Chapter 13. Designing the Production Deployment

In this chapter:

This chapter details sample configurations and best practices for properly designing a WebLogic deployment for an e-commerce application such as our WebAuction example.

This chapter describes and illustrates:

• A variety of WebLogic deployment scenarios

• A sample WebLogic deployment configuration for each deployment scenario

• Best practices for deploying WebLogic Server applications

As you move from development and testing of a new WebLogic Server application to production deployment on one or more WebLogic Servers, you create a design for deployment. WebLogic Server applications can be deployed in a variety of environments. The WebLogic Server product suite runs on many different platforms and supports many types of clients: Web browsers, C++ applications, and Java applications. For each type of client, the WebLogic Server container provides a complete set of standard services such as messaging, transactions, and dynamic Web page generation. Both front-end and back-end components can be clustered to help assure performance, scalability, and reliability.

Using WebLogic Server's Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) implementation and extensions, WebLogic Server developers can build customized solutions for their unique mix of platforms and clients. However, WebLogic Server's support of mix-and-match platform and client deployments adds to the challenge of designing a scalable and robust deployment. This means that developers must follow good design principles.

Rather than detailing the specific “how to's” for deploying the WebAuction application (we do that in Chapter 14), this chapter gives the developer a general picture of how to plan for a successful WebLogic Server deployment, and illustrates standard deployments with case studies.