erwin.tenhumberg

Open Source at SAP in 2010

Erwin Tenhumberg — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 00:32:53 GMT

As the year end is approaching quickly, it is time to look back at what has happened around open source software in 2010, both in general and at SAP specifically.

Matt Asay called 2010 "The year open source went invisible" as almost all organizations use, integrate, support and contribute to open source software these days independent of their business domain or their business model, or how Matt summarized it: "2010 was the year that open source ceased to be a competitive differentiator for vendors and instead became standard operating procedure for everyone".

On the other hand open source software was very visible in the sense that there was a long public debate about the "open core" business model and the fact that we saw a number of community forks popping up including one around my old project OpenOffice.org (I joined SAP in 2008 coming from Sun Microsystems where OpenOffice.org and ODF were key focus topics for me).

2010 probably was not a year of big bang type open source announcements by SAP. Instead it was a year of steady and solid progress regarding SAP's growing engagement in open source.

According to the Eclipse committer statistics of the Eclipse Dash project, SAP is now the 4th largest corporate contributor to Eclipse projects based on the number of active committers. Eclipse Dash shows 22 active committers as of today, but the actual number of SAP committers is around 27 as projects like EGit, jGit, Tycho and Mylyn Reviews are not included due to a (still) missing integration of GIT-based respositories into the Eclipse Dash statistics.

Eclipse Dash shows SAP committers contributing to 16 Eclipse projects in 2010, but considering what I wrote above, the real project number is higher as well, i.e. somewhere around 20. A few new Eclipse projects are currently in the proposal / creation stage, and I am confident that SAP will co-initiate, join and participate in a number of those, too (e.g. Libra). Stay tuned!

SAP is also increasingly active outside of the Eclipse Foundation. Two examples at the Apache Software Foundation are Apache Chemistry and Apache VXQuery. SAP is already using quite a bit of Apache technology, and as a consequence will also start contributing to more Apache projects going forward.

SAP's strong involvement in Eclipse projects and growing participation in Apache projects shows that SAP likes the frameworks, the services and the governance models that these independent organizations provide, just like the frameworks, services and governance models that standards organizations like OASIS offer. Nevertheless, in 2010 SAP also became active in a number of projects outside of Eclipse and Apache. For example, SAP open sourced the SAP NetWeaver Server Adapter for Eclipse at SourceForge.net and decided to join the Gerrit code review tool project at Google Code.

In order to make the adoption of open source technologies easier for our developers and thus to increase and optimize SAP's engagement in open source projects, we at SAP improved and streamlined our governance processes. One externally visible proof point for this is our adoption of the tools from BlackDuck software (you might also be interested in Open Source - from whitespace to Black Duck or this press interview). In addition, SAP increased internal and external evangelism and thus organized, sponsored, hosted and participated in a number of internal and external open source events.

This year SAP organized two successful Eclipse DemoCamps in Pictures and Videos from the Eclipse DemoCamp in Walldorf and Sofia, sponsored and / or participated in EclipseCon, the Eclipse Summit Europe (ESE), the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), the two Open Source Think Tanks in Napa and Paris as well as LinuxTag and Latinoware. For the Eclipse Summit Europe 2010 the SAP employee Bernd Kolb was the program chair, and at EclipseCon the SAP employee Lars Vogel even won the Top Contributor award. Finally, SAP organized a number of internal open source events like webinars and workshops including external guest speakers in order to increase the overall open source expertise within SAP and to foster knowledge sharing and community building. For example, Open Source at SAP in 2009, SAP held another internal SAP Open Source Summit which saw a more than 100% increase in participants compared to last year.

SAP also increased its activities with respect to interoperability with and support for popular open source solutions and related open standards. For example, SAP started to more proactively reach out to customers who are using open source technologies in order to understand their interoperability requirements. In this context, customers and partners can now also easily contact SAP's Open Source Office via email (see the lower right area of the open source page on SDN). For a number of open source technologies the "documented" and "visible" demand by SAP customers and partners is still very low, so that we at SAP first need to understand the situation better before we can make the right investment decisions. Thus, please tell us what your open source interoperability needs are!

