SOA 11g vs 12C

    Oracle SOA 12c vs 11g

The 'c' in 12c stands for Cloud and represents Oracle’s significant investments in delivering cloud-ready products. The new additions to Cloud adapters, support for REST and JSON are direct testimony for that. Read on to see a list of differences between the 11g and the 12c versions of SOA Suite and related products.

Installation experience

   The development environment is much lighter weight, can be installed very easily (you should be able to start from scratch and have your first composite application running within 30 minutes) and allows very short develop/run cycles (quickly try out any changes to the definition of the composite or the service).

   Everything is in there now. An in-memory database (uses JavaDB for soainfra schema) and fully functional soa and bpm domain.

Development experience

•    The Integrated WebLogic Server in JDeveloper is configured in 12c to also run SOA Suite 12c applications. This means
•        a SCA Composite can be run directly from within the IDE to the integrated server – instead of explicit deployment to a stand alone WebLogic Server with SOA Suite runtime.
•        You can put breakpoints and step through your composite, in real time !!!
•    The IDEs for Service Bus and SCA Composites will be integrated in 12c in JDeveloper.
•    Templates will be available throughout the SOA Suite 12c IDE – allowing blue prints with placeholders for SCA Composites, Pipelines, BPEL processes to be prepared and reused when developing the real artifacts. The new SOA starter templates provide an easy way to package SOA composites, components or fragments of a BPEL process and distribute them to other departments, partners or customers
•    Debugging and refactoring support is available in the 12c IDE, for both Service Bus and SCA Composites.
•    Dependency Explorer: This allows to "visualize" the dependencies between various SOA composites as well as Service Bus projects which typically consist of fair number of artifacts that hang together in ways that are sometimes not so easy to track down. It will leverage all its built in knowledge about potential dependencies and it will visualize these dependencies.
•    Testing: Develop and test without having to go to EM. It is very simple to test the web services (SOAP and REST) exposed by SOA composites from the comfort of your own IDE. Using a simple right mouse click on the composite’s service interface (in the Application Server overview window), we can start the HTTP Analyzer for the service – with the right endpoint set, the WSDL (or WADL) loaded and the request message entry form ready to be filled in.
•    Property inspector window: Before release 12c, editing activities in a BPEL process was done in the wizard that could be activated by double clicking the activity or by selecting edit from the context menu on an activity. Alternatively, a developer could resort to the BPEL process source file to make changes to the definition of activities. In 12c, the property inspector has been extended to also support editing the properties of BPEL activities. When the property inspector window is available, it will synchronize with the currently selected activity in the BPEL editor.
•    Component and Property palette undergone a metamorphosis. In the Component palette the Components and adapters are now logically separated and it is possible to display the items in a list view.
•    The JDeveloper IDE acknowledges Folders as a construct that the developer needs control over. Until now, folders were visible in JDeveloper because they existed on the file system. They could not be manipulated from within the IDE. Now, in the 12.1.3 release, they can be created, from the New Gallery
•    Enterprise Scheduler(ESS) SOA 12c comes with its own OOTB scheduler. It is integrated in em
•        It provides the ability to schedule SOA components or services and manages the complete life cycle of a job definition: development, distribution, scheduling, and monitoring
•        Polling adapters can now be restricted to certain times of the day, for example outside of business hours, to avoid resource overload. Users can associate an inbound adapter for a SOA Service with ESS schedules to customize timings for processing of messages.
•        It is also used for bulk error recovery
•    Fault Policy Editor
•     Design and Edit Fault Policies.
•      Besides the already existed functionality a lot of new features are added.
•      Graphical editor for creating Fault policies, Alerts, Actions & Property Sets
•      New Default actions for invoking a WS and enqueue data (JMS).
•       Alerts can be defined to send fault to JMS, Email or Log file.
•       Alerts can be assigned to actions if type of Alert is desired to be triggered.
•      Fault Policies can be coupled, using the Composite Binding dialog, to different levels:
•            • composite • component • reference binding and service binding •
•            New Database Connection Types
•   SOA Suite 12c adds two new Database connection types when creating Database connections; JavaDB and JDE World. JavaDB (Derby) is used to run SOA Suite repository on that is used for the integrated server. With the JDE World connection you have easy access to the data in the JD Edwards database.

•    New Database Connection Types
•        SOA Suite 12c adds two new Database connection types when creating Database connections; JavaDB and JDE World. JavaDB (Derby) is used to run SOA Suite repository on that is used for the integrated server. With the JDE World connection you have easy access to the data in the JD Edwards database.
•  Continuous Integration
•        Continuous Integration brings agility to the systems development lifecycle (SDLC) by completing packaging, testing and deployment of every change to the code.
•        Oracle SOA Suite 12c provides a Maven plugin
•            that allows development teams to use Maven to create, build, package and deploy SOA projects.
•            Through the SOA application and project archetypes, development teams can automate the instantiation of a developer's working environment.
•            Through the Maven plugin goals, a Continuous Integration server such as Hudson can be used to manage SOA projects through the complete lifecycle

         File Based MDS

•        In addition to the existing run-time Meta Data Services Repository, Oracle SOA Suite 12c adds a file-based SOA Design-Time MDS Repository for use during design time. The repository is automatically created when you create a SOA composite application and will typically point to the version control system location.

BPEL

   An in-line sub process has been introduced.

       in-line sub process can best be thought of as a callable scope. It is a scope that is not part of the normal process flow, but rather a unit of encapsulated logic that can be called zero, one or multiple times from anywhere within the BPEL process – even recursively from within itself. It is in effect very similar to a private member function in a Java Class or a procedure in the body of a PL/SQL package.

   A stand-alone Sub Process has been introduced.

       These are defined in a separate file (with extension .sbpel) and appear as components in their own right in the composite overview. They can be called from multiple other BPEL components (but only from BPEL components)

   Encrypt/Decrypt Personally-Identifiable Information (PII): It assists in Protecting sensitive data from appearing in the Admin consoles in clear text.

       For example a Social Security Number or Credit card Number. Specific Fields in a message can be encrypted when entering the SOA composite application in the service binding component, and decrypted while exiting the application in the reference binding component. It is available for services and adapters in both SOA (SCA Composite) and Service Bus. The PII policy is attached to the SCA Composite. The credentials/encryption to use is configured on WLS and is stored using the Credential Store framework (CSF).

   Updated XSLT mapper:

•        Better support for complex stylesheets
•        multiple templates possible, named templates possible
•        You can see the XSLT execution sequence using Execution View
•            Execution View shows the order of execution of templates (both named and matched) as they would be executed by the processor.
•            You can see the overall flow of a complex XSLT process and provides a means to troubleshoot problems in template creation before executing the XSLT.
•            In addition, the user can use the execution view to navigate to any section of the stylesheet by clicking on the desired node in the execution view dialog
•        The XSLT View provides a graphical view of all XSLT statements that can highlight context nodes for the selected template rule allow the immediate error detection when creating multiple templates

   New XQuery support (including own mapper) -

       BPEL has a dedicated activity to use XQuery in your BPEL code for transformations. The XQuery mapper has support for XPath 2.0 and user defined functions. The mapper is really user friendly and it’s made consistent with the XSLT mapper interface. The mapper also has an integrated Test framework and is build for reuse in both SOA & Service Bus

   Use nXSD anywhere

       nXSD translation is a first class citizen within a BPEL process, Service Bus and Mediator.

           Now messages can be translated anywhere within the integration flow, not only on the edges.

   Sensors can be defined at runtime

       In SOA Suite 11g sensors had to be defined at design time. In the SOA Suite 12c it also will be possible to define or change them at runtime: Design Time at Run Time (DT@RT). This functionality is added to the existing ‘SOA Composer’ application, which is already used to change other runtime metrics like the Rule Engine and Domain Values Maps (DVMs).

Adapters

   SOA Suite 12c will have an adapter for Coherence – allowing information to be put on or read from a Coherence grid – doing with the in memory Coherence grid what the database adapter does with persistent data in a relational datatabase. This JCA adapter makes it easy for a Service Bus business service or a SOA composite application to interact with a Coherence memory grid. Fully declaratively and with very little trouble, data can be put on a Coherence grid (aka cache) and read from that cache. The cache is accessed like a big map: using a key, an object is saved to and retrieved from the cache. The cache is accessible across service executions and process instances, as well as across cluster nodes.

   Cloud adapter: Oracle SOA Suite 12c simplifies cloud integration. The recently released Oracle Cloud Adapters simplify the integration of cloud applications with your existing infrastructure to allow, for example, your field sales teams to have real-time access to all of your on-premise applications.

       Adapters to connect to SalesForce has been provided. More are in pipeline like for RightNow (Oracle Service Cloud), Oracle Sales Cloud, Eloqua (Oracle Marketing Cloud) and Big Machines (Oracle CPQ Cloud)

       An SDK is also being provided to create custom integrations into the cloud.

       Simple to use

           The adapters have the usual look and feel of Oracle adapters.

           The cloud adapter configuration wizard engages users with an extremely simplified view of the business object catalog from the SaaS application from where they could browse and select one or more objects of interest for executing CRUD style interactions.

   A REST binding has been introduced within JDeveloper to simplify mobile enablement by exposing traditional SOAP services, Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs), JCA adapters connecting backend applications or just about any other underlying implementation through REST/JSON. The REST binding is available for SOA composites and Oracle Service Bus services and allows the configuration of REST interactions as exposed services or proxy services. It also allows the invocation of externally available REST services.

   LDAP adapter. The LDAP adapters has support for inbound and outbound integration. With this adapter you can access you LDAP directory i.g. check if a certain user has the required privileges to execute the called operation. You can perform CRUD operations on target directory servers.

   UMS Adapter

       The UMS adapter already exists in 11g, but in the 12c release of SOA Suite this adapter has gotten a major update. In 11g the UMS adapter only supports Email, but in 12c it also support SMS and IM for inbound and outbound integration. Besides that the adapter now has a new outbound operation type to get the status of a send message.

   MFT Adapter

       New Technology Adapter: MFTFor integrating Managed File Transfer (MFT) with SOA Suite there is a MFT adapter available and can be used for inbound and outbound transactions. With the inbound operation a SCA Composite can receive files or file references from MFT. The MFT adapter uses an own WSDL that can also be used for other technologies i.g. Java. With the outbound operation you can send files to a MFT server (Web service endpoint of a MFT source) to be processed further.

   MQ Adapter to integrate with IBM WebSphere MQ

   MSMQ Adapter to integrate with Microsoft Message Queuing

       Microsoft Message Queueing (MSMQ) is a message infrastructure and a development platform for creating distributed, loosely-coupled messaging applications for the Microsoft Windows operating system. Applications that use MSMQ create/locate a queue, connect to the queue, navigate the queue, send/receive messages from a queue and use the MSMQ queue properties to define the behavior of the queue where applicable and needed.

   Oracle Adapter for SAP R/3

       This provides native bidirectional integration with SAP R/3. It supports invocation of BAPI/RFC and IDOCs to send and receive data from the SAP R/3 application. The Adapter is natively integrated into JDeveloper and communicates with the SAP Business Object Repository to provide a graphical browser of the objects in SAP for the user to discover, search and select for the integration. In addition to browsing the objects in the repository, the adapter design-time allows searching for the objects by name or wild card expressions

   The Web Service Adapter is renamed to SOAP Adapter

OSB

   The IDEs for Service Bus and SCA Composites will be integrated in 12c in JDeveloper. For Service Bus development, this means that no longer OEPE (Eclipse) is used, In fact the development of Service Bus services looks very much like the development of SCA Composites – even with a visual overview of an SB project with its Proxy services, its pipelines and its business services – very similar to an SCA Composite with its Services, Components and References.

   For Service Bus 12c, the pipeline is a first class object – along with Proxy, Split Join and Business Service. Multiple proxy services can share a pipeline, and one pipeline can call another one.

   Templates

       Just like SOA Suite’s SCA Composites the SB also supports the use of templates. But it works a little different. Templates are Pipeline-based, this means that you can select a template when creating a new Pipeline. There are two types of templates; Unlinked, which is a copy of the template, and Linked, Pipeline stays connected to template. In the template you can use Placeholders so permit changes to that part of the Pipeline. If the Pipeline is linked to a template and the template is changed the linked Pipeline will inherent these changes. You create a template pipeline, instead of a normal Pipeline and place it in a centralized project or in the MDS for re-use.

   You can expose a Pipeline as a REST service. When doing it creates a REST binding just like in a SCA Composite.

   Splitting Proxy from Pipeline

       Because a SB project is more like a SCA Composite (same overview) the Proxy is split from the Pipeline. This means that the Proxy and the Pipeline are two individual things. With this concept multiple Proxies can be wired to one Pipeline

   MDS support for importing shared resources (limited)

       Service Bus has now Design-Time support for MDS (MetaData Services). You can select resources from the MDS that you want to import into your SB project. Service Bus can’t connect to a Remote MDS on runtime. This choice is made, because SB can be installed separate from SOA and SB doesn’t have there own DB repository for saving MDS artifacts.

       Dynamic Validation Activity

           SB 12c updates the Validation Activity. It is now possible to Dynamically validate a variable. Using Expressions you should return a fully qualified type or element reference (i.g. {http://www.example.com}inventoryRequest). Besides the Dynamic validation you also have the option to save the validation result to a variable or to raise an error (behavior in 11g).

   Disable Activities

       In SB 12c it is possible to disable activities. This can be handy if you want to skip activities, but do not want to remove them. Every activity can be disabled in Design-Time, but also on Run-Time using the Service Bus composer.

   Test expressions on Design-Time

       It is now possibile to test expression on Design-Time. In the Expression Builder you can click on the Test Expression icon to test the expression. JDeveloper will deploy a small artifact to the Design-Time environment of SB and start a small browser window where you can test the expression.

   SB Debugger

       Just like SOA (SCA Composite) Service Bus has a debugger. It works the same as the SOA debugger.

   Enterprise Manager instead of SBConsole

       The Service Bus console has found a new home with the switch to JDeveloper. Most functionality is moved to the Enterprise manager.

   Using Domain Value Map (DVM) in Service Bus projects

   Mediator-like re-sequencer now available in OSB

       Business transactions often span multiple technical transactions and require groups of messages to be processed in exactly the right order. Sometimes, these messages already arrive in the correct order and need to be prevented from getting out of order, or they arrive in random order and need to be re-sequenced. The re-sequencer in Oracle Service Bus orders messages based on sequential or chronological information, and then sends the messages to the target services in an orderly manner. The sequencing is performed based on the sequencing strategy selected

Mediator

   Translate from Native action

       At the level of the Java callout an extra action Translate from Native is added. With this action you can transfrom a CSV/JSON/String element of the request to XML using a NXSD transformation. The transformed output can then be used in the routing rules of the Mediator. This action can be done on operation level, but also on a specific routing rule for that operation.

   Override Using action

       With this action you can override routing rule options using a DVM or Business Rules. Based on a element value of the request you can change the routing rule option dynamically. With the key value you have the possibility to override the XSLT transformation file, Filter expression, Execution Type, Syntax Validation (XSD), Semantic Validation (Schematron) file instead of creating a bunch of static routing rule.

   New graphical editor for Assign action

       The graphical editor for the Assign action is the same as BPEL uses. You can create multiple copy rules by using drag and drop functionality.

B2B

   A new facility in SOA Suite 12c will be Managed File Transfer that provides an implementation of the claim check pattern to handle large files. MFT brings an internal (S)FTP server to the SOA Suite platform. Files can be uploaded to this server and automated operations – such as decrypt, decompress and start an SCA Composite passing it the meta-data and a reference for the file – can be configured. This allows customers to load data securely into Oracle Cloud applications as well as third-party cloud or partner applications.

   Streaming support for large payloads

   For enhanced management and monitoring B2B is also integrated with the SOA Error Hospital. It is very simple to track messages end to end by adding direct links to Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control from B2B Reports and vice versa

   Support for Local Policy Attachment for Web Services security configuration have also been added

Business Rules

   The use of business phrases in 12c will allow the definition of conditions and expressions labeled with meaningful names that can subsequently be used and reused to compose rule conditions and actions.

   Enhanced SOA Composer for Business Rules.

       Rule editing has been greatly improved

       One can also export to Excel and edit the rules there

Oracle Event Processing

Oracle Event Processing, part of Oracle SOA Suite, can handle up to a million messages per second at extremely low latencies when running on Oracle engineered systems(1), making it the ideal solution to perform real-time filtering, geo-location, and pattern matching on the massive streams of data generated by IoT "smart" devices.

   Just like SB, OEP leaves it previous IDE Eclipse behind and is now fully integrated in JDeveloper.

   New to Oracle Event Processing 12c is the shared use of the Oracle SOA Suite user interface, providing companies the ability to seamlessly integrate filtered and correlated big data into actionable enterprise processes for corrective action

   Two new adapters, one for CSV (in-/outbound) and EDN (in-/outbound).

   Extensions added to support Hadoop and Oracle NoSQL for use as a source just like the TABLE component

   Extension for invoking/receiving Remote Method Invocation (RMI) calls.

