WebLogic Application Deployment & Shared Library

In an enterprise application deployment scenario, there are many cases where some libraries are used/referenced by multiple applications. It would indeed be a bad design to include such common libraries with every application deployed on the WebLogic server. Not only does it prevent redundancy of resources on the server, it also consumes valuable space & deployment time - especially when the libraries are huge.

WebLogic server offers the shared library concept using which EARs, JARs, EJBs and WARs can be shared across applications in a WebLogic domain.

Let us now see how to package and deploy a shared library in WebLogic server;

Step 1: Create a folder structure as shown below

Step 2: Copy all the libraries (in this case JAR files) that you would want to share across applications to the lib folder under WEB_INF
Step 3: Create a file under META_INF folder by name "MANIFEST.MF"
Step 4: Contents of the MANIFEST.MF file are shown below

Manifest-Version: 1.0
Specification-Title: CommonJars
Specification-Version: 1.0
Implementation-Title: CommonJars Implementation
Implementation-Version: 1.0
Implementation-Vendor: Oracle
Extension-Name: CommonJars

Step 5: From the root folder location, execute the following command to generate a WAR file

jar -cvf sharedlib.war *.*

Step 6: Now, login to Oracle WebLogic console, choose "Deployments" and deploy the generated WAR as a shared library - steps with screenshots below

Step 7: Now that the shared library is deployed, let us refer this shared library from another application

Open the weblogic.xml file. If it is not present in your application, create this file under WEB-INF folder of your application and refer the shared library as shown below;

<?xml version = '1.0' encoding = 'windows-1252'?>
<weblogic-web-app xmlns="http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/weblogic-web-app">
    <library-ref>
        <library-name>CommonJars</library-name>
    </library-ref>
</weblogic-web-app>

Enjoy sharing libraries across your enterprise applications.

Enabling Business-Driven Development Through Oracle BPM

Recently I was talking to the VP of Business Operations of a leading financial services company. The excerpt from the discussion below;

"How do I empower my business analysts/line of business users to take full control of our business processes?"

"After all, the people in our organization who best understands the business processes are our business analysts. But what we traditionally see is that the Information Technology trying to overwhelm and drive business which is a tragedy. I feel it is imperative for my business analysts to take control of our key business processes which are now driven by our IT whims & fancies."

"But the question that I would like to ask you is how to do it? and more importantly what solution can you offer?" 

The first thing that we need to understand here is that;

"There are really no IT projects in an enterprise. It is only the business processes that drives business which require IT to move it forward"

More often than not, this is forgotten. Honestly speaking the IT wing of a business knows very little about the business and business has very little control on the IT. Increasingly this is the same deficiency or insufficiency more and more businesses are facing. In trying to be agile on their business fronts they are unable to reflect at the same speed on their IT which has now become a critical part.

How to bridge this gap?

The answer lies in ensuring a seamless integration between the business and IT which we term as "Business-Driven Development".

Top three things to enable and sustain this approach are;

We need a technology that will

Equip your business analysts to design & model the business processes who is better placed to understand them

Enable them to share their business process models with the IT (Developers) to get them implemented. What we are trying to enable here is a top-down development approach driven purely by business

Empower stakeholders and LOB users to monitor the key performance indicators (KPIs) on the business processes in real-time so as to take immediate actions to resolve them

Oracle Business Process Management Suite (BPM) along with Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) - part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware stack can help you achieve all of the above and much more.

Lets delve into these for a moment and look at the components which will help us in achieving the goal.

Oracle Business Process Composer: This is purely a web-based modelling tool which will enable the business analysts of your organization to take control of the core business processes. The composer equips business analysts to work in groups, perform iterative model design/development, configure business rules, share the models with IT for further development, deploy them on server and much more. The important thing to note here is that a business process model can be developed from scratch without any IDE installation - all from within your web browser. I am sure the business guys are going to love this.

Oracle Business Process Workspace: Again a web-based workspace portal which allows all business users under various organization  roles to login and perform actions on their tasks.

Oracle Business Activity Monitoring: A web-based process monitoring dashboard which enables operational visibility into the business processes real-time. Again the BAM dashboards can be built by business users from within the browser based on the KPIs.

Is this not cool technology to take your business forward. Worrying less about IT and concentrating more on business development & growth has always been a dream. Now, take advantage of the latest & greatest technology from Oracle to move your business FORWARD!

Please feel free to write back to me if you need more information on this topic.