Environment setup

Development Tools

To develop a ZK application, we suggest following working environment.

• Eclipse:

It's an open source IDE. Currently, ZKoss provides Visual Editor plugin for Eclipse.

• WTP:

Web Tools Platform, it includes tools for developing Web and Java EE applications.

• FireFox:

A browser that implements open web specifications, and many powerful plugin can help debugging on it.

• Firebug:

A plugin for FireFox. It's a must have tool for debug web applications.

• ZK jars:

You can use ZK by simply copy all needed jar files into certain directory. Please refer to quick start guide.

• ZK Studio:

A visual editor plugin provides by ZKoss. It's helpful to debug zscript in ZUML, and it provides many useful functionality like content assistance.

Please refer to our quick start guide for step by step installation tutorial.

Configuration files you should know

ZKoss has provided Configuration files for most common use cases. In most case, you simply copy and paste it.

web.xml:

To develop a Web application with ZK, you have to configure servlets, listeners and an optional filter to web.xml. It is also know as Deployment Descriptor.

zk.xml:

zk.xml is the configuration descriptor of ZK. This file is optional. If you need to configure ZK differently from the default, you could provide a file called zk.xml under the WEB-INF directory.

For detail explanation of web.xml, zk.xml, please refer to Appendix A, B of ZK developer's reference

When you use other back-end frameworks like hibernate, you have to modify zk.xml as well. Also, ZKoss has provided reference zk.xml. You can simply copy and paste it.

See Also

From ZK Forum:

Eclipse 3.4 and zul.xsd

Quiz

1. A plugin for FireFox is a must have debug tool. What is it?
2. What's the visual editor plugin provides by ZKoss?
3. What's the two configuration files you should know?

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