Windchill is highly customizable and provides various mechanisms and APIs to customize business logic, user interfaces, and services and infrastructure. The topics that follow document these mechanisms, making it possible to configure and customize the applications. This includes activities such as minimally tailoring user interfaces or creating new business objects with supporting user interfaces and server-side logic.

This chapter provides a “Hello, World!” introduction to Windchill customization by introducing a new, persistent class and backing user interface. The example assumes familiarity with Java and the Eclipse IDE. While not obligatory, Eclipse is known to work well and project setup tools are provided.