Migrating Weblogic Application to Jboss Application

Main objective of this article is to high light the check points when an application deployed in Web logic Server to be migrated to JBoss EAP.

• Identify the server architecture (Nodes,Core,Clustering,Load Balancing) 
• Identify the components/frameworks,shared libraries and third party libraries used in the application
• Identify the resources (JNDI,Databases,JMS, external interfaces)
• Identify any proprietary API usage such as Weblogic JMS, Weblogic Servlet etc
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Leaving server side architecture aside, Application source code and configuration files  are the next important candidates for  scrutiny. There could be java code which need to transformed to JEE spec (from Weblogic API), and deployment descriptors(weblogic-ejb-jar.xml) present in the source application.

Here are the list of areas which needs special attention during the migration

• JMS implementation which uses Weblogic APIs 
• Custom Mbeans
• Oracle APIs
• WebLogic JNDI
• WebLogic EJB
• WebLogic Webservice
• WebLogic Security
• WebLogic Servlet annotations
• Bea APIs
• WebLogic Logging API
• WebLogic MDB
• Resource adapter
• WebLogic JSP tag
• WebLogic Transaction Manager
• WebLogic Application lifecycle events usage
• WebLogic EJB Startup annotation
• WebLogic Protocol
• WebLogic JNDI 
• WebLogic Singleton Services
• WebLogic security 
• Oracle web cache
• Deployment Descriptors
•     weblogicejbjar.xml
•     ejbjar.xml
•     ejbappjms.xml
•     weblogic.xml
•     weblogicapplication.xml
• weblogicweb.xml
•  Weblogic webservice Configurations
• webservice.xml
• weblogicwebservices.xml
• WebLogic datasource  Configurations
• WebLogic XA  configuration
• weblogiccmprdbmsjar.xml

Apart from this we also need to consider compatibility of third party APIs or frameworks on the target servers such as

• Struts 1.x  API/Config
• Spring 2x 
• Hibernate 2x
• Hibernate 3.x 
• Java 1.4 API 

Note : Hibernate 2x and 3x has reported issues on Jboss EAP 7.0

Identifying and re mediating above scenarios and uses case would be mammoth task if there are large number of application, and  organisation would often refrain from migration seeing the risk.  There are couple of discovery and remediation tools available which mainly helps to identify this vulnerabilities and even to automatically transform the source and configuration which eventually mitigate the risk of migrating.

In the coming blog I would explain more  on discovery pattern and using tools