How to: Port E-Commerce local dev environment to Open Source

[Former Member]

"These instructions can be used to set-up an alternative local development environment that runs on open source software. This should be considered an additional environment to standard E-Commerce development environment and expects to only be a local development environment for the E-Commerce developer. Once local development is to be shared with other developers or testers the developed code should be deployed to the centralized development Netweaver AS instance and from there as per standard processes to test/QA and production. This generally happens through check-in of code to a version control system from which a build is done to produce a deployable unit.

Hello all,

after 5+ years of and using internally a port of E-Commerce on Open Source dev tools and seeing how SAP is talking about Open Source more and more now (but perhaps not being able to move towards it at great speed) that we would release the "how to" manual + a full Eclipse workspace for you to start doing your Web Shop development outside NWDS and NWDI...

So go to http://www.sisusoftware.com/ecommerce and get the enjoyment of freedom running your E-Commerce development on anything you like

Note: This is just for your local dev. not for test or prod environments...use SDM to deploy the resulting product to the Netweaver stack...

Enjoy!

Cheers,

Kalle

Edited by: Mark Foley on Jan 20, 2011 10:37 AM

[Former Member]

Please don't take this personally.

If you were attempting to create the EAR file outside of NWDS / NWDI, well, refer to this by [How to create custom Application in E-commerce 5.0 without NWDI|https://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/Snippets/HowtocreatecustomApplicationinE-commerce5.0without+NWDI] The document is gives a much simpler way to create the ear/war files, still valid for current versions. But if your attempt is to bring this application outside of NetWeaver Java application server, I have few questions.

This is just for your local dev. not for test or prod environments..

So, how can I enjoy, if I can not go productive with this? Oh, well, what-if I want to monitor this application along with my other SAP apps and systems. I just touched the tip of the what-if iceberg. There are many reasons I want my SAP application to remain in an SAP system environment. What are we loosing by running this in NetWeaver platform. I am still able to add thrid-party libraries to my NWDI, yet remain in an integrated environment. What are the business benefits to my customer by running this in a open platform?

And I am afraid what you have shown is certainly NOT open source. Any software application if available in human readable form doesn't mean that it is open source. A licensed Java based web application running in a different (may be open) platform is STILL a licensed application.

I am confused, like many of my friends here...

Easwar Ram

[Former Member]

Hello,

right, not sure how to best respond as you are almost not talking about the same topic here.

We did not provide a lot of the details as this is really aimed at those who know where to apply this. If the instructions and usage scenarios are confusing then I would suggest that this is not a topic you are interested in.

What we describe has really nothing to do with the building of EAR files. I don't even understand why there is a wiki snippet for such a trivial task (no offence to it's creator).

Local dev environment is the key in this. After you want to deploy centrally to dev, test, prod, etc. you do so onto the Netweaver server (of course!). This just gives you much more development time flexibility in many aspects: Choice of IDE to do your development in (latest versions of Eclipse, Netbeans, etc.), Choice of servlet container (Jetty, Tomcat, etc) which brings generally a lot of performance benefits in the development stages, including server restart times of a few seconds, hot deployment of code, fast debugging, etc.

We are not talking about open sourcing SAP E-Commerce web application. What gives you that idea?

If we take projects like Eclipse, Jetty and Tomcat as examples these are open source projects...even SAP aknowledges that Eclipse is an open source project. We are talking about running it locally on open source projects. Anyone doing so would still need to have all the licenses as they do today + Netweaver environments, etc.

So thank you for the feedback, but I got a feeling from your posting that you were focusing a bit on trying to shoot this down instead of approaching it as an interesting idea possibly worth investigating further.

Cheers

Kalle

[Former Member]

Hello, Like Kalle I have been running SAP ISA on an open source stack(Dev Env) and I wanted to explain in more details the benefits.

The point is not to make ISA open source, it's obviously not and we have a License of course.

It's not either done to replace the SAP ISA server but to make the development environment more productive.

Here are some of the benefits of running ISA on a OSS stack (in my case I Use tomcat or jetty, ant, subversion, Hudson and the H2 Database):

- In my opinion Ant, Subversion and Hudson are better at what they do than what is provided in NWDI (better docs, broad usage, integration with any tools, and importantly better stability)

- Tomcat/Jetty is very small & lightweight (will run on almost any hardware including a laptop), doesn't need a fast CPU, or tons of memory, the stack is under 100MB VS >40GB for NW.

- Tomcat can run on almost any OS, whereas NW is quite restrictive (It's a full Java app, there are not many reasons why it should be OS limited)

- A new developer environment can be setup in minutes. With NW it can take hours if not days.

- It is easy/fast to maintain/replace. A "broken" NW CE setup can be a major task to fix/upgrade (often need OS reinstall)

- A "standard" java projects mean we can use any standard tools, for example we can use great tools like VisualVM instantly.

- Instant J2EE restart. Restarting a NW J2EE engine takes a fairly long time.

Tomcat / Jetty offer features not available in NW (WE are on 7.0 I'm aware 7.2 will be much better)

- It is possible to do JSP debugging and stepping ! Since B2B/B2C JSP's are full of logic code this is super useful.

- It is possible to do code hot-swapping during debug !

- Much Better error reporting than NetWeaver (NW logs are huge and NW JSP compiler error reporting is poor)

- Tomcat IDE integration is great (regardless of IDE), allowing single click INSTANT deploy / run / debug / profile with whichever IDE we want. Some of those tasks are either MUCH slower or unavailable in with NWDS.

The project is still SAP "standard" and can be deployed to the real NW stack (for validation, QA and production).

Believe me the developer productivity is GREATLY enhanced in our B2C scenarios. (the JSP debugger and enhanced error reporting accounts for a lot of that).

Anyway, this is probably not for everyone and not intended to replace the NW stack, just a setup that can be a productivity boost for the development environment.

SAP is supposedly embracing Open Source .... all this is is using SAP software in harmony with Open source software, I'm not sure why you find this confusing.

[Former Member]

Hi,

As the author and many others, I have used NWDI and NW J2EE Server for development before (in my case, WDP Java - and I have no escape!) - it's part of life, we all did this once or we are still doing it.

I think the main reason for this thread is "to bring light" to E-Commerce development; You can now propose changes that take hours instead of weeks of development. Not to say it's very nice to feel you are "hoppin in" your Delorean every single morning and going back to early 2000 when you open your NWDS - Yes, I like to use the latest Eclipse...

I've tried myself and I'm impressed with the quality and the benefits of the proposed development environment. I appreciatte very much the whole documentation provided in the link.

And Kalle, would be nice to have something similar when E-Commerce 2.0 is released..

D.

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