by Craig Cmehil on March 6, 2007 at 5:49 am
It’s not specific PHP but with this release I’d imagine we will soon be seeing the new PHP connector coming out as well, NetWeaver RFC gives the Next generation Ruby and Perl Connectors, even though it’s Ruby and Perl it’s certainly worth taking a look at that’s for sure!
There’s been a lot of activity around this part of things lately and we are already seeing the connectors now being developed to handle both SOA as well as the RFC, and what’s even better:
RFC is a stable technology, and has been for many years, so I can understand why this revelation may not seem very exciting. What is exciting is the unprecedented level of cooperation, understanding and good will that has come out in a relatively short time, as I have moved through the process of redeveloping the Ruby and Perl RFC Connectors. The result is (and will be more so), a better fit in terms of how the SDK works with Dynamic Languages, allowing the API that the Dynamic Languages offer for RFC connectivity, to better reflect the nature of those programming languages. For example – there are better features in the new NW RFC SDK that allow for easy translation of ABAP types to Ruby/Perl types.
So as you can see many a new change coming to the world of SAP and Scripting Languages!
by Craig Cmehil on December 5, 2006 at 8:10 am
It seems that James finally got around to blogging about something he saw. He talked a bit about it during one of the RedMonk Radio episodes but did not even scratch the service leaving me sitting ask “What the…” but finally he blogged it and will hopefully be sending over the “deets” from Andrew soon.
James saw a presentation from T-Mobile and how they developed (rather quickly) an app using Adobe Flex. Now I like Flex (I too can get down with Flex) and I’m hoping to add a “Flex” forum to SDN here in the near future (any Adobe guys want to help moderate?) and since I’ve been pushing the use of Scripting Languages his post is right up my alley in fact in more ways than one.
I’m not going to comment on SAP’s UI strategy, Filip did that and Thomas just reminded everyone of that and raised a few more comments, nor will I comment on what Dan said about SAP’s UI, not that I don’t have an opinion it’s just…
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by Craig Cmehil on August 2, 2006 at 9:41 am
I get this question a lot, and in fact since SDN is becoming more noticeable in the outside world and the fact that we have a growing and strong community and a decent size library of information, the question seems to be popping up more and more of late.
Why should I use PHP in my SAP landscape?
Well the bottom line is this, and I know that if someone really wants to make me look bad they’ll post this way out of context, “You should not use PHP in your SAP Landscape”, now the rest of it for those of you interested in the whole story. You should not use PHP in your SAP Landscape if you don’t already have it. No one, myself nor SAP is actually telling you to run out and learn everything you can about PHP. What is being said is simply this, “if you have PHP already in your landscape you don’t need to run out and learn something else”.
A lot of times someone will hear that they are installing SAP so they do a search and find all this information related to ABAP, Java, .NET so on and so forth so they think that all that work they’ve already done in PHP for their internal applications will have to be redone, removed or replaced. This is simply not the case, and that is the message I’ve been trying hard to get across. If you have PHP knowledge in house already and add SAP to the mix then you can still leverage that PHP knowledge and do not need to retrain all your developers in something other than the basics of how a SAP system works.
In fact with the release of NW04s the support for Web services is tremendous and therefore might make life even a little easier for your developers.
OK this was a lot shorter than I was thinking but I don’t want to confuse the bottom line message with clutter.
by Craig Cmehil on April 19, 2006 at 7:29 am
One of the many problems most developers or business specialists face when wanting to see what a new technology, or I should say a different technology has to offer is all the pieces to the puzzle. Let’s see you are a developer and you’ve been using, in this particular case, PHP for a few years and you deploy applications inside of your company’s intranet and network.
Recently your friend who works as a system administrator over on the SAP systems has been complaining that the support desk needs to be able to do something with users in the system. Your first questions is “what do they need to do, and why is it a problem”. His response is interesting as all the support desk needs to do is lock or unlock the users. This of course is something you have already built for other systems and it runs as a PHP application on the intranet for the support desk. You of course say “hey I already did that I’m sure I could add onto it and make it work for your system as well”; the administrator is of course happy as this means he does not have to deal with any development nor making several changes to menus and profiles, etc.
You both sit together and decide to write up a quick proposal, you’ve heard and seen things on the net about working with SAP and PHP so you know it’s possible. What you don’t realize though is that there is not an “out of the box” environment ready to go.
Each of those items needs to be installed and configured and that just to test things. This of course can cause a project, especially one not high on a priority list to be nixed. Well I (that’s me now, not our friend here the PHP developer or his friend the system administrator) came across this problem from several people so I decided that I would go ahead and see what I could to make life a bit easier.
I put together a little development environment called “Scripting in a Box”, now some might ask about XAMPP and why I didn’t just use it and all I can say is that I have my reasons and it was mainly because of the planned expansion of this environment. Continue Reading…
by Craig Cmehil on March 20, 2006 at 11:42 am
So you might be an experienced ABAPer or even an experienced PHPer, but do you know how to get the basic development environment setup to actually connect your PHP application to your SAP backend system?
This is actually one of the most confusing parts, simply because of the various version levels and pieces of the puzzle. I decided to jot down some notes on this setup and what better way to preserve my notes than by sharing them with others? Therefore here’s the next blog in my series on discovering the flexibility of PHP together with SAP. Continue Reading…
