Welcome to the IBM® Watson Explorer Application Builder. Using Application Builder, you can build user applications that deliver a
360-degree view of your data repositories. This guide provides information and examples to
show you the techniques that you need to produce an application. Like any construction
project, your application can grow to be complex. The information that is provided in this
guide gives you the basic building blocks to construct an application that is as unique as
your business requirements.
Attention: A fully functional application that is built with
Application Builder is provided externally on
http://greensearch.org:8080/AppBuilder/admin: You can log in to this application
with the user name of
data-explorer-admin and the password of
TH1nk1710. This sample application provides a general overview of the
main features and configurable options available in
Application Builder. This sample application is intended to be a live,
hands-on, working example of application that is built by following the procedures that are
described in this documentation. Although you can change configuration settings in this
application and are encouraged to do so, the application is not intended to be a model for
ongoing evolving application development. The application resets every hour on the hour to its
initial configurable state.
Application Builder is organized into multiple components that
are used together to deliver an application to the user. An application is composed of the
following major components:
- Application - The user accesses the application by using a supported browser. The
application is served through the Application Builder by
combining the information that is identified in its configuration.
- Application Builder - Application Builder serves as an administrative interface and
framework for the application to be housed. Application code (such as HTML and CSS) is
delivered by Application Builder. Application Builder reads configuration information from a ZooKeeper
server. The Application Builder administration tool is used
to create and maintain that configuration data.Application Builder also pulls data from the configured stores to
populate the application pages. In some instances, data from the user is sent back to a
collection store by the application. For example, this action occurs for shared spaces,
activity posts, and useful links. Multiple Application Builder instances can serve as front ends for a single application.
- ZooKeeper - A ZooKeeper server or group of servers contains the configuration information
(application and entity model) that is common across all Application Builder installations in the deployment. Each Application Builder instance is configured to connect to ZooKeeper
and automatically obtains the current configuration information when an application page is
requested by the user.
- Watson Explorer Engine - One or more Watson Explorer Engine instances are used as the collection store.
Watson Explorer Engine serves collection information (indexed
data from a data repository) as it is requested by Application Builder to be delivered to the user by the application.
Watson Explorer Engine also serves federated store content
(unindexed data from an external data repository that is preprocessed by Watson Explorer Engine). In some cases, such as shared spaces, activity
posts, saved content widgets, tagging, content from the application is also sent in some
special cases to an indexed collection store.
- Directory - A user store such as LDAP is typically the unified means of identification and
authentication for your network. Application Builder does not
modify any content from this store, but uses it for user identification. In some cases,
users can be identified from a collection store, but this behavior would preclude any single
sign-on functionality that an authentication server such as LDAP can provide.
- Data Store - A data repository is the data that the application serves to the user. This
repository might be a file share, a Microsoft
SharePoint installation, an IBM
Lotus Notes® database, or any other repository
that contains business data. Typically, the content of these repositories is indexed as a
collection in Watson Explorer Engine. In some cases, it might be
appropriate to federate the content directly from the original repository.