No joke. I’m ashamed to say I have had to endure Weblogic in the past. God was that time a massive clusterfuck.
The company I worked for decided to use two particular separate products (frameworks, specifically; ATG and Endeca, even more specifically) to use in tandem in a rewrite of the company’s main e-commerce application. Between when we signed on the dotted line and when we actually started implementing things, Oracle acquired the companies behind both products in question.
The company should have cut their losses, run away screaming, and started evaluating other options. That’s not what happened. Instead, they doubed-down and also adopted several other Oracle products (Weblogic and Oracle Linux on (shudder) Exalogic servers) because that’s, of course, what Oracle recommended to use with the two products in question. The company also contracted with Oracle-licensed “service integration” companies that made everything somehow even worse.
And the e-commerce site rewrite absolutely crashed and burned in the most gloriously painful way possible. They ended up throwing away tens of millions of dollars and multiple years on it.
When the e-commerce site rewrite did happen, it was many years later and used basically only FOSS technologies. I guess at least they learned their lesson. Until the upper management turns over again.