WebLogic Platform ISV Partners' Guide
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This document describes the services and tools provided by BEA to facilitate your job, as a BEA Independent Software Vendor (ISV) partner, of making your applications easy to use and delivering them to your customers. It begins, in this chapter, with the following topics:
To improve its ability to distribute WebLogic Platform and enhancements to it, BEA works in partnership with many ISVs. The following table defines the various types of ISVs that work with BEA in this way.
BEA provides the following resources and tools for its partners:
This section describes each of these resources in detail.
WebLogic Platform ISV Edition is a special software package tailored for ISVs who have a current agreement with BEA to build value-added solutions on WebLogic. WebLogic Platform ISV Edition comprises a set of WebLogic Platform components specifically packaged to help ISVs jumpstart their service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives.
WebLogic Platform ISV Edition leverages the capabilities of WebLogic Platform to provide a means to rapidly develop applications that perform the following:
WebLogic Platform ISV also includes WebLogic Portal's run-time framework to develop and run rich-featured portals and Web front ends to applications.
The following WebLogic Platform components are included with ISV Edition:
A graphical environment that you can use for building, testing, and debugging WebLogic Platform applications. The Workshop IDE's intuitive user interface lets you design your application visually and hides the complexity of J2EE programming.
The portal framework provides several key features for application development that partners can leverage to do the following:
WebLogic Platform ISV Edition is intended for use with ISV applications and is not intended for general-purpose use or development of other custom applications. For more information about ISV Edition and developing applications for it, see Using WebLogic Platform ISV Edition. For important information about distributing ISV Edition applications, see Distributing WebLogic Platform.
Note: WebLogic Platform ISV Edition is an entry level packaging of the full WebLogic Platform product. If there are features outside the scope of ISV Edition that you need for your value-added solution, your BEA partner representative will work with you to choose the set of components that you need.
WebLogic Platform ISV Edition is available for download from the following site:
http://commerce.bea.com/showallproducts.jsp
The BEA Partner Program is a forum for jointly developing business opportunities with technology companies that redistribute BEA products, either as stand-alone software or as part of a package that includes their own software. The goal of this program is to provide partners with resources that can accelerate time-to-market profitability, such as technical services, education, and marketing resources.
Partners worldwide benefit from services such as discounts on instructor-led classes, technical Webcasts, and Web-based product training. The program also offers comprehensive technical services and support to software developers
This document, WebLogic Platform ISV Partners' Guide, is written for partners who enroll in the BEA Partner Program as a Software Partner. BEA Software Partners include Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) developing technology that complements and extends the functionality of BEA WebLogic Platform. BEA Software Partners also include Application Service Providers: vendors who provide full solutions, including hardware, hosting, software, and services.
If you are not already enrolled in the BEA Partner Program and you would like to enroll, complete the following steps:
As a benefit of the BEA Partner Program, partners who enroll receive a set of software licenses and media, which includes BEA Tuxedo with Jolt and the following offerings:
Enables full development and scale-limited commercial usage rights of WebLogic Platform, and includes support.
Grants partners the ability to load the WebLogic Platform software onto test servers for the purposes of QA and pre-production testing, creating demonstrations, and creating and testing proof-of-concept applications and other prototypes in configurations that potentially require a great deal of scalability.
For comprehensive information about the software and licenses, enrolled partners can access the BEA Partner Program Guide at the following URL:
ftp://pdownload:BUY_ME@ftpna2.bea.com/pub/program/BEA_Partner_Program_Guide.pdf
The WebLogic Platform package available from BEA normally includes a license that prohibits the buyer from redistributing the software. However, for partners who are in the business of redistributing WebLogic Platform or its components, BEA provides the ability for ISVs to generate a license for their customers so that they can run the WebLogic Platform software that is bundled or embedded with the ISV's value-added solution. This generated license is called the ISV redistribution license.
Although the function of all ISV redistribution licenses is the same—to provide customers of ISVs with the ability to run the version of the WebLogic Platform software distributed by the ISV—each license is unique, specific to each individual partner, that controls the specific set of WebLogic Platform components that ISV customers can use at run time.
ISV partners who have current agreement to distribute a value-added solution with WebLogic Platform ISV Edition receive software that allows ISVs to generate both an ISV redistribution license and a version of the WebLogic Platform software that is associated with that license. The ISV redistribution license allows ISV customers to run the specific WebLogic Platform components associated with that license. (For a complete list of components included in WebLogic Platform ISV Edition, see WebLogic Platform Components Included in ISV Edition.)
To find out how to generate an ISV redistribution license and package it with the WebLogic Platform software developed by your company, see Distributing WebLogic Platform.
To simplify the tasks of installing and configuring WebLogic Platform, BEA provides the following tools:
For each tool, BEA provides a simple and intuitive graphical user interface (GUI). The tools are designed, specifically, to help you create ISV-ready WebLogic Platform configurations that your customers will be able to install easily.
