During your research into whether Oracle's WebLogic is the best option for FinanceFiction, you came across some other middleware vendors and their products. Although it was not your assignment to investigate them, you thought it was wise to have a quick look at the kind of solutions other companies provided.
IBM provides a wide variety of middleware products, with its strategic platform called WebSphere Application Server. In general, it provides the same resources as Oracle WebLogic does.
Some of the products are:
- WebSphere Application Server
- WebSphere Business Integration Toolset
- WebSphere InterChange Server
- WebSphere MQ
- WebSphere Message Broker
- WebSphere Adapters
- WebSphere Process Server
- WebSphere Portal Server
Another vendor is TIBCO, which is also a provider of infrastructure software for companies. Some of its products are:
SAP is a software vendor that provides Enterprise Software (as discussed in the JCA adapter). It specializes in ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software, and provides a lot of business solutions such as supply chain management and data management. Technical platforms are NetWeaver and some specialized frameworks.
The open source community also provides middleware solutions. One of the well-known solutions is Apache, that is also used within Oracle Fusion Middleware.
Apache is an open source web server for all kinds of operating systems such as AIX, Solaris, Windows, and AS 400.
The first version came out in 1995 as an answer to the Netscape web server, but unlike Netscape, Apache still exists and is still popular. It's being used by a lot of vendors as their HTTP server.
In the Oracle Webtier Utilities, Apache is used as the web server (Oracle HTTP Server). To integrate the Webtier, a new module is used, which is mod_ohs.