J2EE for ABAP Programmers

[former_member182193]

SDN is hosting the '

J2EE for ABAP programmers

' Webinar as part of The SAP NetWeaver RIG Know How Network Webinars series.
On

Wednesday, February 18th

, Jeff Gebo, a Sr. RIG WebAs Specialist, will present the similarities between ABAP and J2EE and lay down a roadmap for taking your ABAP skills to the J2EE world.

We invite you to post your questions to the presenter prior to the Webinar taking place and carry on the discussion throughout and following it.

Dial-in Numbers:
Date: Wednesday, February 18, 2004
Time: 8 a.m. Pacific, 10 a.m. Central, 11 a.m. Eastern; 5pm Central European Time
From within the US, call: (888) 428-4473
From outside the US, call: +1-(651) 291-0618
Password: NetWeaver04

WebEx Info:
Topic: SAP NetWeaver Know How Network
Date: Wednesday, February 18, 2004
Time: 11:00am, Eastern Standard Time
Meeting Number: 742391500
Meeting Password: netweaver04 (lower case)
WebEx link: http://sap.webex.com

A

replay

of this call is available for five days following each conference. Please access this recording by dialing one of the following numbers and using the replay access code 720128.

Tollfree: 800-475-6701

International: 320-365-3844

We encourage you to join this Webinar, educate yourself and collaborate with SAP experts and peers.

Message was edited by: Amir Blich

[Former Member]

Thank you for the webinar on Wednesday, it was very informative. I have a few follow-up questions:

1. Are there any specific release dates yet for Web AS 6.40? With the Developer Studio and the integrated ITS, it seems worth waiting for when planning an upgrade.

2. I had read that Web Dynpro for ABAP was to be included in 6.40, did you say that it would not be until a later release?

3. With NetWeaver '05, will there be a new release of the Web AS - 6.50? Any new development capabilities planned with the next release?

4. What is the SAP Integration Framework that is shown sitting on top of the Eclipse Plugin Framework?

5. As far as data access, and ABAP schema and JAVA schema, is it correct to say that any data access for SAP data as we know it today will be through BAPIs, RFC, connectors, etc. With my limited knowledge of JAVA, I assume it is possible for a JAVA application to access SAP data with a BAPI while also accessing external data through SQL calls?

Thanks,

Jeff Mathieson

Compass Group

[Jeff-Gebo]

Hi Jeff,

good questions, below are your answers:

1) 6.40 Web AS will be released for Rampup at the end of March. For more information about rampup visit: http://service.sap.com/rampup

2) Yes, Web Dynpro for ABAP was originally planned for release with 6.40 Web AS, it has now been moved back to the NetWeaver 05 release of the Web AS.

3) Yes, there will be a new release for NetWeaver 05.

4) The Integration framework is refering to the ability to easily create and to call web services.

5) Yes, all data access from Java to ABAP will be made using BAPIs/RFMs, IDocs, and web services...the SAP Java Connector plays a critical part in this. As for calling the underlying ABAP database schema from Java, this is not supported! There are many reasons for this, one being that the data integrity is maintained at the ABAP application level, not in the database.

I hope this helps!

Cheers,

Jeff

[Jeff-Gebo]

Hi Jeff,

good questions, below are your answers:

1) 6.40 Web AS will be released for Rampup at the end of March. For more information about rampup visit: http://service.sap.com/rampup

2) Yes, Web Dynpro for ABAP was originally planned for release with 6.40 Web AS, it has now been moved back to the NetWeaver 05 release of the Web AS.

3) Yes, there will be a new release for NetWeaver 05.

4) The Integration framework is refering to the ability to easily create and to call web services.

5) Yes, all data access from Java to ABAP will be made using BAPIs/RFMs, IDocs, and web services...the SAP Java Connector plays a critical part in this. As for calling the underlying ABAP database schema from Java, this is not supported! There are many reasons for this, one being that the data integrity is maintained at the ABAP application level, not in the database.

I hope this helps!

Cheers,

Jeff

[Former Member]

Hi All,

If you need a short tutorial to bring you up to speed on Java (with JCo!) for ABAP programmers. Have a look at www.sapgenie.com

It's very easy to read, and it will give you <b>a good grounding for J2EE</b>if you don't have any Java experience.

BTW I delivered the <b>FIRST</b> course of J2EE for ABAP programmers at SAP Education centre in Brussels.

Alistair

[former_member182193]

For those of you who missed the event or would like to hear it again, a replay of this call is available for five days following each conference. Please access this recording by dialing one of the following numbers and using the replay access code 720128.

