The Studio development environment

Guidewire Studio is a stand-alone development application that runs independently of Guidewire PolicyCenter. You use Studio to build and test application customization in a development or test mode before deploying your changes to a production server. Any changes that you make to application files through Studio do not automatically propagate into production. You must specifically build a .war or .ear file and deploy it to a server for the changes to take effect. (Studio and the production application server—by design—do not share the same configuration file system.)

Guidewire recommends that you not run Studio on a machine with an encrypted hard drive. If you run Guidewire Studio on a machine with hard drive encryption, Studio can take 15 or more seconds to refresh. This slow refresh can happen when you switch focus from the Studio window to something else, such as the browser, and back again.

To assist with this development and testing process, Guidewire bundles the following with the PolicyCenter application:

• A QuickStart development server
• A QuickStart database
• A QuickStart server used for testing that you cannot control
• A QuickStart database used for testing that is separate from the QuickStart development database

The following diagram illustrates the connections between Guidewire Studio, the bundled QuickStart applications, the local file system, and the PolicyCenter application server. You use the QuickStart test server and test database for testing or development as PolicyCenter controls them internally. In general, dotted lines indicate actions on your part that you perform manually. For example, you must manually create a .war or .ear file and manually move it to the production server. The system does not do this for you.