Unfortunately, the otherwise often praised huge variety of competing open source projects including forks and derivatives does not make life easier when you have to integrate and support those solutions. In theory the answer should be standards, but unfortunately often the desired integration scenarios are not covered by the scope of existing standards, and as a consequence one has to pick and choose which open source projects to integrate and support. For example, the various flavors of OpenOffice.org like Oracle Open Office, IBM Lotus Symphony, LibreOffice, RedOffice, etc. have slightly different UIs and feature sets and in some cases even have different extension / programming models which are obviously not covered by the OpenOffice.org / ODF Support in SAP Software. Nevertheless, the new SAP NetWeaver 7.3 product is a very good example of a new SAP product that significantly improves the support for standards and open source (e.g. Mozilla Firefox).

Finally, SAP Ventures, which is SAP's venture capital arm, added another open source company to it's investment portfolio in 2010. In addition, to past investments in open source vendors like Alfresco, GroundWork Open Source, Intalio, JasperSoft, Zend, etc., SAP Ventures is now also an investor in MuleSoft.

All these open source activities by SAP haven't gone unnoticed by the outside world as a number of external statements show. The analyst firm The 451 Group calls SAP a “case study for open source engagement”, IDC Europe acknowledges that “SAP is significantly more active in the open source community than two years ago”, and the InfoWorld blogger Savio Rodrigues concludes “SAP minimized risk while adopting open source, so can you”. Another result of SAP's growing engagement in open source might be the large number of open source related blog entries on SDN, i.e. the ones filed under the categories "Open Source", "Eclipse", "Scripting Languages", etc. Apparently, the open source community within the very large existing SAP developer community is growing as well.

All in all, as I said earlier, 2010 probably was not a year of big bang type open source announcements by SAP. However, looking back I think SAP clearly demonstrated that it is very serious about its open source commitments by making significant contributions to a large number of projects. Therefore, I'm pretty sure that we will see SAP's engagement grow even further in 2011. Again, stay tuned!

Thanks a lot to all the different open source communities as well as to my colleagues at SAP who made SAP's various open source contributions happen! I'm looking forward to 2011! Happy holidays and a happy new year!

Pictures and Videos from the Eclipse DemoCamp in Walldorf

Erwin Tenhumberg — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 12:46:24 GMT

Last week, we had the second Eclipse DemoCamp at the SAP headquarters in Walldorf, and according to the feedback we received so far, the attendees enjoyed the demos and the happy hour. Here are a few quotes from Twitter:

"good attendance at #democampwalldorf - I guess 150+ people. Ekke talks about # redview" (Ralph Mueller)
"back from the #democampwalldorf - great event, great BBQ and lots of interesting people" (Benjamin Muskalla)
"Cool demo of #Riena 2.0: create navigation structure with assembly editor, generate views, controllers, bindings from it." (Natalia Ossipova)

The pictures from the event also give an impression of how the event went. In addition to photos that Jutta Bindewald, Christel Rueger and I took, I also used my Flip UltraHD camera to record the demos. The image quality of the original .MP4 files is pretty good. Unfortunately, the Flip UltraHD does not allow to connect an external microphone / audio source, so that the audio could be better.

However, the bigger issue were the new, additional batteries that I bought just a few days before the event, as the Flip UltraHD does not work with a connected USB / power cable. Unfortunately the new rechargeable batteries (or the charger I used) did not work as expected. Therefore, I unexpectedly and very suddenly ran out of power during the demo by Steve Powell. I then juggled between different batteries, so that I still was able to record most demos, except the last two. I'm very sorry!

Anyway, the video recordings of the welcome speeches and the various demos can be found here:

Bjoern Goerke - SVP Technology & Innovation Platform Core, SAP AG - Welcome Speech
Ralph Mueller - Director Eclipse Foundation EMEA, Eclipse Foundation - Welcome Speech
ekke (Ekkehard Gentz) - Independent Software Architect - Modeling meets Runtime redView (Videos: Part 1, Part 2)
Jochen Hiller - Deutsche Telekom - Developing an Android application (Videos: Part 1, Part 2)
Michael Wenz - Graphiti (Videos: Part 1, Part 2)
Benjamin Muskalla - EclipseSource - e4, the future of Eclipse (Videos: Part 1, Part 2)
Matthias Sohn - SAP AG - EGit (Videos: Part 1, Part 2)
Steve Powell - VMware - Virgo (Videos: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)
Andreas Voigt - MicroDoc GmbH - Project-Review: Migration of 4th GL applications with Eclipse (Videos: Part 1, Part 2)
Christian Campo - compeople AG - Riena 2.0 (Videos: Part 1, Part 2)
Alexej Spas - instinctools GmbH - Documenting Eclipse applications using Single Source approach (Videos: no recording due to battery issues)
Jan Sievers - SAP AG - Building eclipse applications with Maven Tycho (Videos: no recording due to battery issues)

Thanks a lot to all the presenters and the attendees who turned this year's Eclipse DemoCamp into another success!

