Deployment overview

While you are working with Infor e-Commerce Development Studio, all of your changes are stored in your Working Folder, which is on your local hard disk and is easily accessible to Infor e-Commerce Development Studio. To preview your application, or to make it available on the web, you must activate (expand) the components to create JSP files, generate and copy the files to a folder where your application server can find and execute them. This process is called deploying your application.

When you deploy an application, the Infor e-Commerce Development Studio does the following:

  • It loads all of the pages that are part of your presentation structure, converts all of the component settings into server-side scripts and saves the results as JSP pages in a temporary, compressed ZIP archive on your local disk.

  • It adds all of the other files in your Working Folder and its sub-folders to the compressed ZIP archive using the same folder hierarchy as the original. This ensures that all of your graphics and other static documents (such as HTML documents) are included with the presentation. This also includes all business object and data-source definitions.

  • It contacts the Infor Application Installer running on your application server and uploads the temporary ZIP file to it.

When the Infor Application Installer receives a ZIP file from the Infor e-Commerce Development Studio, it does the following:

  • It decompresses the archive to a temporary location on the web server.

  • It reads all of the business object and data-source definitions and uses them to generate a set of stateless session beans (EJBs) for the application layer. One EJB is generated for each business object and each pipeline is represented as one method on the EJB; connector settings are interfaced into the EJB methods.

  • It adds the required standard support files, such as the pipeline engine Java class, which is shared by all of the EJBs.

  • It creates a new application in IBM WebSphere (if necessary) and saves all of the generated files as required to make the application available. For complete details about how applications are saved and configured by WebSphere, please see your IBM documentation.

  • If a previous version of the application exists and if the new deployment includes a changed application model, then all existing presentations are deleted before the new one is installed. This means that for applications including more than one presentation, all presentations must be re-deployed after changes are made to the data model.

  • If a web server name is given, the application is mapped to that web server in WebSphere.

For more information about how the Infor Application Installer servlet helps facilitate deployment, see Infor e-Commerce Component Resource Kit Developer's Guide.