BEA's installation program makes it easy to install either the entire WebLogic Platform product or individual components of it—whichever you prefer. The program offers an easy-to-use tool called Smart Update, which enables you to obtain and install product upgrades. In addition, the installation program helps you launch installers for third-party products, such as XMLSPY and Stylesheet Designer.
When run in noninteractive or silent mode, the installation program makes it even easier for your customers to install WebLogic Platform.
If you are planning to distribute WebLogic applications to customers, you may want to take advantage of two tools that can help you simplify the configuration of your customer's environment: the Configuration Wizard and the Template Builder. Using the Template Builder, you can create custom templates of the WebLogic domains required to run your applications. After your customers install your product, they can run the Configuration Wizard to set up their environments based on these custom templates.
Like the installation program, the Configuration Wizard can be run in silent mode. In other words, after your product is installed, you can run the Configuration Wizard to set up your customer's environment without any customer input.
By creating a simple shell script or command file that sequentially runs silent mode installation and silent mode configuration, you can simplify even further your customers' work of installing and configuring WebLogic Platform. This gives you customers a streamlined process, right out of the box, so that they can start running your applications more quickly and easily.
WebLogic Workshop Version 8.1 offers a new feature for Workshop applications: the ability to develop Java controls. Java controls are server-side components that encapsulate external resources and business logic for use in Workshop applications. They are integrated with the Workshop IDE and managed by the Workshop run-time framework.
To enable users to configure the run-time behavior of the Java controls in your Workshop application, you can also add a custom, design-time user interface to your Java controls.
For application programmers using the Workshop IDE, Java controls are a set of methods and callbacks that expose simple Java method interfaces. These interfaces, in turn, are customized to access a specific resource. By providing easy defaults and extensive examples, Workshop makes it easy for both partners and end users to build controls.
As a partner, you can use controls to create simple wrappers for potentially complex application software. Such a wrapper, exposed in WebLogic Workshop, can serve as a user-friendly software development interface to your final product software. To help you build your own controls, WebLogic Workshop provides a package called the Control Development Kit (CDK): a set of APIs, samples, and documentation, that you can package for distribution to your customers, along with your own software. The CDK is part of the Extension Development Kit (EDK).
After you enroll in the BEA Partner Program, you receive access to a comprehensive set of tools and resources that support the entire scope of partner enablement, training, software development, marketing and sales assistance, and support. For more information about partner support provided by the BEA Partner Program, see About BEA Partner Support.
BEA collaborates with Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) who sell the following types of products:
Table 1-2 describes the job required to sell and deliver each type of product, recommends a procedure for performing that job, and provides links to instructions, in this document, for each procedure.
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1. Enroll in the Partner Program. See BEA Partner Program. 2. Back up your 3. Install the partner software bundle. See Using the Partner Software Bundle. 4. Create the ISV redistribution license and link it to the WebLogic Platform software you will redistribute. 5. Create a package to distribute to your customers, ensuring that the ISV redistribution license and the WebLogic Platform software to which it is linked is installed correctly. See Distributing WebLogic Platform. Note: For instructions for distributing custom software along with any or all of WebLogic Platform, see steps 3 through 6 in the procedure for ISVs of layered products, later in this table. |
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Distributing a prepackaged WebLogic application that runs on WebLogic Platform or its components |
1. Enroll in the Partner Program. See BEA Partner Program. 2. Install the partner software bundle. See Using the Partner Software Bundle. 3. Build, test, and deploy the application. See Applications You Can Develop on WebLogic Platform. 4. Configure the WebLogic domain in which the application is meant to be run. Then create a template or template extension of that domain.
5. Create an appropriate distribution mechanism (such as an installation program or a Web download) for your application. If you want to deliver your product with a script that runs the Configuration Wizard in silent mode, write that script now. (See Template Builder.) 6. Create user documentation for your application. If you want your customers to run the Configuration Wizard to create a domain based on a custom template or a template extension you have provided, write instructions for doing so. See Preparing Customer Documentation. |
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Creating and distributing WebLogic Workshop controls and IDE extensions |
1. Enroll in the Partner Program. See BEA Partner Program. 2. Install WebLogic Platform. See Installing BEA WebLogic Platform. 3. Build and test the component. See Creating and Packaging WebLogic Workshop Java Controls. 4. Create online help for the component. See Creating Online Help.
For more information about WebLogic Workshop extensibility, visit the following Web site: http://dev2dev.bea.com/products/wlworkshop81/ext_overview.jsp |
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1. Enroll in the Partner Program. See BEA Partner Program. 2. Familiarize yourself with the WebLogic JRockit JVM, and with BEA's policies for providing and supporting it. 3. Learn about how BEA distributes WebLogic JRockit and provides support, for this product, to partners and their customers. See Supporting and Distributing WebLogic JRockit. |
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Creating non-BEA software for use in a WebLogic Platform environment |
1. Enroll in the Partner Program. See BEA Partner Program. 2. If you are creating management or monitoring tools, see Programming WebLogic Management Services with JMX for detailed information and code samples for working with WebLogic Server MBeans. |
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