Setting Up Environment

The purpose of this section is to tell you how to prepare an environment for working with Spreadsheet in API.

Prerequisites

Before developing a web application with Spreadsheet, you should prepare the following softwares:

• Install JDK 1.5 or above
• Install an application server
  • You can install any JavaEE application server you like. If you don't have one, Tomcat is a good choice.
• Install Eclipse or other development tool.
  • In this book, we will use Eclipse as the default IDE to explain related setup.

Prepare a Dynamic Web Project

To save your time from creating a project out of nothing, you could just download the sample project which is a ready-to-run Eclipse dynamic web project. Even if you insist to create a project by your own, you still can reference the sample project.

There are several files inside the sample project that require to explain:

• /WEB-INF/web.xml

  This web descriptor contains minimum configuration to run Spreadsheet.

• /WEB-INF/lib

  All jar files required to run Spreadsheet are here. You should see zss.jar in it.

• /index.zul

  The page that uses Spreadsheet, and you can see the basic usage and configuration.

• org.zkoss.zss.example.startzss.MyComposer.java

  The controller of Spreadsheet component in index.zul. It's the place where you write codes to control Spreadsheet.

Maven Project

• download sample maven project
• explain dependency
• reference other steps in creating a dynamic web project