ATG Applications - Module Direcory Structure

    To develop an (ATG) application on ATG platform, it can be included as a module or set of modules in the ATG Nucleus-based applications. The Nucleus-based applications are J2EE applications that include ATG Nucleus Framework. The Nucleus framework gives you access to a set of features of the ATG platform that are portable across application servers.

    Based on the above description, ATG application modules should follow core features to develop and assemble as a J2EE application (EAR).

 

• Application components are packaged in a simple, modular directory structure.
• Modules can reference other modules on which they depend, and which can be automatically loaded.
• The correct class path, configuration path, and main Java class for a given set of modules are dynamically calculated for both client and server.
• Updated modules are automatically downloaded from server to client.

Application Module Directory Structure

 An Oracle ATG Web Commerce installation must have a single module root (DYNAMO_ROOT) directory that contains all ATG application modules and your custom application modules. We should package classes and configuration files into that module. Module may not contains directly under module root. If that is the case, the module name uses parent-dir.module-dir format.

    Each module directory and its subdirectories can contain any number of module resource files such as platform libraries, Nucleus component configuration files, J2EE applications, web applications, HTML documents, and EJB modules.

The META-INF directory containing the manifest file MANIFEST.MF. 
The config directory contains the configuration files for Nucleus components. 
The j2ee-apps directory contains the J2EE web applications

   We can develop our code some other directory structure. But at the time of packaging the application as an ear, all required modules should be in a single module root  (DYNAMO_ROOT).

Oracle ATG Web Commerce – Introduction

    ATG is an application platform – a framework and a solution - for building content- driven web applications - largely for ecommerce and publishing sites. It is a Java based application platform for hosting web-based applications, as well as RMI accessible business components, with an ORM layer (Repositories), a component container (The Nucleus), an MVC framework, and a set of tag libraries (DSP tags) for JSP.

ATG product suite comes with several application like;

• ATG Commerce which includes DAS, DAF, DSS, DPS, DCS, Content Administration, Merchandising and some reference applications
• ATG Search/Endeca
• ATG Commerce Service Center
• ATG Campaign Optimizer
• ATG Outreach
• ATG Customer Intelligence
• ATG Multi-site

   

       The Dynamo Application Framework (DAF) runs on top of your application server and supplies essential facilities for application development and deployment (Nucleus, Repositories, tag libraries, security, etc.). It gives you an RMI container, distributed caching, distributed locking and distributed singletons, distributed events and messaging, a task scheduler, a rules engine and a mechanism for defining business workflows with custom actions and outcomes, a graphical editor for business workflows, support for versioned data, support for roles and rights, logging and auditing - all out of the box, and all using very coherent and consistent APIs.
      At Applications/Solutions level, you have the components and the APIs for dealing with user profiling, identity management and personalization, content authoring, versioning and publishing, content search, product catalogs for tangible and intangible goods, product search and guided navigation, pricing, tax calculation, promotions, shopping carts, gift lists and wish lists, payment types, shipping methods, order tracking, customer relationship management etc.

       ATG application is a piece of software installed independent of the ATG platform, which can be included as a module or set of modules in a Nucleus-based application.

       The Nucleus is a lightweight container for managing the life cycle and dependency binding of Java component objects. It is the core of the ATG framework and all other services and frameworks are hosted within it.

       Nucleus-based applications are assembled into EAR files that include both the application and ATG platform resources, and which are then deployed to your application server.

     Since ATG platform architecture, build and deploy approach is different from J2EE standards, you should understand ATG approaches apart from the regular Build and Release skills and tools.