OpenWGA 7.10 - OpenWGA Concepts and Features

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 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 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.