BTW, SAP also helped to organize an Eclipse DemoCamp in Sofia this year, which according to the feedback from the audience was interesting and fun as well.

10% Discount on EclipseCon Registration Fee

Erwin Tenhumberg — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 05:30:23 GMT

Members of the SAP Community Network can benefit from a 10% discount on the EclipseCon 2010 registration fee due to SAP's gold sponsorship of the event.

Interested developers just need to register via this site. Eclipse plays a key role in SAP's product strategy for the Java technology, e.g. SAP NetWeaver CE.

BTW, the SAP sessions at EclipseCon are "Eclipse Modeling Panel" by Bernd Kolb, "SAP's opening up towards Open Source - benefits and challenges" by Karsten Schmidt, "Graphiti - The Graphical Tooling Infrastructure Speaking Plain Java" by Michael Wenz and "The way you look tonight - Generating flexible UI's with EMF and Databinding" by Lars Vogel as well as "Towards Contributors Heaven: from CVS and SVN to EGit/JGit" and "Understanding and Using Git at Eclipse" by Matthias Sohn.

Craig Cmehil about Twitter, etc. at the SAP Open Source Summit 2009

Erwin Tenhumberg — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 01:24:39 GMT

Here is the recording of Craig Cmehil's excellent SAP Open Source Summit 2009 session about effective communication using blogs, podcasts and Twitter:

Enjoy the video!

Eclipse Memory Analyzer at the SAP Open Source Summit 2009

Erwin Tenhumberg — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 01:17:21 GMT

With this blog entry I share another session from the internal SAP Open Source Summit 2009. In this session Andreas Buchen from SAP talks about the benefits of open source based on his experiences in the Eclipse Memory Analyzer project. Enjoy the session!

BTW, Craig Cmehil's Open Source Summit session will be published next. Thus, stay tuned!

Accessing ABAP Web Services from OpenOffice.org

Erwin Tenhumberg — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 13:49:56 GMT

People who would like to know how to access ABAP Web Services from OpenOffice.org should check out this Wiki page. The Wiki page gives an overview of the necessary steps. SDN members are invited to help extend and improve the tutorial by adding comments, screenshots, tips and tricks.

Open Source at SAP in 2009

Erwin Tenhumberg — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 23:56:42 GMT

In 2009 SAP was quite busy with respect to Open Source. And since Matt Asay recently said on Twitter: "SAP is much more active in open source than usually credited.Needs to better tell its story" I thought it can't hurt to provide a little summary of what SAP has done in 2009 with respect to open source.

SAP's 2009 open source story started with Open Source Meets Business - Postlude in Nuremberg, Germany in January. My impression was that many people in the audience were quite surprised to hear in how many different areas and ways Open Source plays a role at SAP.

In May SAP organized the very first Eclipse DemoCamp at the SAP headquarters in Walldorf, Germany which turned to be a This was the Eclipse DemoCamp in Walldorf. Therefore, I'm pretty sure that there will be more Eclipse DemoCamps in Walldorf in the future.

In June SAP moved up its membership level at the Eclipse Foundation from Strategic Consumer to Strategic Developer, meaning that SAP commits to having at least 8 full-time developers on the project. However, what is more important than the membership level, is that SAP contributed a lot more code than in the past. SAP now has 13 active contributors at Eclipse and contributed more than 1.8 million lines of code in 2009 which makes SAP the third largest corporate contributor to Eclipse. In 2009 SAP even initiated or co-innitiated two new projects at Eclipse, i.e. the Eclipse Pave project and the Eclipse EGit project.

At SAP TechEd 2009 in Phoenix and Vienna in October Karsten Schmidt and I presented about SAP's open source strategy as well as the benefits and risks of open source. In Phoenix we had more than 50 attendees and in Vienna we were even able to attract more than 90 people with the subject. BTW, people who are wondering why and how SAP is participating in Open Source, might want to watch the SAP TechEd Live interviews with Hervé Couturier, Claus von Riegen and me recorded at SAP TechEd 2009 in Phoenix and Vienna.

