WebSphere Development Studio Client for iSeries Product Tour

Welcome

Take this tour to become familiar with your integrated toolset for iSeries. Check out the new features and find out what to do first!

Product introduction

The standard and advanced editions of IBM WebSphere Development Studio Client for iSeries are ideal workstation development tools for creating, testing, deploying, and maintaining traditional and e-business iSeries applications.

Built on Eclipse 3.0 technology, the platform offers you a comprehensive development environment that integrates all of your tools, teams, applications, and projects seamlessly.

The Workbench

Before you start, the next few stops on the tour will help you get acquainted with the workbench. Find out how it's organized, navigate around easily, and learn where to find additional assistance.

Layout

Perspectives define the set and layout of views, or windows, that you see in the workbench. Each view helps you accomplish a specific type of task or work with specific types of resources.

For example, the Remote System Explorer perspective helps you manage remote servers. It contains these views:

Navigation

The workbench is designed to be flexible so that you can customize its appearance to suit your needs. watch as we show you several ways to navigate quickly between the various views, editors, perspectives, and menus in the workbench:

Customize preferences

Customize the behavior of the workbench to meet your needs. For example, specify settings for remote command execution or local cache size.

Help

To view the online help, select Help > Help Contents from the workbench menu. This displays the information center, where you can navigate and search the product documentation. You can also press F1 in any view or wizard for brief pop-up help.

Tutorials and samples

The product offers you direct help with your iSeries programming tasks.

A Tutorials Gallery provides detailed learning instructions, and a Samples Gallery contains examples of source code that you can examine and run in the workbench. Both of these resources can be accessed from the Welcome view, as well as the Help menu.

Development highlights

Next on the tour is an overview of the development cycle, from editing your RPG application through to testing and debugging.

Additionally, you'll learn more about the integrated set of tools that will help modernize your enterprise.

Connect to an iSeries server

You can work with remote resources by defining a TCP/IP connection to a remote server in the Remote System Explorer perspective. In the Remote Systems view:

Maintain iSeries applications

After you create a connection, you can perform actions on remote files and folders. For example, open an ILE RPG program for editing. When you are finished, verify and compile the program, and then run the program on the server.

Transform iSeries data into Web and Java applications

Use iSeries Web and Java tools to transform your code into Web and Java applications that run on iSeries logic. Open the Program Call wizard to generate Java resources that call a remote iSeries program or procedure.

Create a WebFacing application

With the IBM WebFacing Tool, you can quickly convert your DDS display file source members so that your iSeries programs can run in a browser interface.

Use a wizard to select one or more DDS source members to convert with only a few mouse clicks. You can can also select a Web look-and-feel, choosing from either several predefined styles or designing your own.

Portal Toolkit

Only the advanced edition supports portal technology:

Support for EJB and J2EE

Only the advanced edition has tools to support Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) technology:

Test in a local WebSphere server environment

The WebSphere test environment is essentially a local copy of the WebSphere Application Server runtime environment.

You can test all types of applications in the workbench, diagnose errors, and review the look and feel before deploying on a Web server.

Debug iSeries applications

The integrated iSeries debugger helps you easily debug code that is running on your iSeries server:

Conclusion

This concludes the product tour!

Feel free to look over the rest of the Welcome pages before beginning your work.