A year after Oracle acquired rival BEA, the enterprise-software powerhouse has released WebLogic Suite 11g, a major upgrade to the product line. This release, announced July 1, is the first release of Oracle middleware entirely based on BEA's WebLogic Server.

Customers that have had issues with predictable quality of service and the overall operational costs of running WebLogic will have a keen interest in this release. New features focus on streamlining operations, ensuring high uptime and application availability, and improved application performance.

The core of the suite is the Oracle WebLogic Application Server for building and deploying enterprise applications and services, including complete Java EE 5 and Java SE 6 implementations. This release now includes Rich Internet Application (RIA) support via the new server-side HTTP publish-subscribe engine. 11g release addresses issues of QoS and operational costs those issues with three components: a data grid to enable more efficient and cost-effective scale throughout the enterprise, the JRockit Java Virtual Machine with its deterministic memory management, and automated management for large installations.

The data grid, called Coherence, provides replicated and partitioned data management and caching services in addition to a peer-to-peer clustering protocol. Coherence was designed to have no single points of failure. If a server becomes inoperative or is disconnected from the network, it automatically fails over and redistributes its clustered data management services.

If a new server is added, or when a failed server is restarted, it automatically joins the cluster and Coherence moves services to the server, thus redistributing the cluster load. This is a major plus for applications that require a high degree of availability.

The JRockit Java Virtual Machine is now built into the suite. It adds real-time infrastructure capabilities and JVM diagnostics with the goal of speeding up any Java EE or Java SE application. The tools provided with JRockit can help application teams discover latency and memory leak issues with their applications in a jiffy. This is especially important for applications that require millisecond response times.

Oracle also bundles Enterprise Manager Grid control into the suite, which provides a unified management framework to control the entire line of Oracle products, including the database, applications, and all the middleware components. The Diagnostics Packs for Oracle Middleware and Coherence give operations teams a single pane of glass to manage the entire Oracle suite. If you have non-Oracle products in your environment, you'll still need another tool for consolidated end-to-end management, but at least all of the Oracle data can be consolidated in a single element manager.

The final component of the suite is the Oracle JDeveloper, an integrated development environment for Java-based Java EE, Java SE, SOA applications and user interfaces. JDeveloper includes support for the full development life cycle and includes a number of new capabilities.

Some of the more notable enhanced features include a complete Java IDE for SOA; Java EE and Java SE development; AJAX development support; the ability to manage and monitor multiple Oracle WebLogic Server domains; and simplification of root cause determination between database and application servers using transaction tracing.