Getting Started with Oracle WebLogic Server 12c: Developer's Guide: If you've dipped a toe into Java EE development and would now like to dive right in, this is the book for you. Introduces the key components of WebLogic Server and all that's great about Java EE 6.

While writing this book, a couple of Unix-like operating systems were used, more specifically Mac OS X and Ubuntu. So, when referencing a directory path, the format adopted is /some/folder. If you are a Windows user, the equivalent path would be C:\some\folder.

The base folder used in the book is /opt/packt/. Inside it, we're going to add a few more folders to accommodate the necessary components. Here's the basic structure you have to create before moving on to the next section:

/opt/packt/
  |- domains
  |- etc
  |- install
  |- workspace

Of course, you don't need to follow the preceding definitions. If so, just remember to change the references accordingly, when mentioned.

Since Oracle WebLogic Server 12c offers support to both Java SE 6 and 7, we're going to use the newest version, so we can code using a few developer-friendly features, such as the diamond operator and multicatch statements, as outlined in the The Project Coin section in Chapter 1, Overview of WebLogic Server 12c and Related Technologies.

Oracle WebLogic Server's installation is pretty straightforward; we just need to pay attention to the Java SDK selection in order to use the one we just installed.

The installation package we got doesn't come bundled with a development environment (Oracle JDeveloper, NetBeans, or Eclipse/OEPE). To create the book's applications, we decided to use Eclipse along with Oracle's application server plugin, OEPE, which is a great tool for Java EE development, integrating the IDE with WebLogic Server and other Java EE application servers. Perform the following steps to install it:

In order to explore Java Persistence, we need to install and configure a database server, and MySQL is a logical choice, being widely adopted and lightweight.

The software is available to several operating systems: Microsoft Windows, Debian, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Red Hat, Solaris, Mac OS X, and so on.

sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client

PrimeFaces is a suite of components built on top of JSF 2.x, giving you lots of first-class widgets to use on a Rich Internet Application (RIA) solution, such as charts and mind maps. Its only requirement is to choose between Oracle Mojarra and Apache MyFaces, both JSF 2.0 implementations, and to reference the chosen one. The current implementation version at the time of writing is 3.5.

As you may know, after finishing the installation of Oracle WebLogic Server, you have the necessary binaries to start a container, but there is no configured server to deploy your code yet (unless you installed the samples, but we're not going to use them). To accomplish this, you have to create a domain consisting of one or more server instances. Your code runs on these instances.

We're going to use a basic domain template, consisting of just one instance, since we don't have any scalability or high availability requirements for the time being.

To create it, follow the ensuing steps:

The next step is to configure the Eclipse IDE so it knows about Oracle WebLogic Server's installation, the domain we created, and PrimeFaces' shared library.

The last step is to configure the data sources that the application is going to use at WebLogic, and create links to these databases at Eclipse. This kind of connection is a data source (DS) inside WebLogic Server.

OpenLDAP is a cross-platform, free, and open source implementation of a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) server, released under a BSD license. It was started in 1998 and since then has had active development and constant releases, being widely adopted by many commercial-grade systems and applications.

Although WebLogic server includes its own embedded LDAP server for default security management, it's neither used nor recommended for application-specific security management. That's when third-party LDAP servers and products are recommended and offer much more flexibility and features for a real-world scenario.

In this section we're going to provide general guidelines for OpenLDAP configuration, but due to the way different operating systems package the software, some configuration...

At this point, we have installed and configured the Oracle WebLogic Server, an IDE (Eclipse OEPE), and the additional pieces of software needed to develop our applications.

The following is a table with all paths and environment variables that you may have defined in your environment in this chapter:

In the next chapter, we're going to set up the projects that will evolve throughout the book, develop the business entities, and use the libraries and packages we've just created. These projects will be deployed to the server and we will run a simple test to make sure everything is properly configured.