What Can You Do with Workshop 8.1?
Web Services development and deployment is just one of the aspects of Workshop. However, as the product evolved from its first release as part of the BEA WebLogic Platform 7.0 to its second release in the BEA WebLogic Platform 8.1, Workshop is now wearing multiple hats.
Enterprise-Class Web Services Development
Workshop goes beyond the synchronous view of Web Services prevalent today. It provides the infrastructure for loosely coupled, asynchronous Web Services with commitments toward enhanced security and reliable messaging that increase the overall interoperability of these services. Built on top of the industry-proven WebLogic Server, these Web Services are highly scalable, available, and reliable. Workshop also provides a rich development environment and various deployment and orchestration environments.
Table C.1 highlights some of the key features within Workshop that enable truly enterprise-class Web Services development and deployment.
Table C.1. Web Services Features in Workshop|
Asynchronous conversations | Workshop supports seamless message correlation, state management, and conversation lifecycle management. | Business service objects | Business developers deal with a higher abstraction; coarse-grained messages that improve scalability and usability. They worry about writing business code rather than technologies implementation details. | Reliable messaging | Workshop provides the ability to ensure "once and only once" and "specific order" processing of messages. | XQuery | Visual, standards-based transformation of data between Java and XML | XMLBeans | XMLBeans is a technology that enables you to maintain the native XML structure, while providing a JavaBeans interface or view to the data. Therefore, you always have a synchronized version of the XML structure and corresponding JavaBean structure. | Standards support | Workshop supports the SOAP 1.2, WSDL 1.1, and UDDI 2.0 specifications. | Security | Workshop supports the evolving WS-Security specification. | Powerful runtime | Support for synchronous and asynchronous Web Services orchestration, distributed transactions, and security. | Deployment | You can deploy your Web Services and your J2EE applications through the Workshop IDE, on top of the WebLogic Server. | Testing | Workshop generates a complete test environment that allows testing of these Web Services independent of a full application and access to all resources. |
Web Application Development
BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1 introduces a set of visual designers, controls, and framework extensions that enable developers to create powerful server-side applications with dynamic JSP/HTML user interfaces. These visual editors and drag-and-drop tools expose the Java page flow, Worklists, XMLBeans, and control functionality of Workshop that enable the development, assembly, and deployment of Web applications. Much of the J2EE plumbing, such as session and state management, is hidden from the developers by using annotated Java files.
Table C.2 highlights some of the key features within Workshop that simplify Web application development.
Table C.2. Application Development Features in Workshop|
Architecture | Workshop is standards based, built on blueprints, and leverages the MVC design pattern and the Struts open source framework for Web application development. | Visual development | Workshop provides a rich WYSIWYG interface, two-way editing, drag-and-drop interfaces to write Java code as well as JSP and HTML. | Java Page Flows | Workshop provides tools for developing Web page flows, business logic execution, and data binding. | Data binding | Workshop has drag and drop tools for binding data on a JSP to a backend database, control, or Web Service. Rich tag libraries to provide JSP/HTML support. | Annotated code model | Workshop introduces the concept of annotated coding to support complex functionality such as navigation, state management, validation, security, logging, and other core architecture services. | Reuse | All components developed through Workshop are packaged as JAR files so that components can be reused and leveraged across applications. |
Portals and Integration Application Development
In Platform 7.0, no Portal or Integration development was done through Workshop. In the 8.1 release of Platform, Workshop forms the single point of entry into the entire BEA suite. Workshop enables developers to incorporate advanced EAI/BPM and process portal functionality into custom development projects by unifying workflow, presentation, and business logic in a single environment using the same programming model. WebLogic Workshop Platform Edition enables you to create workflows graphically so that you can focus on the application logic rather than on implementation details as you develop. It includes a data mapper to create data transformations graphically. WebLogic Workshop generates a query from the graphical representation of the data transformation.
Table C.3 highlights some of the key features within Workshop that allow Portal and Integration development from this unified IDE.
Table C.3. Workshop Leverages the BEA WebLogic Platform|
Java controls | Extensible through the creation of controls. These controls are available for use anywhere in the Platform—through Workshop, they are available in Integration, Portal, and Server. | Java Page Flows | A concept from the portal product that allows Struts based page navigation and actions. | Worklists | The business process management tool from the Integration product is now available through Workshop. |
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