Open, Save and Compile


The Application Builder is the heart of JDesignerPro development. In this area are all the functions necessary to create, save, compile, debug and deploy and application. Let’s start by explaining the base features, beginning with the New Application button.

New Application

Press this button to create a new application. If your current application has not been saved, you will prompted to do so by a message in the status bar. A popup menu will be displayed allowing you to choose the type of application you wish to create.

To create a client side application choose New Visual App. To create a server side application choose either of the server or EJB module choices. To create a new component such as your own charting or other Java component choose New Component Panel.

When creating server side modules a template is created for you based upon the type you chose. Entity modules are modules that remain active on the server and can be accessed by client applications. Session modules typically have a specific task they perform before completing and therefore do not remain active on the server once they are complete. EJB modules fit the Enterprise Java Bean model but do not take advantage of the extended features of the Enterprise Server such as Job logging and access to the Server internals. If you wish to uses these features you should use the Server modules rather than the EJB modules. Click here for more help on choosing a server module type.

You are now ready to start building your new application. To save your work, press the Save button, as described below.

Open Application

To open an existing application, press this button. A popup menu will appear allowing you to select from a list a recent application that you have worked on or to select a Visual or Non Visual application.

TIP: If your application gets to be larger than 250KBytes, you may find it is slower to load it into the Application Builder. If this is happening it generally means you have too many objects and sub-tabs on a single application module. There is a more efficient solution, please see the page titled Reusing JDesignerPro Objects.

If you choose to open a Visual Application the file picker will appear. It shows only the ".jdp" (JDesignerPro's file suffix for files not compiled) files found in the last directory from which you opened a file. Use the tree on the left to navigate to the folder that contains the jdp file you wish to open. To see the entire disk, click the computer icon in the upper left of the tree.

To open an application file, either double-click the file name or highlight it then press the Open button at the bottom of the screen. Once opened, JDesignerPro will load the class file information and display any objects and other information previously saved.

If you choose to open a Non Visual Application the file picker will appear. It shows all of the .java files that exist in the directory that was last used to open files. The server side development system of the Application Builder will open any .java source file. We recommend that you not open and rebuild .java files for applications that have a corresponding .jdp file as any changes you make will be lost if you again rebuild the .jdp file. Use the tree on the left to navigate to the folder that contains the Java source file you wish to open.

To open the Java source file, either double-click the file name or highlight it then press the Open button at the bottom of the screen. Once opened, JDesignerPro will load the class file information and display the visual representation of the Java source file using the server side development features of the Application Builder.

The Open dialogue in Application Builder only shows partial directories and always starts with the last directory that you accessed. To refresh the contents of the file picker simply double-click on the folder that you want refreshed.

Save Application

When you want to save your work, press the Save Application Button. A popup menu will appear. Choose Save Application or Save As depending on whether you wish to rename the current application. If you choose Save As the file picker will appear. Enter a new name for your application in the File Name field and press Save.

Generally you should avoid placing spaces in your application names. We also recommend that you keep your application names to 20 characters or less.

Preliminary Build

JDesignerPro has three forms of compile. The Preliminary Build should be used first whenever testing a newly designed project. The Preliminary Build gives a temporary name to the file to avoid caching conflicts. This way you get to see the compiled result quickly.

When a Preliminary Build is done, JDesignerPro shows you the finished product in Preview. You can do no code editing in Preview, but the application is running as though it were deployed. To continue to work on the screen, click back to the Application Builder tab. You can do any number of Preliminary Builds. Preliminary Builds cannot be deployed. You must do a Final Build before deploying a screen.

The Preliminary Build button saves your project as a numbered file, like PrelimXXXX, where XXXX is a random number, in the JDesignerPro root directory. Each Preliminary Build you do will create a new numbered file.

The .jdp file, the file that stores all the project settings is also saved. It is saved into the directory you chose a the time of the original save, such as the User directory.

For more information see the Preview Tab page.

Debug Build

To use the debugger you must do a compile with the Debug Build button. Doing a debug compile builds a special version of the application screen which facilitates debugging. Do a Final Build when you are ready to deploy.

Note that due to the caching feature of Java once an instance of a class has been creating in the current invocation of the Java VM it cannot be removed. This means that the first time you build your application for debug the class that is created is the one that you will continually see every time you debug regardless of how many times you rebuild it. To see the new class you must restart JDesignerPro. This is exactly why we provide the Preliminary build feature. As VMs progress we will eliminate this problem.

Final Build

Use the Final Build feature when you are satisfied with the status of your project and plan to exit to work on another project or to close JDesignerPro. For interim compiles to test your project, use the Preliminary Build feature, described above.

In order to use the Deployment features, you must first do a Final Build. When the Final Build is complete, JDesignerPro will move you automatically to the Deployment tab. You are not required to deploy immediately and can simply click back to the Application Builder to start another project if desired.

All classes that you wish to deploy must be in the JDesignerPro root directory. The Final Build will save your project’s settings into the .jdp (JDesignerPro's file suffix for applications that are not yet compiled) file and save the finished .class file directly into the JDesignerPro root directory, ready for deployment.

Note that due to the caching feature of Java once an instance of a class has been created in the current invocation of the Java VM it cannot be removed. This means that the first time you final build your application the class that is created is the one that you will continually see every time you preview the final build regardless of how many times you rebuild it. To see the new class you must restart JDesignerPro. This is why we provide the Preliminary build feature which uses a randomized name for the class at each build.

Display compile errors

When compiling your application, compilation errors will automatically be displayed at the bottom of the Application Builder window. To hide the errors click on the compile errors button. To display the errors click again on the button. It remains depressed while the errors are being displayed and is automatically reset if a clean compile is made.