In part 1 (Appcelerator RIA + Spring Services) I gave an overview of the technologies that I used for my Appcelerator learning exercise, including Spring, Skyway Builder, and Appcelerator (of course).  I should have probably described the application that I create too.  I built an application that lets the end-user of the application get a five day weather forecast for a city that they select.  For this application:
  • the weather data comes from a NOAA web service that is accessible using SOAP
  • the Spring Services are defined and generated from Skyway Builder
  • the web application is implemented using Appcelerator

The Appcelerator website is the best resource for installing Appcelerator, so I won't repeat the steps here.  Suffice it to say that Appcelerator is pretty simple to install, and the principle mechanism for interacting with the Appcelerator SDK is the command-line interface (CLI). 

Appcelerator also offers some Eclipse-based tooling, but I wasn't able to get it working.  At first I thought it might be colliding with the Skyway Builder plugins, but Appcelerator plugins didn't work with a vanilla Eclipse 3.3 installation either.  The Appcelerator plugins are no longer prominently highlighted on the Appcelerator website, so I'm thinking it may no longer be maintained.  I asked on the Appcelerator forums whether Eclipse plugins were even supported any longer, but I never got a response.  As a matter of fact, I didn't get any response to any of my forum questions.  Bummer!

Undeterred....I proceeded on my own.  I created a new Skyway project called NOAAWeather, which resulted in two Eclipse projects: a modeling project (NOAAWeather) and a standard Eclipse web project (NOAAWeather-Web).  My goal was for Accelerator to generate the basic structure of a web application, and I would copy the structure into the web project.

Side note: This series of blog posts assumes that the reader has some basic familiarity with Skyway Builder and Spring.  If you aren't familiar with Skyway Builder, there are a variety of resources available on the Skyway Community website, including videos, tutorials, and sample applications.  

Using the Appcelerator CLI, I specified the following:
C:\java\appceleratortest>app create:project . myapp java
Connecting to update server ...
Fetching release info from distribution server...
Using service java 1.0.19
Using websdk 2.2.2
Installing components ... (this may take a few seconds)
Appcelerator Java project created ... !


The SDK created a folder called myapp which had several sub-folders.  Using the contents created by the SDK, here's what I did to appcelerate my web project (fyi...appcelerate is not an official appcelerator term...but maybe the should consider it...lol):
  1. copied myapp\templates\web.xml to WEB-INF\web.xml in Eclipse web project
  2. copied java libraries (myapp\lib\*.jar,  myapp\lib\compiler\xerces-2.7.1.jar, myapp\lib\compiler\xml-apis-2.7.1.jar) to WEB-INF\lib in Eclipse web project.
  3. copied myapp\app\services\org folder to src folder of Eclipse web project
  4. copied myapp\public folder to the WebContent folder of the Eclipse web project

I deployed the web project (to Apache Tomcat) and made sure Service Tester worked.  I was confident that the basic pieces were in place.  The next step (part 3) was to start using Skyway modeling to implement and generate the Spring services that would be used by my application.