Welcome!

[Former Member]

Hello SAPers!

Welcome to the new forum focused on working with SAP from PHP. Before we continue give me a moment to introduce myself. My name is John Coggeshall, a Senior Technical Consultant at Zend Technologies, the company responsible for the Zend Engine powering PHP. I've been involved with PHP for about 8 years now and am the author of a number of books and articles on PHP technologies published worldwide. So I've been doing this for awhile, but I have to say you never really hear much about SAP and PHP working together. That was why I was happy to lend my time to a new PHP/SAP-focused blog and moderate this new SAP/PHP forum. If you're interested in my blog you can find the link to it here:

/people/john.coggeshall/blog/2005/05/04/zend-and-sap-team-up-to-promote-php

As your moderator I'll be floating about answering questions and encouraging discussion about any PHP related topic. Of course, feel free to bring SAP into the discussion as well! It's also been rumored that the SDN is an incredibly vibrant and involved community, so I'm really looking forward to getting this section off the ground.

So, with that said, welcome!

Cheers,

John

[johna69]

I have been fiddling with PHP in my spare time for a number of years and have some apps up and running. My Prediction Football scripts have had nearly 9000 downloads (a lot for me).

I was surprised and pleased to see that there is an SAP extension for PHP, I had been using nusoap to perform webservice integration between PHP and ABAP Web Services in my spare time, now I have something else to look at.

Cheers

JohnA

[Former Member]

It's really a great for me to see that at least SAP support officially PHP.

However I've been unable to put in place any web dev using PHP. I'm doing PHP in spare time for 4 years but I stick to ABAP in my job due to lack of customer needs. I hope all of this (this forum, weblogs and like) can change it!

Is it necessary to said that I like very much PHP ?

However, in addition to your demand on participating in weblog which is normal, I think that a lot of people do know PHP but never has the chance to use it in a professionnal environment. So would it be possible to run a POLL ? Something like :

PHP is for you :

- a spare time langage and nothing more

- a spare time langage but I do ABAP in real

- a spare time langage but I do JAVA in real

- I've heard of it

- I'd like to learn and develop with

etc ..

What you think of it ? I found interesting to evaluate the potential community of ABAP/PHP developpers.

[marilyn_pratt]

Hi Bertrand,

Hmm...poll? Okay, a few thoughts in this direction.

1) We have on the rare occasion polled our SDN community about their experiences with SDN. If we were to do so again, I could recommend incorporating your PHP question into a general poll question regarding programming languages. Of course this would give "future" results.

2) If I wanted something more immediate, I might hesitate to send a survey about PHP to all our 150,000 participants because that might be considered spam ;-(

3) I use (for non-professional purposes) Zoomerang! as a survey tool and it allows me to poll my academic friends who have agreed to tolerate my survey and allow me to gather results. I guess one could email the participants in this discussion forum, but again, it might be more useful to just ask for feedback in this forum.

4) You might want to start a new discussion thread here, where you pose your questions: How do you use, or would like to use PHP in the SAP context? Who would like more information about learning to develop with it?

5) I could recommend the creation of a local poll, posted on the technology page, but I don't know the precedent for such a request.

Well thanks for getting the juices going about how to handle this...will need to revisit this after sharing these ideas with others.

regards,

Marilyn

[johna69]

Hi Marilyn,

I do not know if this is something that SDN has considered, but some forum software (e.g. vbulletin) allows the users to create polls associated with their threads. The poll is visible as part of the thread and posters have the option of voting.

This may be what you are covering in point 5.

Regards

John

[marilyn_pratt]

Hi John,

Thanks for your comments. Jive doesn't support this function. I am looking to alternative solutions (point 5).

cheers,

Marilyn

[Former Member]

Hey guys, great idea polls can be very useful but in this case we already have a demand for PHP otherwise there would not have been a forum created and the effort put forth from SDN to have it's first (to my knowledge) external moderator (John Coggeshall in this case) to help out.

I can't answer for John's weblog although it has been ranked high in the Top 25 for awhile now. My 3 PHP related weblogs:

May 17, 2005 <a href="/people/sap.user72/blog/2005/05/17/php-howto-your-system-status-rz20 / HowTo: Your system status (RZ20)</a> views 191

May 15, 2005 <a href="/people/sap.user72/blog/2005/05/15/getting-started-with-php started with PHP</a> views 155

June 17, 2004 <a href="/people/sap.user72/blog/2004/06/17/php-and-sap-together-at-last and SAP, together at last?!</a> views 2512

Since May 4, 2005 the forum here has had 13 topics posted with 88 replies.

Points have already been accumlated (questions answered by more than 3 people) and at the moment only 2 topics show as not answered. From an overal percentage I would say we are one of the most active forums on SDN at the moment (proper ratios of course) with the best asked/answered ratio.

So with all of that in mind, would the poll tell us anything more than we already know? Would it enable us to make the forum better?

It would without a doubt generate more traffic or most likely would but linking to our PHP related weblogs in the developer areas or especially on the SDN home page (hint hint Marilyn) would accomplish this just as well. I mean we dominate (PHP that is) the <a href="https://www.sdn.sap.com/sdn/developerareas/technology.sdn?node=linkDnode11">Technologies</a> developer area.

Don't get me wrong, like I said I like polls but I'd hate to see us make Marilyn and all the others go through so much trouble and perhaps it not bring us any more information that we already have?

