WebLogic Suite Reviews

I use the tool for hosting.

I am satisfied with the product. The product is reliable. We can depend on it.

A supplier installed the solution. They were managing the solution, and then the contract ended. Then, we faced issues because we did not get the necessary training to use the solution. I had to train myself to use the product. The product is not easy to use if we do not have proper training.

I have been using the solution since 2016.

The tool is very stable.

The tool is scalable.

The support is not good. In countries where Oracle is not available, Oracle gives licenses to third-party companies to sell their product. They are called FDPs. Oracle does not make sure that the FDP engineers are competitive and that they can handle things. Most of the time, we need to raise SRs to Oracle. I don't think the model I'm using works well because I have to raise SRs with Oracle repeatedly.

It would be better if the FDP engineers were skilled. Even if we have a service level agreement with them, we do everything ourselves. That is the reason I ended up doing a lot of things myself. I read a lot of things and trained myself. We cannot rely on FDPs.

Neutral

I have used Microsoft most of my life.

I'm running the tool from Oracle Private Cloud Appliance. Since I have some training, I can easily deploy the solution.

We pay for Oracle Premier Support. The product comes bundled with Oracle Premier Support.

People who want to use the solution must research the tool and get trained to benefit from it. I am not familiar with all of the features of the product yet. I do not know whether the solution is platform-dependent or platform-independent. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

Our organization uses Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) for managing our operations and deployments. We also utilize WebLogic and ADF in conjunction with ODI.

We utilize WebLogic to deploy all of our web-based programs using Java and all of our Oracle web services.

The most valuable feature of WebLogic is it has excellent performance and stability compared to the previous solution we used. 

I have been using WebLogic Suite for approximately 10 years.

The stability of WebLogic Suite is good.

WebLogic Suite is highly scalable.

We have approximately 500 people using the solution in my organization.

I rate the scalability of WebLogic Suite an eight out of ten.

I have not used another solution similar to WebLogic Suite.

The solution is easy to set up.

I have received a return on investment using WebLogic Suite.

I rate WebLogic Suite a nine out of ten.

I usually use the single model or the clustering model of the solution. We deploy the dual application, ADF application, and BPM application, and there is a different scenario for each of them even though they all use WebLogic services. Each use case is somewhat different. It is our customers that use WebLogic. I deal with mid-size companies and also enterprise size companies. We are resellers and I'm the technical manager. 

WebLogic has a very robust server so the product is robust. If there are issues it's usually because there's been a misconfiguration or maybe the application deployed under the WebLogic server has errors. Another positive is that you don't need to go editing external files - the console and the enterprise management tools that Oracle provide for monitoring are really easy to work. The parameters and everything can be found on the console.

Another point is that it has a different way for configuring and working with the application server. You have the EM, the console, and the WLST which you can use the scripting for. You can even extract the WebLogic server from another dual application which can be used in a programming application so you have a console over their application service.

One other feature that is useful is that you can extract WebLogic from different scenarios and from different environments. Because it's based on Java you can run with WebLogic on a PC which has Windows on a server which has AIX or Linux or any other environments. It can handle all of the environments. There are so many good things about this application, I could go on for an hour. 

I think the only area where Weblogic could be improved would be if they were to develop a solution for smaller applications. WebLogic is really a solution for enterprise companies, meaning that it requires a lot of RAM. Sometimes you're working on a smaller application but WebLogic still needs a huge amount of RAM for it to work. Jboss or Apache, on the other hand, would start with the minimum amount of RAM, for example, 300 megabytes and with WebLogic, you need 3GB or 4GB. Because it's very heavy, the extraction time is longer compared to other solutions. Jboss would start in seven seconds, whereas WebLogic would start in 40 or 50 seconds. If there was a light version of WebLogic that would be useful. 

I would also like to be able to turn off features. For example, if I don't want to use the GMS, I can't turn it off. 

I've been using this solution for 10 years. 

This is a very stable solution.

The product has great scalability. It can handle many concurrent users because of its coherent architecture.

We don't need any support for this solution but many of our customers get the Patch Updates from the Oracle website. 

I think Oracle WebLogic and IBM Websphere are the best application servers that anybody can use for the Java application. I haven't worked with Websphere but from what I've read it's good, although it's only relevant for enterprise applications. Oracle WebLogic can be used for both enterprise and standard applications, and also in the development environment.If you're looking at midsize applications, then there are other competitors as well, whether from Oracle, Jboss, Tomcats, all of them. For enterprise applications, I think WebLogic and WebSphere are the two main players in the market. 

The initial setup of WebLogic is very easy. You only need about 10 minutes to start the application. Compared to other Oracle products, it's very straightforward and easy to configure. 

I'm not involved in licensing. I know that Oracle has a site called shop.oracle and you can check it there. There is a support team and online sales team that could help with that. 

If you take the time to go through the documentation of this product and its features you'll become familiar with the enterprise standards. It's a good path to becoming familiar with enterprise architecture. Even from an academic perspective, learning and using this application server can be a good start to understanding what can be achieved with an enterprise application server. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

I like that it's industry tested and available on various platforms. I'm not sure we use any specific features of it, other than it’s a robust web server; the services, the database pools, good integration with Oracle database 12c, which is another product that we have.