In October SAP also announced that SAP will start contributing to a number of projects a the Apache Software Foundation and that SAP signed Apache's Corporate Contributor License Agreement. As people might have noticed, the names of SAP employees have already appeared on a number of Apache mailing lists and various incubator projects.

SAP's increasing interest in Apache projects also encouraged me to invite Justin Erenkrantz from the Apache Software Foundation to SAP's very first internal Open Source Summit.

The 2-day internal SAP Open Source Summit took place in Walldorf in November and was organized in order to foster knowledge sharing and community building within SAP around the topic of Open Source. In addition to Justin Erenkrantz from Apache, Matt Asay from Alfresco as well as Dirk Riehle (former SAP employee and now the first open source professor in Germany) agreed to present as external guest speakers. Like with the public Eclipse DemoCamp, the attendee feedback regarding the internal SAP Open Source Summit was encouragingly and overwhelmingly positive which makes me believe that there also will be more internal SAP Open Source Summits in the future.

Even though the summit was an internal event, so that SAP employees could discuss experiences and issues openly, there are a number of sessions which can be shared externally. One of these sessions is Justin's keynote, which Justin allowed me to publish and which I'm doing with this blog entry.

Thanks again to all summit speakers and attendees, and to the external guest speakers Dirk Riehle, Justin Erenkrantz, Matt Asay in particular for turning the internal SAP Open Source Summit into such a valuable and useful event which one attendee even called "One of the most informative and collaborative events at SAP ever - and a holistic view on all dimensions of open source."

O.k., enough words, here is Justin's keynote presentation about the Apache Software Foundation:

SAP Increases Participation in Eclipse

Erwin Tenhumberg — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 06:27:26 GMT

As can be read here, SAP is increasing its participation in the Eclipse open source project. SAP's raise of the membership level at the Eclipse Foundation is just one example of this increasing participation.

SAP is one of the founding members of the Eclipse Foundation and started as a so-called "Strategic Consumer". Now SAP decided to raise the membership level to "Strategic Developer", meaning that SAP will have at least 8 developers assigned full time to the Eclipse project.

So what will these 8 or more developers do? If you're following the news around Eclipse you might have already noticed that SAP joined, co-initiated or proposed new projects at Eclipse. For example, SAP co-initiated the new Eclipse GIT Team Provider (EGit) project where a few of the initial committers will come from SAP as the following quote from the project proposal shows:

Robin Rosenberg (Dewire AB)
Shawn Pearce (Google)
Gunnar Wagenknecht
Mik Kersten (Tasktop)
Matthias Sohn (SAP AG)
Christian Halstrick (SAP AG)
Stefan Lay (SAP AG)

Another area where SAP is planning to contribute to the Eclipse project is the proposed new project Pave. In case you don't know yet, what Pave will be about, here is a quote from the project proposal:

"The objective of the Pave project is to create an extensible framework, which supports the following use cases:

Enable PDE developers to define new patterns.
Allow reusing of existing operations and their UI in patterns.
Provide a single point of entry for all patterns based on a contextual input.
Manage enablement of patterns – make available only patterns that are applicable to the current object given as input.
Manage validation within patterns and operations – enable overriding existing validations and add new validations.
Enable data sharing between the operations within a single pattern – the output data of previous operations should be matched to the input data of the following operations, where possible.
Allow creation of complex patterns – composition of patterns.
Allow contribution of UI elements to the patterns: wizard pages, dialog boxes, etc.
Enable headless execution of patterns.
Define a pattern that generates a skeleton for creating a new pattern.
Define patterns that exemplify the usage of the framework. If any of these patterns fit better in the scope of an existing Eclipse project, then they may be moved to that project later."

Another Eclipse project SAP gives Equinox a closer look is the Eclipse Equinox project. The Eclipse Dash project provides nice metrics and graphs illustrating SAP's past and current contributions to various Eclipse projects. Looking at the data you will get reminded that SAP has already made a number of contributions to the Eclipse Data Tools Project (DTP) and the Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project (WTP). Eclipse WTP is also one of the examples where SAP has a leading role, i.e. Kaloyan Raev from SAP is the project lead of the WTP EJB Tools project. Another example is the Eclipse Memory Analyzer (MAT) project which is led by Andreas Buchen from SAP and is based on SAP's initial code contribution in 2007.

