Workshop 8.1—More Than an IDE

WebLogic Workshop consists of two parts:

• An integrated development environment (IDE)

• A standards-based runtime environment

The purpose of the IDE is to remove the complexity in building applications for the entire WebLogic platform. Applications you build in the IDE are constructed from high-level components rather than low-level API calls. Best practices and productivity are built into both the IDE and runtime. We'll expand on this subject later in this appendix.

BEA WebLogic Workshop is a part of the standard BEA WebLogic Platform download. Workshop is available in two editions:

• WebLogic Workshop Application Developer Edition is targeted to be the basic IDE for developers on the BEA WebLogic Platform. It enables developers to build complete J2EE application and Web Services. The general paradigm for Workshop is the use of Java controls, which are covered later in this appendix. The key components that developers would use this edition for are

  • Java controls

  • Web Services

  • Web applications

  • Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs)

• WebLogic Workshop Platform Edition includes additional extensions to the IDE and runtime framework that enable you to build portal applications and workflows in conjunction with the WebLogic Portal and WebLogic Integration products, respectively. The key components you develop in this edition, in addition to the ones you can create in the Application Developer edition are

  • Portal applications

  • WebLogic Integration components: workflows, data transformations, and application view controls