Recently I was called on to develop a Message-Driven Bean (MDB) that was to be deployed under Oracle Weblogic 10.3. Easy enough, right? The only problem was that the queue it was supposed to listen to was on a remote Unix machine, and was defined under IBM MQ Server 6.0. There are several how-to's on the internet about how this can be done, but none of them were complete enough to get it working. My goal in this article is to tie together all of the threads needed to get Weblogic 10.3 and MQ chatting away happily.

Switching out your Weblogic Page Flow Controllers in favor of Spring Controllers is easier than you might think. Here are just a few steps to help the integration.

Dependencies

The latest production release version of Spring is version 3.0.2. In this version they have broken the release into about 20 different jar files. The libraries listed below are those that you will need to include in the WEB-INF/lib your project:

In my previous blog, we discussed how to locate MBeans within the custom tree.  We're going to piggy back that discussion and show how to purge an EHCache MBean by executing the removeAll() operation.

For reference, let's see the findMBean() helper method we defined previously:

My collegue Ron DiFrango recently wrote a blog about exposing custom MBeans within the WebLogic container.  Both Ron and myself experienced similar frustrations when trying to work with custom MBeans and his blog is a must read if you're having difficulty finding yours.

Once the container is setup as directed in Ron's blog, you'll quickly notice that several of WLST's APIs for navigating do not work in the custom tree; most notably is the find API.  The lack of a find API is especially troubling when you have MBeans such as ones for EHCache that use the memory location as part of the unique identifier, for example:

Recently I was asked to configure a web application using client certificate authentication. I did this is using Weblogic Application Server version 10.3, however the concepts for this apply to most application servers. The following sections describe the configuration changes that must be applied to the environment for this to work.

Web application

The web application needs to be modified to restrict access to resources and require the use of a client certification. In order to do this modify the deployment descriptor of the application by adding a security constraint:

…

<security-constraint>

<display-name>Sec_Constraint_1</display-name>

Eric Miles and I were working on different clients that were both utilizing the Weblogic application and the Spring framework.  Each of needed a way to expose some of the configuration items as JMX beans so that production support folks could change the values of these items at runtime without requiring server re-boots.  Because both of us were using Spring, exposing the beans was fairly straight forward, we just followed the Spring documentation for exporting JMX beans.