Assembling an ATG Application

     When you assemble an ATG application (nucleus-based), the application resources (such as class libraries, web applications, and EJB modules) and the ATG platform resources (such as Dynamo Application Framework, platform libraries)  are copied from the Oracle ATG Web Commerce installation into an EAR file.

     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.). Nucleus component framework gives you access to the personalization, commerce, and content administration features of the ATG platform in applications. These portable frameworks are designed to run on the industry’s leading J2EE application servers such as JBoss, WebLogic, and WebSphere.

    We can assemble an ATG application in two modes; development mode and stand-alone mode

• In development mode, the application draws configuration information for Nucleus components from properties files in the Oracle ATG Web Commerce installation
• In stand-alone mode, the properties files that configure your Nucleus components are imported into the EAR file and stored in directories that correspond to the Oracle ATG Web Commerce modules

    Our build script should take care the following few things when you assemble an ATG application

• Custom application modules should be created/generated at ATG installation (DYNAMO_ROOT) directory and install application resources if you develop code out side ATG installation dir.
• ATG modules should be automatically analyzed to determine the CLASSPATH, configuration path, and inter-module dependencies
• After evaluating the list of dependency modules and coming up with a final list of modules, the system CLASSPATH each should be defined in the atg_bootstrap_ejb.jar file of the final ear.
• The class files of each module should be placed into the atglib dir of the final ear
• The atg-bootstrap.war and the atg-bootstrap-ejb.jar components should be copied from D:\ATG\ATG10.0.2\DafEar\base\j2ee-components to final ear file
• All ATG modules, which are part of your application, should be copied to <name.ear>/atg-bootstrap.war/WEB-INF/ATG-INF directory in the case of standalone ear

      Another important thing to remember about the ATG assembly process is that the config path is not determined until runtime. At runtime, the NucleusServlet inspects the module ordering and sets the config path.

      ATG platform includes an application assembly tool (runAssmler) that you can use to build J2EE enterprise archive (ear) files. All necessary Nucleus classes and configuration are included in the EAR file, so you can simply deploy the application and run it.