointless this is.
Say our server hardware costs $6k. To use that box with WebLogic, it costs $40k total (hardware + 2 licenses because it's dual-CPU). To use that box with JBoss, it costs $6k (just hardware).
It doesn't matter what the performance is. JBoss would have to perform incredibly poorly for it to be worth using WebLogic instead, because I can deploy 6 JBoss servers plus load balancing hardware for the cost of a single WebLogic server. So where WebLogic does 400 ops/sec for a particular load configuration, JBoss would have to do about 65 ops/sec to "break even". As it is, JBoss does about 300 ops/sec for the same load config.
Now if I can just convince the developers that no, they do not *have* to have WebLogic...
-Todd
"The details of my life are quite inconsequential..."
First, how are you supposed to do development in an environment where it takes almost a minute to restart the application and find out if your latest change is working properly? That type of coding harks back to the dark ages of coding when you had to wait minutes before the compile and run was finished. There are kludges for creating "simulated" app server environments that give you faster development times, but that can only take you so far.
Secondly, it is practically impossible to create a distributable self-installing application that installs with no fuss into an app server environment. I am amazed that people are willing to put up with the configuration headaches for delivering app server solutions that they would never accept for their desktop applications.
Thirdly, there is a constant confusion surrounding issues like "session" and "non-session" beans, maintaining "transaction compliance", and whole hosts of finagle issues. Many of these issues have a drastic impact on performance depending on your choice, and usually the choices that give sufficient flexibility and acceptable performance are only available with completely proprietary vendor specific solutions.
As far as I can tell, the original vision of having easily developed, easily deployable, and high performing server-side application solutions has been lost and has been replaced by an environment in which it is difficult to create code, painful to deploy solutions, and a real headache to tune for speed.
This is such an unfortunate fate for EJBs. In the original vision, EJBs were to be the server side equivalent of Microsoft's ActiveX controls for the desktop. There are still some good ideas buried in the EJB specs, but the heavy weight app servers have buried these little nuggets inside massive overachieving bloat ware.