Weblogic 12C history

WebLogic 10.3.6 is still the latest 11g version but Oracle will support 10.3.6 till 2018 and extended support till 2021. So Oracle’s Fusion Apps and we have enough time to migrate to WebLogic 12.1.X. Oracle also promised that the upgrade should be easy. That being said we can take look at the WebLogic 12.1.X features. 

Jun 2013 Oracle already released WebLogic 12.1.2 which has since WebLogic 12.1.1 been certified for Java EE 6 and it looks like the Java EE 7 certification is still far away, so Oracle updated the 12.1.2 version with some badly needed frameworks like WebSockets. To make the developer experience more complete Oracle added more support for Maven and it comes with a utility to synchronize a Maven repository with all the needed WebLogic libraries.

12.1.2 is also the first release, which comes with Fusion Middleware infrastructure components. For now FMW 12.1.2 contains ADF & OWSM and comes with Enterprise Manager & MDS.

WebLogic 12.1.2 replaced the BEA installer and the BSU patching utilities with the Oracle Universal Installer and the OPatch utilities for applying patches.  To make it even more easier it just comes in one taste ( no Java included or a specific Operating System installer ).  Just one big jar file for WebLogic with Coherence or one for WebLogic, Coherence and FMW.

WebLogic 12.1.2 introduced Dynamic Clusters, Elastic JMS and integrated Coherence configuration and management. Dynamic Clusters is a great feature to extend the WebLogic Cluster with Managed Servers based on a Server Template. For this we only need to change a parameter on the cluster and the new Managed Servers are distributed over the NodeManagers. To use this feature your blades need to have enough free resources to handle the extra Managed Servers.

Elastic JMS can be combined with Dynamic Clusters, this way we only need to create 1 JMS server, target this to the cluster and every Cluster node will have its own JMS server.

When we look at the announced features of WebLogic 12.1.3 and 12.1.4 we can see that Oracle continues on this road.