Get your hands off me, you damn, dirty Console!

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Hussein Badakhchani's Blog | February 21, 2007   3:14 AM | Comments (9)

Lets start with the only good feature of the WebLogic 9.2 console, it's blue. Gone is the gaudy green colour of past versions and instead we have the liquid blue enforced by BEA's marketing mandarins. But as soon as you browse to the console URL alarm bells start to ring, why did it take a good 5-10 seconds to load up and where is the miserable applet tree on the left hand panel? Then the first real clue of how bad things are going to get, you notice the URL: http://localhost:7001/console/console.portal? thats right "portal". The immortal line from planet of the apes rings through my monkey head "They did it! The b*******s finally did it! Damn you all! Damn you all to hell!".

It seems the console has been reimplemented using some portal widgets and large dose of, erm, design. Almost all the old features I used to use have been rendered unusable or have been completely removed, here's the list:

• All the functionality provided by the old applet that was rendered with a right mouse click now takes at least three clicks, each click taking a minimum of 3 seconds. Things like viewing the JNDI tree, Server logs, thread queues etc.
• No performance applet which indicated heap usage at a glance.
• All basic operations such as deployment require endless clicks to confirm your actions.
• Everything now runs considerably slower.

I can only assume the people who designed this application have never had to use the console in their Rationally Unified lives. Perhaps they thought they could make end users more agile by getting them to double or triple the number of mouse clicks it took to untarget a connection pool. Another theory I have is that the WLST team sabotaged the console in order to ensure all WLS managment was scripted. I take my hat off to you WLST team, mission accomplished!

I know the WLS 10 preview is now available, I'm going to down load it at the end of February, this will give the console team some time to fix the defects I have raised. My bug report will be posted to this blog so stay tuned. Now then, what was the URL for the JBoss console...

Comments

• Lol. Have you tried deploying the 8.1 console app to 9.2? I wouldn't put it past you Hoos.

  Posted by: simonvc on February 21, 2007 at 3:25 AM

• If the WLS 10 console turns out to be as bad then I think BEA really ought to consider dropping it altogether and create a Open Source console instead. Imagine if you could deploy that console onto any Java EE compliant appserver and if it came with a raft of ready made scripts for automating all the routine jobs. It can only be a winner for BEA. The console must be as much of a cost centre for BEA as it is for me ;)

  Posted by: hoos on February 21, 2007 at 3:36 AM

• I think you know already that BEA has a history of poor "User Experience" in the management console area. Do you remember WebLogic 6 and 7 with the lovely color combination of purple and orange. That said at least BEA WebLogic has a partial management solution. JBoss/RedHat management console is non-existent. IBM and BEA seem on par at this moment with Oracle trailing far behind and JBoss a non-runner.
  
  For runtime inspection of server state you might want to check out JXInsight's JVMInsight that includes many extensions for JNDI, JMX, JDBC, JRockit JMAPI,.....
  
  http://www.jinspired.com/products/jxinsight/new-in-5.0.html
  http://www.jinspired.com/products/jxinsight/new-in-4.1.html#4
  http://blog.jinspired.com/?cat=12
  
  Regards, William

  Posted by: wlouth on February 21, 2007 at 5:09 AM

• Maybe they realize that it's about time to reduce the enormous complexity of the BEA Portal product. Maybe eating their own dog food might result in a decent Portal product at some time, but currently it leaves us with both a bad WLS Console and a far from good portal product. When a developer run i developer mode, there shouldn't be all these confirmation steps to apply changes. In production mode it's acceptable, but in development mode it's just annoying.

