3. With SAP, Companies Can Choose Their Own Development Paradigm

I found it interesting to learn that the approach SAP recommends to its clients is the exact same freedom SAP provides its own development teams when choosing which language to program in. "The paradigm that we're following internally is looking at the skill sets of the teams doing the development," said Jung. "We also  looking at an existing business logic we're building on top of and into, including the new edge applications, and new composites, and we use those criteria to decide which language to base them in.

"The idea of Enterprise SOA, of taking your core business logic and exposing it in open standards-based ways, means that even though business logic might be implemented in ABAP, it's exposed via an open standard and can be consumed by any other language that complies with that open standard," said Jung. "So all of a sudden, if customer X comes along or partner X, and they're more comfortable with Java, and they already have experience in it, there's no reason why they can't continue to develop in that language and consume our Enterprise Services and the process goes either way. It isn't limited to ABAP and Java once you look at it from an Enterprise Server standpoint; it's really open to many other options."

I wasn't going to let Thomas off the subject of staffing development teams without asking him about offshoring. "Offshoring, used in the proper medium, can be very beneficial to a company," said Jung. "Obviously, my personal opinion is that it isn't well suited to all aspects of programming. There are obviously advantages to having a programmer who's more in tune with your business, who's part of your company, who's going to be the one who gets a support call in the middle of the night and has personal knowledge of the business and connections within the business. I also think that doing research activities and doing architectural design for a company - making those architectural decisions and putting the proper technologies in place - are things better left to someone who has an intimate knowledge of the business, who's often part of the business themselves, and not somebody from another company."

4. How Project Teams Should Prepare for CE/eSOA

SAP's Composition Environment (CE), a key component of NetWeaver 7.1, brings SAP's next generation Java-based tools in one environment. I asked Thomas to share some of the highlights of CE. "First of all, it's the latest release of Java EE (EE 5.0), so CE is on the cutting edge of what's supported by the standards. Because CE is standards-based, you find yourself being able to inter-opt with other Java-based applications easier. We've also built a lot into CE that's obviously focused on creating composites. So the modeling tools and the programming capabilities of the Java environment, of Visual Composer, of the newest version of Guided Procedures that is integrated into CE - these are all very much focused on how you can combine services from different sources."

I asked Thomas how CE could help companies take better advantage of eSOA-based programming. "CE has integration with the Enterprise Services Repository (ESR) to help you find services more easily," said Jung. "Then that integration flows right into Visual Composer, so now, not only can I access BAPIs from backend SAP systems and drag and drop them onto my design area, but I have those same kind of capabilities going right into the ESR.  I think the other important capability is the tool sets. If you look at Web Dynpro for Java, if you look at Visual Composer and Guided Procedures - these are our latest versions, so they have the latest capabilities built into them, and with CE being this lean environment for building composites, it's obviously something where we can deliver innovations quicker than we can to the core standalone release of NetWeaver. So you'll see us integrating new capabilities much faster."

Thomas also cited NetWeaver Voice as another example of CE-based innovations. "The other area that we're focused on is identifying some non-traditional application areas," said Jung. "If you look at the first release of NetWeaver CE, we introduced NetWeaver Voice: That's the capability to create phone-based, touch-tone and voice input-based applications, so we're looking at other types of composites that we can build into this framework. Yet, like in the case of NetWeaver Voice, we leveraged Visual Composer, so if you already know how to use Visual Composer, then you really use those tool-based skill sets you have to build a new type of composite."

5. SAP's Latest Modeling Tools: Supporting Developers and Business Users

With each iteration of NetWeaver (7.1) as of this writing, SAP seems to come out with yet another modeling tool to aid in eSOA-based development. Fortunately, NetWeaver CE pulls a lot of these previously disparate products into one location. Asking SAP about modeling tools was a little tricky, because there are evidently some exciting developments in this area not yet ready to be publicized that are poised for public announcement pretty soon - perhaps at SAPPHIRE 08? However, Thomas was willing to give his take on the modeling tools that are currently available. He pointed out that there are two kind of modeling tools to consider: one type can help business experts get more involved in the development process, and the other type enables programmers to avoid repetitive functions.

"If you look at the current version of NetWeaver CE, there are modeling tools all throughout there: the ones that are given the main focus as modeling tools: Visual Composer and Guided Procedures, and there are new tools coming down the road," said Thomas. But there's also the idea of taking the parts of traditional programming that are kind of repetitive and dropping in some modeling capabilities. So I think we see two aspects of modeling tools: the first aspect, and what a lot of people notice right away is, ‘Hey, I don't necessarily need to be a programmer, I've got these tools that can take me so far, that can let me build a certain type of application and I can be a business process expert or, even if I'm a programmer, I can quickly prototype something.' And that's where a tool like Visual Composer is particularly strong.

"Then we see other aspects where we can use modeling tools as productivity enhancements for full-blown developers, and we're building those kinds of capabilities into the core development platform: NetWeaver Development Studio and the ABAP Workbench. So we take the things that would be difficult to describe in code or would be repetitive, and we replace those parts of the programming model with modeling tools but still give you the full power of the underlying programming language."

6. How Should IT Managers Cultivate eSOA Talent?

We wrapped up the podcast by asking Thomas to put on his CIO cap and tell us how SAP project teams can start to develop the kind of in-house talent necessary for eSOA development projects. "Putting my mindset in the shoes of a CIO, one of the biggest things that I would look for is a project team that's really self-motivating and self-teaching," said Jung. That kind of team is going to not only produce good output, but is willing to get out there, learn on their own what's out there, and be able to come back to me with good technical options. I think what's more important than a team that knows XYZ technology is the ability to adjust, adapt, and bring everything to the table as new things come along, because the innovation is moving so fast.

"To me, this means staying connected, using SDN, using other websites, keeping up with what's going on and, like you mentioned, taking advantage of the free downloads on SDN for CE, for NetWeaver, for the Java and ABAP core. They're all available on SDN, so I really would expect my team - even if the business is still on an older release, even if we haven't bought into whatever the next release SAP is offering - to have downloaded whatever evaluation software is available on SDN as soon as it's available and already be playing with it.

That's one of the key components: You can't wait until the business is ready to do the upgrade to start learning about what the next release contains from a technical standpoint."

Conclusion

When we look at the array of tools and approaches, SAP development has never been more complex. But once the options are understood, there is a huge upside: the NetWeaver platform brings with it a much greater flexibility to choose the development tactics most appropriate to your business strategy and in-house talent. There's no way to spell out all the best practices for SAP development in one article. Having said that, I hope this interview with Thomas Jung provided a useful framework for understanding where SAP is headed and how to take advantage of these new technologies.

Thomas Jung, SAP Labs. Thomas Jung is an SAP NetWeaver Product Manager focusing on Custom Development - particularly in the areas of ABAP, MDM APIs, UI Strategy, and NetWeaver Voice. Before joining SAP Labs in 2006, Thomas was an applications developer for an SAP customer. He was involved in SAP implementations at this customer as an ABAP Developer for nearly 10 years. He is also the co-author of the SAP Press Books, Advanced BSP Programming and Next Generation ABAP Development.