The Windchill product is highly customizable and provides various mechanisms and APIs to customize business logic, user interfaces, and services and infrastructure. The chapters that follow document these mechanisms, making it possible to do everything from minorly tailoring a user interface to creating brand 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.