AIR, Flex, RIA, SAP

SAP Widget Foundation is a desktop software that exposes a REST API to SAP systems. After you have installed the widget foundation, it exposes the interface as a localhost url using a local webserver instance. You can configure BAPIs that you want to expose from the widget foundation admin interface, under the hood though it uses SAP Java Connecter (JCo) and SOAP Web Services to communicate with the SAP back-end.

Now that we have a url exposing a REST api, it is fairly easy to use an HTTPService and have Flex/AIR applications talk to SAP. Here is a video that Abesh created a while ago that walks you step by step through how to do this.

Abesh has now also released an AS3 wrapper around the exposed REST API, which makes it even more simpler to use this method of communicating with SAP from AIR applications.

There are of course several other ways of making AIR talk to SAP, the most obvious one is to expose a BAPI as a web service and make Flex/AIR talk to that directly using the WebService component. You could also have a server part to your application and have that communicate with SAP using the various connecters available for various programming platforms.

When I was working with SAP my job was to create prototype applications that showcased how data from SAP could be used in conjunction with various RIA technologies to make life easy for the enterprise users and I found the widget foundation approach of making my applications talk to to SAP very easy and useful, I hope you do too.