The following mind map
provides a detailed layout of the different features in WID that you
will use to develop integrated SOA and BPM solutions.
Business Integration perspective
is the default perspective that provides rich features to visually
define business processes and solutions through simple drag-and-drop
technology. It lets you efficiently manage your integrated solutions
that consist of projects and libraries, as shown in the preceding map.
Starting WID
You can start WID from the Start | Programs by selecting the WebSphere Integration Developer shortcut or from the command line by executing % WID_HOME% \wid.exe. After starting WID a splash screen will appear as shown in the following screenshot:
After the splash screen, you
will be asked to provide a workspace path. Here are few suggestions to
help you choose the right workspace location:
We recommend not to
go with the default location and to change the location to something
short and manageable. For example, we recommend C:\AllWork\ws1. On Windows-based machines this becomes more important due to the 259 character limit on the fully qualified path.
You
can create multiple workspaces based on your development needs. From a
usability and manageability perspective it is always better to keep all
workspaces in the same location, which would be C:\AllWork.
Finally,
do not place the workspace folder within the production install folder.
This is to prevent deletion or corruption of your work if the product
is uninstalled or updated.
One of the first things you will
notice if you have not used a product based on Eclipse 3 (for example,
Eclipse Web Tools Project, Eclipse SDK, and so on), is the welcome
screen that is shown when you start a new workspace. From this screen
you can access information about the product overview, cheat sheets,
tutorials, samples, new features, migration information, and web
resources. If you close the Welcome screen, you can always open it again
by selecting Help | Welcome from the menu bar.
There is another new
feature added in Eclipse 3 that is important to know. This feature is
referred to as progressive disclosure, though you may also hear it
associated with the term "Capabilities". Progressive disclosure is a way
to hide certain product features based upon your role. For example, if a
user is not working on web services development, it is possible to hide
the associated wizards and tools by disabling the web services
development capabilities. Capabilities that are not enabled can be
enabled either when the feature is first accessed, or by enabling the
appropriate capability through the Preferences menu.
Business Integration perspective
The primary perspective in
WebSphere Integration Developer is the Business Integration perspective
as shown in the following screenshot:
The majority of
your Business Integration work is done from this perspective and it is
the default perspective when the product is launched.
Available views
The
primary view in the Business Integration perspective is the Business
Integration view. This view is used to manage and view all Business
Integration resources. The resources shown in this view provide a
logical grouping of resources and hide artifacts that are not essential
for business integration development. It is important to note that this
view only shows a logical representation of the resources in the
workspace that are related to Business Integration work, and there is
not a one-to-one relationship to physical resources on the file system.
Both module and library projects are visible from the Business
Integration view.