SAP also tries to mingle with peer Eclipse developers from other companies in order to improve collaboration and to make new friends. The recent Eclipse DemoCamp Walldorf Videos - Part 1 was the first Eclipse DemoCamp on SAP premises and immediately turned out to be a huge success. It looks like the DemoCamp in Walldorf was the largest DemoCamp ever with almost 200 attendees. We got This was the Eclipse DemoCamp in Walldorf as well as from the blogosphere.

I guess SAP's Eclipse story illustrates how many software and hardware vendors as well as enterprises get involved in open source. Initially SAP was mostly a consumer of the open source Eclipse technology which is also reflected in the initial membership status at the Eclipse Foundation. However, now that SAP has become more familiar and more comfortable with the Eclipse Foundation and the various Eclipse projects, SAP is also increasingly participating and contributing. Therefore, I personally agree with Matt Asay that open source foundations are a great way to increase open source participation over time and to also guarantee the long-term viability of open source projects.

Since SAP's participation is only one aspect of SAP's involvement in open source, let me also give a quick overview about other areas where SAP has been or is supporting open source. Actually, if you haven't seen it before, you might want to take a look at Open Source Meets Business - Postlude earlier this year. As Mark points out in his slides, SAP was one of the first supporters of Linux and thus helped to built up Linux' credibility as an operating system for the datacenter and also encouraged other vendors of enterprise software to support Linux as well.

Another Linux-related fact that many people don't know is that SAP was one of the investors in Red Hat before Red Hat's IPO. Read for example the following quote from this article:

"A major commercial-grade supplier of Linux scores a chunk of investment dollars from Germany's leading software company. SAP today announced an equity investment of an undisclosed amount by the SAP Venture Fund in Red Hat Software, adding more support to the Linux bandwagon and the open source movement."

Talking about SAP's past and current investments in open source companies, many people also don't know that SAP was one of the investors in MySQL AB before it got acquired by Sun Microsystems as this press release illustrates:

"MySQL AB has said that the company has completed an $18.5 million Series C round of financing led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), the Menlo Park, California-based venture capital firm. Corporate investors in the round were Intel Capital; Red Hat; SAP Ventures, a division of SAP AG; and Presidio STX, the U.S.-based venture investment subsidiary of Sumitomo Corporation."

However, that does not mean the SAP, or SAP Ventures to be more acurate, stopped investing in open source companies. Current investments by SAP Ventures in open source companies include Alfresco, JasperSoft and ZEND as well as Intalio and GroundWork. Thus, SAP is influencing the open source ecosystem quite a bit through its investments.

Finally, as Mark Yolton also pointed out in his OSMB keynote presentation, SAP is supporting open source technologies like Firefox and OpenOffice.org. If you want to see what this support for OpenOffice.org looks like, check out OpenOffice.org / ODF Support in SAP Software.

Eclipse DemoCamp Videos - Part 2

Erwin Tenhumberg — Thu, 28 May 2009 02:03:10 GMT

O.k., here is the rest of the videos I recorded at the Eclipse DemoCamp in Walldorf.

I was not sure if I should publish all remaining videos at once or not. On the one hand, most people won't have the time to watch all the videos at once. Thus, posting the videos one by one would have given people the opportunity to watch something new every day or every week.

On the other hand, the Eclipse DemoCamp series has just started and therefore the demos are cool and hot now, and people are looking for the videos as I write these words. Therefore, I decided to publish all the remaining videos at once with this blog post. It makes it also easier for people to find, promote and reference the videos of the demos.

BTW, in case you haven't seen the other DemoCamp videos yet, you can find them in Eclipse DemoCamp Walldorf Videos - Part 1.

Michael Scharf (Wind River): A new View on Tables -- a flexible framework to show tabular data in SWT Tables and Trees

Achim Demelt (eXXcellent solutions): Modeling is fun!

Jochen Hiller (Deutsche Telekom AG), Frank Gerhardt, Gerhardt Informatics: Dynamic OSGi application using Equinox

Elmar Eperiesi-Beck (CORISECIO): Equinox based SOA Security Framework - a future Eclipse Project

Gunnar Wagenknecht (AGETO): Equinox on Servers - An introduction to the Eclipse Gyrex project

Marcus Harringer (MicroDoc GmbH): Virtual Embedded Devices with OSGi, Eclipse and Flash

Guy Philipp Bollbach (itemis): TMF Xtext: a self-experiment

Enjoy!

