IBM CICS Transaction Server vs. Oracle WebLogic Server

IBM CICS Transaction Server is multi-decades proven transaction server which is very scalable, very secured, easy to use, has good transactional capabilities, works well all other mainframe resources such as Db2, languages on IBM mainframe, has access control capabilities in terms of who can access the transaction for read mode vs update mode, etc.

Incentivized

If you need to have complex options in place you can count on Weblogic to be a robust Applicational Server you can rely on. But you would need to keep an eye on maintaining the framework updated quite frequently to avoid security breaches and subsequent severe situations. If you don't have other infrastructure for test purposes, I wouldn't advise you on having devs and QA installing this heavy application in their local machines, there are other lightweight solutions that would be a better fit for that.

Incentivized

• De facto standard in the legacy enterprise
• Multiplatform connection
• Native connection with DB2

Incentivized

• The brand relation between Java and WebLogic Application Server usually provides a quicker access to programming features and their availability for the applications deployed.
• The access to centralized configuration both from console and command line WLST eases the implementation of changes major or not in an organized and expedite way.
• The maturity of the product is also visible in the available tools provided by the product itself, for both monitoring of resources and alerting for availability and thresholds

Incentivized

• Would like to see the transaction response matrix on the average transaction response among all requests.
• Would like to see GUI tool to be able to see currently running transactions
• Would like to be able to get the details of where the cics transaction was triggered from

Incentivized

• The Admin UI should be further simplified, the UI design was not too user-friendly— too many options and clicks required, difficult for the new beginners to figure out what they are looking for.
• The admin server becomes the single failure point, although Oracle suggested some workarounds by setting VIP and VHost, it was not quite easy and straight forward.
• Domain replication is hard, requiring a lot of knowledge and scripts efforts.
• Admin will hang if the node manager communication encounters some issues for one or some nodes in the domain/cluster.
• Not able to kill/terminate the stuck thread, the only way is to restart the managed server (JVM)
• License cost is too high, for small businesses.

Incentivized

I would have given it a 10 but sometimes the hogging threads become a issue and needs server bounce. Except that, we are very pleased with the product.

Incentivized

Oracle WebLogic Application Server is great at security, performance and features.

Incentivized

The Oracle support is not great sometimes. They take a long time and need a lot of data over and over to resolve issues.

Incentivized

There is no comparison, in practice, the possibility of using the latest programming languages but, above all, the databases can be different and more modern than DL1.

Incentivized

I believe the Oracle WebLogic Suite is probably a better all encompassing suite of development tools for the IT department. [It] is probably a bit more expensive than other competitors like Apache Tomcat or NGINX, but is worth the investment if you consider the savings from time to get code into production.

Incentivized

• It has allowed us to use our decades old code and still continue to support the business
• Allows us to have faster time to market and modernize our systems
• We can still continue to use our legacy resources for modern systems

Incentivized

• WebLogic Application Server definitely had a positive ROI since all the applications are deployed on a single platform and making maintenance extremely cost effective.
• Since all major cloud vendors support and maintain WebLogic, it gives us an opportunity to explore possibilities to move the organizational infrastructure on to the cloud without too much effort.

Incentivized