Having the Oracle support has improved how my organization functions. We have a support contract for it 24/7. That's a huge thing, having the support.

Being able to stay on top of the release cycle and having reps that can keep us in the loop has been a major benefit.

I would like to see better integration with some of the cloud stuff that Oracle provides. We just went to an Oracle hackathon; a couple of us, a couple of weeks ago. It's a little confusing how the WebLogic Server, the cloud services and some other services interact; we were just trying to see how that works. What's the vision Oracle has bringing those two worlds together? That's what I'd like to see.

I’ve found it very stable. We haven't really had any issues that are related to the product at all.

We have scaled it. We've had this product several years and kept upgrading it, of course. We started out with, maybe, one server instance, and then two, and now we're up to four. We haven't really had any major issues, as long as you follow the standards. It's been great.

We had some Oracle people that we worked with that came in house. We were doing a major upgrade. People came and helped us day-to-day for a number of weeks. It's been great. As I’ve mentioned, having the 24/7 support, especially from our DBAs’ perspective, has been a real plus.

Back in the day, probably 15 years ago, there were very few application servers. WebLogic was, at the time, the best. Of course, it changed hands a few times. Oracle finally bought it. We were an Oracle shop. We had a database. There just wasn't really any other solution, in terms of having the quality and support that we enjoy. I think that's important.

When you're running a business and you have customers around the country depending on you to get the business done, having the up time, having the server stable, and having that support behind us is the most important thing.

When I’m looking at a vendor, it's important that they follow industry standards, and have very strong support. I keep coming back to the 24/7 support. That's been invaluable for us; to be able to pick up the phone, or have somebody get on site with us because it's a mission-critical type of business we're in. That's the most important; having the Oracle name and standard, following that.

At that time, there were only a few options. At a previous company, we even made sort of a homegrown, homespun version, aspiring to get to WebLogic someday, when we had enough money. This was a start-up.

When I joined the company I'm with now, they had just become an Oracle shop and started with this product. I think we evaluated JBoss at the time. Every couple of years, we evaluate and see what's out there.

WebLogic's still the strongest, with all the suite of products that they provide.

If you are serious about it and you have the money to spend, then spend it on a winner. There's all kinds of open source stuff out there. Stuff is changing constantly. If you're trying to run an enterprise business, it's sounds great, it's great for proof of concept. But, when it comes down to it, you don't want to build your own car. You want to buy something that's got some standards, has a big name behind it. That's what I suggest.

I don't give anything a perfect rating. This is software. It's constantly changing. Again, the breadth of services that are provided, and the support, again, is key to us.

We use WebCenter Content and WebLogic. We use the tool to centralize the data and manage the document and life cycle, metadata management, and workflows. We use WebCenter Content for content management.

The solution is useful for centralizing data.

The documentation is too broad. The content search is not easy. We see a lot of sources of information, but we must dig in to get what we need. We need to do trial and error. It might be because there is a lot of information in the documentation.

I have been using the solution for five years.

The customer support team must improve. Unless our queries are critical or highly prioritized, there are not many responses. We need to share a lot of information for any query we ask. It's not good.

Neutral

Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

We are using WebLogic Suite for application insurance and consent of a user.

I have been using this solution for approximately 10 years.

The solution is stable. However, the earlier versions of the solution were not as stable. I have used versions 7 through 12.

WebLogic Suite is scalable.

The technical support has been good from WebLogic Suite which is Oracle provides.

The installation was easy, it took approximately one week.

There is a license required for this solution and the price could be reduced.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate WebLogic Suite a nine out of ten.

I work with Telcos, one of the cell phone providers in South Africa, and they use it for their billing infrastructure. 

The applications running on the WebLogic suite are for billing and customer CRM, which goes out to the call centers and the dealers. We maintain the environment.

The feature that I have found to be the most valuable is the ease of deployment. 

In the beginning, you do tend to struggle a bit, but once it's deployed, then everything falls into place and maintaining it is quite simple.

It is difficult to say which features can be improved at the moment, as we are not working with the most current version and I am not aware of the features offered in the new version. 

Once we catch up and move on to version 12C, we need to see what can be migrated to the cloud. 

It might not be suitable to migrate the systems to the cloud, or maybe only portions of it. For example, it makes sense for our web services to go on the cloud, but not the actual application, the CRM system.

If we are considering the version that we are currently working with, then I would say that it's all fairly straightforward when it comes to using it. However, there are some small things, such as being able to restart clusters, where you can choose to restart each server one by one instead of all at the same time.  

The ripple start is what we refer to as shutting down and restarting one server at a time in a cluster. In other words, when you kick off a ripple start, and it would go through, it will shut down the one instance, and start it up, then it would move to the next one. It wouldn't shut them all down, and I wouldn't have to manually, stop one, start it up, wait for it to come up and then move down to the next one. This solution would benefit from the inclusion of a ripple start function for clusters.

Also, the cloud integration, which I've heard is very strong with Oracle, it's the shift and lift methodology. 

