Development Trends

In the good old days when the SAP Portal was brand new and everybody discussed what kind of content would/could be available in there in the near future, there was always one example which was demo’ed again and again: The Stock ticker or The list of preferred stocks and related updates. Although we knew that most customers did not have this “need”, the demo continued to survive – and it took a while  before there was a real proposal on serious content.

Will the same thing happen to SAP Flash Island?

…. will Google Maps examples and colour full Piechart examples be the “Stock ticker” for SAP Flash  Island?

Maybe… or maybe not… maybe there are a lot of inspiration to find in the Adobe Flex community, because there are already a lot of exising components and applications available – and a lot of different API’s are already supported by Adobe Flex. The inspiration might lead you to a ‘non-stock-ticker’ for SAP Flash Island.

If you visit Adobe.com/devnet you might find some inspiration to a new mashup – which could be a SAP Flash Island candidate  – just to mention a few:

• Component: Adobe Cocomo – read more
• API:  Google Analytics – read more
• API: Facebook – read more

If you want to have a closer look at some of the newest possibilities within Google Wave, then SAP has developed a prototype called Gravity. Gravity uses Google Wave and could be used to develop Business Process models – which could be used later on in SAP’s BPM software.

See the prototype in action and read more here

In this blog I will try to describe how you can get started with Adobe Flex development. It will be an ongoing process – and I will post some of my Flex projects/examples in here as well. I have been working with SAP ABAP development since 1994 – and within the last 5 years I have been working with B2B projects using SAP BSP development.

So how do you as an ABAP developer get started with Adobe Flex development? And are there any of the development skills from SAP you can reuse in Adobe Flex?

I decided to start with some e-learning material from TotalTraining (http://www.totaltraining.com/prod/adobe/flex3_riaa.asp) – and decided to focus on FLEX3 – even though SAP Flash Islands will be built in FLEX2 (the major difference is more Object Oriented focus and better performance).

Today, I realized a free alternative to e-learning - Adobe has launched ‘Flex in a Week’ – here you will find a lot of materials, exercices and videos which will guide you through the FLEX3 development process (http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/videotraining/) 

Another place to start – is buying the book ‘Developing SAP Applications with Adobe Flex’ at SAPPRESS (http://www.sappress.com/product.cfm?account=&product=H1951) – this book will guide you through the basic of FLEX and how to integrate this with SAP. The only ‘problem’ I have with this book, is the method used to integrate SAP and FLEX – all examples is based on custom-made SAP BSP pages which will communicate with FLEX using XML. This will work fine – but FLEX has the possibility to use SOAP directly, which means you can use all existing BAPI’s – no customcode needed (it will just require that you decide to web-service enable them). I will describe this in a separate blog later.

In SAP NetWeaver 7.0 EhP1 – a new UI feature is made available. The new Flash Island UI element makes it possible to use Adobe Flash Island in the SAP Web Dynpro framework. The Adobe Islands will be developed in the Adobe Flex Builder and loaded into the MIME repository. With Adobe Island it will be possible to create rich Internet components which will be embedded in SAP Web Dynpro’s.

Click here to see example (Source: SAP Developer Network, http://sdn.sap.com)
Click here to see eLearning example (Source: SAP Developer Network, http://sdn.sap.com)

With FLEX3 the process of integrating Flex and SAP NetWeaver has been made a bit eaiser. All webservice in SAP could be made available in the Enterprise Services Repository (ESR) which is the central information repository for enterprise services in SAP. In order to use these webservices in a FLEX application you import the relevant WSDL using the ‘Import Web Service’ in Flex Builder 3. The import-feature will generate all the classes and datatypes needed in order to call the webservice in SAP. After this you will be able to work with the webservices using the ActionScript classes – no need to think about xml etc. In previous Flex versions you had to generate proxies using a Proxy Generator in order to integrate FLEX with SAP.