Exercise 4.1: Opening the Web perspective

In this exercise you will use the Web perspective. This allows you to access tools and views specifically related to Web application development. However, you are still in the Remote System Explorer (RSE) perspective which gives you the tools to do your iSeries programming tasks as you have discovered in the previous module.

Perspectives

Before you go further, let's review perspectives. Perspectives are a collection of views and tools assembled to help different kinds of users to do their job when they use the workbench. These workbench users will have different jobs (roles), for example, one user needs to work with iSeries objects related to RPG/COBOL, another user is dealing with Java programs, and another user with Web page development. Each of these different user types will need different views of the files/objects they are working with and they need different tools. The perspectives present the user with a selection of specific views/tools geared towards the different roles the users have. The workbench has many predefined perspectives, like the:

You can also create your own perspective by using the Save Perspective as option under the Window menu in the workbench, after you have modified a perspective.

Now that you know what a perspective is you can go ahead with our exercise. You are a Web developer in this tutorial and that is the reason you will select the Web perspective. The Web environment provides its own perspective since it needs to give its users access to unique views and tools targeted towards Web tasks. You create a Web project in the Web perspective.

To open the Web perspective:
Open perspective

  1. Click Window > Open Perspective on the workbench menu.
  2. Then click Other on the pop-up menu.

    The Select Perspective dialog opens.
    Select perspective

  3. Select Web from the list.
  4. Click OK.

    The workbench will now show the Web perspective with the Project Explorer view open on the left hand side.
    Web Projects view

You have accessed tools and views for iSeries Web application development and now you are ready to begin Exercise 4.2: Creating a dynamic Web project.