New RESTful Management API in WebLogic 12.1.3

What you should know:

WebLogic 12.1.3 comes with a new implementation of the RESTful management interface.

Why RESTful?

RESTful interfaces are interesting because they …
– can be used from any language (UNIX curl, Python, Java, you name it …)
– are leight-weight. All you send is an URL using http (and possibly some JSON data)
– are leight-weight on the client side. No JVM is required, unlike let’s say JMX.
– can easily be used across firewalls because the underlying protocol is http.

What is new?

Unlike previous versions of the management interface, WebLogic 12.1.3 provides a technically better implementation for RESTful management, since the interface…
– incorperates versioning
– uses canonical URLs
– uses the well-known http verbs GET (to retrieve information. e.g about a configured data sources), POST (to create e.g. a new data source), OPTIONS (to create a JSON data structure used as a template for create a new datasource), DEL (to delete a datasource).
– returns RESTful URLs in the response.

What is missing?

Currently there is no support for JMS, Workmangers, etc. Since there is no generic way of accessing MBean attributes in WebLogic’s implementation of the RESTful management interface you have to wait for Oracle to implement support for those ressources.

Gossip is spreading that the missing ressources will be included in WebLogic 12.2.1.

More?

more information can be found in the Oracle documentation. There are also some web casts available on the WebLogic Book Youtube channel.

Even More?

I recorded a 2 minute tech-tip for OTN. Previously I explained how the open source Jolokia alternative can be used together with WebLogic.

 

Cloud Computing Workshop in Berlin

A Tad of Cloud Evangelism

It’s always a pleasure to travel to Berlin for various reasons. A fortnight ago I was running an AWS/Google/Netflix OSS/Cloud Management workshop for a non-disclosed European Agency. I had about 3 dozens of attendees working at the forefront of technology.

 

mosaik

 

Yesterday a Thank-You letter from their director arrived.

“My people work on mosaic pieces… Your presentation showed the whole picture”.

Thanks a million! I makes me feel flattered.

WebLogic 12.1.2 Node Manager Bug

Update: Bug fixed in WebLogic 12.1.3:

the bug described below seems to be fixed in WebLogic 12.1.3.  Node manager is now checking the state of the servers and correcting it if wrong.

node manager bug fixed

As usual, please feel free to provide your own experience in the comment section.

WebLogic 12.1.2 Node Manager Bug

While working with WebLogic 12.1.2 I discovered the following bug. Not sure though if the same would happen with 10.3.X.

Try the following:

– Create a domain with one managed server

– Configure a machine, then start the per domain node manager. Using the admin console start the managed server. All working lovely so far.

– It’s lunch time. Stop node manager. Then stop the managed server using the admin console. This shouldn’t be a big deal.

– After lunch: start admin server and node manager. Node manager reports managed server is running (which is not correct!).

– Try to start managed server and it will report an error message that it is in incompatible state. 🙁

bug

Reproduce it!

Check the video below to reproduce it (just a quick recording, not a nice one):

 

1.) Interesting enough the server.PID file is removed when the managed server is shut down. However when restarting the node manager the managed server it is detected as running.

2.) With the node manager stopped, when forcing the managed server to shut down via admin console, ms1.state file shows FORCE_SHUTTING_DOWN, whereas when forcing the managed server to shut down (same button) with node manager running, the state is SHUTDOWN.

 

As you could guess, I wanted to spend my morning with sth else.
Comments welcome! Lunchtime for me now.

 

Oracle Coherence with WebLogic 12c

Collecting material for the next edition of my WebLogic 12c book I began writing a primer about Oracle Coherence from a WebLogic perspective. Coherence is part of the WebLogic Suite and you can start using it right away.

Many WebLogic professionals still consider Coherence as something complicated and challenging to get started with, so I made a number of hands-on Coherence primer screencasts available – also more blog postings with best practices will follow.

Make sure to subscribe to WebLogic book YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/weblogicbook

 

Basic Introduction

Coherence is a coherent data grid that provides a number of different cache implementations, which are well described here. The following figure illustrates how data A. B, C is stored into different nodes with the same put(key, value) method.

coh_cache impl

Oracle Coherence Basics, Multicast Test and Firewall Issues

Oracle Coherence Command Line, Replication and Availability

 

 

Development with NetBeans Introduction

Oracle Coherence NetBeans API and NamedCache

 

 

Coherence ActiveCache with WebLogic

Coherence ActiveCache can be used to offload session data from WebLogic into Coherence cache nodes. These cache nodes can be managed with WebLogic Nodemanager. A detailed explanation can be found here.

coh_wlsdomain

 

Oracle Coherence ActiveCache for WebLogic 12c configuration

 

Oracle Coherence ActiveCache Demo for WebLogic 12c

 

Oracle Database as a Service in the Amazon Cloud: Now with APEX, Oracle XML DB and your Data Center’s IPs.

Amazon Web Services improved its Relational Database as a Service (RDS) for Oracle. It now supports APEX (finally, see the lengthy APEX discussion here), the OracleXMLDB and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

For more information: