Support for web

There is actually a long list of new and improved Web Service support features in WLS 10.3. In the world of Web Services, the challenges are performance, reliability and security. For the first two there are many contributing factors, such as vendor platforms, code implementation, architecture, hardware, etc. For security, the highest hurdle is often the complexity. SAML 2.0 provides a simpler method of securing web services.

At first glance, this doesn't seem like all that impressive of a feature. But if you search for articles on WLS LnF customization, you will find that it didn't use to be all that easy, and there is a really good use case for wanting it to be. The most recent real-life scenario I dealt with where this would have been really useful was where I had to administer seven different environments (development, integration, performance testing, configuration testing, functional testing, acceptance testing and production) during the pre-launch phase of the project.

It would have made my life much easier to have color-coded the different consoles for each environment as it was more the rule than the exception to do updates to multiple environments at the same time, and almost always very late in a long day when someone had to have the changes done immediately.

There are many Spring-based applications deployed on earlier versions of WebLogic Server. Some of these deployments have had maintenance challenges. In many cases, those challenges have become manageable through a combination of updates and patches. In other cases, they are upgrade candidates just waiting to happen.