The Oracle ATG Web Commerce platform includes ATG Dynamo Server Admin, an HTML-based interface that lets you inspect individual components at runtime. The default interface displays a component by listing its contained children and the values of its properties. Individual components can override this default behavior and provide their own servlets to act as the interface for that component. These custom servlets can also subclass the default servlet, so that it looks like the normal default servlet, possibly with some additional information.

In order for a component to define a custom administration interface, it must implement atg.nucleus.AdminableService. When the administration interface is asked to display a particular component, it first checks to see if the component implements AdminableService. If it does, Nucleus calls getAdminServlet to get the servlet that displays the component’s administration interface, then passes the call off to that servlet. If the component does not implement getAdminServlet, Nucleus uses the default administrative servlet to display the component and its properties in the Component Browser.

The default administrative servlet is called atg.nucleus.ServiceAdminServlet. It contains a number of methods that can be overridden, as well as a number of methods that perform useful functions, such as formatting object values into HTML.