Redstone has long experience of BEA’s telecom product WebLogic Network Gatekeeper (WLNG). However, over the years we have felt a small gap in documentation for a public developer/integrator/testing audience – meaning partners and people that actually try to deploy professional clusters using WLNG in a mobile operator’s traffic flow.

Short description of the product

From a technical point of view; WLNG is a middleware product, a telecom protocol converter with policy checks. It exposes ParlayX interfaces northbound, and various lower protocols southbound. E.g. Parlay, MLP and SMPP. You will find much fancier description of the product at Oracle/BEA web site.

We were talking about a doc gap... A typical case for this gap is workarounds for known issues or expert recommendations for configuration in various situations. In this blog we will try to describe situations we run into, and share our thoughts…

The WLNG version I currently (Q2 2008) using is WLNG 3.0. There will be a new GA release for WLNG 4.0 summer of 2008. That release will be cleaner and more competent. Some basic concepts will also change. I’m looking forward to put my hands on it; in some deployment or in custom coding! No matter what, I will give you updates about that release in this blog!

Acquisition of BEA Systems

Another interesting thing is that Oracle now has fulfilled the acquisition of BEA Systems, Inc in spring 2008. Hopefully Oracle find motivation and business value to glide into telecom area even more, using BEA’s WLNG. Both BEA and Oracle have invested quite much into SOA. On www.oracle.com they say: “Oracle expects that its Fusion Middleware portfolio will evolve as the centerpiece of the combined companies’ middleware offerings going forward, with BEA products becoming a part of the Fusion Middleware product family.”
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So, most probably, we will see WLNG integrated as a Java EE product within Oracle’s Fusion Middleware...

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