Artifacts produced during development cycle

When you use IBM MobileFirst™ Platform Foundation to develop a mobile application, you produce client and server artifacts.

Client artifacts

A mobile binary file ready for deployment on a mobile device. For example, an Android .apk file, or an iPhone .ipa file. These are usually uploaded to an "App Store" such as the Apple Store or Google Play.

Application metadata and resources (.wlapp)

A .wlapp file. Metadata and web resources of a MobileFirst application deployed on the MobileFirst Server. Used by the MobileFirst Server to identify and service mobile applications. For hybrid Windows 8 Universal apps, two .wlapp files are produced: one for desktop devices, the other for phones and tablets.

Adapter files (.adapter)

An adapter file (.adapter) contains server-side code written by the MobileFirst developer (for example, retrieve data from a remote database). Adapter code is accessed by MobileFirst applications via a simple invocation API.

.wlapp and .adapter files are referred to in this topic as content. These are typically identical between the organizations development, testing, and production environments.

A project web archive (WAR) file to be deployed on your application server

This file contains the default server-specific configurations such as security profiles, server properties, and more. .wlapp and .adapter files use these properties at various stages. Typically, the project WAR file is adapted to the test and production environment, when you deploy the file to your application server. For more information, see Deploying the project WAR file.