OOW 2013 Summary for Fusion Middleware Architects & Administrators by Simon Haslam
This September during Oracle OpenWorld 2013
the weather in San Francisco, as you see can from the photo, was
exceptionally sunny. The dramatic final few days of the Americas Cup
sailing competition, being held every day in the bay, coincided with the
conference and meant that there was almost a holiday feel to the whole
event.
Here's my annual round-up of what I think was most
interesting at OpenWorld 2013 for Fusion Middleware architects and
administrators; I hope you find it useful and if you think I've missed
something please add a comment!
WebLogic and Cloud Application Foundation (CAF)
The big WebLogic release of the year has already happened a few months ago with 12.1.2 so I won't duplicate that here.
Will
Lyons discussed the WebLogic and Coherence roadmap which essentially is
that 12.1.3 will probably be released to coincide with SOA 12c next
year and that 12.1.4, the next feature-rich WebLogic release, is more
likely to be in 2015. This latter release will probably include full
Java EE 7 support, have enhancements for multi-tenancy and further
auto-scaling features to support increased density (i.e. more WebLogic
usage for the same amount of hardware). There's a new Oracle Virtual
Assembly Builder (OVAB) out already and an Oracle Traffic Director (OTD)
12c release round the corner too.
Also of relevance to
administrators is that Oracle has increased the support lifetime for
Fusion Middleware 11g (e.g. WebLogic 10.3.6) so that Premier Support
will now run to the end of 2018 and Extended Support until 2021 - this
should remove any Oracle-driven pressure to upgrade at least.
Java Mission Control
Java
Mission Control (JMC) is the HotSpot Java 7 version of JRockit 6
Mission Control, a very nice performance monitoring tool from Oracle's
BEA acquisition. Flight Recorder is a feature built into the JVM which
records diagnostic events into, typically, a circular buffer which can
then be used for historical analysis, particularly in the case of a JVM
crash or hang.
It's been available separately for WebLogic only
for perhaps a year now but, more significantly, it now includes JVM
events and was bundled in with JDK7 Update 40 a few weeks ago. I
attended a couple of interesting Java One sessions on JMC/Flight
Recorder and have to say it's looking really good - it has all the
previous JRMC features except for memory leak detector, plus some
enhancements around operative sets and ECID filtering I think.
Marcus
also showed how you could add your own events into flight recorder by
building your own event class - they are then available for graphing
alongside all the other events in JMC. This uses a currently an
unsupported/undocumented API, but it's also the same one that WebLogic
uses for WLDF events so I imagine it is stable. I'm not sure quite
whether this would be useful to custom applications, as opposed to
infrastructure services or ISV packaged applications, but it was a very
nice demonstration.
I've been testing JMC / FR enabling on several
environments recently and my confidence is growing - it feels robust
and I think could very soon be part of my standard builds. Read the full article here.
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