At last ! I’ve been waiting a very long time :)
I wondered why WLS was so slow to come out … but ok, I know some huge work has been done on that version.
Waiting room
I was a bit surprised that Oracle did not announce it @Devoxx (since it would have been the perfect occasion) whereas some of my fellows already received an email, inviting them to attend the launch event on the 1st december.
Speaking about that launch event, I was excited to see the WLS 12c new features and when I joined the event, the excitement quickly faded away : I was a bit bored by the first part … I am not saying it was not interesting, but honestly it felt the audience targeted was clearly people not like me. So I kept on doing stuff while listening with a distant ear to the speakers.
Then came the second part, and that was one hundred time more interesting ! Even if the biggest feature announced was … Java EE 6 !
I’m not saying it’s not important, but as the Glassfish blog pointed it out recently, Java EE 6 is more than two year old now … So I guess everyone had already played with Java EE6 (with GF or another one, since WLS is the last one to be out !). I would have liked to see things more WebLogic specific.
Installing the product
I went several times on the Oracle download page to get the brand new WLS version, but everytime I had a “Check back soon” message.
And then, finally, on Friday, it was here, ready to be downloaded : as promised, a zip version is available and its size is hard to believe : 168 Mb ! Looks amazing, compared to the Windows installer version (more than 1Gb).
Following the instructions, I had to define my MW_HOME variable and then I could call the setWLSEnv script without any trouble. Once my environment set, I ran the script and I encountered the following exception :
Removing the JAVA_OPTION part (which I didn’t need) helped me to launch the script but I encountered another error :
Okay, my JAX-WS version is too old … yet, I’m using a recent JVM :
java version "1.6.0_20-ea"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_20-ea-b02)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 17.0-b12, mixed mode)
Ok, let’s update to the lattest version (update 25) … But it didn’t change a thing : I had to follow the instructions, that is to say copy the three libs into the jre/lib/endorsed directory)
It’s better but when I enter the username used to boot, the JVM shuts down …
Thanks to Google, I added an option “-Dweblogic.management.allowPasswordEcho=true” and this got me unstuck
And finally, my domain is created !
To sum up, I would say that the distro is really lighter than what I was used to but finally the installation is not as easy as I wanted it to be.
I had to tweak the scripts, add some options (undocumented) : I guess an extra effort could have been made to simplify the initial installation.
But now my domain has been set up, even if some things were a bit disappointing, I’m going to play with Java EE 6, on my favorite server and I’ll try to share some blogposts later on.
