Weblogic and Coherence 12C

Friends,

I had published two post on Coherence*Web few years back, Where in first post, I had published introduction and benefits of Coherence*Web and in second post, I had published step by step procedure to configure it with Weblogic. Refer below links for same

Coherence*Web, Introduction & Benefits
Coherence*Web configuration ( Version 3.X )

If we specifically talk about Coherence then, Coherence*Web is a feature of Coherence for sessions management however Coherence itself a big product with lot's of features and enhancements now ( from 12C release ) for application availability, performance, scalability and more.

As per Oracle Portal - 

Oracle Coherence is the industry leading in-memory data grid solution that enables organizations to predictably scale mission-critical applications by providing fast access to frequently used data.

So, Oracle Coherence provides capabilities for the storage of large numbers of Java objects in-memory across a large cluster of Oracle Coherence servers. Storing objects in-memory can give large performance improvements to many applications where latency in data access causes performance and scalability problems.

In one line - 

Coherence Offload session and application data management from the app server tier

And major benefits of Coherence*Web you can define as below

• Decouple session management from web container
• Handle more users without adding more application servers
• Restart/maintain applications/containers without losing sessions
• Handle very large sessions efficiently

Coherence*Web 3.x and 12c

There are lot's of enhancements and features introduced with Coherence 12C but here I am going to cover specifically related with conerence*web configuration.

In traditional approach for versions till 12.1.1 ( 3.x, 12.1.1 ), you had to deploy and update classpath for some coherence related code and libraries ( you can see my Coherence*Web configuration post, which was for 3.6 version as link provided above) and had to configure and start external JVM ( cache server ) separately from weblogic for storing session & cache data by calling DefaultCacheServer java class, but there was lot's of challenges related  with this approach like development, deployment, management, management across different platforms and environments.


No from 12C, 12.1.2 versions onwards, you don't need to do any such changes specifically for session replications. 

So, the Major changes from 12C, 12.1.2 onwards are - 

Coherence*Web SPI is deprecated in 12c (12.1.2)

The coherence-web-spi.war file, which was included in previous releases of Coherence*Web, is deprecated in 12c (12.1.2). The Coherence 12c (12.1.2) distribution includes a coherence-web-spi.war file in the coherence\lib directory, but this file is provided only for backward compatibility with older versions of WebLogic Server.

ActiveCache (active-cache.jar) Replaced with Managed Coherence Servers

ActiveCache (active-cache.jar), the collection of WebLogic Server features which allow deployed applications to easily use Coherence data caches and seamlessly incorporate Coherence*Web for session management, has been deprecated in the 12c (12.1.2) release. ActiveCache is still supported in the 12c (12.1.2), primarily to support upgrades of applications developed on older releases.

New Session Cache Configuration File

In previous releases, Coherence cache configurations and services used by Coherence*Web SPI were defined in the session-cache-config.xml file, As of the 12c (12.1.2), Coherence cache configurations and services used by Coherence*Web are defined in the default-session-cache-config.xml file, which can be found in the coherence-web.jar file. The default cache and services configuration defined in the default-session-cache-config.xml file should satisfy most Web applications.

More Coming Soon..............