如果我在Weblogic 10.x上进行开发并部署到Weblogic9.2.x，会有多大的风险？

Question

Recently I took over a relative old project, which is running on weblogic 9.2. I need work on some change requests. I don't know much about weblogic product.

The old DEV-Env is windows based, however I dont have a windows machine. I tried to download Weblogic9.2 for linux (32bits), however I cannot find the link on Oracle website, after quite a lot google, still no working link found.

So the options for me:

1. find out a working link, download weblogic9.2 and work with it
2. download and use the 10.x version from oracle
3. setup a windows box (we have the installer of weblogic9.2 for win)

the 3 is the last thing I want to do. If someone knows where can I get the 9.2 version, it would be great. If there is no weblogic9.2 available, can I work on weblogic10.x and release to 9.2 in production? how risky is it?

Answer 1

Developing in WLS 10.x and deploying in 9.2 may cause some trouble.

There are quite a no of features which have been upgraded in 10.x, such as Java 5 to 6, J2EE 1.4 to 5, Servlet 2.4 to 2.5, JSP 2.0 to 2.1, EJB 2.1 to 3.0.

While most of the features here do have backward compatibility, you have to be extra careful when you develop.

I would suggest to develop based on the lowest common denominator features only, and build on the same server you are deploying it to. (ie 10.x has a diff build, and 9.2.x has different one.)

EDIT: There seems to be a authentic binary available on PeopleSoft's FTP site .

Answer 2

It's definitely a risk. Different versions of Weblogic use different jars, so what works on 10.x may not work on 9.x. It's a good practice to have your QA and PROD environments as similar as possible including node setup and startup variables.

If your current PROD deployed code works on 10.x then I would upgrade your PROD environment to 10.x and continue your development on 10.x. If not then do what you can to have 9.x on your DEV environment as well.