• Web Applications provide the basic Java EE mechanism for deployment of dynamic web pages based on the Java EE standards of servlets and JavaServer Pages (JSP). Web applications are also used to serve static web content such as HTML pages and image files.

• Web Services provide a shared set of functions that are available to other systems on a network and can be used as a component of distributed web-based applications.

• XML capabilities include data exchange, and a means to store content independent of its presentation, and more.

• Java Messaging Service (JMS) enables applications to communicate with one another through the exchange of messages. A message is a request, report, and/or event that contains information needed to coordinate communication between different applications.

• Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) provides pooled access to DBMS resources.

• Resource Adapters provide connectivity to Enterprise Information Systems (EISes).

• Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) provide Java objects to encapsulate data and business logic.

• Remote Method Invocation (RMI) is the Java standard for distributed object computing, allowing applications to invoke methods on a remote object locally.

• Security APIs allow you to integrate authentication and authorization into your Java EE applications. You can also use the Security Provider APIs to create your own custom security providers.

• WebLogic Tuxedo Connectivity (WTC) provides interoperability between WebLogic Server applications and Tuxedo services. WTC allows WebLogic Server clients to invoke Tuxedo services and Tuxedo clients to invoke EJBs in response to a service request.

• Coherence provides distributed caching and data grid capabilities for WebLogic Server applications.

• Overview of WebLogic Server Application Development describes developer tools and best practices for coding WebLogic Server applications.

• WebLogic Server clusters provide scalability and reliability for your applications by distributing the work load among multiple instances of WebLogic Server. Incoming requests can be routed to a WebLogic Server instance in the cluster based on the volume of work being processed. In case of hardware or other failures, session state is available to other cluster nodes that can resume the work of the failed node. In addition, you can implement clusters so that services may be hosted on a single machine with options to migrate the service to another node in the event of failure.

  In addition to replicating HTTP session state across servers within a cluster, WebLogic Server can also replicate HTTP session state across multiple clusters, thereby expanding availability and fault tolerance in multiple geographic regions, power grids, and internet service providers.

• Elasticity in dynamic clusters enables the automatic scaling of dynamic clusters and re-provisioning of their associated resources. The elasticity framework leverages the WebLogic Diagnostic Framework (WLDF) policies and actions system.

• Coherence clusters provide scalability and fault tolerance by distributing data across any number of cluster members ensuring that data is always available and easily accessed by any application hosted in WebLogic Server.

  In addition, web applications can choose to use a Coherence data grid for storing and replicating HTTP session state to improve scalability, fault tolerance, and performance.

• Work Managers prioritize work based on rules you define and by monitoring actual run time performance statistics. This information is then used to optimize the performance of your application. Work Managers may be applied globally to a WebLogic Server domain or to a specific application or component.

• Overload protection gives WebLogic Server the ability to detect, avoid, and recover from overload conditions.

• Network channels facilitate the effective use of network resources by segregating network traffic into channels based on the type of traffic.

• Simplified JMS cluster configuration and high availability allows applications to easily scale WebLogic JMS services such as JMS servers, SAF agents, and persistent stores. Cluster-targeted JMS servers and persistent stores allow targeting the JMS service artifacts directly to the cluster and eliminate the need to configure artifacts individually for every server in a cluster.

• WebLogic Server persistent store is a built-in, high-performance storage solution for WebLogic Server subsystems and services that require persistence. For example, it can store persistent JMS messages or temporarily store messages sent using the Store-and-Forward feature. The persistent store supports persistence to a file-based store or to a JDBC-enabled database.

• Store-and-forward services enable WebLogic Server to deliver messages reliably between applications that are distributed across WebLogic Server instances. If the message destination is not available at the moment the messages are sent, either because of network problems or system failures, then the messages are saved on a local server instance and are forwarded to the remote destination once it becomes available.

• Enterprise-ready deployment tools facilitate deployment and migration of applications from the development phase to a production environment.

• Production redeployment enables enterprises to deploy a new version of their application without interrupting work in progress on the older version.

WebLogic Suite contains the following server-side components:

• Oracle WebLogic Server

• Oracle Coherence

  Oracle Coherence enables organizations to predictably scale mission-critical applications by providing fast and reliable access to frequently used data. By automatically and dynamically partitioning data in memory across multiple servers, Oracle Coherence enables continuous data availability and transactional integrity, even in the event of a server failure.

  WebLogic Server includes a Coherence container that simplifies the management and deployment of Coherence clusters and Coherence-based applications.

• Overview of TopLink

  Oracle TopLink builds high-performance applications that store persistent object-oriented data in a relational database. It successfully transforms object-oriented data into either relational data or Extensible Markup Language (XML) elements.

  Oracle TopLink is an advanced, object-persistence and object-transformation framework that provides development tools and run time capabilities that reduce development and maintenance efforts, and increase enterprise application functionality.

  Oracle TopLink includes support for EJB 3.0 in Java EE and Java SE environments, as well as support for EJB 2.n container-managed persistence (CMP). You can integrate Oracle TopLink with a variety of application servers, including Oracle WebLogic Server, JBoss Application Server, and IBM WebSphere Application Server.

Along with the code examples, two versions of a complete sample application, called Avitek Medical Records (or MedRec), are installed when you install the examples, as described above.

The original MedRec (which was included in previous versions of WebLogic Server) is a WebLogic Server sample application suite that concisely demonstrates all aspects of the Java EE platform. MedRec is designed as an educational tool for all levels of Java EE developers. It showcases the use of each Java EE component and illustrates best practice design patterns for component interaction and client development. MedRec also illustrates best practices for developing applications on WebLogic Server.

The Spring version of MedRec, called MedRec-Spring is MedRec recast using the Spring Framework. If you are developing Spring applications on WebLogic Server, you should review the MedRec-Spring sample application. In order to illustrate how Spring can take advantage of the enterprise features of WebLogic Server, MedRec was rearchitected to replace core Java EE components with their Spring counterparts. The functionality in the original version of MedRec is reimplemented using Spring in MedRec-Spring. Refer to the MedRec-Spring sample for details.

To launch MedRec, run startWebLogic.cmd or startWebLogic.sh script from ORACLE_HOME/user_projects/domains/medrec, where ORACLE_HOME is the directory you specified as the Oracle Home when you installed Oracle WebLogic Server.

To launch MedRec-Spring, run the startWebLogic.cmd or startWebLogic.sh script from ORACLE_HOME/user_projects/domains/medrec-spring, where ORACLE_HOME is the directory you specified as the Oracle Home when you installed Oracle WebLogic Server.