Tutorial: Getting Started with Workshop

Workshop is a set of plug-ins to the Eclipse IDE platform that allows you to quickly and easily create enterprise applications (SOA, J2EE) for deployment on a wide variety of servers, including WebLogic Server, Tomcat, JBoss, and others.

Note: This tutorial requests that you create a new workspace; if you already have a workspace open, switching workspaces will restart the IDE. Before beginning, you might want to launch help in standalone mode to avoid an interruption the restart could cause, then locate this topic in the new browser. See Using Help in a Standalone Mode for more information.

This tutorial provides an introduction to using Workshop including:

If you have used Eclipse with other plug-ins or with the Java Development Tools (JDT) plug-in, you will find this material very familiar.

Background Information

This tutorial assumes a good working knowledge of Java and object-oriented programming as well as a basic understanding of web applications.

The Eclipse IDE Environment

Workshop is built on the Eclipse IDE framework. Eclipse is an open source initiative that is widely supported in industry. As a result, many of the standard features of Workshop are described in the Eclipse documentation, available at http://eclipse.org. Familiarity with Eclipse is not required for this tutorial, but basic Eclipse knowledge is helpful.

Programming Tools and Frameworks

Workshop makes extensive use of Java 5 annotations. You can learn more about annotations at http://java.sun.com.

This tutorial does not assume expertise in J2EE. However if you are unfamiliar with J2EE, more information is available at http://java.sun.com.

Workshop integrates the Beehive open source framework, a project of the Apache Software Foundation (http://beehive.apache.org). Beehive provides tools for creating NetUI page flows (JSP files linked to a Java controller for maintaining user state information) and controls (an object model for standardized simplified access to resources and encapsulated business logic). A local copy of the Apache Beehive documentation is included with your Workshop installation.

Tutorial Overview

To demonstrate the features of Workshop, this tutorial will walk you through the process of creating and running a simple "Hello, world!" application. At each point, the tutorial will discuss the features of the Workshop interface and show you how to access other resources that will help you learn more about Workshop.

Steps in this Tutorial

Step 1: Exploring the Features of Workshop

Step 2: Setting Up a New Enterprise Application

Step 3: Creating a Web Application and Testing it on a Server

Step 4: Modifying the Page Flow and Testing your Changes

Click the arrow to navigate through the tutorial:


Still need help? Post a question on the Workshop newsgroup.