BEA Workshop Studio 

This multi-specifications IDE from BEA serves as a one-stop environment for your Java Web applications development needs. Our sample JSF application helps demonstrate some features of the Studio

The BEA Workshop Studio, formerly NitroX Studio, is a

multi-specifications supporting IDE. Initially, all features are supported in

all the products for a trial period of 15 days. After that registration is

required for all editions except JSP Editor, which has a free license, and

retains only JSP support after the trial period is over.

The IDE has some interesting features such as AppXRay that

keeps continuous track of the pages being developed. The feature is also capable

of maintaining information for a Web project imported to the studio. The feature

quite effectively reduces both development time and errors. The AppXNavigator

feature gives hyperlink style navigation to navigate to any Java, JSP, struts,

or JSF dependency from within the editor. It helps to search or refer to

specific resource. Thus any changes are easy to view. The AppXaminer is used to

manage Web dependencies and visually display the relationships between

resources. These features provide a simple, yet effective way for updating or

debugging the application.

The IDE provides the DBXaminer feature that can be used to

browse through the database and provide OR persistence through Hibernate. The

DBXaminer can be used for exploring database, viewing database diagrams, running

database queries, generating OR mappings, managing Entity Relationships and

configuring Hibernate.

The Workshop Studio has a category called Web Artifacts.

Files, which are more or less used as resources in an application for provided

configuration information and similar features, have been grouped into Artifacts

category by the IDE. Files such as HTML, stylesheets, JSP page, empty page

fragment to be included in a JSP page, Tag files and tag library definitions

come under Artifacts. For struts, framework struts page, module, configuration

file, tiles configuration file and validation configuration file have been

provided under the artifacts category. The artifacts can then be edited using

the AppXNavigator and AppXamier features.

The IDE installs on top of Eclipse. To use the Studio

features users have to switch to the 'Workshop' perspective by going to the

Menu Window>Open Perspective>Workshop. For creation of a Web application

the user can simply choose the option for New Web Application which is added to

File>New>Project menu. The wizard then takes user through a complete set

of options in each of the screens, which also allow for choosing which version

of JSP the user wants to use, including an option for enabling JSTL (JSP

Standard Tag Library) support. The user is then also given the options for

selecting a framework of his choice from the available options of Struts, JSF,

and Hibernate in the same wizard.

The IDE gives an easy to navigate Tag Libraries window. The

window has a complete list of tag libraries as chosen by user during creating

Web application. The tags represented are easy to add using drag and drop

feature and easily edited using the wizard-based capabilities provided in the

IDE Smart Editor. The IDE also has Property Sheets, which provide a listing of

attribute value pairs for stylesheet and Java script elements.           

Analyzing application dependency between JSP files  of the application using AppXaminer	Configuring application server for auto deployment  of the Web application developed

Deployment is also easy using the IDE. It completely

supports JBoss, Apache Tomcat, WebLogic and WebSphere servers. Once developed

the user can configure auto deployment by going through Windows>Preferences

menu options and then choosing Workshop in the preferences dialog box. The

Server Configuration option is available there. To add a new Configuration,

click Add. This invokes Create Server Configuration dialog where we have an

option for Auto Deployment in the Configurations Tab. The Application Server tab

on the same window provides a dropdown list to choose the server type. The user

then needs to provide path of Server Installation directory and the JDK

installation directory. This eases out the burden of deployment from the

developer and allows a quick and easy way of running the application.

The IDE is a powerful environment for both developing and

managing Web Applications. The features and layout have all been meticulously

designed to facilitate RAD. The IDE gives the developer freedom to concentrate

more on the application logic, while leaving configuration and directory

structure intricacies to the IDE itself. The user can easily navigate through

and use the GUI Tools to design pages as per her requirements. Open the new

project from File>New>Web Application to view the New Project Wizard. Give

the name of project via DemoApp, and choose a location. The user can choose

which specification is to be implemented in the following screens, which accept

options for JSP versions, JSTL inclusion and Faces Versions. Once the user

clicks on finish after all the selections, the IDE builds the directory

structure or the Web Application, and the user will see the Web root directory

which would also contain the configurations files  via web.xml (the deployement descriptor) and faces-config.xml.

In the src>java folder make a packages “beans” and “utils”. Write the

code for UserBean, which will represent the user and will have the attributes

Name, Password, LoginId and Address with appropriate Get and Set methods.

private string name = null;



...


public void setName(String name){this.name = name;}


public String getName(){return this.name;}

The bean can be configured using the Faces Configuration

option on AppXplorer. Expand Faces Configuration>Managed Bean directory and

choose New Managed Bean. In the Manage Bean Tag give the name as user and choose

the scope as session from the dropdown list and in the Managed Beans Class

Properties section click on Choose Bean and add 'beans.UserBean' from the

dialog that opens, click Next to specify the managed properties. Then click Add

and write 'contactDetails' property name field and write #{contactDetails}

for property value. Similarly, a ContactDetailsBean can be created and added to

Managed Beans. Then write pages register.jsp for registration form

and welcome.jsp for welcome page in the pages directory.

To define the page navigation rule, expand Faces

Configuration right-click on Navigation Rules and choose new Navigation Rule. In

the Navigation Rule Properties choose source page as register.jsp click ok. This

will create a navigation rule with register.jsp as source page. A Navigation

Case has to be added i.e. once the user has registered he should see

the welcome.jsp page after submit button is clicked. Right click the rule

/pages/register.jsp and choose new navigation case. In the outcome field, write

'Success' and for destination page, choose Welcome.jsp.

Now if you open up the faces-config.xml file, you will see

the navigation rule with dependency defined from register to welcome in the

AppXNavigator. You will also find tags

and