BEA Workshop User's Guide

Workshop is an IDE built on the Eclipse platform that simplifies the process of developing web-based, service-oriented (SOA) and J2EE applications.

Workshop provides tools that automate and simplify development:

This documentation set applies to the Workshop family of products:

• BEA Workshop for WebLogic
• BEA Workshop Studio
• BEA Workshop for JSP

The Workshop family of products are built on the Eclipse IDE framework. Workshop adds the following features:

AppXRay and the Application Database

The Workshop group of products share an underlying layer of software called AppXRay that analyzes the JSP pages, Java source files, resource bundles, compiled classes, Struts and Web configuration files, and uses the information it finds to build an application database of the relationship between all of these items. The application database plays a major role in consistency checking, as it provides much of the information which is used to validate the consistency of the application.

Web Services

Workshop provides a simple object model for web service development that allows you to define the web service operations as methods. Workshop then automatically handles the staging/sending/receiving/unstaging for SOAP messages that are required to implement a standard web service.

For ease of accessing web services, Workshop provides a system control (see below) that allows you to access operations on a remote web service through a simple method call.

Web Applications

When developing web applications, Workshop supports the Struts and the NetUI frameworks both of which integrate a Java controller that maintains state and performs resource access and business logic with JSP files that provide the user interface.

The Workshop group of products integrate the Web Tools Platform (WTP) open source plugin to Eclipse. Projects created in Workshop can thus take advantage of the project management tools provided by WTP.

Facets

When projects are created, facets can be added to support frameworks like JSF, Hibernate, JPA and Struts. Facets can also be added or removed from your projects at a later time.

Simplified Resource Access: System Controls

For simplified access to J2EE resources and web services, system controls encapsulate complex interactions, allowing you to access resources with simple method calls.

Encapsulating Logic or Resource Access: Custom Controls

For encapsulating your business logic and customizing resource access, custom controls provide a simple object model, so that components can be easily used by intermediate programmers without specialized knowledge.

Enterprise Java Beans Development Tools

If you need to develop Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs), Workshop provides tools that simplify the process through EJBGen.

Data Binding

The Workshop group of products provide a data-binding engine that understands how to make the data from your application available in your web pages. It does this by tying into the application database and into the extended metadata that is provided through your classes and tag libraries. This information is combined through the Design Palette view to provide intelligence to every editable element on the page. The Workshop group of products allows any attribute of any element in your web page to be bound with dynamic data, and can still make use of framework specific patterns for data binding.

Database Management Tools

Workshop provides a comprehensive, easy-to-use set of database management tools. You can use the database tools in conjunction with application development (e.g., to test your SQL statements from a JSP file) or as a complete standalone database front end for any JDBC-enabled relational database.

Support for Many Servers

The Workshop group of products has the ability to run and debug your applications on most of the popular web containers that are in use today, including BEA WebLogic Server, Tomcat, JBoss and others.

Extended Debugging

Workshop provides an extended debugger that integrates with the Eclipse debugger to provide:

• Setting breakpoints directly in JSP pages
• Stepping in and out of JSP pages
• Debugging context analysis

With Workshop extended debugging, you can choose where you would like to break on a JSP page, start a debugging session, access the JSP page, and immediately see the state of all of the runtime data accessible on that JSP page. All of this happens transparently with Workshop.

Security

Support for message-level and role-based security.

Support for Fundamental Frameworks and Tools

Workshop integrates and extends open source tools including:

	J2EE application framework Standard web services architecture Java 5 annotations Eclipse Apache Beehive Web Tools Platform (WTP) Java Server Pages (JSP) Struts Tiles JavaServer Faces (JSF) MyFaces Hibernate BEA Kodo Spring Framework Spring IDE XMLBeans

Note: For Workshop for JSP users, most advanced Workshop development features are available only for the first 30 days after installation. After the 30 day trial period, these features are disabled.