Application Development

In both two-tier and three-tier applications, you need to prepare your client workstations for development. This chapter describes the steps and the changes you can make to the default Panther settings for your project.

For information on setting up web application servers (which operate as Panther clients in a three-tier environment), refer to Chapter 2, "Web Application Setup," in Web Development Guide.

For information about setting up development clients using Panther for IBM WebSphere, refer to "How to Set Up the Development Client" in Panther for IBM WebSphere Developer's Studio.

Copy Your Panther Distribution

You need to make a copy of your Panther distribution for each project. This has the following benefits:

• You can make modifications to the contents of the distribution without modifying the original files.

• At any point, you can compare the distribution file to the working version of the file to see what modifications you made for the project.

• When you install or re-install Panther, it will not overwrite the project-specific versions of files.

For a description of the directory structure in a Panther distribution, refer to Chapter 2, "Understanding the Panther Distribution."

Configure Your Panther Application

To configure your Panther application, you need to perform the following steps:

• Specify the environment needed for Panther software components.

• Distribute that environment to your client workstations.

• For JetNet or Oracle Tuxedo applications, configure remote access to libraries and repositories.

• Create an application directory on the client.

Specify Your Panther Environment

Panther uses setup variables to point to the Panther installation, other setup files, and other files required by the application, such as libraries. Each developer must set the following setup variable either in their environment or in the Windows initialization file for Panther:

SMBASE

(mandatory) The directory path to your Panther distribution. This setting is used to locate Panther software components, particularly smvars.bin, the file containing your configuration settings, in the config subdirectory of this location. If smvars.bin is not located at $SMBASE/config/smvars.bin, then you also need to set the variable SMVARS.

Other common variables are:

SMSETUP

Project-specific variable settings.

SMPATH

Directories to search for application files.

SMFLIBS

The libraries to open when you start Panther.

SMTERM

The video driver to use with Panther.

SMUSER

The user name to use in development processes.

You can change other configuration settings as needed by your project:

Colors

Colors in your Panther application can be set by:

• Changing the color properties of objects in the Editor.

• Changing the color scheme of the GUI desktop. For Windows, the Display section of the Control Panel has an Appearance card which sets the color scheme. Versions of X Windows using the Common Desktop Environment have desktop settings.

• Changing the settings of Panther components in the configuration map file. In GUI environments, the default settings match the color scheme of the GUI desktop.

• Defining extended colors in the configuration map file. Once defined, the names will appear in the Extended Color property in the editor and can be used to define colors in Panther components in the configuration map file.

• Changing the color palette settings for the sixteen basic colors in the Motif resource file or Windows initialization file.

The name of the configuration map file varies for the different environments:

• Windows: wincmap

• X Windows: xwincmap

• Character-mode: bwcmap, clrcmap

• Web: webcmap

Run cmap2bin after making any changes to these files.

Message File

Panther messages are defined in msgfile.bin. (The ASCII equivalent is msgfile.). Refer to "Using Message Files," in Application Development Guide for details about message files.

Multiple Platforms

If you are going to deploy your application on multiple platforms, such as Windows and character-mode, you need to be aware of the following settings.

• Colors—Character mode applications have a maximum of sixteen colors—eight basic colors and their highlighted equivalents—while GUI platforms have a much larger color palette.

• Fonts—Character mode applications use a fixed width font while GUI applications generally use a proportional font. With multiple platforms, you will want to coordinate the font settings.

Programming Functionality

If you want to write your own C functions, you will need access to a C compiler so that you can rebuild your Panther executable after installing the functions.

To use Java methods for event processing, you must have access to the JDK during development. When the application is deployed, the application clients must have access to the JRE. The location of the Panther classes ($SMBASE/config/pro5.jar) is automatically added at runtime; however, you must specify the location of your own class files in the CLASSPATH environment setting.

Remote Library Access

In JetNet and Oracle Tuxedo environments, you can have remote access for libraries and the repository. This allows for greater conformity during application development.

Distribute the Setup to the Client Workstations

In a UNIX environment, you need to distribute the environment settings and create symbolic links or scripts in order to run the executables for each local client. For JetNet/Oracle Tuxedo applications, there are setup files available in $SMBASE/samples/newapp.

In a Windows environment where each developer can have a separate copy of the programs, you need to devise a method for each developer to access the master copy of the application files.

Create an Application Directory

It is suggested that you create an application directory for the project on the client, the web application server, and the application server (for JetNet, Oracle Tuxedo and WebSphere). This provides a default location for all your libraries and external programming code (C, Java, JPL).