WebLogic "lite" Administration Console

If you have used WebLogic 8.1 console and planning to upgrade to 9.2 or 10.x, boy you are in for a surprise! Well, its good and bad.

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Java 1.4 and WebLogic 8.1 End Of Life

As you might already know Sun announced End Of Life for JDK 1.4 to be October 2008. Since WebLogic 8.1 runs only on JDK 1.4, BEA announced EOL for WebLogic 8.1.

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Encrypting a string in weblogic

One of my developer was asked me this morning if he can encrypt a string so that he does not have to store a clear string in his scripts or variables while configuring resources especially JDBC connection pool's.

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Rotating your Standard Out/Err log files

If you are a WebLogic Developer or an Administrator there is 90 - 100% chance you have had situations where the WebLogic Server log files are filling up the disk space.

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Dev2Dev Blog

I have decided to move all my dev2dev blog post's to blogger since I am planning to actively post not only about BEA products but in general about other topics.

Ideas for WebLogic Server Console Extensions

I worked many years at BEA mostly developing tools and applications that ease the management and administration of WebLogic Server.

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Jython 2.2 is finally here!

The first major production release of Jython after almost 6 years is finally here. Jython 2.2 implements Python 2.2 and also includes a number of features from Python 2.3.

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WLST startServer re-visited

From the past few months I have been working on a project to create a framework for our WebLogic application developers that can be used to easily build, configure and manage their WebLogic Servers.

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WebLogic Server Console Extensions Project

A few months ago I have started the WebLogic Server Console Extensions CodeShare project on dev2dev to serve as a repository for WLS 9.x console extensions and posted a few extensions. Continue reading here

In case you run into this issue ...

While upgrading our WLS console to use the latest libraries i.e. to use the latest Struts, Beehive, WebLogic Portal versions.

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Jython is just too useful

Recently I had to do this repeatedly while working on a project.
1) Revert files with extension .foo that are checked out from source control under a base directory structure.

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WLST as a Jython Module

Few questions that I answered about WLST as a module via various email queries recently.

What is a Jython Module?
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Having a profile for your WLST sessions

Did you know that you can have a profile setup for all your WLST sessions?

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WLST - BEAWorld session - part 3

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WLST - BEAWorld session - part 2

Continuing with the demo, reaad here

WLST - BEAWorld session - part 1

In BEAWorld this year I had a session on New and Enhanced WebLogic Scripting Tool with the tag line 'Automate the mundane and slay the difficult'. Inspite of being the last session for the whole event I was impressed with the turn out. Before diving deep into my presentation I did a WLST familiarity check and was pleasantly surprised by the number of users in the audience who raised their hands. The familiarity is majorly due to the fact that we released WLST on dev2dev that works for WLS 7.0 and 8.1 (all service packs). BEA very well understands that many of its major customers do not prefer using tools that are not supported. Hence BEA recently announced support for WLST 7.0 and 8.1. So now users can grab the tool from dev2dev and start using it. If you find any problems you can even file a support case and we will resolve the issue.
···As part of my presentation I have demo'ed some new features in WLST that are available OOTB in 9.0 and promised the audience that I will make the demo scripts available via my Blog. The demo included how one could start from scratch and create a full blown domain consisting of servers in a cluster all via few or one single simple WLST script(s). The demo started of with a simple script that loaded a default template that ships with a typical WLS 9.0 installation. The script sets the administration username and password, sets the administration server name to 'myserver' and writes the domain to a directory. Here's the script that is used to setup the default domain.

# Read the default template that comes with WLS installation
print "Read the default domain"
readTemplate("d:/bea/load47/weblogic90/common/templates/domains/wls.jar")
# set the password for default administration user
cd("Security/base_domain/User/weblogic")
cmo.setUserPassword("weblogic")
setOption('OverwriteDomain', "true")
cd("/")
cd("Servers/AdminServer")
cmo.setName("myserver")
writeDomain("d:/bea/mydomain")
print "Done creating and writing the domain"
closeTemplate()

Lets explore how you can enhance this script to do more. We will configure couple of managed servers, create a cluster and add these managed servers to this cluster. In my demo this is exactly what I did after starting the server and while connected to the server. Here we will do all this even before starting the administration server. The script will look as shown below.

