Technically, these file path properties are environmental, and should really not be embedded in your .ear file. Ideally, you want to create .ear files that can be deployed anywhere in your enterprise without having to be modified in any way.

If you have your production WebSphere environment on zOS, AIX, or any other non-Windows environment, you will undoubtedly have a different file path to your pages than you do on a Windows development machine. But that's the way this software is set up, so we'll just go with that for now. Just be aware that if your are generating an .ear for deployment, you will need to modify these environmental properties to match your target environment.

There are a number of other things that we could change, but this is enough to get up and running, so let's close this file and say "Save" when it tells us that we've made changes to the contents, as shown in Figure P.

FIGURE P

Close and save the properties file when you are finished. Click picture for a larger image.

Test Your Wiki
That's really all there is to it. At this point, your wiki should be ready to rock and roll, so the next thing to do is to try it out. Right click on the Web project to bring up the context menu one more time and select Run on Server, as shown in Figure Q.

FIGURE Q

Select Run on Server to test your wiki. Click picture for a larger image.

Select your server (I use the WebSphere Applications Server 5.1 Test Environment embedded in Studio) and click Finish to initiate the server and the application, as shown in Figure R.

FIGURE R

Select your target test environment and click finish to initiate the test. Click picture for a larger image.

If all is well, the next thing you will see is your new wiki's welcome page in the internal Web browser of your Studio, as you can see in Figure S.

FIGURE S

Congratulations! You have a new .ear wiki!! Click picture for a larger image.

Now you can play around with it and try out all of the feature and functions and make sure everything is configured just the way you want it.

Customize Your Wiki
At this point, you can export your .ear file and deploy it to your application server and start using just the way it is.

However, there are a number of contributed plug-ins and templates out on the JSPWiki web site that you might want to take a look at to enhance your basic wiki. And you may want to add a few custom enhancements of your own. You can, of course, customize your wiki simply by adding new pages and altering the sample pages that were provided as part of the package, but there are many things that you can do beyond just altering the content.

While I was in playing around with this product, I modified one of the custom templates by adding elements of the WebSphere Application Server's Administrative Console application to come up with a WebSphere-like template.

You can take a look at how that came out at http://www.jspwiki.org/Wiki.jsp?page=WebSphere. But whether you customize yours extensively or simply use it right out of the box, a wiki is a nice addition to your portfolio products and has a number of valuable uses. The more you use it, the more you will find you have uses for it.

Jeff Chilton is a Contributing Editor for DominoPower and WebSpherePower magazines, and in his spare time serves as Vice President of Fulfillment for Echo Technology Group, Inc., an IT consulting firm that specializes in enterprise-focused best practices. Visit http://www.teametg.com for more information or email him at jchilton@teametg.com.