About Infor e-Commerce Development Studio
Infor e-Commerce Development Studio is a software development tool for developing, managing, and operating e-commerce applications on the web. Infor e-Commerce Development Studio is an Eclipse plugin - this means that any Web developer who is familiar with Eclipse can easily use Infor e-Commerce Development Studio. By utilizing the Eclipse IDE, you can design your Web applications including user interface, application logic and database connectivity. It minimizes the need for using multiple IDEs and toolkits during Web application development to increase productivity.
XML interaction
As an alternative to the web-based graphical presentation, your application can also have an XML gateway, which enables the application to communicate with customer systems directly by exchanging XML documents.
Application design
Behind the presentation lies an application layer and data-access layer, which provide business logic and database access to the application.
The application layer is made of business objects, each of which implements a specific type of business logic by providing a set of attributes (data field values) and methods (executable commands) that are called in response to user commands submitted via the presentation layer. Infor e-Commerce Development Studio provides controls for creating business objects, configuring attributes and establishing methods.
Data access
Data access is provided through a plug-in-based connector architecture. For each type of data source, such as a Microsoft SQL Server database or a Infor M3 BE System, a different connector must be used. The connector is programmed to communicate with a specific type of data source and to provide configuration settings appropriate for that data source. Each connector also includes mappings, which control how values from the data source are mapped to the various attributes of each business object. The methods of the business object control how the values are used, which data source they are drawn from and which calculations will be made.
Application preview and deployment
To preview your fully functioning application, you must deploy it to a test application server. This process converts the pages and their components into JSP pages that can be executed by the application server. It furthermore generates a Java class and stateless Java bean (EJB) for each business object, thereby making the business objects and their methods available to the JSP pages. Connector settings are interfaced within each of the EJBs as required.
When the application server receives a request for a JSP page, it executes the page with the help of any required business objects, resulting a standard HTML page, which is returned to the user and displayed in his or her browser.
When your application is ready for public use, you must deploy it on a live application server.