What's New in Fusion Middleware 11gR1 PS1 & WebLogic 10.3.2?

13 Nov 2009 by Simon Haslam (in Install & Upgrade)

What's new? Good question! I stumbled into a whole load of new downloads for OFM 11gR1 PS1 this morning, including WebLogic 10.3.2, but have been unable to find out anything much about them. Whilst I had been expecting new versions of JDeveloper/ADF (see my comment a couple of days ago) and SOA, I didn't know we were getting the whole stack!

I spoke to a chum in Oracle Support who says apparently the WLS update is a minor release (with some fixes) but is primarily there to support changes for Patch Set 1 in the other middleware products runing on top of WebLogic. There was also an interesting comment from someone in Oracle on this OTN thread: http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=986264 suggesting that documentation is on its way. Good.

Here's the list of the new OFM 11gR1 PS1 (i.e. 11.1.1.2) products:

• SOA Suite
• Complex Event Processing
• WebCenter Suite
• Identity Management
• Portal, Forms, Reports and Discoverer
• Application Development Runtime
• OFM Companion products
• WebLogic Server (all packages) 10.3.2 (instead of 10.3.1)
• Repository Creation Utility
• Web Tier Utilities
• Patch Scripts (see below)
  

The unchanged ones are:

• B2B Document Editor (eh?)
• Access Manager & related (still 10.1.4.3.0)
• SSO MRCA (10.1.4.3.1 - we're not expecting an 11g version of OSSO)
  
• Content Management for WebCenter
  
• WebLogic SmartUpgrade (11.1.1.0)
  

In particular note the download called "Patch Scripts" - the README says: "This is the patchMaster tools that is used to patch (upgrade) 11gR1 to ps1." On quick inspection it has directories for the different middleware components: the java ones mostly seem to contain a change to their jps-config.xml, there's what looks like a minor change to an OID configuration, and many look empty.

As for WebLogic 10.3.2: I've done a clean install and built a new domain - all seems fine so far.

So the big question is: should existing OFM 11g installations be upgrading to PS1? Well, we'll have to see what the documentation says, but my guess is unless you've found a problem and have been recommended to do so by Oracle Support there's probably no desparate hurry. On the other hand, if your development team is moving to PS1 for JDeveloper ADF and/or SOA then, yes, your deployment environments will need to be either rebuilt or upgraded.

Final thought: why is Oracle calling the first 11g R1 patchset 11.1.1.2? We know there's going to be an 11gR2 later, so surely it would be simpler to call it 11.1.2? I assume this is a hangover from the IAS numbering days (supposedly to stop database and app server version numbers coinciding), but anyone looking in from outside would think it's very odd!