IBM WebSphere used to do things like that, where you could do a ripple start as opposed to shutting everything down and it would manage each one individually. That would be useful. if it's a live environment we have to ripple start. That's the big one, otherwise, we are pretty happy with everything.

The debugging function is nice on the Weblogic, but one thing WebSphere has, is, that you can apply the debugging permanently, or just until the server is restarted. 

That might also be a feature that would be nice on WebLogic, but not critical because we turned it off afterward.

This solution is very stable.

The only time it's not stable is when the code has a memory leak, or it's heap dumping or the garbage collection isn't fine-tuned. That is not the environment, it's the code. The environment itself is extremely stable.

We have to get caught up as the version we are using is out of support. 

The buzzword right now is cloud, and at some point, we have to see what we can take to the cloud and what we cannot. There are plans to move in that direction.

It is scalable. We have added extra servers and extra instances when it's been required. 

We don't run on VMs, we run on IBM LPARS. We don't run VMs where you can have them firing up, on-demand, but it is scalable for our purposes.

Officially it's not supported, but we do get support when it's required. For example,  approximately six months ago there was that day-zero vulnerability bug that had to be patched. 

The patch that we applied on WebLogic actually broke some environments.

We logged tickets and worked with Oracle and they were able to support us, isolate the issue, and give us new fixes. 

The support was very good and worked very well.

From this experience, I would rate the technical support quite highly. They were able to pinpoint the issue quite rapidly and assist us with a new patch. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Previously, we used the IBM product called WebSphere.

WebSphere and WebLogic are both very similar. They have the same purpose, the same end. I liked the way WebLogic is compartmentalized in the server where you can go and find the configurations, and see it on a file. It's fairly file-based, the data source is everything. 

WebSphere wasn't stored quite that way, so you couldn't work as nicely outside the system. 

There might have been a few other tweaks that WebSphere had which Oracle doesn't. But on the whole, I would say Oracle is far better, it more superior to the IBM product.

The initial setup is complex. We did a migration from WebSphere to WebLogic.

The reason it's complex is it was already running, but it was a very different animal than WebSphere. There were code changes required, which fell to the developers on the development side. On the operational side, things like fine-tuning little things like the data sources work a bit differently, but once you figure one out, then the rest all falls into place.

At the moment the deployment model we use is on-premises, and nothing has been migrated to the cloud. It's a project for the future.

The deployment was approximately just over one year to get it migrated fully to where we were stable enough to turn off the WebSphere.

It was a little bit better than I had expected it to be. We all felt it would be an eighteen-month to a two-year project, and it did come in a little bit less than that. But of course, the business expects it in three to six months. We did try but realized that it was not going to happen unless everything just magically works the first time.

I'm on the operations side, I'm not on the development side. We look after the infrastructure and the upgrading.

The developers are a large team. On the operations team, we have approximately ten people. One person can do a feature release, which is what we call a deployment, in an evening. This is done three times a week.

We do deployments roughly once a week, three times a month. 

We have our own in-house developed deployment manager, which we call the Deployamater, and they set up all the deployments. The manager fetches the EARs, JARs, pages, and JSP files, then it deploys them. 

We don't use the automated deploying via Oracle. We manage it like that, but we do it in an offline environment. 

We duplicate our environments and we go to our offline environment, deploy there, test it first, and then switch the traffic to the new environment that it's being deployed to.

I am a subcontractor to Vodacom, and the company I work for is a vendor, and they are an approved vendor with Oracle.

It is difficult to offer advice because every scenario is different, but I would suggest that you use the available expertise. There is a lot of expertise, don't try to do it all alone.

I wouldn't go back to WebSphere and for me, I would say it is the market leader.

I would recommend this solution and I would rate this product a ten out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for the UI (user interface), as a middleware product that communicates between different servers including application servers and databases.

I think the way the managed servers and the load balancing as well as the threading have been distributed is very good.

The transaction handling of WebLogic and the way it is designed is excellent.

Customization is a bit of an issue for us. 

Support could be better. The expertise when we have some Oracle WebLogic issues and challenges is not there. The issues are not being addressed in time. This really needs to be improved going forward.

I've been using the solution for five years.

We've been using the solution for five years and haven't had any issues with stability so far. There haven't been bugs or glitches. We haven't had crashes.

The solution is scalable. This shouldn't be a problem for organizations that need to expand.

We have about 200 people using the product currently. Mostly they are developers and testing teams.

We've contacted technical support in the past. They've been okay, but they could be better. Sometimes it takes a while to get answers and some individuals don't have a clear knowledge base. I'd rate it seven out of ten in terms of satisfaction levels.

We haven't used a different solution. However, we have a vendor who has created a product which is based on the WebLogic.

The initial setup was not handled by myself. We have a separate team that handles the actual installation of WebLogic. However, I didn't see challenges in the implementation and the team didn't raise any issues that I know of.

I don't remember the exact version number of the solution we are using, but it's around version 12.

I'd suggest other companies shop around. There are other competitors. The cost and the actual purpose of the application should be considered before choosing any solution. 

However, we can recommend this solution considering the stability and scalability that we have seen over the last five years.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.