Ready-Set-Go!

Having set the tone in my last blog a few days back I now would like to get started and talk about the anticipated architecture of the ‘DemoKit’ sample application. As you remember, one of the main aspects of Composite Applications is their adaptability to change. It’s that inherent flexibility of Composites that makes them a good long-time investment and fundamental cornerstone of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). I already shared my stance on this topic in a recent article for the SAP Mentors Quarterly titled ‘Innovation without Disruption‘ and I see little-to-no value in paraphrasing it here again. Hence, I refrain from repeating that particular topic… and directly jump to the architecture overview.

First things first

In my last SCN blog post I introduced the idea of “Composite Applications – The Missing Manuals” and the team behind it. In today’s edition of my accompanying blog series I’d like to provide some more details and background information about the concept we have in mind. I’ll talk about our vision and then discuss how we approach our first contribution to SAP Code Exchange.

One of the main motivations that drives the team behind the project is to roll-out our experiences gathered in the process of developing Composite Applications over the years. I’d rather avoid the term ‘best practices‘ as there’s a bad taste to it and may lead people to believe that there’s such a thing as a silver bullet or one-size-fits-all solution. There is not! By that rational, all we can and want to offer is to share with the community what worked for us in the past – there is a great likeliness that it may also work for you or at least provides you with a wider spectrum of lessons-learned to make a more educated decision in the future.

Introduction

Today I have the privilege to officially announce the kick-off of the ‘Composition Application – Missing Manuals‘ initiative!

Having build Composite Applications on all releases of SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment (NWCE) and its predecessors for several years now we – SAP Custom Development – have gathered a lot of experience in how-to develop this new breed of enterprise software. Since my first blog in 2007 I’ve been actively rolling out our findings and learnings on behalf of the organisation and in 2011 we want to take our contributions to the next level with this initiative:

The ‘Composition Application – Missing Manuals‘ initiative hosted on the
SDN Code Exchange Platform aims to create a productivity starter kit and sandbox system for the development of Composites by providing technical libraries and an easy demo app documenting its features & how-to use them.

Links: Composition Application – Missing Manuals | Twitter

Introduction

After several conventional posts in the last couple of months I’ve been thinking about blogging more about technical topics again in order not to loose my credibility of being an architect and coder (well, whatever is left of that anyway!) And just how it should be, I didn’t have to look out for an interesting topic for too long – it found me. In my current project we have this use-case of allowing customers to change existing message texts we ship as OSP (Original Sourcecode Provider) plus add news.) As this is a typical non-functional requirement inherent to Internationalisation (short: I18N) I figured it would be a great topic, even more so as it also falls into my favorite niche – extensibility. ;)