A development environment typically consists of a single-server J2EE container for unit testing Web and enterprise J2EE applications. In contrast a production environment is far more likely to be a complex, clustered configuration. Problems discovered during production-level testing often require looping back to the development team for modification of the Web or enterprise application. Many of these issues can be caught earlier in the cycle by having the development team perform unit testing against a clustered environment. This tutorial presents a straightforward way for developers to try their applications in a cluster by utilizing the WebLogic Scripting Tool (WLST) to automatically provision applications into this environment.

Caching information on the WebLogic tier can significantly increase performance and reduce the number of external system calls needed for data retrieval. This is especially true when an application wants to store bits of information that rarely change, such as a list of countries or catalog entries. Nowadays, memory is so cheap that application architectures can benefit from caching data on the Web/EJB tiers.