Rags to Riches

en route to a “richer” Internet

1. Vikas 08.05.08 / 10am

   Whats the sense in integrating some unheard of thing called Web Dynpro when you can have the entire UI in Flex?
2. Mrinal Wadhwa 08.05.08 / 10am

   Vikas,

   Web Dynpro is SAP’s primary UI technology .. there are hundreds of millions of dollars of SAP installations in enterprises out there that use Web Dynpro as their UI

   Mrinal
3. mullin 08.05.08 / 8pm

   What’s the envioronment like for SAP devs? I’ve never touched anything from SAP. Are developer tools free? I am sure SAP’s underpinnings are very complex, how difficult is it to become productive? Are SAP technologies fun to work with? Lively market for consultants? Where’s a good place to learn more (besides sap site)?
4. Adil Wali 08.29.08 / 1am

   This is a great post, Mrinal. I am deeply interested in the Enterprise 2.0 space, and particularly, the use of Rich UIs in enterprise applications. This is definitely a big step in the right direction. Have you had a chance to do do the seamless embedding yourself yet? I’d be curious to see what you thought of the experience.

   Best,
   Adil
5. Mrinal Wadhwa 08.29.08 / 3am

   Adil,

   I haven’t had the chance to try it out, but I saw a blog post from Rich Heilman where talks about his experience, he says…

   “Basically you use a SAP delivered library in your Flex component, and call a method to register the Flex component with Web Dynpro. There are also other methods provided which handle the interaction between the Flex component and the Web Dynpro application, such as firing events back and forth. You then upload your Flex component to the Web Dynpro ABAP component, set the root container as a Flash Islands container, map the SWF, set a few context mappings to the data sources used in the Flex component, and that’s pretty much it. Ok, so maybe I’m making it sound too easy, but I was actually really surprised how easy it was to get working.”

   That sounds pretty straight forward. I will share my experience as well whenever I get a chance to try it out.

   I’m not surprised that smart people like you see the potential here .. I think this is huge.
6. Guillaume 09.27.08 / 1pm

   This is definitely a huge improvement for Web Dynpro as, until now, it was nearly impossible to have customized client-side components.

   I guess this is because SAP wanted to still be able to address several outputs? (HTML+Javascript+CSS, Flex, smartphones [WML?] for Web Dynpro Java)

   Until now, there were complicated mechanisms to achieve “Flex-integration” using suspend/resume plugs together with BSP (the other UI technology), and so on…

   @mullin
   SAP being an ERP editor, its solutions are really business-oriented (be it Finance, Human Ressources, Logistics or whatever). I think this is the main differentiating point compared to other big editors.
   The development environment are not “state-of-the-art” (especially on the ABAP-side [ABAP is the proprietary language]) that’s why I would not call them “fun” to work with.
   But Web Dynpro’s strength is that it relies on the huge business data models, functions, processes… that SAP provides and thus, allows huge productivity when building business applications at the cost of a “average user experience”.
   With Flash Islands, I hope we will abe able, when it is required, to improve user experience.