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Benefits of webAF for Web Application Development

Web applications use a diverse collection of technologies stitched together with various kinds of linkages and relationships, often in a large number of files. Conventional Web application development usually involves using a variety of command-line tools in various packages, and developing batch files to try to add a degree of consistency to the process. webAF offers a refreshing alternative. It helps you manage this complexity with a single consistent, integrated tool, thus reducing or eliminating much of the drudgery of development, testing and deployment. Best of all, webAF provides tight integration with other SAS technologies, bringing that power to life in your Web applications.

Features

  1. Integrated Development Environment (IDE) - webAF presents you with a familiar and intuitive GUI development center, with the features of program development extended to include web development.

  2. Project wizard with content templates - The project wizard jump-starts your Web development by letting you choose the features that you want to include and initial content of your project. Starter files are then generated for you, including a web.xml file. An initial JSP file includes declarations of tag libraries supporting the features you selected. Servlets have boilerplate code for the standard methods. You can also "adopt" an existing Web application in the new project wizard.

  3. Systematic locating of projects and directories - When you start a new Web application project, webAF automatically supplies the necessary directory structure, and populates the WEB-INF\Lib directory with the JAR files needed. You can specify the base directory for your Web application to be external to the project directory, too.

  4. Automatic updating of build file and web.xml - As you add or remove servlets or Java source files from your project, webAF automatically updates the build.xml file to include the file and classpath information, and updates the deployment descriptor (web.xml) to include the necessary servlet declaration and mapping.

  5. SAS tag libraries - A variety of custom tag extensions are provided to make it easy to integrate commonly-needed functionality into your JSP files. When you create a new JSP file from the Tag Library JSP template, the necessary tag library directives will be automatically included in the file, and you can drag and drop tags from the palette onto the file. You can use a pop-up property sheet or customizer to set attributes for custom tags.

  6. SAS transformation beans - Separation of model and view is enhanced by using transformation beans. They accept data from an existing AppDev Studio model (for example, a DataSetInterface model that retrieves data from a SAS data set) and transform it into different representations (such as HTML, DHTML and/or JavaScript), as appropriate to your web page.

  7. Drag and drop support - Components can be dropped either on a "visuals" tab or on the source code to quickly develop content.

  8. Debugger with support for remote and JSP debugging - The integrated debugger extends familiar use of breakpoints to Web applications. You can even set breakpoints in the compiled JavaServer Pages source tab of the editor (available for supporting Web servers, including the Tomcat server that is integrated in webAF).

  9. Auto-serve of current project - As you create a new Web application project, the webAF Web server will automatically serve your application, so you can just click the Execute in browser toolbar button to test it. After you make a change and rebuild the project, clicking this button again will automatically stop and restart the Web server, so your changes will be reflected in the served content.

  10. Deployment support and generation of WAR file - A menu command consolidates your entire Web application into a single .war file that can be deployed to compliant web servers. During construction the deployment descriptor (web.xml) file is validated automatically, and a user-supplied or generated Manifest.mf file is included in the .war file.

  11. Ant-based customizable builds - Build scripts are generated by webAF using standard Ant XML files, and are automatically modified as you add new files to your project. Build files can also be customized with user-defined targets.

  12. Configure multiple Web servers - You can configure multiple Web servers from a dialog box in webAF, and then easily switch servers to test your Web application.

  13. Start and stop Web servers - Convenient menu commands are provided to start and stop the current Web server.

  14. J2EE support - Menu commands provide a convenient way to start and stop the J2EE server and the Cloudscape database server.

  15. Integrated Struts and JSTL support - The popular open-source, industry standard Jakarta Struts framework can serve as foundation for your Web application. Select an option in the project wizard, and webAF will automatically include the required XML files and tag libraries. The JavaServer Pages Standard Template Library (JSTL) is also integrated, to reduce or eliminate the need for Java code snippets in JSP files.