Microsoft Application Server (deprecated) vs. Oracle WebLogic Server

Regardless of the environment, Microsoft Application Server is used to manage internal applications. Installing legacy software on the computers of end-users is a cinch with this solution. It provides a central location for updating and managing legacy applications. It is less valuable if you're using only web-based and cloud-based apps.

I see Oracle WebLogic Application Server being appropriate when an application needs several different data sources and messaging providers configured and accessible, with a configured level of control of resources (connection pools) and timeouts. It is also advisable to create distributed resources that you can configure as always active to provide more processing power, or as failover for situations of availability in case of disaster recovery, for example. An application where the number of required resources configured is very small and almost non-changeable, and no scalability is required, some other options exist in the market with less cost.

Incentivized

• Microsoft Application Server has been very stable. We have had very few issues with downtime except for updates.
• We now have a central location to manage and update our legacy apps without the need to install each app on each user's system.
• Application performance is surprisingly very good and responsive even in bandwidth restricted environments.

Incentivized

• I love that the weblogic dashboard allows you to manage applications and see the status of each application.
• Oracle WebLogic Application Server simplifies usage periods in the development and production of business applications.
• Oracle WebLogic Server allows me to define various aspects of data source entry, including creating a specific multiple connection to facilitate data entry.
• Performance and administration are highlighted in weblogic.

Incentivized

• Wished Microsoft would offer better support options that are cheaper.
• Updates sometimes require restarts which cause downtime.
• More support for 3rd part software vendors.

Incentivized

• The Admin UI should be further simplified, the UI design was not too user-friendly— too many options and clicks required, difficult for the new beginners to figure out what they are looking for.
• The admin server becomes the single failure point, although Oracle suggested some workarounds by setting VIP and VHost, it was not quite easy and straight forward.
• Domain replication is hard, requiring a lot of knowledge and scripts efforts.
• Admin will hang if the node manager communication encounters some issues for one or some nodes in the domain/cluster.
• Not able to kill/terminate the stuck thread, the only way is to restart the managed server (JVM)
• License cost is too high, for small businesses.

Incentivized

I have found Microsoft Application Server to be incredibly easy to use. I have used dozens of similar programs and have always struggled to navigate through all the functions. So far I have been able to adapt and learn this software with ease. I rarely run into a problem that I wasn’t easily able to move forward on with a few tips.

Oracle WebLogic Server has so many features that sometimes it's hard to find the right place to setup things, I think the dated user interface does not help with that either. This has a direct impact when deciding to use it as your application server, you'd need to have the right people and invest the time needed to master it. If you're application justifies it then it will definitely be a great choice in the long run.

Incentivized

Oracle WebLogic Application Server is great at security, performance and features.

Incentivized

MS Application Server has been great for our company it has enabled us to free up IT staff and lowered the maintenance costs of our internal application maintenance.

Incentivized

The Oracle support is not great sometimes. They take a long time and need a lot of data over and over to resolve issues.

Incentivized

Microsoft Application Server has stood out to me because it has been so easy to use and utilize for our organization. I was not involved in the integration but being a user I can say that it has made a huge impact to how we access and utilize our databases. I have found that using Microsoft Application Server has increased my productivity. I spend less time navigating and waiting for things to load.

I wasn't involved in selecting the server we were using but in our team we've made some efforts to improve the local deployment process by trying some other Applicational servers too. Apache Tomcat was a more lightweight solution for sure, and it coped well with our applications needs, configuration and performance wise. Despite that, since we didn't got clearance to change that into our local servers, we kept using Weblogic to guarantee compliance between the testing environments and production.

Incentivized

• MS Application Server has been great for our ROI since it has reduced dedicating IT resources to maintaining legacy applications on end-users systems.
• We have been able to have a central location for all our legacy and on-prem applications.
• Our IT operations have been able to greatly improve efficiencies.

Incentivized

• It made it easy to handle over a 100 of deployments across multiple nodes every quarter.
• It was easy to scale up our application to 36 nodes as the volume of transactions increased over the years.
• Helped us achieve 99.999 availability for our users.

Incentivized