## The BigTel Story, or how WebLogic Server Saved the Day

This story about a fictitious company is part of the interactive demo that you can run on your local Windows machine, after you register and download a 30-day free trial of the WebLogic Server software. The interactive tour you install uses a live WebLogic Server and a real SQL database -- JBMS, a pure-Java emendable DBMS from Cloudscape -- to generate realtime database queries. In this online version, we'll tell the story and describe what you'll see in the tour.

BigTel, Ltd. sells a wide variety of telephony and related services. Their Corporate Engineering department has just been charged with building and deploying some very high-visibility applications before the next stockholders meeting.

We join them as the VP of Engineering, Ms. Veep, is announcing that management wants -- in less than 3 months -- systems that will support:

- Services call handling-dispatching
- Customer info
- Field engineer support

The BigTel engineers immediately see the challenge: to build a sophisticated set of business applications that depend upon multiple databases, span multiple networks and server hosts, and run on a variety of clients -- everything from remote laptops on the Internet to workstations using the local intranet. The applications will need to be secure and robust, and a lot of the information they provide will have to be delivered in realtime. What's more, they'll need to support an ever-growing client base without interruption -- if they go down, the entire organization suffers. Not only must the applications be reliable, the whole infrastructure that supports them must work flawlessly all the time -- no matter what.

One engineer at BigTel has been working a lot lately in Java. On his enthusiastic recommendation the engineers at BigTel decide to build the applications in Java, specifically with WebLogic Server, a pure-Java, multitier framework for building enterprise applications.

"So tell us what WebLogic Server can do for us," Ms. Veep asks the Java engineer.

"Well, WebLogic Server's standards-based component services and support for Enterprise JavaBeans will make it easy to plug in our business logic. All of the server infrastructure for efficient networking, security, performance, and robustness that BigTel needs is built right into WebLogic Server. I think its integrated services -- EJB, security, database connectivity, events, remote method invocation, distributed processing, access control lists, and naming services -- will make building complex network applications like this a lot easier! And with WebLogic Server clusters, we can add new servers as the workload grows. Not only that, with WebLogic Server's sophisticated failover and load-handling technology, we can sleep at night -- without the beeper going off!"

The engineers at BigTel download the WebLogic Server kit from BEA Systems and start to work. We join them later that afternoon -- excited about what they've already been able to do . . .

More . . .