Always curious I decided to read on and see why this person was active. It was a clear message as well “it’s about sharing knowledge” and Micky went on to mention some of the folks involved.

Here it goes, my personal ‘heroes’ when it comes down to sharing their knowledge and making me profit from it. In other words, teaching others how to evolve their (ABAP) skills in random order:

Naimesh Patel who has a very nice website of its own which is really worth visiting once in a while, especially for people who like to take a dive into ABAP OO. But it was on SDN where I first ‘met’ him and got to appreciate his knowledge. Obviously I’m not the only one, since often his anwers or website are used as reference when answering a post on one of the ABAP forums. The same actually goes for the next person who’s answers I often like to read, Marcin Pciak. He also knows his way around ABAP OO, and is an early adopter of the ‘new’ way to ABAP programming. Also let’s not forget J@y , a®s, Clemens Li, Max Bianchi, and Rob Burbank, Thomas Zloch and last but definitely not least Uwe Schieferstein. All of them have been around for quite some time now and they really tend to give the relevant (correct) answers from which I for one, am still learning. Like I said, I’m sure I’m leaving out several fellow SDN’ers that should be part of this list as well, so sorry for that.

For ABAP performance and tuning the list is not quite that long, but on the other hand, I’m pretty sure I’m not leaving out that many contributors. Top of the list is, without a doubt, Siegfried Boes, who not only has strong performance knowledge, but also has a great sense of humor when answering or correcting other peoples answers. Although sometimes I get the idea that he is getting a bit tired (and he probably should) of all the people who think they know what they’re doing but obviously don’t (just think about the FAE vs Joins discussion). But, whenever I’m looking for some pointers, he is the one to search for. And second in line of heires is probably Hermann Gahm.

Almost done here (time to get back to the Christmas Dinner), but not before mentioning that being an ‘active’ member on SDN (or only ‘just’ an active reader), does not only help you to learn and evolve your skills, it also boldly takes you where a lot of ‘us’ have already gone before, namely to the EG-heads.

It was on SDN that I first got to hear about enterprise geeks via ‘Shameless plug for the Enterprise Geeks Podcast’. We all know (and who knows, maybe even love) Thomas Jung, Ed Herrmann, Graig Cmehil, Dan McWeeny and Rich Heilman who all have been of great influence to this community. And through these ‘geeks’, I for one, got one of the best professional advices ever: Read, read and read some more. I think it was from Ed Herrmann on one of the pod-casts, so thanks for that.

Well, that’s just about it on ‘Why I’m active on SCN’. Thanks for reading and by all means do leave comments (plus or minus).

Seeing that the true spirit of SDN has not been lost I’ve decided it was worth braving the cold weather to come into the office today!

Also added is a optional check on the http://localhost:8080 index page to check for updates.

It has also been mentioned by a few users there is a problem when attempting to install new components or update exisiting plugins in Eclipse, it seems the following file missing: c:\Development\eclipse\features\org.rubypeople.rdt.source_0.8.0.604092300RC1\feature.xml simply copy the feature.xml from C:\Development\eclipse\features\org.rubypeople.rdt_0.8.0.604092300RC1 to C:\Development\eclipse\features\org.rubypeople.rdt.source_0.8.0.604092300RC1 and that should solve the problem.

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.

The biggest changes to the package where the additions of Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

There has been a steady increase in the number of PHP blogs available on SDN though and the forum has been quite active as well. Unfortunately I’ve not been as active as I hoped and therefore I’ve been trying to rearrange my schedule and workload a bit to compensate so I can actually start developing.

This blog here was actually intended to show more development with SAP and PHP but has instead starting to turn into a more information service of what is happening regarding PHP and SAP. I’m at odds though as both are very interesting topics and I happen to be in a interesting position to provide on both.

In fact if you’d like to hear first hand what is happening then join me on June 28th, 2006, Wednesday, between 20:00 – 21:00 CET (Berlin Time) for a online conversation (more info) where we talk about where things are going and get feedback from the growing community. This is the first one I’ve planned so I’m hoping the turn out is good and we get some good feedback, but to be honest as the topic of “PHP and SAP” is just starting to take hold I’ll be happy with 5 people on the call.

I’m hoping by the end of the week I’ll have another update for you especially in regards to one or two PHP projects I’ve been working on…