Eclipse DemoCamp Photos

Erwin Tenhumberg — Wed, 27 May 2009 03:29:50 GMT

In case you missed the small note at the end of Eclipse DemoCamp Walldorf Videos - Part 1 about the Eclipse DemoCamp in Walldorf, the photos we took at the DemoCamp are now online on Flickr. Below are my favorite ones.

Hervé Couturier (EVP Technology Development, SAP) doing the first welcome speech:

The fascinated crowd:

Karsten Schmidt doing one of his many speaker / demo intros:

Jochen Hiller (Deutsche Telekom AG) doing a great demo about OSGi and Equinox:

Bernd Kolb who made sure that all speakers stayed within their time slots:

Christel Rueger (left) and Jutta Bindewald (right) who took all these photos:

Me trying to capture everything on video:

The "official" event t-shirt:

Lively discussions during the Happy Hour:

A happy looking Ralph Müller (representative for Europe for the Eclipse Foundation):

If you want to see more pictures, just go here! The next set of DemoCamp videos will soon be posted as well!

Eclipse DemoCamp Walldorf Videos - Part 1

Erwin Tenhumberg — Tue, 26 May 2009 01:14:08 GMT

With this blog entry I want to start publishing the videos from the Eclipse DemoCamp in Walldorf. Cutting, compressing, converting uploading video content takes longer than I thought. Thus, please be a little bit patient with me! It might take a few days until all the videos and pictures from the DemoCamp are published.

As you will quickly find out by watching the first videos, I'm still a "video recording and editing rookie". In order to keep costs and overhead low, I just used the stuff I had at home. We also did not want to blind speakers and attendees with large spotlights as we wanted to maintain the cosy atmosphere of an Eclipse DemoCamp. Thus, the videos might be a little bit dark. Finally, recording live demos is not a trivial task as you have to zoom to the right part of the screen at the right moment at the right speed and with the right zoom factor (next time I might experiment with a combination of VNC and Webcam Mac), and compressing videos can make them a little bit blurry. Thus, the qualitiy of the videos is far from being perfect. However, I still believe that the content is useful and interesting. Thus, enjoy!

The Eclipse DemoCamp started with a short welcome speech by Hervé Couturier who is the EVP heading Technology Development at SAP. In his speech he underlines the importance of Eclipse and open source in the context of SAP's product strategy. View and listen yourself!

Following Hervé Couturier from SAP, Ralph Müller the representative for Europe from the Eclipse Foundation also did a short welcome speech.

The first live demo then was delived by Benjamin Muskalla from EclipseSource and Krum Tsvetkov from SAP. First, Krum demonstrated the power of the Eclipse Memory Analyzer Tool (MAT) and then Benjamin showed a web version of the memory analyzer built based on the Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) technology. I think the demo was quite impressive! Thus, I hope I was able to capture at least a little bit of the power of the memory analyzer and the RAP technology in my video!

Very soon I will publish the next set of videos and pictures! I hope you enjoy viewing the DemoCamp videos, and I'm curious to hear your feedback regarding the Eclipse DemoCamp in Walldorf as well as my video recordings!

Quick Update #1:

The pictures from the Eclipse DemoCamp in Walldorf are now online as well.

Quick Update #2:

The rest of the videos from the Eclipse DemoCamp in Walldorf Eclipse DemoCamp Videos - Part 2 as well.

Interview about Eclipse DemoCamp

Erwin Tenhumberg — Wed, 13 May 2009 07:40:11 GMT

I just did a short interview with Karsten Schmidt and Bernd Kolb about the Eclipse DemoCamp at the SAP headquarters in Walldorf on May 19th, 2009. Through the interview you will find out who Karsten and Bernd are, what a DemoCamp is and why you should attend.

Hervé Couturier, Executive Vice President and head of the Technology Development organization at SAP will open the DemoCamp with a short welcome speech for the attendees. Then, there will be several demos showing cool stuff from projects like the Eclipse Runtime project and the Eclipse Modeling Project. The Happy Hour at the end will give enough opportunity for discussions with other members of the Eclipse open source community.

For the interview, you have a choice between a .mp3 version and a .ogg version. Enjoy the interview and don't forget to register for the DemoCamp if you want to come! There are only a few open seats left!

In case you don't live close to Walldorf, you can also check out the list of locations for the other Eclipse DemoCamps. There is a good chance that there will be a Eclipse DemoCamp somewhere close to where you live.

