Web Application Builder Overview

E-Application Builder Main objectives

The e-application builder is a set of tools packaged as an IRAD editor designed to create a wizard-like Web Application without any coding.

With the e-application builder, you will design your application as a sequence of pages, call web services in response to user interactions and graphically link your application data to the GUI.

With the E-Application Builder, your application is saved in a format which clearly separates the GUI (saved in XML files as *.XMLDlg) from the business control (saved in another XML file as a *.XMLCtrl).

By referencing your e-application in an enterprise archive of a J2EE server, you can use a browser to launch and execute it simply by entering it as a URL.

[Top]

E-Application Builder Fundamentals

GUI pages

Each page of your application is designed statically using the Dialog Builder. This page is then stored in a separate XML file and read sequentially at run-time.

Sequencing pages and Using Processes

The pages are grouped in processes. An application consists of at least one main process, but several processes can coexist in your application. When the e-application starts, its main process is invoked. When called, a process displays its start page, and then follows sequentially through all the pages until the last page is reached, then the application returns the calling process. When the last page of the main process is reached, the application finishes.

Logic

Many UI widgets in your GUI have declared events on them. You can set a business logic to be invoked when these events are triggered. The business logic is defined in an object called a behavior. In a Behavior, you can fetch data from your GUI or store it in a special global repository called a Session Data container, transform that data by invoking Web methods from Web Services or custom-written java code, and store the resulting data in your GUI or back into the Session Data container. With the E-Application builder, this sequence of operations is designed graphically for each Behavior and associated to a GUI event.

[Top]

Where to go from here

To find out more about the E-Application Builder interface, see Getting Familiar with the Web Application Editor. To know how to use this interface, see Working with Web Application Editor. If you want to go deeper, you can follow a step-by-step scenario to create your own E-Application Wizard by following the scenario described in Creating your first E-Application.

References

History

Copyright © 1994-2006, Dassault Systèmes. All rights reserved.