The development environment

Before we discuss key components of WEF, let's take a look at the development environment.

From a development environment perspective, WEF is a plugin that is installed into either Eclipse or IBM Rational Application Developer for Websphere. As a plugin, it uses all the standard features from these development environments at the same time that it provides its own perspective and views to enable the development of portlets with WEF.

Let's explore the WEF development perspective in Eclipse. The WEF development environment is commonly referred to as the designer. While we explore this perspective, you will read about new WEF-specific terms. In this section, we will neither define nor discuss them, but don't worry. Later on in this chapter, you will learn all about these new WEF terms.

The following screenshot shows the WEF perspective with its various views and panes:

The top-left pane, identified by number 1, shows the Project Explorer tab. In this pane you...