The following paragraphs describe the Deployment Tool GUI and the ways to access the functionality of the tool. If you need to specify settings for your components or application, or deploy your application on a server, the following is a guide to how your particular task may be accomplished with Deployment Tool.
When you open the Deployment Tool help by using the Help menu, the primary screen is opened. Its title "Deployment Tool" appears at the top. After an application is created, a ":" and the < application name > appears after the general title.
Immediately under the title are the names of the menus: File, Edit, Tools, and Help. Pulling down Help offers you the choice of Contents.. or Using Help...
Under the names of the menus is a toolbar composed of icons in four groups and two singletons. The toolbar icons offer convenient access to functionality that can also be accessed through the File and Tools menus. Their groupings indicate kinds of functionality:
Deployment Tool displays tree views on the left side of the primary window. For example the Files tree view may show an application and under it the component archive files that you have opened or created with the tool.
An EAR file may contain component archive files-- EJB JAR(s) (Enterprise JavaBeans(tm) Java(tm) ARchive), WAR(s) (Web component ARchive), application client JAR(s) (Java ARchive), and/or RAR(s) (Resource Adapter Archive). When you select a node in the tree, the tool displays a set of tabbed panes that represent a deployment descriptor. Selecting a tab displays a window for entering values in the deployment descriptor which sets environmental and other values used at runtime when the J2EE application is executed.
If you change values in a tabbed pane and select File->Save, the deployment descriptor in the archive file is updated.
This tree view shows the J2EE servers that the tool is connected to. By default, the tool connects to the server on your local host. To connect to an additional server, select Add Server from the File menu. Clicking on each server node in the tree, the tool displays the J2EE applications that have been deployed on that server.
When you select a node in the tree, its corresponding tabbed panes are displayed in the panel. The tabbed panes allow you to edit settings of the selected tree node. To view online help for a tabbed pane, select the pane and press F1.
The fourth set of icons in the Toolbar access update and deploy functionality. When a file in an application has been changed, the clicking the Update icon causes the file in the application EAR to have the latest version.
Clicking the Deploy icon displays the Deploy Module dialog box. You can specify the application and the server for deployment. If you wish to retrieve the client jar file, check the Return Client Jar box and specify the location where the client jar will be stored. Clicking OK will complete generation of the deployment descriptor and ready the application for deployment.
The last icon in the Toolbar is the Verify J2EE Compliance icon. This icon causes
the application to be checked for conformity to the appropriate J2EE specifications.