BEA Weblogic Interview Preparation Guide

BEA WebLogic is a J2EE application server and also an HTTP web server by BEA Systems of San Jose, California, for Unix, Linux, Microsoft Windows, and other platforms. WebLogic supports Oracle, DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, and other JDBC-compliant databases. WebLogic Server supports WS-Security and is compliant with J2EE 1.3.
BEA WebLogic Server is part of the BEA WebLogic Platform™. The other parts of WebLogic Platform are:
► Portal, which includes Commerce Server and Personalization Server (which is built on a BEA-produced Rete rules engine),
► WebLogic Integration,
► WebLogic Workshop, an IDE for Java, and
► JRockit, a JVM for Intel CPUs.

WebLogic Server includes .NET interoperability and supports the following native integration capabilities:
► Native enterprise-grade JMS messaging
► J2EE Connector Architecture
► WebLogic/Tuxedo Connector
► COM+ Connectivity
► CORBA connectivity
► IBM WebSphere MQ connectivity

BEA WebLogic Server Process Edition also includes Business Process Management and Data Mapping functionality.
WebLogic supports security policies managed by Security Administrators. The BEA WebLogic Server Security Model includes:
► Separate application business logic from security code
► Complete scope of security coverage for all J2EE and non-J2EE components

The EJB Specification prohibits this behavior, and the weblogic.ejbc compiler checks for this behavior and prohibits any polymorphic type of response from a create() or find() method.
The reason the create() and find() methods are not polymorphic is similar to the reason constructors are not polymorphic in Java. The derived classes generally do not know or cannot initialize the base class properly.

No. Within an unsigned applet, you cannot load native libraries over the wire, access the local file system, or connect to any host except the host from which you loaded the applet. The applet security manager enforces these restrictions on applets as protection against applets being able to do unsavory things to unsuspecting users.
If you are trying to use jDriver for Oracle from an applet, then you are violating the first restriction. Your applet will fail when it attempts to load the native (non-Java layer) library that allows jDriver for Oracle to make calls into the non-Java Oracle client libraries. If you look at the exception that is generated, you will see that your applet fails in java.lang.System.loadLibrary, because the security manager determined that you were attempting to load a local library and halted the applet.
You can, however, use the WebLogic JTS or Pool driver for JDBC connectivity in applets. When you use one of these WebLogic multitier JDBC drivers, you need one copy of WebLogic jDriver for Oracle (or any other two-tier JDBC driver) for the connection between the WebLogic Server and the DBMS.

I tried to run two of the applets in the examples directory of the distribution. I installed the WebLogic classes on my local machine (NT server) and on another machine (a Windows 95 client). I am not using any browsers, just trying to run the applets with Appletviewer. The applets work fine when I run Appletviewer from the NT server, but do not work at all from the Windows 95 client.


There are two possible problems: Either the CODEBASE tag is not properly set in the applet HTML file, or the class files are not properly loaded on the HTTP server.
The applet works on the NT server because you installed the WebLogic distribution on your NT server. Even if the applet cannot successfully load the necessary classes from the HTTP server, it does find them in your local CLASSPATH. But when you try to run it from the Windows 95 client, the applet must load the classes over the wire from the HTTP server, and if you haven't installed them correctly, it will fail.

Clients that connect to a WebLogic Server cluster and look up a clustered object obtain a replica-aware stub for the object. This stub contains the list of available server instances that host implementations of the object. The stub also contains the load balancing logic for distributing the load among its host servers.

Your JDBC code may throw the following exception:
"The coordinator has rolled back the transaction.
No further JDBC access is allowed within this transaction."

The WebLogic JTS JDBC driver throws this exception when the current JDBC connection transaction rolls back prior to or during the JDBC call. This exception indicates that the transaction in which the JDBC connection was participating was rolled back at some point prior to or during the JDBC call.
The rollback may have happened in an earlier EJB invoke that was part of the transaction, or the rollback may have occurred because the transaction timed out. In either case, the transaction will be rolled back, the connection returned to the pool and the database resources released. In order to proceed, the JTS JDBC connection must be closed and reopened in a new transaction.

a. Close any open resources, like database connections
b. All non-transient, non-serializable fields(except some special types) should be set to null.
c. All transient fields should be set to null
d. Make all database connection reference fields transient
e. All primitive type fields should be set to null



Choices A, B and D are correct. When a bean is about to be passivated, its ejbPassivate() method is invoked, alerting the bean instance that it is about to enter the Passivated state. At this time, the bean instance should close any open resources and set all non transient, non serializable fields to null. This will prevent problems from occurring when the bean is serialized. Transient fields will simply be ignored.Serializable fields will be saved.Open resources such as sockets or JDBC connections must be closed whenever the bean is passivated. In stateful session beans, open resources will not be maintained for the life of the bean instance. When a stateful session bean is passivated, any open resource can cause problems with the activation mechanism.
A bean's conversational state may consist of only primitive values, objects that are serializable, and the following special types-SessionContext, EJBHome, EJBObject, UserTransaction and Context (only when it references the JNDI ENC) . The types in this list (and their subtypes) are handled specially by the passivation mechanism. They don't need to be serializable; they will be maintained through passivation and restored automatically to the bean instance when it is activated

Setting up your CLASSPATH correctly depends on what you are trying to do. The most common tasks are described below:
* Starting WebLogic Server. See Setting the Classpath Option in the Starting and Stopping WebLogic Servers section of the Administration Guide. In addition, your WebLogic distribution includes shell scripts that you can use to start the server. These scripts, which are located in the domain directories under the config directory of your WebLogic Server distribution, automatically set up the CLASSPATH variable in the shell before starting the server.

For instance, I am deploying an EJB and a resource adapter (.rar), the EJB has no dependencies on the .rar because the EJB is writing to the common client interface (CCI). The EJB client application has sends/marshals as parameter classes that are defined in the .rar. For some reason the EJB's class loader hierarchy cannot find the definition of this .rar-specific class, even though the .rar is deploying successfully. I receive the following error on the EJB client:
java.rmi.UnmarshalException: error unmarshalling arguments; nested
exception
is:
java.lang.ClassNotFoundException:
com.mycompany.InteractionSpecImpl



When you pass an instance of com.myclientcompany.server.eai.InteractionSpecImpl as an argument to your EJB, the appServer needs to de-serialize (unmarshal) the object under the EJB context, and it needs the required class for unmarshalling, inside the ejb-jar(raTester.jar). So if you include the interactionspecimpl class in your ejb-jar file, then you do not need to include those classes in your server's classpath.

No, there's no way to allow a request to wait for a pool connection, and from the system point of view there should not be. Each requests that waits for a connection ties up one of the fixed number of execute threads in the server, which could otherwise be running another server task. Too many waiting requests could tie up all of the execute threads and freeze the server.