DeployTool online help describes how to use the Application Deployment Tool to package applications and components into archive files for deployment on J2EE servers, create and edit deployment descriptors that set runtime enviroment and configuration values, and deploy the resulting J2EE applications on the server.
This section describes how to access online help, how to navigate through the help topics to find the information you want, and how to apply this information in the use of the DepolyTool.
If you already know how to use DeployTool online help you may skip to the next section where the DeployTool Primary Window is described.
You can get help and information about the DeployTool in the following ways:
F1 key | Press the F1 key to see information about the DeployTool window that has keyboard focus. |
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It is very important to establish keyboard focus in a window before pressing the F1 key. In some cases you may have to highlight something in the window in order to establish focus. |
Help menu | Choose Help > Help to start the Help viewer with this page displayed. Use the navigators in the left pane to locate information. |
Help buttons | Click the Help button in a dialog box for information about how to use that dialog box |
The left pane of the help viewer contains two icons that can help you navigate through the help information:
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Table of contents. Topics are organized by task (where possible). Topics displayed in the right pane are highlighted in the table of contents. |
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Full-text search. Type a natural language phrase in the Find field
and press return. A ranked list of topics are returned with
the following information:
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The Application Deployment Tool enables you to:
The types of components and files handled by the DeployTool are
The following paragraphs describe the DeployTool GUI and the ways to access the functionality of the DeployTool. If you need to specify settings for your components or application, or deploy your application on a server, the following is a guide to how your paticular task may be accomplished with the DeployTool.
When you open the DeployTool help by using the Help menu, the primary screen is opened. Its title "Application Deployment Tool" appears at the top. After an application is created, a ":" and the < application name > appears after the general title.
Immediately under the title are the names of the menus: File, Edit, Tools, and Help. Pulling down Help offers you the choice of Contents.. or About... Choosing Contents brings you to the Primary Window screen you are reading. The contents of the other menus are described below under Menus.
Under the names of the menus is a toolbar composed of icons in four groups and two singletons.The toolbar icons offer convenient access to functionality that can also be accessed through the File and Tools menus. Their groupings indicate kinds of functionality:
The DeployTool displays tree views on the left side of the primary window. For example the Files tree view may show an application and under it the component archive files that you have opened or created with the tool.
An EAR file may contain component archive files-- EJB JAR(s) (Enterprise JavaBeans(tm) Java(tm) ARchive), WAR(s) (Web component ARchive), application client JAR(s) (Java ARchive), and/or RAR(s) (Resource Adapter Archive). When you select a node in the tree, the tool displays a set of tabbed panes that represent a deployment descriptor. Selecting a tab displays a window for entering values in the deployment descriptor which sets enviromental and other values used at runtime when the J2EE application is executed.
If you change values in a tabbed pane and select File->Save, the deployment descriptor in the archive file is updated.
This tree view shows the J2EE servers that the tool is connected to. By default, the tool connects to the server on your local host. To connect to an additional server, select File->Add Server. Beneath each server node in the tree, the tool displays the J2EE applications that have been deployed.
When you select a node in the tree, its corresponding tabbed panes are displayed in the panel labelled Inspecting. The tabbed panes allow you to edit settings of the selected tree node. To view online help for a tabbed pane, select the pane and press F1.
The fourth set of icons in the Toolbar access update and deploy functionality. When a file in an application has been changed, the clecking the Update icon causes the file in the application EAR to have the latest version.
Clicking the Deploy icon accesses the deploy wizard screens. The user can specify the application and the server for deployment in the deploy wizard. The user can supply any missing JNDI names and the WAR context root. Clicking the Finish button will complete generation of the deployment descripter and ready the application for deployment.
The deployment wizard contains functionality for enabling remote connectivity for stand lone applications by returning a client Jar containing stub classes that enable remote connectivity.
The next to last icon in the Toolbar is the Verifier icon. This icon causes the application to be checked for conformity to the appropriate J2EE specifications.
The Clone Inspector icon causes the tabbed pane in use to be duplicated so that two components can be processed at once.