When working with many of our Oracle OTM clients, the question inevitably comes up: "Which platform should I choose for OTM - WebLogic or OAS?" (WebSphere is rarely mentioned).

From my perspective, here's what it comes down to this:

BEA WebLogic
Pros:

• Highest performance platform for OTM, when combined with JRockit (Linux / Win32)
• Supported for 8 years - OTM (GC3) was developed on this platform
• Production proven by nearly every OTM / GC3 client
• Well known by Oracle OTM support and development staff

Cons;

• Additional licensing / support required with a 3rd party
• Uncertain future with OTM
• Uncertain future of BEA as a company

Oracle OAS
Pros:

• Licensing / support comes bundled with the Oracle OTM offering
• Will be the preferred platform for OTM in the future
• The future of Oracle appears stable

Cons:

• Lower performance, due to lack of JRockit support
• Not production proven
• Has only been supported for 1 year
• A new technology for Oracle OTM support and development staff

So - given the pros and cons, I feel it's an easy decision for any company that plans to use OTM in production. Since OTM is critical to their businesses (if it doesn't work - nothing ships), the most proven and best performing platforms wins - WebLogic.

However, this is clouded by the possibility that BEA will be acquired by either Oracle or another party. For my money, the result remains the same. I've only had to call BEA support a handful of times, since GC3 first became a product; mostly I just require the installation files, a valid license file and away we go! The OTM installer configures WebLogic, so no expertise is required there. When running OTM, the furthest I delve into WebLogic anymore, is the WebLogic Console, which shows thread information, work queues, garbage collection graphs and some fine details about JRockit.

Of course, all of this will change in time; after all - which is Oracle going to invest more energy in? OAS will become more widely supported and will be proven in production. OTM will support newer versions of the Java JDK, which closes some of the performance gaps between the Sun JDK and JRockit. OTM will begin to leverage the OAS clustering technology, which may (note: remains to be seen) perform better than the current implementation. And all of the Oracle support and development teams will become more familiar with OTM on OAS - lending to quicker issue resolution. In the time between now and then, however, you can spend a considerable amount of money on downtime, issue resolution, consulting fees and performance tuning with OAS. To me, it makes sense to leverage WebLogic now and plan on swapping over to OAS, when it's ready.

When making the choice for yourself, take these questions into account:

1. What platform am I willing to bet my business on?
2. Do I understand the full costs involved, both immediate (licensing / support) and longer term (issue resolution, downtime, performance tuning, consultants, etc.)?
3. Do I have test cases and automated performance tests, so that I can compare the platforms prior to go-live?
4. Do I plan to leverage OTM v6.0 or v6.5 when they are released? If so, can I change application servers them?

What are your thoughts?

--Chris