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thomas_jung
Developer Advocate
Developer Advocate

Welcome to the first of a series of weblogs on BSP development. This series of weblogs is going to be a little different than some of the others you may have read. I wanted to create a journal of sorts of our experiences during our rollout of the BSP development tool.

This weblog will detail the good, the bad, the challenges, and how we overcame these challenges. Our solution to these problems is where you should take particular note. We don’t consider ourselves experts at BSP. The solutions that I put forth are simply how we accomplished something. Hopefully these weblogs will spark a good string of conversations amongst the BSP community on SDN. For more definitive how-to answers, I would refer you to any of the excellent weblogs written by Brian McKellar. I will try and include links to his weblogs where there is a direct correlation.

Outline
The following is the outline that I had planned. If anyone has any suggestions, you can always add them to the discussion area of this weblog.

Part Ithomas.jung3/blog/2004/06/17/bsp-150-a-developer146s-journal-part-i-introduction Introduction
Part II - System Layout
Part III - Impact on your Development Team
Part IV - RFCs and the BAPI Browser
Part V - XML for RFCs
Part VI - Example application with customer BSP Extensions and Design 2003 themes
Part VII - Dealing with multiple languages (English, German, Spanish, Thai, and Polish)
Part VIII - User Authentication (Single Sign-On)
Part IX - User Authentication (Trusted RFC)
Part X - IGS Charting
Part XI - Table View Iterators
Part XII - Value Input Help Popups
Part XIII - Developing ABAP WebServices
BSP a Developer's Journal Part XIV - Consuming WebServices with ABAP - Consuming WebServices with ABAP
BSP Developer's Journal: Part XV - Stateful BSP and Timeouts - Stateful BSP and Timeouts
BSP Developer's Journal Part XVI - Using the BTF Editor - Using the BTF Editor
Part XVII - Recreating a Standard Transaction


Background
To give everyone some background, our company has been developing ABAP programs as part of our R/3 environment for 8 years now. Our development team is very focused on ABAP and probably more knowledgeable in ABAP then any other programming language, as a whole. For web applications, pre-BSP, we took the approach of developing them in ASP and using the DCom connector to access data from R/3.

About 2 years ago, we got our first look at BSP (version 610) at a conference in Las Vegas. We were immediately intrigued by the possibilities that it provided. We were already looking at moving from ASP/DCom Connector to a next generation tool. We were initially considering only .Net/.Net Connector or Java. Now we had a 3rd option to consider.

Choosing a Solution
Our initial decision to go with BSP was really based upon the fact that we could continue to leverage our ABAP skills. As we began our work we also found that BSP had some nice performance/scalability advantages as well (or at the very least we knew how to tune and scale the code and system because we were already familiar with the core SAP technology). Two years later with about 2 dozen productive applications, we are still quite happy with our decision to go BSP.

Outlook
To give you a look ahead, the next weblog in this series will look at the early days of our project. During these first few steps we were trying to choose platforms and layout our system landscape.

Shameless Plug
If you liked this weblog and would like to see some of this content in a live format, you could always vote for my session to be included as part of SAP TechED. The name of my session is Applying our ABAP Skills to BSP Web Development.

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