Programming WebLogic Resource Adapters
Introduction and Roadmap
The following sections describe the contents and organization of this guide—Programming WebLogic Resource Adapters.
- Document Scope and Audience
- Guide to This Document
- Related Documentation
- Examples for the Resource Adapter Developer
- New and Changed Features in This Release
Document Scope and Audience
This document is written for resource adapter users, deployers, and software developers who develop applications that include J2EE resource adapters to be deployed to WebLogic Server. This document also contains information that is useful for business analysts and system architects who are evaluating WebLogic Server or considering the use of WebLogic Server resource adapters for a particular application.
The topics in this document are relevant during the design and development phases of a software project. The document also includes topics that are useful in solving application problems that are discovered during test and pre-production phases of a project.
This document does not address production phase administration, monitoring, or performance tuning topics. For links to WebLogic Server documentation and resources for these topics, see Related Documentation.
It is assumed that the reader is familiar with J2EE and resource adapter concepts. The foundation document for resource adapter development is Sun Microsystems J2EE Connector Architecture Specification, Version 1.5 Final Release (referred to in this guide as the J2CA 1.5 Specification): http://java.sun.com/j2ee/connector/. Resource adapter developers should become familiar with the J2CA 1.5 Specification. This document emphasizes the value-added features provided by WebLogic Server resource adapters and key information about how to use WebLogic Server features and facilities to get a resource adapter up and running.
Guide to This Document
- This section, Introduction and Roadmap, introduces the organization of this guide.
- Understanding Resource Adapters, introduces you to the Oracle WebLogic Server implementation of the J2EE Connector Architecture as well as the resource adapter types and XML schema.
- Creating and Configuring Resource Adapters, describes how to create resource adapters using the Oracle WebLogic Server implementation of the J2EE Connector Architecture.
- Programming Tasks, describes programming tasks for resource adapters.
- Connection Management, introduces you to resource adapter connection management.
- Transaction Management, introduces you to the resource adapter transaction management.
- Message and Transactional Inflow, describes resource adapter messaging inflow and transactional inflow.
- Security, describes how to configure security for resource adapters.
- Packaging and Deploying Resource Adapters, discusses packaging and deploying requirements for resource adapters and provides instructions for performing these tasks.
- weblogic-ra.xml Schema, provides a complete reference for the schema for the WebLogic Server-specific deployment descriptor, weblogic-ra.xml.
- Resource Adapter Best Practices, provides best practices for resource adapter developers.
Related Documentation
The foundation document for resource adapter development is Sun Microsystems J2EE Connector Architecture Specification, Version 1.5 Final Release (referred to in this guide as the J2CA 1.5 Specification): http://java.sun.com/j2ee/connector/. This document assumes you are familiar with the J2CA 1.5 Specification and contains design and development information that is specific to developing WebLogic Server resource adapters.
For comprehensive guidelines for developing, deploying, and monitoring WebLogic Server applications, see the following documents:
- Developing Applications with WebLogic Server is a guide to developing WebLogic Server applications.
- Deploying Applications to WebLogic Server is the primary source of information about deploying WebLogic Server applications.
- Performance and Tuning contains information on monitoring and improving the performance of WebLogic Server applications.
Examples for the Resource Adapter Developer
In addition to this document, Oracle provides resource adapter examples for software developers. WebLogic Server optionally installs API code examples in WL_HOME\samples\server\examples\src\examples, where WL_HOME is the top-level directory of your WebLogic Server installation. You can start the examples server, and obtain information about the samples and how to run them from the WebLogic Server Start menu.
The resource adapter examples provided with this release of WebLogic Server are compliant with the J2CA 1.5 Specification. Oracle recommends that you examine, run, and understand these resource adapter examples before developing your own resource adapters.
New and Changed Features in This Release
For a comprehensive listing of the new WebLogic Server features introduced in this release, see “What's New in WebLogic Server” in Release Notes.