I assume that most of the people, who will read this, might have watched "When Harry met Sally". It is a lovely movie of Meg Ryan. I loved it mostly because of Meg Ryan :). I thought to keep the title on similar lines to mark the meeting of two people; in this case me an Oracle Middleware. In the enterprise application world, I started my career with SAP system and have been working on the same platform. The only interaction I still have with Oracle is more from database perspective. Well, now Java too ;). Industry changes quickly.
In this blog series, I would like to share my experiences with Oracle Web Application server, in a "dating" conversation mode, to give it the touch of "Harry and Sally".
For quite some time I have been thinking to explore the other pastures beyond my current relation i.e. SAP. After some "deep thinking", I selected Oracle Application server, which now is called Oracle Weblogic server, as the next probable. I started planning for the meetings and dates. The idea was to know her better. My thoughts are to explore
- Architecture
- Load balancing
- Scalability and
- Failover capabilities.
After some reading, thanks to available documentation and installation/configuration guides, I noticed below differences about this beauty.
- Oracle Weblogic Application server is purely based on Java.
- Platform architecture is quite different from SAP Netweaver server.
- The J2EE architecture is also different from SAP Web Application server. SAP J2EE engine architecture probably has been customized to align better with home grown ABAP server.
- The terminology and naming convention differs in both worlds to specify the same things.
- The most interesting one for me was that, I got much more technological details of the Oracle Weblogic server and the applications that run on it. However, these technical details seems to be abstracted in SAP world.
This gave me confidence and I collected the courage to say "Hello" to Oracle. I got carried away a little and picked the more sophisticated lady, Oracle Fusion Middleware, to meet . Now the only thing left was to find a meeting place. This is the time to use current relations and it did not disappoint me. I had enrolled to SAP virtual world event in April 2010. My laziness allowed me to have a discussion with virtual world only in August and I found another friend, named Cloudshare. I immediately thought to use Cloudshare as the meeting point with my new probable relation i.e. Oracle Web Application server. Will this be called cheating? ;). After some thought, I went through the below tasks to setup the environment for first date.
- Created a user account at Cloudshare.
- Setup the meeting hall with required furniture. In my case all are Windows 2K8 R2 64 bit machines with 1 GB RAM and 25 GB HDD and a desktop client.
- Create an account on Oracle.com to download the software. In my case, it is Oracle Fusion middleware/ SOA suite and Oracle Weblogic server. Please check the versions as this lady comes with her own complex dependency matrix.
- The sophisticated sister, Oracle Fusion, has more demands. It needs Oracle DB as well, which needs to be setup by Repository creation Utility (RCU).
- The meeting place, CloudShare, provided ready to use Oracle DB. But unfortunately, it could not withstand the specifications of the lady. So, I had to work a little more to pacify the lady by fulfilling the demands. Please refer to "dependency matrix" above.
- The information available on net is very useful to handle this lady.
The preparation was all set to execute my plan. And the plan is to setup Oracle Weblogic Server architecture to be able to test the scenarios as mentioned above. The demanding Oracle Fusion also has requirement to setup one "SOA"server and one "BAM"server. To test my plan I setup a "domain" as it is called in this world.
Figure 1: Oracle Fusion Middleware domain setup
I am not getting in to the details of what happened when I started my first date to setup this domain. This is a simple and straightforward process, if you follow the available documentation.
To conclude, the first date was beautiful as expected. Almost everything went smooth and I returned back home happy with success message. I believe that my partner enjoyed as well. I will describe in next blog, how I burned my fingers when I got too close to her.
Love
Arundeep Singh