Introduction to creating web applications

Web Applications Manager allows you to create and edit web mapping applications that showcase the geographic information running on your server. The application-building interface is intended for people with little or no web development experience.

Through Web Applications Manager, you build your web application and tailor it to the needs of the people who will use it. Web Applications Manager lets you choose the data you want to show, select map elements such as North arrows and scale bars, select tools for working with your application, and configure the map layout.

The main steps in creating your web applications are the following:

• Choosing layers to be displayed in the map
• Configuring tasks
• Defining the look and feel
• Deploying the application

The above links explain each stage of creating a web application in Web Applications Manager. If you want to briefly step through the process of building a simple application, see Tutorial: Creating a web application. Otherwise, read on for more detailed instructions.

A note about migrating web applications to different machines

Esri fonts are used to display North arrows, input/output parameters for geoprocessing, and so on, in the web mapping application. These Esri fonts need to be available on the computer that is hosting the web mapping application. If you deploy your web mapping application on a computer that does not have ArcGIS Server installed, you will need to install Esri fonts on that computer.

If your web mapping application uses multiple resources from different projections, the application will project the layers to the coordinate system of the bottommost layer. For some projection types, the transformation information to support this is located in the folder <ArcGIS Installation Directory>\pedata. If you deploy your web mapping application to a computer that does not have ArcGIS Server installed, you will need to copy the pedata folder and its contents to that computer. You will also need to edit the file PeHome.properties of each web application deployed. This file is located in the WEB-INF/classes folder of the .war file. Update the value for the property PEDATAHOME to the location of the pedata folder. If you have not created your web applications yet, you can also make this change to the PeHome.properties template in <ArcGIS Installation Directory>\java\web\webcontrols\WEB-INF\classes\. Web applications created in ArcGIS Web Applications Manager or Eclipse/NetBeans IDE use the value in this template file to define the PEDATAHOME property.

How to start creating a web application

To start creating your web application, log in to Web Applications Manager. The login requires a user account that is a member of the administrators group on the machine.

Once logged in to Web Applications Manager, follow these steps to start creating an application:

1. Click the Applications tab and click Create Web Application.
2. Enter a name for your application.
3. Type a more detailed description of the web application. This description will be visible from the Applications tab.
4. Click Next to continue to the layer selection panel.

For help with the next panel of the wizard, see Selecting layers to display.