Take this tour to become familiar with your integrated toolset for System i5 or iSeries. Check out the new features and find out what to do first!
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 i5/OS or OS/400 applications.
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.
Perspectives define the set and layout of views, or windows, in the workbench. Each view helps you accomplish a specific task or work with specific resources. For example, the Remote System Explorer perspective helps you manage remote servers. The default views are:
Some of the views in the Remote System Explorer perspective offer unique enhancements to help you work with your i5/OS or OS/400 applications:
The Remote Systems view allows you to manage connections to System i5 or iSeries hosts.
The iSeries Table View provides a list of items, such as members or objects, in a table format similar to PDM. It also allows you to perform actions against these items, such as editing and compiling.
You can also activate the iSeries Data Table View, which displays data records in a table format.
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, and menus in the workbench.
You can drag and drop windows to modify the layout. Grab an editor tab and drag it to the edge of the editor work area.
You can maximize a view or editor by double-clicking on the title bar of the view or a tab of the editor. Double-click again to restore it to its usual size.
Fast views allow you to easily access views when you need them, without taking up additional workbench space.
Customize the behavior of the workbench to meet your needs. For example, specify settings for remote command execution or local cache size.
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.
To receive language-sensitive help, press F1 in an editor window. If the cursor is on an operation code, you receive help for that operation code. Otherwise, you receive help for the current specification.
WebSphere Development Studio Client offers you direct help with your System i5 or 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.
Next on the tour is an overview of the development cycle, from connecting to a System i5 or iSeries server to 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.
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:
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.
The integrated iSeries debugger helps you easily debug code that is running on a System i5 or iSeries server:
The IBM WebFacing Tool converts your i5/OS programs to run in a web browser within minutes. Using provided tools, you can further enhance the application's appearance, and customize how it will function on the Web without affecting the i5/OS program.
Host Access Transformation Services (HATS) brings your i5/OS applications to the Web without source files by dynamically transforming the 5250 data stream.
You can now link your WebFacing and HATS projects together to take advantage of features unique to each. Linked HATS/WebFacing projects interoperate seamlessly with a unified Web interface.
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.
Use WebSphere Development Studio Client's Web and Java tools to transform your code into Web and Java applications that run on i5/OS or OS/400.
Open the Program Call wizard to generate Java resources that call a remote i5/OS program or procedure.
WebSphere Development Studio Client for iSeries, Advanced Edition, supports these additional features, which we will look at next:
For more information on additional Advanced Edition features, browse through the pages in the Welcome view.
The Advanced Edition offers support for the Application Diagram Viewer, which allows you to visualize application flow and control.
There is an animated tour of the Application Diagram Viewer in the Tutorials Gallery, which can be launched both from the Welcome view and from the Help menu.
Using the Advanced Edition, support for single signon and EIM is enabled.
Portal technology is supported in the Advanced Edition. You can build and test portlets just as easily as any other type of application.
This concludes the product tour!
Feel free to look over the rest of the Welcome pages before beginning your work.
For introductory tutorials and samples, visit the Tutorials and Samples pages in the Welcome view. To try actually doing some programming tasks with the assistance of “cheat sheets,” follow the links on the First Steps page in the Welcome view.