Before you can access the Merchandising environment, the Merchandising application must be assembled as a J2EE application and deployed to an application server. The J2EE application must contain an instance of the modules that are used by Merchandising. When the application assembly is finished, you deploy and start the application.

The ATG asset manager (the publishing server, on CIM) and production applications must also be assembled and deployed in this way.

Note: If you use CIM to configure your installation, you do not need to perform the steps in this section.

The ATG platform provides an assembly tool for creating J2EE applications. See the chapter Developing and Assembling Nucleus-Based Applications in the ATG Platform Programming Guide.

To build an application to run with Merchandising, include the following modules. See the Merchandising Modules table for information about each module.

If your environment includes a staging target, use the -layer stagingandprod flag. For information about deployment targets, see Target Site Basics in the ATG Content Administration Programming Guide.

If your environment includes a preview server, use the -layer Preview switch. For information about setting up preview, see the chapter Setting Up Preview in the ATG Business Control Center Administration and Development Guide.

The modules that you use for the asset management server, where Merchandising runs, are generally the versioned equivalents of those that are used in production. If the production server uses the B2BCommerce module, the asset management server uses the B2BCommerce.Versioned module, indicating ATG Business Commerce with support for versioning (ATG Content Administration).

When you build the application, you specify the type of commerce product that your site implements (ATG Consumer Commerce or ATG Business Commerce), as well as other Commerce features. For example, the following command includes Merchandising (DCS-UI.Versioned), BUSINESS CONTROL CENTER components (PubPortlet), and ATG Consumer Commerce (B2CCommerce.Versioned):

<ATG10dir>/home/bin/runAssembler MyApp.ear -m DCS-UI.Versioned
PubPortlet B2CCommerce.Versioned

For additional information about how to deploy your J2EE application, see the documentation from the application server vendor.