The Agentry Editor provides several features for creating, managing, and publishing the Agentry application project. An application project can be added to the current Eclipse workspace via an import or a new project created from scratch. Importing can be performed using one of a number of different sources as discussed in detail in the sections on importing. Creating a new project from scratch is performed using the New Application Wizard within the Agentry Perspective in Eclipse.
Project management features include the ability to export definitions from the project to a single file, as well as support for multiple developers through a common repository, or “Team Development,” a concept new to the Agentry 5.2 release. Exports can be performed for the entire project, manually selected definitions within the project, or automatically selected definitions based on differences between two different versions of the same project. Additional features include the ability to compare two projects or a project and export file and to selectively import components from a source to the current project.
Publishing is the task performed when modifications within the application project are in a stable state and can then be either tested or deployed to end users. The process of publishing can include development publishes, production publishes to a single Agentry Server instance, or production publishes to a cluster of Agentry Servers. The process of publishing to production for deployment can be performed directly to the Agentry Server(s), or, alternately, may involve an intermediary Agentry Production Server. This depends on the network environment and policies in the implementation environment and is discussed in detail in the sections on publishing to production.