# What's New in WebLogic Workshop 8.1

WebLogic Workshop 7.0 simplified development of enterprise-class web services for J2EE experts and corporate application developers alike. With WebLogic Workshop 8.1, BEA expands that vision to make WebLogic Workshop the integrated development environment of choice for building complete J2EE applications. The following sections outline some of the new features in WebLogic Workshop.

## Shared Development Environment for BEA WebLogic Platform

Now you can use the WebLogic Workshop development environment to build WebLogic Platform applications in a friendly, graphical development environment. You can build web applications and web services. You can build a portal using WebLogic Portal. You can add business processes to an application using WebLogic Integration.

## Java Controls

WebLogic Workshop offers a new extensible control model for creating Java controls. Corporate developers and ISVs can create new control types and use them in Workshop applications. Controls can be simple reusable components or sophisticated components with design-time customization. Controls are the conceptual heart of WebLogic Workshop — once you encapsulate a piece of business or application logic in a control or build a control that represents an enterprise resource, that control can be used consistently from any component in the application.

## Web Application Development

WebLogic Workshop provides a new JSP/HTML editor which you can use to build web applications. You can add controls to your JSP pages to easily access enterprise resources. WebLogic Workshop also includes page flows, based on the Apache Struts framework, for coordinating JSP pages into web applications.

## Sophisticated Java Integrated Development Environment

The WebLogic Workshop IDE has been completely redesigned and now offers complete application and project management for J2EE applications, a versatile editor for handling a variety of file types in the J2EE application, an integrated debugger, and integrated Ant build scripts.

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