Yes. I Do ... I Hate Weblogic. I Hate It With A Vengence.

But Its Enterprisy!!!

There are some people out there who seem to think u need a super expensive, fully fledged J2EE application server to host a simple JSP/Servlet application. I don't know why. Maybe it feeds their ego that they are doing "enterprise development".

Anyway, I know for a fact that some of the biggest customer facing applications in australia, like this one, was deployed on this simple jsp/servlet container. Now I don't know what they run now, but this was the case about 3 years ago when I was last on the project. And they had been running on it fine for awhile before i got there.

This is F***en Retarded

Something a dude next to me just exclaimed, and it sums up my feelings on Weblogic...

So whats wrong?

Its a memory hog. Assigning 512m of heap space and 512m of perm gen space still results in Weblogic dying after about 7-10 deploys. This means that we have failing Selenium/Web test builds about 3 or 4 times a day JUST BECAUSE OF WEBLOGIC DEPLOYMENT FAILING DUE TO OUT OF PERM GEN SPACE ERROR!!!!!!!!!

Its slow. Deploys take forever. And it gets slower and slower the more deploys you do. And we're not even talking about 30 or 40 deploys. After literally 5 deploys its time to restart the server! Completely hopeless. Which leads me onto my next point which is...

It takes forever to startup. Its like someone just stuck a "sleep for X amount of time" in the startup sequence. Cos the server just sits there doing nothing for about 5 minutes every single freken time. grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

How much do these people pay for this thing?

A very very big number

Alternatives

Just cos you don't pay top dollar for an application server doesn't mean its not good. Take a look at this, and this, and this one. I've never had to restart an application server as many times as I've had to with Weblogic. Its ridiculous ...