The FileNet Web Application Toolkit provides an extensible framework and reusable modules for building Web applications. The Toolkit supplies the behaviors and data structures for authentication, event routing, state information, preferences, localization, and other features of robust and scaleable applications.
As shown in the illustration below, FileNet has developed a number of Web applications from the Toolkit, including FileNet P8 Workplace. You, too, can leverage the Toolkit to access the Content Engine, Process Engine, and third-party backend servers.
See Also
Toolkit Modules
The design goal of Web Application Toolkit was to create an MVC-based framework with a reusable UI component model. This model was required to facilitate the development of a robust HTML-based application user interface with little or no DHTML/JavaScript required.
The UI components defined in this model therefore associate component presentation with server-based UI events, and with automatic scoping of component stateful data based on where the component is deployed.
FileNet chose not to use a pre-existing framework such as Struts because of its lack of such a component model. Struts provides an MVC event model, but without the componentization of a user interface and its associated events, and, therefore, also does not provide an automatic scoping of stateful data based on where such a component would be deployed.
Global events, introduced in version 3.0, provide an event model which can provide capabilities similar to the event model used in Struts. In a custom application, one or more UI module beans can subscribe to and process global events. The event behavior can be easily modified, or replaced through bean declaration in the application page, or the introduction of additional subscribers.
Using the Web Application Toolkit, FileNet has built the following out-of-the-box applications that you can integrate as-is into your production environment.
NOTE FileNet P8 Workplace includes the Application Engine UI Service which allows Toolkit-based applications to leverage Workplace operations with a minimum of coding. For example, a custom application can invoke Workplace Java™Server Pages (JSP) pages to select objects, to check in documents, and to get properties. For details, refer to the Workplace Application Engine UI Service Guide.
The Toolkit includes the following resources:
To build a Web Application Toolkit application, you will need one or more of the following JAR files:
Some of these files require other .jar files (including third-party .jar files). The required .jar files are installed with the FileNet P8 Workplace software in <app_root>/WEB-INF/lib. For listings of required JAR files, see JAR File Dependencies.
Workplace source code is available upon request. For details on downloading the source code, see the technote "Obtaining FileNet Workplace Source Code," available from the IBM Support and Downloads site.
Sample applications are available on the IBM support site, ranging from basic samples to get you started with the Toolkit to advanced samples that exercise a broad spectrum of the Toolkit functionality. For download instructions, see Accessing IBM FileNet documentation.
Documentation is provided on the FileNet P8 Platform Documentation CD or ESD image , including the Javadoc for Web Application Toolkit, for the out-of-the-box FileNet P8 Workplace application, and for the Workplace presentation API (packaged in a separate JAR for convenient Toolkit-based development). The Javadocs are located in the following directories:
Updated IBM FileNet documentation is located on the IBM support site. For download instructions, see Accessing IBM FileNet documentation.