BTW – For clarification, I love working with SAP as a company and technology – but I do think it’s funny all the restrictions and caveats SAP put in place because they have to to support the suite. ESS is/was just the perfect example.

I don’t think I’m giving away any secrets, but the conversion is planned for ERP 6.0 Enhp 5. The development work is being done as we speak. Customers had been asking for this, for many of the reasons you stated.

Funny thing about Java and ABAP; I reckon anyone who knows both doesn’t believe there’s should be a dual between them – it’s just what do you use in what scenario and it’s great that SAP give you the option if you need it. For example, in the SOA space; if you didn’t have JAVA, you’d be stuffed as soon as you encounter the requirement for custom adapters or user modules (Note service oriented architecture for most smaller vendors doesn’t mean web service; it just means services, hence the above comment).

That said, strongly agree with Thomas’ comment about SAP Java. There are some serious JAVA people out there (I’ve even met one with preferences for older JDK versions for development), but they are typically not the ones you want battling the question “where do we do web enablement development for ERP?”.

So now the dust is kind of settling on what to use when I have one question…When will SAP finally move ESS to ABAP? It’s amazing what SAP expects the SME customers to do to invest in ESS…Very Long tongue in cheek rant following:
(Customer)I’d like to run ESS with my business suite. Can you help me?
(SAP)Sure. First, install a JAVA stack (as a dual stack or single – though we don’t recommend dual stack here as we have problems supporting you, though it’s probably better for you in the long run but if we ever remove JAVA from ERP, you’ll have it hanging around dormant forever). Oh – And you’ll need Sol Man Diagnostics too to monitor that JAVA thing, as otherwise JAVA is one big black box. Luckily we do want you to install dual stack there so you get to see what the difference between dual and single stacks are (you lucky devil). You’ll need an SLD strategy too cause if you get that wrong, well…don’t go there. What? You want to change ESS too? Oh, then you’ll need to install NWDI. We recommend another box for this since it’s kind of intense when it actually does something! Did we mention you’ll need JAVA developers too? Not real ones, just ones who understand Web Dynpro and component development. Graduates should do since there aren’t many WDJ people out there. It would be nice if they know ABAP but if they don’t, it just makes debugging ESS twice as hard, so no biggy. Oh, and your Basis people are NetWeaver certified right? Oh, they’re not. Hmm. Well they just have a bit to pick up then. They are going to love JSPM. It hides all the complexities of support packs when it works…Oh, and one last thing, you know that ERP single JAVA stack; well it’s going to have to be patched and upgraded in parallel with the ABAP stack from now on as we don’t support you if they are out of whack but you’ll be good at the upgrades cause you’ll need to upgrade Sol Man first every time which reminds, me; since you;re monitoring all your production systems with Sol Man, you’ll probably want a test Sol Man Dual Stack installed too. Got it?
(Customer)Oh…Umm….Thanks…We’ll get back to you on that one.

Anyway, love the rants, and keep up the good work guys,
Matt
ps. I still realize that ADS will be needed in the future, but Portals are good things to install, and unlike the rest, at least ADS doesn’t have a hard dependency on support packs (yet).