Comments on: Does Really ABAP Perform Better in Portal Development than Java? http://www.itcserver.com/blog/2005/04/15/does-really-abap-perform-better-in-portal-development-than-java/ The SAP Consultant's Journey Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:37:50 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6 By: Hasso's assassin http://www.itcserver.com/blog/2005/04/15/does-really-abap-perform-better-in-portal-development-than-java/#comment-11 Hasso's assassin Sun, 19 Feb 2006 04:44:23 +0000 http://www.itcserver.com/blog/2005/04/15/does-really-abap-perform-better-in-portal-development-than-java/#comment-11 While the article ?Why ABAP Performs Better in Portal Development than Java? is professionally written, I feel the underlying motive of the document is to promote SAPTips. In my opinion SDN would do well to remain impartial and not affiliate with external profiteers. The content is topical - ABAP vs JAVA in the portal arena, but given the history of Portals and where we are at today is this a necessary argument. From the early days in the mid to late 90's SAP released MySAP Workplace which was a great start but being written and using proprietary methods (ABAP and ITS), put this product out of the Enterprise Portal solutions market. Next came SAP's partnership with TopTier, at the time TopTier was the developer?s choice of application for SAP to Enterprise Portals integration. SAP EP was born and TopTier was bought, the initial product had its limitations when it came to open environments. With the SAP J2EE Engine, SAP EP 6 was finally an open application. Creating high-end Portal Content meant development dependent on Java API?s. Now we have Webdynpro. SAP Webdynpro is a web development framework which currently supports ABAP and JAVA development, rendering the content to a high-end user friendly UI via web browsers. The goal of an Enterprise Portal is to unify and align people, information and business processes. Bring together structured and unstructured data from different applications, technologies and locations. And finally render this data into information in a user-friendly form which enables workers to do their jobs. For a view into the future of Enterprise Portals, take a look at the yardstick Apache's product Jetspeed which is the open source standard for Enterprise Portal applications, the product has evolved from its roots in JAVA API's and JSP templates and now is becoming a fully XML Portal deployment framework, couple with this Apache's Cocoon which is a web development framework which uses XML Forms and the MVC (Model View Controller) paradigm which takes SOC (Separation Of Concerns) to another level, enabling developers to build Portal applications as if they were playing with lego. Equivalent is Webdynpro, SAP's answer to open Portal development. Web Applications and Portal Content can be configured using a WYSIWYG drop and drag environment, coding is still needed for some application control and to fill the gaps in available functionality. WebDynpro is currently released in Java via Eclipse (Netweaver Developer Studio) and ABAP via the Workbench. Webdynpro promotes separation through the use MVC and supersedes the BSP and Java IView development through the PDK programming models which are the models discussed in Axel and Lyntons article. When Webdynpro matures it will become XML Form based MVC framework. The business data (Model) will be brought in via web services and the screen (View) and application control (Controller) will all be configurable. Programming will not be necessary and the development if you could call it that will be done in a UML modeling application. One positive I took from article 'Why ABAP performs better than JAVA in Portal development', is that it there is no substitute for 'process knowledge already gained from years of ?traditional? experience'. My advice to ABAP programmers learn ABAP data persistence and how to create web services from function modules, as this is the future for ABAP . While the article ?Why ABAP Performs Better in Portal Development than Java? is professionally written, I feel the underlying motive of the document is to promote SAPTips. In my opinion SDN would do well to remain impartial and not affiliate with external profiteers.

The content is topical - ABAP vs JAVA in the portal arena, but given the history of Portals and where we are at today is this a necessary argument.

From the early days in the mid to late 90’s SAP released MySAP Workplace which was a great start but being written and using proprietary methods (ABAP and ITS), put this product out of the Enterprise Portal solutions market. Next came SAP’s partnership with TopTier, at the time TopTier was the developer?s choice of application for SAP to Enterprise Portals integration. SAP EP was born and TopTier was bought, the initial product had its limitations when it came to open environments. With the SAP J2EE Engine, SAP EP 6 was finally an open application. Creating high-end Portal Content meant development dependent on Java API?s. Now we have Webdynpro. SAP Webdynpro is a web development framework which currently supports ABAP and JAVA development, rendering the content to a high-end user friendly UI via web browsers.

The goal of an Enterprise Portal is to unify and align people, information and business processes. Bring together structured and unstructured data from different applications, technologies and locations. And finally render this data into information in a user-friendly form which enables workers to do their jobs.

For a view into the future of Enterprise Portals, take a look at the yardstick Apache’s product Jetspeed which is the open source standard for Enterprise Portal applications, the product has evolved from its roots in JAVA API’s and JSP templates and now is becoming a fully XML Portal deployment framework, couple with this Apache’s Cocoon which is a web development framework which uses XML Forms and the MVC (Model View Controller) paradigm which takes SOC (Separation Of Concerns) to another level, enabling developers to build Portal applications as if they were playing with lego.

Equivalent is Webdynpro, SAP’s answer to open Portal development. Web Applications and Portal Content can be configured using a WYSIWYG drop and drag environment, coding is still needed for some application control and to fill the gaps in available functionality. WebDynpro is currently released in Java via Eclipse (Netweaver Developer Studio) and ABAP via the Workbench. Webdynpro promotes separation through the use MVC and supersedes the BSP and Java IView development through the PDK programming models which are the models discussed in Axel and Lyntons article.

When Webdynpro matures it will become XML Form based MVC framework. The business data (Model) will be brought in via web services and the screen (View) and application control (Controller) will all be configurable. Programming will not be necessary and the development if you could call it that will be done in a UML modeling application.

One positive I took from article ‘Why ABAP performs better than JAVA in Portal development’, is that it there is no substitute for ‘process knowledge already gained from years of ?traditional? experience’. My advice to ABAP programmers learn ABAP data persistence and how to create web services from function modules, as this is the future for ABAP .

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