Services Tab Window

Introduction

The Services Tab is a container that hosts services. Maintaining the respective services is the responsibility of the owner of the hosted services. These services and its components can be used directly from the hosted window. The services that may hosted via the Services Tab are: database connections, Web Services and EJBs. Users can directly access and modify the services through Services Tab.

The UI representation is a Tree View in a dockable Window, which, by default, is docked in the upper left corner of the tool. The root node of the tree is hidden and currently we planned to host three root nodes: Databases , Web Services and EJBs. In future other services may be hosted here Ex. JPA Entity beans

Requirements

• Support for hosting independent services
• Support to drag and drop of services on to consumers like VWP designer or JSP Editor

Functionality

Since most of the functionality needs to be described from the UI point of view, refer to the detailed UI document.

The Services Tab doesn't know any information about the services that are hosted on its explorer view. It simply picks up the root node specified in the layer file and inserts it as a child in its node hierarchy.

To understand the interaction with the respective services such databases and Web Services and EJB please refer the respective functional specs.

Public contract to add the Services root node

As mentioned about the Services Tab does not know any thing about the hosted services. Only the root node (that extends the Openide Node) of the hosted service need to be supplied to the Services Tab. This is done through the XML layer of the respective module that represents the service.

For example to host the Web Service the following is defined by the Service Type "Web service" in its XML layer file

<folder name="UI">
   <folder name="ServicesTab">
          <file name="org-netbeans-modules-websvc-nodes-WebServiceRootNode.instance" />
   </folder>
</folder>

Locaion of Servces Tab in the Netbeans Window System

Few possible locations have been discussed so far (Yet to be finalized)

• Left Top Tab group (along with Projects, Runtime etc)
  (may be too crowded here)
• Left Bottom along with Navigator
  When no project is opened, Navigator window is blank.
  Possibly Services Tab can be the initial window in that tab group.
  Once project is opened, Navigator window will be fronted
  
• Right Top along with Palette.
  At this location initially Services Tab will be hidden.
  When a project is opened, along with Palette tab, Services Tab could open.
  Like Palette, Services Tab also will be a on demand window.

So far, Item 2 above is considered the favorable location

Attachments

ServicesTab.jpg

23841 bytes