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The BEA Workshop Studio group of products are built on the Eclipse IDE framework. For information on the standard features of Eclipse, consult the Workbench User Guide. Workshop Studio adds the following features:
The BEA Workshop Studio group of products integrate the Web Tools Platform (WTP) open source plugin to Eclipse. Projects created in Workshop Studio can thus take advantage of the project management tools provided by WTP. When projects are created, facets can be added (facets can also be added or removed at a later time) to add support for features like JSF, Hibernate, JPA and Struts.
The BEA Workshop Studio 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. This database is used to provide rapid access to detailed information about your application. The application database is built when a web project is created or opened for the very first time, or if a project is opened with a newer version of the software.
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. It is also the foundation for all of the information navigation features in the Workshop Studio family of products.
Consistency checking allows you to make changes to your application and immediately see the potential errors which could occur in each application layer. The Workshop Studio group of products make use of a sophisticated, highly-tuned system that determines what errors could result from changes to the files in your web application project. These errors are presented through the standard Eclipse error presentation system using the workbench Tasks view. Errors are also shown in all of the editors, including the JSP Source Editor and the Struts Configuration Source Editor, as annotations in the vertical ruler area. This works the same as for Java source editing, the only difference being the Workshop Studio group of products do not require that a file is saved before a problem is detected, performing their analysis in real-time in order to detect problems as they occur even before the file is saved.
Web application development is very much centered around the integration of dynamic data with the presentation elements on a web page. Unfortunately, there is not a uniform or universal approach to this problem and in fact, there are competing standards and frameworks that all approach this problem differently. The Workshop Studio 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 Variables view and the Tag Editors to provide intelligence to every editable element on the page. The Workshop Studio group of products allow 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.
You can bind any attribute of selected elements in the JSP editor using the Property Sheet and the data binding engine will automatically generate the tags which will output the data-bound value to the page. In the case of JSP pages, the IDE will use jsp:getProperty tags and in the case of Struts, the IDE will use bean:write tags. This intelligence is built-in and requires no additional configuration from the developer. The IDE also extends the concept of data binding to deal with localization, and supports binding presentation elements to localized data sets.
BEA Workshop for Struts and BEA Workshop Studio also fully support the Struts data binding model.
The BEA Workshop Studio 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. For a complete list of supported servers, see Supported Platforms on the edocs site.
Workshop for JSP provides an extended debugger that integrates with the Eclipse debugger to provide:
With Workshop for JSP 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 for JSP.
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