Just my two cents of course

[marilyn_pratt]

Craig,

Have you been spying on my editor's calendar? You can see that PHP does indeed dominate the technology page for the moment. This week's featured weblog is yours, Craig and I am eagerly waiting for the next installment from you and others. Unless there is a good deal more activity and content sharing PHP can be quickly unseated...

I've been looking at the speed and quality of answers in this forum and yes, statistically it is way up there for response time and interaction.

Median time to first reply 21 m !!!

Way to go you PHPers.

cheers,

Marilyn

[Former Member]

Me spying? No but haven't you been told I'm only of those addicted to SDN so I'm pretty much connected all the time

Occasionally I see things that no longer exist after a short while - maybe one day I'll join Mario in funny SDN stories to tell

As for my next weblogs I've got a few more I've started I've just got a few things going at the moment that take precedent so the next ones might be a bit delayed.

That of course doesn'T stop you from amybe writing up a weblog on the wonderful activity you as a SDN manager are seeing in this new forum

[maximilian_schaufler]

Statistics will take some time to reach a long-time-value, though it would be nice to keep the forum that active, especially the last 2 days.

Hope to start my first PHP/SAP weblog next week, in the meantime I'm currently "giving lectures" (you'll read about that in a weblog for Craig's challenge g).

[Former Member]

You've my interest peeked Max!!!

[marilyn_pratt]

Hi Max,

Of course you are correct about statistics and the need to see performance over time.

In the meanwhile, thanks for whetting our appetites for upcoming weblogs. We are ready, and it will be exciting to see the PHP/SDN Weblog thread grow

cheers,

Marilyn

[Former Member]

Now you are looking at my calendar Marilyn. My second challenge (provided the first goes OK) will be the same but including SDN and PHP in it

/people/sap.user72/blog/2005/04/27/challenge-are-you-ready

[Former Member]

Hi,

I work ABAP for almost three years now, but before that I had a short work contact with PHP. I already had the chance to try (a little bit) the new SAPRFC module of PHP, and I liked it, but this is still a superficial impression.

PHP can only bring simplicity in a world that is known for exactly the opposite (but what human construction comparable in size with SAP's business suite isn't complex?), with all the advantages that come along: simpler development, simpler framework, better compatibility and portability over different OSs and yes! different browsers.

I an anxious to see the following.

Bogdan

[Former Member]

My name is Niek de Visscher. I have been working within the SAP/i2 SCM environment for Philips Consumer Electronics (as business analyst), before starting to work as a freelance consultant, with a focus on PHP web applications development and content management systems in PHP.

As I have a fair deal of knowledge of both SAP and PHP, I am very excited to see that people are working on getting the great power of PHP and SAP together. I strongly hope that the outcomes are put in practice rapidly, because, in my opinion, PHP and its extentions will make it so much easier to develop better and more complex solutions with far less efforts.

Keep up the good job!

Regards,

Niek de Visscher

[Former Member]

The attention that PHP is receiving lately can only be good news. Now due to the SAPRFC extension(<a href="http://saprfc.sourceforge.net/">http://saprfc.sourceforge.net/</a> ), people are starting to see the power which PHP is providing. It's not the fact that PHP can talk to SAP via this extension, its the other tools that come with PHP from SOAP to PDF generation, this is what makes it so powerful.

Using these tools can provide high value business systems for a very cost effective price. The Information Technology industry has become complacent in extracting large sums of money from business organisations, and forcing them to adapt around the products which are sold to them.

PHP gives some of the controls back into the hands of the business managers, and forces the Information Technology industry to reassess what value are they actually offering.

I'm looking forward to seeing what occurs in the coming months.

[Former Member]

Hi all,

my background in PHP goes back to mid 2001, when I started to look into WebCMS for my thesis. From then on I helped out in the Postnuke project and later in the Xaraya project.

As for SAP, I learned some ABAP in lectures during my studies of information systems (Wirtschaftsinformatik).

Since mid 2002 I work as full time ABAP developer at a company in southern Germany, that is an SAP development partner.

Basically, working on PHP/SAP isnt something you can do in your free time. The hard part is getting access to an SAP system. I ordered the Netweaver 2004 DVD for Linux, which was free, and installed it on a box with 256MB RAM, cuz I dont have anything better at home. It ran, but you couldnt really work with it.

And at work, you normally dont get either the time to work on PHP, or the administrators to allow you fiddling with the systems they need to maintain.

So its a difficult technology combo, imho.

And since the ABAP/Webdynpros are on the horizon for SAP ERP2005/7, its kinda hard to convince a traditional ABAP company to invest into PHP knowledge and build up new PHP solutions from scratch.

[Former Member]

Pleasure to have you aboard! I've read a bit of your work already and it's a pleasure to have the chance to communicate with you here.

As for your blog though I <a href="/people/sap.user72/blog/2004/06/17/php-and-sap-together-at-last you by a few months but I'm looking forward to reading your next blogs!!

I took the liberty to post a thread here earlier we have a similiar one in the <a href=" forum</a> basically we all just reply to it with a quick link to our weblog relating to the topic and most people set a watch on the topic and get an email right away when a new weblog is there.

Marilyn made a comment in the thread but typically it's only a link to the weblog like I did.

Craig

[Former Member]

I've been playing around with PHP now for about 2 years but I must say that I've not done much other than tweak things already out there, most of which are running on my own <a href="http://craig.cmehil.com">website</a>.

SAP wise I've only had time to play around a little bit with connecting with PHP as we don't use PHP in the company, much a pity, but what can you do.

I do have a new weblog in the works though relating to PHP since I saw this forum yesterday