After the recent public GA of SAP NetWeaver Cloud, tutorials must be sprouting up all over the internet like mushrooms.
This one of mine aims to be just 'another tutorial'.
The geeks out here will have immediately spotted in the title the hint about ANTLR, aka "ANother Tool for Language Recognition", a great piece of software by Terence Parr.
By the way, Terence Parr is the author not only of ANTLR, but also of my favorite geek motto: "Why program by hand in five days what you can spend five years of your life automating? “. Kudos to Terence!
So much for the introduction, what is all this about?
Recently, I had the chance to work on an internal application on SAP NetWeaver Cloud.
I was so delighted with this first exposure that I urged the need to share my experience with an old friend of mine ("un ami de trente ans"), who works as a self-employed programmer there.
I mean, there in France.
Yes, I am French.
I tried to convince my friend that SAP NetWeaver Cloud would be good for him, for his business, and for his banker’s business.
I always had miserable selling skills, and despite - maybe because of - the abundance of superlatives in my description, he was skeptical.
At the end of the call we were still good friends, though.
Later, thinking of our conversation, I devised a silver-bullet selling strategy : I would produce a tutorial, a super-easy tutorial, as easy as a man could ever produce, and I'd come back to him, invoking the eternal value of true friendship to at least have him reviewing the tutorial. He obviously would be delighted by the experience, and would became a new and happy SAP customer, and the SAP stock price would rise a little, little bit, and this is good because I still own some shares.
This clever scheme was too big to fail!
While writing the tutorial, although my thoughts were focused on overcoming my friend's (typically French) harsh critical attitude, it became obvious that such an effort (me writing the tutorial) could serve as well to evangelize other people all over the planet.
So instead of writing a mere personal mail, I took the time to write a nice public Github page.
It is this page that I try to sell in this blog (you've be warned, I'm not a salesman).
http://cthiebaud.github.com/abendrot/
Looking forward to getting feedback from you.
Christophe