# Read the default template that comes with WLS installation
print "Read the default domain"
readTemplate("d:/bea/load47/weblogic90/common/templates/domains/wls.jar")
# set the password for default administration user
cd("Security/base_domain/User/weblogic")
cmo.setUserPassword("weblogic")
setOption('OverwriteDomain', "true")
cd("/")
cd("Servers/AdminServer")
cmo.setName("myserver")
cd("/")
create("ms1","Server")
create("ms2","Server")
create("mycluster","Cluster")
cd("Servers/ms1")
cmo.setListenPort(8001)
cd("/")
cd("Servers/ms2")
cmo.setListenPort(9001)
assign("Server", "ms1,ms2", "Cluster", "mycluster")
writeDomain("d:/bea/mydomain")
print "Done creating and writing the domain"
closeTemplate()

After we had our minimal domain setup, I started a Node Manager using all the defaults. By default the Node Manager Server is started at port number 5556 and all the logs will be written to the directory where WLST is running. For more options check out the help for startNodeManager via help('startNodeManager'). Now once I have the Node Manager up and running, I used the command nmConnect to connect to the Node Manager and started the administration Server. After the server is started I connected to the server. Here's the script that I used.

# start the Node Manager, this starts at
# default port 5556
startNodeManager()
# connect to the NodeManager, the default admin
# username and password can be used
nmConnect("weblogic","weblogic")
# start the server via the NM
nmStart("myserver")
# now disconnect from NM
nmDisconnect()
# connect to the administration server that we just started
connect("weblogic","weblogic")

If you notice I used the administration username and password to connect to the NodeManager server. This is because by default the username and password are set to the administration server's username and password in development mode. If you set up your domain to run in production mode you will have to explicitly set this username and password via the SecurityConfigurationMBean's NodeManagerUsername and NodeManagerPassword attributes. Here's the WLST console output after running both the scripts.

D:\bea\mydomain>java weblogic.WLST

Initializing WebLogic Scripting Tool (WLST) ...

Welcome to WebLogic Server Administration Scripting Shell

Type help() for help on available commands

wls:/offline> execfile("d:/bea/domain.py")
Read the default domain
Done creating and writing the domain
wls:/offline>execfile("d:/bea/start.py")
Launching Node Manager ...
Successfully launched the Node Manager.
The Node Manager process is running independent of the WLST process
Exiting WLST will not stop the Node Manager process. Please refer
to the Node Manager logs for more information.
The Node Manager logs will be under D:\bea\mydomain\.

Connecting to Node Manager ...

Successfully connected.


Starting server myserver

Server myserver started successfully

Successfully disconnected from Node Manager


Connecting to weblogic server instance running at t3://localhost:7001 as username weblogic ...

Successfully connected to Admin Server 'myserver' that belongs to domain 'mydomain'.

Warning: An insecure protocol was used to connect to the server.
To ensure on-the-wire security, the SSL port or Admin port
should be used instead.

wls:/mydomain/serverConfig>

To recap what we did so far, I created a minimal domain from a template (that ships with BEA WebLogic Server), started a Node Manager Server, connected to it and started the administration server in the domain we created, disconnected from Node Manager Server and connected to the administration server that we just started.

I will continue the demo in my next blog entry.

All about Silos
I am at BEAWorld and trying to salvage as much information as I can from the key notes and sessions. One interesting keyword I kept hearing and saw sprinkled all over the keynotes is "silos". Here's a literal dictionary meaning of silos, "A tall cylindrical structure, usually beside a barn, in which fodder is stored". Well, this is not exactly what the keynote speaker's meant.. ;). In technical terms silos mean applications, data or software's that are built monolithically and do not participate in any common software infrastucture a company might have. The strong message from the keynote speakers at BEAWorld that kept resonating is that the BEA AquaLogic product family provides software that will let you connect disparate and unsynchronized silos of applications by employing an integration architecture and SOA to help unify a sprawling infrastructure.

WLS 9.0 Management API - Part 2

In my last blog we discussed what we had to manage WLS prior to 9.0.

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WLS 9.0 Management API - part 1

WLS 9.0 Management API - part 1
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BEAWorld session on WLST

BEAWorld session on WLST
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