Oracle WebLogic Server vs. TIBCO ActiveSpaces

I see Oracle WebLogic Application Server being appropriate when an application needs several different data sources and messaging providers configured and accessible, with a configured level of control of resources (connection pools) and timeouts. It is also advisable to create distributed resources that you can configure as always active to provide more processing power, or as failover for situations of availability in case of disaster recovery, for example. An application where the number of required resources configured is very small and almost non-changeable, and no scalability is required, some other options exist in the market with less cost.

Incentivized

TIBCO ActiveSpaces is only suited in the company where Tibco suites have been already used, the license cost is not a concern, it is only required for data caching purposes and only works in the client/server mode for middle-sizes of data. If the expectation is data cache + distributed computation or embedded IMDG is also one requirement or the data cluster needs span multiple data centers, other light-weight OpenSource IMDG solutions should be considered

Incentivized

• I love that the weblogic dashboard allows you to manage applications and see the status of each application.
• Oracle WebLogic Application Server simplifies usage periods in the development and production of business applications.
• Oracle WebLogic Server allows me to define various aspects of data source entry, including creating a specific multiple connection to facilitate data entry.
• Performance and administration are highlighted in weblogic.

Incentivized

• Easy to scale
• Support for many hardware and software platforms
• Easy to implement

Incentivized

• The Admin UI should be further simplified, the UI design was not too user-friendly— too many options and clicks required, difficult for the new beginners to figure out what they are looking for.
• The admin server becomes the single failure point, although Oracle suggested some workarounds by setting VIP and VHost, it was not quite easy and straight forward.
• Domain replication is hard, requiring a lot of knowledge and scripts efforts.
• Admin will hang if the node manager communication encounters some issues for one or some nodes in the domain/cluster.
• Not able to kill/terminate the stuck thread, the only way is to restart the managed server (JVM)
• License cost is too high, for small businesses.

Incentivized

• TIBCO ActiveSpaces Tuple-based data structure is not flexible enough to support customized native data objects.
• There is no secondary index option.
• Doesn't provide "predicate based In-Grid distributed search and result aggregation."
• only can be used as data cache, the node's only contribute memory but can not use the data partition owner node's computation power to apply the distributed computation customized by the user.
• Cross data center replication (geographically) is a pain.
• Encounter the performance issue when the data volume is huge, even according to the architecture design, linear scaling up should not have that issue.

Incentivized

Oracle WebLogic Server has so many features that sometimes it's hard to find the right place to setup things, I think the dated user interface does not help with that either. This has a direct impact when deciding to use it as your application server, you'd need to have the right people and invest the time needed to master it. If you're application justifies it then it will definitely be a great choice in the long run.

Incentivized

TIBCO ActiveSpaces is easy to install and integrate with other product suites. It is easy to understand and implement as well. TIBCO ActiveSpaces supports multiple databases for storing the data(we are using Oracle Database). All the master data related to the users is being stored using TIBCO ActiveSpaces which keeps the data in memory and help to retrieve it quickly. It has helped to prevent concurrent login sessions by the same user as session details are stored in TIBCO ActiveSpaces and we override the existing user session with the new session details.

Incentivized

Oracle WebLogic Application Server is great at security, performance and features.

Incentivized

The Oracle support is not great sometimes. They take a long time and need a lot of data over and over to resolve issues.

Incentivized

I wasn't involved in selecting the server we were using but in our team we've made some efforts to improve the local deployment process by trying some other Applicational servers too. Apache Tomcat was a more lightweight solution for sure, and it coped well with our applications needs, configuration and performance wise. Despite that, since we didn't got clearance to change that into our local servers, we kept using Weblogic to guarantee compliance between the testing environments and production.

Incentivized

Before using TIBCO ActiveSpaces, we were storing all the data in Oracle Database and due to large volumes of data response time was more and overall performance had reduced. With the introduction of TIBCO ActiveSpaces, we moved the master data to TIBCO ActiveSpaces for storing data which needed frequent access in memory for faster retrieval. This improved the performance significantly and also made managing data easier.

Incentivized

• It made it easy to handle over a 100 of deployments across multiple nodes every quarter.
• It was easy to scale up our application to 36 nodes as the volume of transactions increased over the years.
• Helped us achieve 99.999 availability for our users.

Incentivized

• Developers with basic knowledge of TIBCO and general data knowledge can easily design and develop an ActiveSpaces based cached solution. As the ActiveSpaces concepts are very simple and easy to understand.
• Some business areas can predict the high influx of a service usage during a certain period. Business will be highly rewarded if they can identify these business areas and provide a cached solution using TIBCO AS.
• Again, this is not a TIBCO ActiveSpaces only advantage and this is true for any/all caching products.
• Some examples for the previous points are
• a. telecom company pre-loading (eager load) customer's usage for the last month, right before releasing/issuing the bills to the customers.
• b. Airline industry loading the customer's itinerary a week before his travel start date. Hence the last minute scrambling to fetch the customer's itinerary travel plans can be avoided.

Incentivized