I’ve been wrangling my hands over BEA’s WebLogic 8.1 Platform for the past four years, but unfortunately, I can’t even take advantage of the features of Java’s latest version (which is 6 7 by now). 8.1 was tied to Java 1.4.2, and we’ve been missing a lot on the features that are promised by the newer iteration of WebLogic, which by now is under Oracle, after it acquired BEA last year (or was that two years ago?).

Thankfully, Oracle has been benevolent to let developers try out their latest WebLogic Platform for free! And the nice thing is, they’ve got this feature that allows automatically “upgrading” 8.1-based code to the latest, 10.3 version.

I’ve played with the feature using the latest versions of some of the applications we developed; I thought the changes will be so different that I might as well re-learn the entire thing. But I thought wrong. There are indeed changes, and most of those will definitely involve somewhat steep learning curves, but for the features that are already existing in 8.1, those are still applicable in 10.3. One noticeable change is 10.3’s use of Java 6’s Annotations, which are like Javadoc but are not enveloped in Javadoc comments.

I’m starting to enjoy 10.3. I just hope I get past the learning curve. Who knows, we might make the upgrade to 10.3 in a year’s time. Why not? We’ve been so immersed in 8.1, that sometimes we forget, an upgrade is all that remains to be seen to be able to take advantage of Java’s new features. Not to mention that our programming skill can get updated too (read: not stagnate) by taking the “next level”.