If you have used WebLogic 8.1 console and planning to upgrade to 9.2 or 10.x, boy you are in for a surprise! Well, its good and bad. The good part is of course the new look and feel, lot’s of new functionality, wizard based configuration and much more. The bad part is, you will immediately notice the heaviness of the Application. It is slow compared to what you were used to with 8.1 console, more clicks and page refreshes to configure resources. That said, if you are looking for a “very” light weight console that can get the job done in way few clicks than the console, you should check out Cypal Lite Console.
I had the oppurtunity to test drive the “lite” console which is in its technology preview version. There isn’t much functionality implemented yet, you can only configure a JDBC Resource for now but you can clearly see where this application is going. The console is pretty light, clean, fast and to the point. For kicks, I compared the time it took me to configure a JDBC resource using the lite console and with the Admin Console. It took me 1 minute 20 seconds with the Admin Console and only 30 seconds using the “lite” console, impressive! I will be curious to see how the JMS and other complex configurations will be handled.
Few minor things I found that can be improved;
- The login screen needs the username, password and the url of the server, there should be no reason to input the url since the appis deployed on the Admin server you better know the url.
- I wasn’t able to connect via https
Things I would like to see;
- J2EE Deployments, including libraries
- Simplify WLDF and WorkManager configurations
- Today there are many options for developers for configuration, there are not many tools out there for monitoring. Hope the “lite” console provides some monitoring capabilities.
Overall the console looks pretty impressive and promising and clearly geared towards a “power” “super” Console user.. 
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