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SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio

The SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio is the new Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE) for Java Enterprise applications, Web Dynpro applications, Web services, portal content and mobile applications. The Developer Studio offers the same usability paradigms as Eclipse and allows the developer to customize many of its features. The Developer Studio works with "Perspectives", like Debug, Java Browsing, Web Dynpro and so on. You can customize your tool bar with the Perspectives you like. You can adjust the parameters how the Developer Studio formats your Java code, you can define templates you want to use for Try/Catch Blocks and many more. The commands to customize your IDE can be found under the Window command.
The Help system contains a very good "Getting started" section that explains all necessary steps to set up a project and guidelines how to use Eclipse. You find this documentation under Help > Help Contents > Java Development User Guide.

The Mobile Infrastructure supplies a perspective in the SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio. The MI perspective looks similar to the Java Perspective, but has the additional view "MI Projects", that only displays open MI projects on your workbench. All other projects are filtered.

For Eclipse you can click here to download the MDK Plug-in. To install the MDK Plug-in, extract the content of the MDKEclipsePlugin.zip file into the home folder for Eclipse (for example, c:\eclipse). After you extracted the zip file you will have the folder <eclipse_home>/plugins/com.sap.ip.me.mdk.developmentTools and <eclipse_home>/features/com.sap.ip.me.mdk.developmentTools.
If you work with Eclipse 3.0 you have to remove the folder <eclipse_home>/features/com.sap.ip.me.mdk.developmentTools before you start Eclipse 3.0.

MDK Plug-in Functions

The MDK Plug-in Functions are represented by following icons in the Toolbar:

The icons stand for the following functions are (from left to right):

You have to do the MDK configuration, before you use the other functions.

See the Tips and Tricks chapter for more details.

Mobile Application Development Cycle

The MDK Plug-In in SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio accelerates the development process. Developing, deploying and starting the mobile application are performed by the MDK plug-in without leaving the development environment.

The following chart shows a typical mobile application development cycle. A click on the bold written text shows the documentation for this step.

The Tips and Tricks document contains helpful information about how to use the MDK efficiently, how to handle large projects and how to debug applications. To demonstrate the MDK plug-ins and how to develop with the MDK, please refer to the examples in the MDK documentation.

If you have existing sources you want to import into a mobile project or if you already have a mobile application that you now want to integrate with the MDK, please refer to the Tips and Tricks document for details.

You also may find the Eclipse Plugins at http://sourceforge.net/ very useful during development, like for example the Eclipse Profiler Plugin.

 

Problems that can occur in the Development Cycle

JSP are not updated

When you create a .war file and start Tomcat the files in the .war file are deployed. JSP are "precompiled" by Tomcat into .java files when called the first time. The Java compiler is started and creates the final class file of the JSP servlet and your application is displayed in your web browser. The "compilation" process takes place in the work folder of Tomcat which is located in <MI_HOME>/work.

When you deploy the application frequently during testing time it can happen, that the latest JSP you deployed is not "precompiled" by Tomcat and a older "precompiled" version is used - so your changes would not be visible. In this case delete all files in the Tomcat /work folder and start Tomcat again.