Perspectives
Learning Center. After you've downloaded WebRatio Platform, you'll see a Learning Center screen. You can close or reopen this screen anytime you want. After you've downloaded WebRatio Platform, you'll see a Learning Center screen. You can close or reopen this screen anytime you want. It's often worthwhile if you are a new WebRatio Platform user to browse through some of the sequences and topics that are available here. Right now, we'll close this view.
Default Perspective. The first thing that you'll see is called a Perspective. This particular default Perspective contains an Editor, on the left a WebRatio Explorer, an Outline, a Package Explorer and Cloud Services. In the lower view you'll see "Layout", "Problems", and "Generation Errors. On the bottom left side, you'll find a "Property View" and an "Overview". It is helpful to create extra space for the Editor window. What we'll do is minimize the views on the bottom to create extra space for the Editor. The arrangement of the Editor and the views is called a Perspective. You can reuse a Perspective that has been already created. To open a Perspective, use the menu sequence "Window", choose "Open Perspective" and navigate to a particular Perspective. To see how this works, let's open the Debug Perspective, which we'll use the following lessons. Once you've opened a Perspective, you'll see that it's displayed in the toolbar for perspectives. Notice that there's also a BPMN Perspective, used for designing business processes. We'll use this in the following lessons. To close a Perspective, you can right-click on it; this will open a context menu, where you select Close.
Views
Adding a View. Now we are back to our original default Perspective. Once you have a Perspective, you'll notice that it is organized into folders. Each folder contains a group of views. You can add views to these folders. In order to add a view, navigate to the "Windows" menu, and select "Show View". Now I want to display a "Runtime Log" View, and I happen to know that it's located in the WebRatio folder. After you select "Show View", select "Other", open the "WebRatio" folder and navigate to the Properties View, then double-click on the "Runtime Log" View and it will be displayed in the folder. You can use the same sequence to add any view to any folder that you choose.
Moving Views. Another interesting property of WebRatio Platform is that you can move views into different positions on the screen. For example, we can take our Properties View and move it here to this folder, and just as easily move it back again. For example, we can take our Properties View and move it here to this folder, and just as easily move it back again. Right now the Properties View does not contain information. Later, when we create a Web Project, the Properties View will display information about the project and the components within the project.
Menu and Toolbar
The WEB IFML Perspective, like most perspectives, contains a main menu and a toolbar. Most features within WEB IFML Perspective can be accessed from a menu, a toolbar icon, or a context-sensitive pop-up menu.
The File menu contains "Save" and "Save As", "Import", and "Export" items. These menu items are replicated on the toolbar with icons for "Save" and "Save All", and there is also a "Print" icon.
The Search menu item is useful for navigating among multiple projects, and among multiple pieces of source code within projects. Search also has a toolbar icon. The toolbar contains many icons that apply only to IFML modeling. We'll consider some of these in the following lessons. These icons include "Generate Layout", "Generate Selection", "Generate and Run", "Deploy" and "WebRatio Add-On". Finally, you'll see these arrows. As you learn modeling, you'll have the ability to jump to previous locations and jump forward, and that's what these arrows are for. Right now, as you begin to learn WebRatio Platform, you can skip learning about these arrows. We'll cover the important ones later in the course.
The Window menu item lets you reorganize the display of perspectives, and the display of views within perspectives.
As you may suspect, the Help menu provides access to information about using WebRatio Platform and its components. The Help menu also lets you search for new versions of WebRatio Platform by checking for updates, and it will also help you to install new software modules into WebRatio Platform.
Starting a New Project
Creating a New Project
Within WebRatio Platform, projects are the basic unit of work and organization. To create a project, navigate to the "File" menu, and select "New". This will bring up the New Project wizard. Select the type of project that you wish to create. In our example, we are going to use a Web Project. You can choose any name that you like for your projects. Remember to avoid white spaces in the project name. Give the Project a name and select "Finish".
Adding Files and Saving
Once you have a project within WebRatio Platform, you can start modeling and populating the project with additional files.
For example, if you would like to include a text file within your project, again select "New", this time we'll select "File", and we'll give the File a name, select "Finish" and now we'll type.
This file contains unsaved information and WebRatio Platform indicates this by showing a small asterisk (*) in the tab that has the filename. If we press "Ctrl+S" for "Save", the file is saved and the asterisk goes away.
Enlarging the working area
There may be times when you'll need more space on your screen to work with a particular text file. You can do this by navigating to the tab, and double-clicking. Once you've finished working with the information and you would like to change the Editor to its previous size, again double-click on the tab. As you proceed through the course, you'll find these features for using projects, editors, and files to be very useful.
Modern operating systems have file explorers that filter the presentation of files and folders. Typically, the default presentation does not display hidden files. The WebRatio Explorer that is currently displayed on the left-hand side of the Workspace is similar. The WebRatio Explorer does not display the projects created from other perspectives, such as the Java Perspective. All the projects are organized in folders. You have one folder for each available WebRatio project type.
WebRatio Development Cycle
With WebRatio Platform, you use an evolutionary prototyping approach. This means that you start creating a prototype with few features and then you evolve it until you have created the final solution. The development of each feature is a cycle that includes the following activities:
- Domain Model Definition
- IFML Model Definition
- Generation
- Test