OpenWGA 7.0 - OpenWGA Concepts and Features

Design and development

Design tools

The prominent tool for creating OpenWGA designs is the OpenWGA developer studio. This is an integrated development environment, based on the Eclipse platform, which allows you to create OpenWGA design projects and test them on an integrated OpenWGA server:

wds.png

You can download the OpenWGA developer studio on the OpenWGA home page. Please also follow the up-to-date installation instructions shown there on the download page.

In order to get started with OpenWGA developer studio there is an integrated tutorial showing you how to create your first OpenWGA runtime project and web application. This is displayed in a separate view when the developer studio is started initially. If you need to restore this view after it was closed go into Menu "Window" and choose menu item "Show View > Other...". In the dialog choose the view "Others > Getting Started". This will again show the view in your current perspective.

A brief description of developer studio

As every Eclipse-based application the user interface of the OpenWGA developer studio is organized in views. These are the sections you see in the screenshot above, titled with "Package Explorer", "Console" etc. Most important view is the Package Explorer which shows you all project files in the workspace and allows you to edit those files by double-clicking them.

In the center of the screen is the editor, where design files are opened for editing. In the screenshot this is the part titled with "*content-info". When editing in an editor you can use the key combinating CTRL+Space (COMMAND+Space on Mac) to call code completion, if available. You can also hold the CTRL key (again, COMMAND on a mac) to highlight references to other resources in the code.

The layout of views and editors shown is called a perspective. A perspective is a special arrangement of views and editors for a specific purpose. You can switch perspectives by clicking the buttons on the perspective panel on the top right. These are the buttons labeled with "OpenWGA", "Debug", "CVS Reposit..." in the screenshot. However, in plain OpenWGA development there is hardly ever a need to leave the "OpenWGA" perspective shown in the screenshot, unless you start using version control systems for your design or start developing in Java.

More elements of the developer studio UI worth mentioning:

  • The button to the top left wds-new.jpg is the generic "New..." button. It can be used to create new projects, web applications and design files of any type. Click it to show a list of all available "entities" that can be created. It will try to create the new resource on the position which you have just selected in Package Explorer

  • A button right of it wds-server.jpg can be used to start the integrated OpenWGA server with the configuration of some WGA runtime project

Development files in Eclipse-based applications are organized in projects which are the topmost folders in Package Explorer view. The most important project type in developer studio is the WGA runtime project, a project that represents the configuration of a whole OpenWGA server plus its used application designs. Runtime projects are used by the integrated OpenWGA server of the developer studio to "simulate" the server which the project represents.

The WGA runtime project consists of the following files, visible in Package Explorer:

  • The runtime.xml contains the configuration of the runtime. Double-click it to bring up the runtime configuration editor. Here you can start/stop the integrated OpenWGA server for this runtime project and see a list of web applications registered in the project. Provided links allow you to create new web applications or sample applications, or to open those applications from the list in browser, content manager or admin client.
  • The designs folder contains the design directories of web applications that are contained in this runtime.
  • The plugins folder contains OpenWGA plugins that are needed on the runtime, either as plugin file or link to a plugin project.
  • The tomcat folder contains specific configurations for the J2EE application server "Apache Tomcat" on which the integrated OpenWGA server is based.
  • The wga folder is the configuration directory used the by the OpenWGA server. It contains the basic configuration file "wgaconfig.xml", an XML authentication file "auth.xml" for specifying authoring users among others.