  Posted by: tronda on February 21, 2007 at 6:05 AM

• Hi All, I'd like to jump in here and comment on a few things. Alot of the feedback related here are things we are keenly aware of. 1) Performance and scalability of the console is something that is actively being looked at as an area for improvement. 2) The design issues are being looked at and considered as well, but it's important to keep in mind that the console does need to serve users in multiple roles, developer, administrator, etc. We've tried to balance it between that and customer requests, perhaps not as successfully for some (like developers). Most of the console developers have been with the product since the 8.x line and one several releases before that. So your assumption about never using it is false. 3) The applet removal was removed primarily because we had ( in the past) users who had issues because of browser plugin compatibility. In the same timeframe (9.x-present) the WLDF framework came about and with it the WLDF console extension which has a dashboard with siginificantly more charts and capability than the previous charts. So the decision was made to remove them in favor of the more capable WLDF console extension. The extension was available (may still be) on dev2dev, but is now shipped with WLS as a supported extension. http://edocs.bea.com/wls/docs91/wldf_console_ext/overview.html 4) The 9.x - 10.x console is not based on the Full WLP product, it's the Portal Framework which is primarily the rendering framework for portal. So in the console of WLS console, the enormous complexity you refer to doesn't really apply. http://edocs.bea.com/wlp/docs92/overview/intro.html#wp1005142 In closing we and I take your concerns very seriously, we don't want the console to be painful to use and we are working on the issues you describe. Thanks! Mike Jasnowski BEA Systems P.S. If you're using java weblogic.Server the default heap settings won't give you the greatest console experience.

  Posted by: masterchief on February 21, 2007 at 9:19 AM

• [REPOSTING with better format, sorry]
  
  Hi All, I'd like to jump in here and comment on a few things. Alot of the feedback related here are things we are keenly aware of.
  1) Performance and scalability of the console is something that is actively being looked at as an area for improvement.
  
  2) The design issues are being looked at and considered as well, but it's important to keep in mind that the console does need to serve users in multiple roles, developer, administrator, etc. We've tried to balance it between that and customer requests, perhaps not as successfully for some (like developers). Most of the console developers have been with the product since the 8.x line and one several releases before that. So your assumption about never using it is false.
  
  3) The applet removal was removed primarily because we had ( in the past) users who had issues because of browser plugin compatibility. In the same timeframe (9.x-present) the WLDF framework came about and with it the WLDF console extension which has a dashboard with siginificantly more charts and capability than the previous charts. So the decision was made to remove them in favor of the more capable WLDF console extension. The extension was available (may still be) on dev2dev, but is now shipped with WLS as a supported extension.
  
  http://edocs.bea.com/wls/docs91/wldf_console_ext/overview.html
  
  4) The 9.x - 10.x console is not based on the Full WLP product, it's the Portal Framework which is primarily the rendering framework for portal. So in the console of WLS console, the enormous complexity you refer to doesn't really apply.
  
  http://edocs.bea.com/wlp/docs92/overview/intro.html#wp1005142
  
  In closing we and I take your concerns very seriously, we don't want the console to be painful to use and we are working on the issues you describe.
  
  Thanks!
  Mike Jasnowski
  BEA Systems
  P.S. If you're using java weblogic.Server the default heap settings won't give you the greatest console experience.

  Posted by: masterchief on February 21, 2007 at 9:31 AM

• Mike, thanks for responding to my rant, that alone earns you my respect. Many of the small to medium sized organisations I have worked for depend on the WLS console to expose functionality to different groups. For instance we give monitor access to domain owners and ask them to use it to access information about their domain rather than rely on us to do it. We give operator and deployer access to developers so that they can carry out server restarts and deploy applications without having to wait for an overworked middleware services team to carry out these trivial tasks; at least on test environments. I have been advised by BEA professional services, on more than occasion, not to bother using the console for these activities when they have been unable to resolve issues that we have found that relate to console usage (I don't want to imply that we found specific bugs in the console code rather we were suffering from lots of problems that lead to functional failures).

  In short for me and probably a very large portion of BEAs customers the console is the face of BEA (not that liquid logic bus thing) when it fails we all notice even if we don't all blog about it. I'm pleased that you responded to this entry and I sincerely hope the console improves. The London Middleware BUG will be more than happy to provide you with clear requirements of what we want from the WLS Admin console, all BEA has to do is ask us and sponsor our next event!

  Posted by: hoos on February 22, 2007 at 3:13 PM

• I should comment that Williams comment (wlouth) was filtered by the new cop on dev2dev's blog engine. Sorry about the delay in enabling your comment, I operate an open policy on all comments to my entries. I am even prepared to tolerate the shameless self publicity of your products but I warn you; if you live by the sword you might end up being gunned down! If I ever get a couple of hours free I might just review one of your products and publish my findings here.

  Posted by: hoos on February 22, 2007 at 3:28 PM

• Thanks for the feedback good and bad. If you're interested I've posted an example console extension that can add the performance applet back.
  sample at: Example
  

  Posted by: masterchief on February 27, 2007 at 10:20 AM