BAM

   BAM has been enhanced to enable rapid and flexible assessment of key performance indicators (KPIs) by storing the data in the industry standard star schema format.

   Multi-browser support including Mobile support, so your dashboard will look and act the same on different devices and browsers.

   In the near future BAM will get a native App (IOS and Android).

   BAM implements a more advanced Security model using OPSS (Oracle Platform Security Services) to secure the data it collects.

   BAM now support a hybrid integration of CQL and SQL, these both query languages can be used together to collect data from different sources.

   It uses Coherence for report and metadata cache.

   It has better integration with SOA Suite and BPM Suite because both use the same Uniform Star Schema and can export the data during the execution of processes to BI to allow continuous monitoring.

   BAM now support a Active-Active High Availability modes so can run on a cluster.

   Continuous monitoring can be done in three ways, Real Time, One Time and Scheduled.

   It can also correlates Business Events that are streamed using OEP.

   BAM supports a side-by-side analysis between historical BI data ans operation data.

   There is even a special BAM dashboard that can be embedded into WebCenter Pages.

       The new dashboards comes more richer out-of-the-box and there is a more extensive catalog with Metrics i.g. SOA/BPM process performance and Human Workflow / Task performance.

       The new dashboards have updated geomap, tree map, watch list, shatter chart and bubble chart components

Monitoring experience

   SOA-Infra Dashboard

       SOA Error Hospital - used to aggregate flow instances that have generated faults and be able to perform actions on instances with common faults collectively. The aggregations can be based on various criteria based on fault types, names or composite level aggregations

           In the SOA-Infra dashboard (recoverable) faults are visual using a chart

           The flow instances tab shows faults that can be recovered, click on Error Hospital to recover them

           In Error Hospital tab faults can be recovered, with option to Bulk Recover

           During the recover attempt the number decreases

           Recovered Faults are shown in Green

       On the SOA-Infra Dashboard page you can search for instances and create/save searches.

           In the past, retrieval of large amounts of data has caused performance problems. In order to improve this, searches have been enhanced to allow for finer grained queries, including composite sensor values, to track specific business cases. Searches can also be saved and bookmarked for quicker access.

       Deployed Composites are show with status and can easily be started and stopped:

       Composite Sensor values are shown directly in the EM dashboard when you click on a instance. You can also search on these Composite Sensors

       Fault Notification Alerts

           While dashboards provide an overview of the system and application health, administrators need to be alerted automatically when something goes wrong in the system. Fault alerts can be routed to communication channels such as email, SMS and IM, while at the same time being posted to the dashboards

   SOA Composite Dashboard

       Composite Dashboard shows only components and services

       The Composite definition can be visually displayed. This is the image of the composite as we see in JDev.

       By default no flow instances are show to give page a much needed performance boost

       When selecting a flow instance more details are show about faults

       Easy to see instance sensor values

       Easy to see Composite dependencies

       The instance flow trace shows adapters in gray and SB integration

       Diagnosability reports for all adapter binding components for SOA applications. These reports provide real-time visibility into availability and message exchange statistics with the Application or endpoint. The three new report types are Configuration Reports, Monitoring Reports and Snapshot Reports.

Weblogic

   The runtime and footprint of the product have been optimized at every level (memory, disk, database) to support mission critical enterprise-wide deployments and web-scale performance, further enabling customers to process increasingly massive workloads. 12c is much lighter and faster then 11g. In 11g the installation and start up times were high and it has a high memory foorprint. SOA Suite 12c changes the game with faster start up times and optimized memory usage. The main reason for this is that 12c is build in a modular way and it uses lazy loading of components.

       Not all SOA components may be used/needed by a customer with this in mind 12c is build in a modular way. First of all 12c has improved start up times and memory footprint with modularity profiles enabling only required components. By default the SOA_FOUNDATION profile is configured after new installation. This can then be altered in EM.

