Home
User Guide
The information contained in this section applies to IBM WebSphere Commerce Version 7.0.0.9 and Feautre Pack 8. The documentation also applies to all subsequent releases and modifications until otherwise indicated in new editions.
Developing
The topics in the Developing section describe tasks performed by an application developer.
Presentation layer
WebSphere Commerce uses Java Server Pages (JSP) to implement the view layer of the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern. The view layer is in charge of retrieving data from the database through the use of data beans and formatting it to meet the display requirements. The view layers determines whether the request is sent to a browser or streamed out as XML. JSP files present a clean separation between data content and presentation.
Customizing WebSphere Commerce Accelerator, Organization Administration Console, or Administration Console
The WebSphere Commerce browser-based tools (WebSphere Commerce Accelerator, Organization Administration Console, Administration Console) can be extended or changed. In addition to customizing the tools you can also create a new browser-based tool that uses the same underlying framework. A new tool based on the tools framework is referred to as a WebSphere Commerce tools user interface center.
Tools framework
The tools framework defines user interface elements and functionality used to control and manipulate these elements.
Tools User Interface Center
A Tools User Interface Center provides the structural framework in which tools are presented to the user. A Tools User Interface Center consists of a menu frame and a content frame. The WebSphere Commerce Accelerator is an instance of the Tools User Interface Center. The Organization Administration Console is another example of the Tools User Interface Center.

Tools User Interface Center

A Tools User Interface Center provides the structural framework in which tools are presented to the user. A Tools User Interface Center consists of a menu frame and a content frame. The WebSphere Commerce Accelerator is an instance of the Tools User Interface Center. The Organization Administration Console is another example of the Tools User Interface Center.

In the user interface customization topics, Tools User Interface Center refers to the Tools User Interface Center instance that you are customizing. For example, Tools User Interface Center refers to WebSphere Commerce Accelerator if that is the tool that you are customizing.

Context-sensitive help

No matter how intuitive you might think that your custom interface is, it is still possible that your users will have questions, about either usage or input. When a user clicks Help, the current page in the content frame is polled to obtain the help key for the page. This key is then included as an argument in a call to the getHelp() function, which launches a separate browser containing the HTML file associated with the specified key. To provide context-sensitive help for your custom interface elements, you need to provide a HTML help file, you need to specify a key in your custom JSP file, and you must update the help mapping file for a Tools User Interface Center.