Invoking the WebFaced Application Programmatically

If you have a separate Web application or Web page from which you want to start the WebFaced application, rather than from the default index.html page, you can do so by using the forward(..) or sendRedirect(..) methods in the standard servlet classes. These classes require you to provide a URL that will be used to determine the content to send back to the browser.

Don't worry if you have not performed any Java coding before; the Java code used here is very simple and the Web tools in the workbench do everything for you to set up the environment. I will guide you through all the steps to create this servlet. The servlet itself receives a server name from a form on a Web page. The server name is part of the URL that is sent to the server from the servlet. This URL is used to invoke the application on the correct server.

In this exercise, you build an HTML page with a form that contains one entry field for the server name. From this form you invoke a servlet, which obtains the server name and then uses the sendRedirect method with a URL passed as a parameter to invoke the WebFaced application.

More information on this topic and all the capabilities of dynamically invoking a WebFaced application are in the topic Programmatic invocation of WebFacing applications in the WebFacing Help documentation.