BEA announced WebLogic Server 10.3 Tech Preview is now available.

http://commerce.bea.com/products/weblogicplatform/weblogic_prod_fam.jsp

Here is my take on WLS 10.3 preview:

"Lightweight" Server - They reduced the footprint to make it a smaller download. The new version strips out Workshop IDE, various JVMs, Upgrade Wizards, Database Drivers, and the console optional. The installer downloads these optional items as the user determines.

Iterative Development and faster startup - BEA is finally making it easier and faster to do iterative development - where you make changes in your code and redeploy over-and-over quickly. In my opinion JBoss owes a large part of its early success to delivering iterative development to developers.

Web Service stack - WLS 10.3 comes with a new SOAP stack for JAX-RPC (J2EE 1.4) and JAX-WS (Java EE 5) Web Services.

SCA Support - Still in the "coming soon" category. SCA should be a good alternative (to EJBs) deployment description language for services running on WLS. BEA is still working on how they will package SCA support.

Spring 2.0.2 now, 2.1 by GA

Java 6 support, finally!

Dojo client support with a publish/subscribe mechanism. It sounds a lot like DWR

C# JMS client - Enables .NET applications to be a client to the BEA JMS message bus, including persistent messaging.

SAML 2.0 support (new) and an update to SAML 1.1 for Web-based security.

Seems like a good minor upgrade to a good application server.

-Frank