Developer Studio provides a local (stand-alone) development environment and a remote development environment. From the Explorers Projects folder, you can develop projects locally on your machine or against a remote WebFOCUS environment. From the Explorers WebFOCUS Environments folder, you develop directly against environments that are configured remotely.

In Developer Studio, you start building a reporting application as a project consisting of different kinds of files. You can create the project as a stand-alone application in the development environment or as a Web-based self-service application that you can deploy.

If you install a WebFOCUS Reporting Server during the Developer Studio installation procedure, you can:

• Locally develop and deploy self-service applications from the Projects area.

  Stand-alone Project-based development and deployment requires installation of a WebFOCUS Reporting Server on the same machine as Developer Studio. A WebFOCUS Client is also required for Project-based development. The files that you create for a local project reside in a subdirectory under APPROOT (defined in the configuration files edaserve.cfg and cgivars.wfs). The Application Root directories (APPROOT directories) attribute must point to the same directory for Project-based development since files will be created with the WebFOCUS Client, which resides on the Web server.

• Connect to one or more remote servers and modify existing self-service applications on those servers. For example, you can add a reporting procedure to an existing application.
• Configure access to one or more WebFOCUS environments so that you can manage resources on the WebFOCUS Client and Reporting Server, and in the Managed Reporting Repository (if installed). From the environment tree you can create and edit procedures, metadata, HTML files, and more.

If you do not install a WebFOCUS Reporting Server during the Developer Studio installation procedure, your environment allows the last two capabilities.

For details, see the Developer Studio Application Development Getting Started manual.