       The profiles listed below are arranged in decreasing order of (memory) footprint

           - SOA CLASSIC ~ SOA Foundation with B2B + BPM Modules

           - SOA FOUNDATION WITH HEALTHCARE ~ SOA Foundation with B2B + Healthcare UI

           - SOA FOUNDATION WITH B2B ~ SOA Foundation Enterprise + B2B

           - SOA FOUNDATION ENTERPRISE ~ SOA Foundation + Full Adapter Set

           - SOA FOUNDATION ~ Orchestration + Mediator + Rules + Partial Adapter set

           - ORCHESTRATION ~ BPEL-Only + HWF + Partial Adapter set

           - BPEL-ONLY ~ BPEL Components + SOA Common Infrastructure + Partial Adapter set

•        The partial Adapter set consist of the FileAdapter, FTPAdapter, DBAdapter, JMSAdapter, AqAdapter, MQSeriesAdapter, OracleAppsAdapter and the UMSAdapter. The full adapter sets add the rest, SocketAdapter, LdapAdapter, CoherenceAdapter, MSMQAdapter, JDEWorldAdapter and the SAP Adapter.
•    Composite Lazy Loading
•        12c introduces a different approach to loading Composites. Lazy loading is a staggered loading of composite artifacts which spreads out bootstrap cost. The composite loading time is itself a fixed number, but this approach delays the loading of some resources (Schemas, WSDL, XSLTs, etc) till it receives its first time request. With this the initial time for server startup is improved and the cost across for individual composites is spread out based on their demand. It reduces overhead from composites which are rarely used and retired composites.
•    Work Managers
•        The self tuning threading model is implemented using Work Managers. WLS leverages work managers across SOA Suite, eliminating the need to perform manual configurations to tune for performance. The required resource management and scheduling is delegated to WLS. The Event Delivery Network (EDN) and adapters do not use work managers for all their processing, but have a separate resource model.
•    DB Tuning out-of-the-box
•        When running RCU to create the initial DB schemas you can choose between several DB profiles; small, medium and large. When selecting a profile in RCU it enables the appropriate OOTB performance features. The medium/large profiles automatically configure DB partitioning and Global hash indexes. The latter helps with faster querying and helps with EM responsiveness and instance tracking performance. The global hash indexes also avoids full table scans and coupled with auto purge feature which keeps the overheads low and recreating of indexes periodically helps with performance.
•    Purge/Partitioning Improvements - More efficient dehydration store management (like auto-purging)
•        Purging of instance data is an important part of SOA Suite maintenance. In 12c Auto purge of SOA DB is enabled by default for new installations. Purging of the SOA DB can now be scheduled through the enterprise manager, which uses Oracle DB schedular. There is improved performance due to the new DB schemas which consolidate Audit and Flow instance data and eliminates orphaned instances. 12c supports Interval Partitioning which accelerates purging by targeting tables/instances within a time range.
•    New manageability enhancements for private cloud deployments. Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c features "push button"-style provisioning of complete environments for Oracle SOA 12c and fast data cloning that enables rapid deployment and testing of enterprise applications.
•    Oracle Traffic Director, is a new released product, that will offer HTTP requests caching, a reverse proxy function and load-balancing based on other algorithms than just round-robin. It will completely replace Oracle WebCache
•    Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder is another new product announced by Oracle which will allow users to package a multi tier application into a consolidated project and move it easily into a virtual box for development, functional testing or just to accomodate a new developer joining the project, without having to build a new system. So for example if an application has a web module, but also uses Oracle Service Bus and Oracle Database, you can assemble all these into one package and use it on an Oracle VM machine.
•    The integration between the Weblogic server and Oracle RAC database is even tighter in the new release, by the use of the Active Grid Link, which now introduces session/transaction affinity with the RAC node. This new feature will bring a 3x boost in performance. Actually, that is one of the new strong selling points of the Weblogic Server 12c, which promises to bring important performance improvements.
•    In the new version, there is also a tighter integration with the Glassfish application server, since now Weblogic will be able to recognize Glassfish deployment descriptors. As a consequence an application that has been developed for Glassfish and deployed on that environment can easily be migrated on a Weblogic platform by a simple re-deploy. Of course, this is subject to discussion depending on the application’s security model for example, since that will have to be accomodated for the Weblogic Security Framework.
•    Another good news for Weblogic administrators and developers as well is an integration between the Weblogic Diagnostic Framework(WLDF) and JRockit’s Flight Recording functionality which promises to be a big step forward in troubleshooting and performing complex diagnostics on the applications.
•    Just for Development or testing purposes, Weblogic will now shift in a super lightweight version (only 168Mb) that will download, unzip and start without the need of running an installer. Even more, one will have the option to start the Weblogic server without the EJB, JMS and JCA containers if only a basic functionality is needed, simply by adding -Dservertupe=wlx to the startup parameters.

   Dynamic Cluster Support: allows the managed servers to be automatically added based on a server template.