Toll free: 800-475-6701

International: 320-365-3844

[Former Member]

Hi, Im Cesar from Argentina. I can't access to url www.sap.webex.com .

How can I do to know about this Webinar. ?

[former_member374]

Hi Cesar,

try it without the 'www': http://sap.webex.com works for me.

Enjoy the session, Mark.

[Former Member]

First of all, I'm a Java developer who has within the last 18 months gotten into SAP and ABAP development.

Questions:

1. Will the IDE's ever merge (ie will SE80 and NetWeaver Developer Studio (Eclipse)) ever come together?

2. Compare and contrast transactions in J2EE with the ABAP classical transactions and object-oriented transactions.

3. Are there any published performance metrics comparing the SAP J2EE server to others (IBM, Oracle, BEA etc).

4. Is the WebDynpro idea supposed to be the notion that we create a model for our application then implement that model (more or less automatically) in the language of our choice (Java, ABAP, C#)?

5. What will OpenSQL look like in the Java context? How does it differ from SQJ?

6. Will SAP J2EE developers ever have direct access to the R/3 data dictionary? Or will we have to used BAPIs/RFMs forever?

Thanks for your time

Paul Chafin

Fla. Dept. of Revenue

Tallahassee, Florida

[Jeff-Gebo]

Hi Paul,

1) There are no offical plans for the IDE's to merge, that said, it wouldn't surprise me if this happened sometime in the future.

2) Interesting question...at the core they are all very similar. One thing that is similar now for the 6.40 J2EE Web AS is the integration of the enque server for database locking during your transactions. SAP continues to take what it is learned over the past 30 years in the ABAP world and is porting them to the J2EE world. What type of other information are you looking for on this?

3) Will look into this.

4) Yes and no, Web Dynpro is a tool that enables you to create professional web based business applications. It is based on the MVC paradigm, thus the idea you mention of the model. The model itself can be BAPIs/RFMs, Web Services, EJBs, etc...but the tool generates META DATA that in turn is currently converted into J2EE code(which in turn can connect to the backend model). In the future there will be a tool for creating ABAP based web dynpros. You can find lots of information on the topic of Web Dynpro here on SDN. There are lots of advantages to using Web Dynpro, it makes things like internationalizing your web applications easy....and much much more.

5) As a java developer you won't notice anything different when using OpenSQL in terms of what your code looks like. What you will notice is that you will be able to port your apps to any of the supported databases. Also, you will be able to create tables with the IDE and configure the data within those tables to be cached at the J2EE Engine level. The J2EE Engine OpenSQL runtime also does SQL Statement caching. Before SAP provided this for J2EE, java developers code this kind of functionality themselves. Now it is just a matter of configuring the table at design time...this is what has been around for years in the ABAP world.

6) Remember that the data integrity on the ABAP side of things is in the application logic, not in the database, that said you must use BAPIs and RFMs. To speed things up, SAP has introduced FastRFC, that opens up a shared memory segment between Java and ABAP when the to runtime stacks are on the same system...this makes getting data from ABAP faster than ever before since it cuts out the network overhead.

I hope this helps!

Cheers,

Jeff

[Former Member]

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for the nice presentation. I have also gone through the recorded session at AT&T but it will be helpful if we can get the link to download the presentation. Is the presentation available for download?

Regards

Nixon

[Jeff-Gebo]

Hi Everyone, and welcome to the J2EE for ABAPers discussion thread. I'm looking forward to the Webinar on Feb. 18th. I would like to invite you to post your questions here on the subject before & after the Webinar. I and my SAP colleagues will be happy to answer them for you. Thank you for your interest in the subject and I look forward to talking to you on the 18th.

Cheers,

Jeff Gebo

Web AS RIG

[former_member584282]

Our company has a pretty simple system landscape, we are using SAP 4.7 with the core modules. We do not have any other system running in our company. We are however planning to install Web AS in near future.

My question is should how much knowledge of Java should our ABAPpers have for the current scanario ?

Amit Purohit.

Micro Inks Corporation.

[Jeff-Gebo]

Hi Amit,

I will assume that you will be going with 6.40 SAP Web AS. With this release there is quite a bit of technical funcationality that is only available on the J2EE side of things...for instance Web Dynpro. If you want to use this functionality you will need to know some java. That said, you can use BSP pages that are based on ABAP to do web development if you like. There is also support for creating and calling web services from ABAP. But in the future, more and more will be coming out on the J2EE side of things from SAP, and you will need to support this...so obviously if your ABAPers can start to learn Java/J2EE now, it will only make things easier for your company going into the future.

I hope this helps!

Cheers,

Jeff