WebLogic Workshop, WebLogic Platform, and the J2EE Landscape - WebLogic Workshop and J2EE
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To best use WebLogic Workshop, you must understand its position in the J2EE and WebLogic Platform landscape. Ultimately, WebLogic Workshop is a tool for building enterprise Web applications. Figure 1.1 shows a simplified version of an enterprise application running on an application server. These tools have existed for a long time, but what makes WebLogic Workshop different is the ease with which J2EE, Integration, and Portal applications can now be developed.
Figure 1.1 - Simple Web applications.
Web applications can be divided, as can most applications, into three main aspects:
Presentation—The application's user interface (UI) aspects. In Web applications, presentation is provided by JavaServer Pages (JSPs), HTML, and Web services.
Navigation—These aspects provide a basis for which pages are displayed, based on user actions.
Business logic and data access—These aspects are used to access data and make decisions based on that data for the benefit of navigation.
Domains, Clusters, and Servers - WebLogic Platform has a number of mechanisms for deploying applications. At the root of the deployment tree is a server, and applications are normally deployed on servers. Servers can be grouped into logical sets known as clusters. From a client's perspective, a cluster looks and acts exactly like a single server. From a developer's perspective, machines with different capabilites can be combined into a single cluster for the purposes of load balancing, fault tolerance, or support of mixed server features. Domains are groups of servers (clusters) defined to support specific Framework services (such as portals) and integration of combinations, and they can be used to create reuseable templates.
Figure 1.2 shows a more sophisticated environment for application deployment: WebLogic Platform. Workshop works with WebLogic Platform, giving developers full access to its features. Although Figure 1.2 isn't intended to be an architectural diagram of WebLogic Platform, you can see how domains contain definitions of services that are available to all servers and the clusters they contain. Clusters, servers, domains, and other production administration features are covered in Chapter 15, "Taking Your Applications from Development to Production."
Figure 1.2 - Domains, clusters, Web servers, and applications.
During the past five or six years, Web applications were built by using several core technologies. Page presentation was handled by hard-coded HTML and dynamic JSPs, all coded by hand. In more sophisticated applications, page navigation was handled by servlets, but more often than not it was hard-coded into JSPs. Data access and business logic were handled by EJBs and Java Database Connectivity (JDBC). In fact, the J2EE landscape isn't all that different today; most applications are still developed painstakingly by hand using these same technologies. So where does WebLogic Workshop fit in?
 This chapter is from BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1, by Albert J. Saganich, Jr., et al. (Sams, 2004, ISBN: 0672326221). Check it out at your favorite bookstore today.
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