Application Designer runs as a web application in any kind of servlet container supporting the servlet API. Information on the required version of the Servlet specification is provided in the section Hardware and Software Requirements.
There are multiple servlet containers available on the market. Tomcat is the most commonly used servlet container of the open source world, but there are also others that in most cases are part of Java EE-based application server environments: Websphere from IBM, BEA Weblogic, Sun IPlanet, SAP Web Application Server, JBoss and many others.
This document provides background information that is helpful when transferring Application Designer to a servlet container of your choice. This document is not designed to be useful when installing Application Designer for the first time - use the standard Tomcat servlet container for doing your first steps.
This document covers the following topics:
Have a look at your installation's <installdir>/tomcat/webapps directory. You see the subdirectory cis. This is the name of the web application which is used by default.
The cis directory contains the following subdirectories:
/cis/ General information.
/config/ Configuration files.
/licensekey/ License key file.
/styles/ Standard location of style sheet files.
/temp/ Temporary files.
/cisdemos/ Application Designer demo project.
/cisdocumentation/ Documentation.
/EclipsePlugin/ Directory for the Eclipse plug-in.
/HTMLBasedGUI/ Application Designer base project.
/META-INF/ Web application standard directory.
/SWTBasedGUI/ Directory for the SWT client.
/WEB-INF/ Web application standard directory.
/web.xml Web application's configuration file.
/classes/ Web application's classes.
/lib/ Web application's libraries.
As with any other web application, the web.xml
file contains configuration information which you have to take care of when
deploying. The file contains information about the servlets which are part of
the Application Designer web application. There is one servlet
Connector that contains important configuration
parameters: cis.home and cis.log.
See the description of the web.xml file for
further information.
If only working with Application Designer GUIs, you do not have to pay further attention to the web.xml file. If working in more complex scenarios in which you might also define other servlets or when you access Enterprise Java Beans, you have to adapt the web.xml file to your needs (for example, you have to add bean reference information).
The name "cis" for the web application is just the default installation name for the web application. You can easily name it in a different way. As with any other correct web application, you can also deploy it multiple times to the same servlet engine.
This is important for you in case you add the Application Designer web application to an existing web application on your side. You add Application Designer to your web application as you add normal libraries, i.e. Application Designer is now running under the control of your own web application.
The following sections provide more information on this aspect.
To demonstrate the usage of Application Designer as a standard web application, you can create a second Application Designer instance inside your Tomcat environment (and a third, fourth, etc.): simply copy the whole cis web application directory and paste it with a new name in Tomcat's webapps directory.
Step by step: let us assume that the name of the new application is secondcis:
Copy the directory <installdir>/tomcat/webapps/cis.
Paste it in the webapps directory and rename the new directory to secondcis. As a result, you have the following directories:
<installdir>/tomcat/webapps/cis
/secondcis
Each web application instance now contains an independent Application Designer. It is no problem to run different versions of Application Designer inside one servlet container.
If you want to access the demo workplace of the first instance, you reference the following:
http://localhost:51000/cis/HTMLBasedGUI/workplace/demo.html
If you want to access the demo workplace of the second instance you reference the following:
http://localhost:51000/secondcis/HTMLBasedGUI/workplace/demo.html
You do not have to make further configuration steps when working with
Tomcat: the standard web.xml contains
the REALPATH parameter as a pointer to the web application's
directory. This means that the directory path is determined automatically. If
you create a second web application in a different servlet container, you might
have to adjust the web.xml file after copying so that the
new web application points to the right directory.
The same way we created a second instance of Application Designer in the section before, we can now add Application Designer to your exisiting web application in which you want to use Application Designer functions. Just copy the cis directory inside your web application's directory and merge the web.xml files of both web applications.
A web application archive can be simply built by zipping one whole web application directory into a corresponding .war file.
However, there may also be more complex scenarios in which you want your deployable runtime to be structured differently compared to your design time. See the section Design Time Mode and Runtime Mode.
Application Designer also provides the WAR Packager tool that takes over the building of the .war file. This tool is designed to cover very basic scenarios of packaging a web application archive file. It should only be used if you are not familiar with ANT build processes. See WAR Packager in the Development Workplace documentation for more information.