Building an application

Use the following information to help you to build a standard Cúram web client application.

Build targets
You build client applications by using Apache Ant build scripts. These build scripts define ordered sequences of processing steps called targets.
Related server build targets
The server application is also built using Apache Ant build scripts and some server targets are needed for the client application. The application configuration files are located in the <server-dir> project so the targets for processing these are part of the server project.
Full and incremental builds
The client build target generates a complete web client application. If no previous build output is present, running this target will build the entire application as a full build. On subsequent runs of this target, the build scripts compare your source files to the previously generated output files to detect what you have changed. The build then updates the minimum number of output files possible in an incremental build.
Dependency checking
For most changes you need only the incremental build, as changes are detected automatically and only the dependent output files are updated. However, some changes are not detected and you might need to run a full build for your changes to take effect.
Build Logs
Each time you run the client target to build the application, all of the messages produced by the build scripts are written to a file in the <client-dir>/buildlogs folder. The files created are named for the date and time on which the build was started. If errors occur during a build, you may find it easier to review them by reading the log file instead of scrolling through messages at the command prompt.
Error reporting
One of the main steps performed by the client target is the generation of the JSP files from the UIM files. This process will check the validity of your UIM files as they are processed. The validity of the UIM files is determined in a number of steps.
Server interface reference
When you develop UIM pages, you need to know details about the façade server interfaces and their properties so that you can select the information that you want to display on each page. This information is all defined in the application's UML model. However, for your convenience, you can generate simple reference documentation in HTML format to make the information more easily accessible.
Page previews
You can produce page previews by running the client-with-previews build target. This generates static HTML pages for the default locale in the <client-dir>/WebContent/Previews folder. Open the pages in a browser to see approximately how the page will look when the application is running. You don't need to start a server to view the pages.
UIM Generator Tool
The UIM Generator tool provides a user interface for automatically generating a UIM page for a particular server interface.
External client applications
Because the webclient directory contains a mix of components that are targeted for different EAR packaging, it can be difficult to use a single development environment and component order to develop and test them. The external-client build target enables development testing to be done on these external client applications.