Finally, if you want to find out more about SAP's involvement in Open Source, please check out our Open Source Integration web page on SDN as well as the various open source related forums, blogs and wiki pages referenced on that page. On those pages you will find information on topics like Linux, scripting languages, OpenOffice.org, and Firefox.

See you at the Eclipse DemoCamp in Walldorf!

SAP and Open Source

Erwin Tenhumberg — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 08:50:11 GMT

As part of my still relatively new role as an Open Source Program Manager at SAP I'm currently investigating all the different Open Source related activities at SAP in order to understand the status quo and to increase the visibility of the various activities. For example, one of my goals is to help extend and improve the Open Source section of the "Standards and Open Source" page on SDN.

As part of my analysis I thought it would be useful to create a list of all the different existing resources that are related to both SAP and Open Source. Since this list could be interesting for other people as well, I decided to capture all the links to articles, blogs, etc. in one public location. Based on a conversation with Craig Cmehil I decided to capture the information on this wiki page, so that other people can easily contribute as well.

Please let me know what topics are of particular interest to you, so that I can provide more information about these topics going forward! Also, please let me know if you're aware of additional resources that I forgot to list on the wiki page! I'm sure I missed quite a few important resources! Thus, just let me know, so that I can add them, or just add them yourself! The topics / categories currently covered on the wiki page are:

SAP and Linux
SAP and Eclipse
SAP and OpenOffice.org
SAP and Firefox
SAP and Open Source Frameworks
SAP and Open Source Scripting Languages
SAP's investments in Open Source companies
SAP and Communities
SAP and Customization
Code Snippets
Misc

Again, I know that my list has many gaps and holes, but I hope you find my list useful and enlightening, anyway.

Playing with SAP NetWeaver on Linux

Erwin Tenhumberg — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 07:17:01 GMT

In order to learn more about the SAP NetWeaver platform, I recently decided to install the software on a laptop at home, so that I can play with both the ABAP and the Java stack. My test platform is a cheap laptop that I bought a few weeks ago just for testing all kinds of software. I'm using that test machine because I did not want to risk messing up my work laptop and I also did not want to be restricted to virtual machine environments.

Since I like Unix-type operating systems like Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X, I decided to play with the Linux downloads that are available for download on the SDN site. The fastest and easiest way to get the SAP NetWeaver 7.0 Trial Version running in a Linux environment is to simply use the SAP NetWeaver 7.0 - Java and ABAP Trial Version on Linux - VMware Edition. The VMware Edition is a great way to test the SAP NetWeaver software as it provides a pre-installed and pre-configured test environment and can be used from any host platform for which a VMware Player exists. SAP NetWeaver 7.0 - Java and ABAP Trial Version on Linux - VMware Edition - Tips & Tricks is all you need to get your SAP NetWeaver system up and running.

As a next step I wanted to get rid of the virtual machine overhead so that I can make full use of the 4GB of RAM and all the CPU cycles in my test laptop. At that time I came across another interesting technology which I had not known before, i.e. WUBI, the Ubuntu installer for Windows. Thus, I thought, why not test two technologies at the same time, i.e. SAP NetWeaver and WUBI.

At this point I probably should make an important disclaimer. Ubuntu Linux is not an operating system supported by SAP. Thus, do not use Ubuntu as the host platform for any serious test, development or production systems! Nevertheless, various blog entries here on SDN and elsewhere have shown that it's possible to get NetWeaver installed on Ubuntu Linux for "educational purposes", anyway. Thus, I decided to follow those instructions and see how far I would get.

Now I can say that I have an SAP NetWeaver 7.0 Trial Version running on 64 bit Ubuntu Linux on my test laptop at home, after I installed Ubuntu via the WUBI installer. Both the ABAP and the Java stack seem to be running fine. I also don't seem to have any problems running the SAPGUI for Java on the same machine.

In order to get there, I had to follow the instructions of multiple blog entries and forum comments. In case other people are bored and want to do the same, I thought it can't hurt to provide a list of all the resources that led me to my installation success.

The most important resource is this blog entry which is based on and refers to N4S Linux Evaluation Edition NW2004S under Debian (Ubuntu). Finding the current location of the 64 bit IBM JDK wasn't trivial as the location has changed. Unfortunately, I even can't provide a new URL right now as I forgot to store the URL somewhere. However, I'm sure people will be able to find the right JDK, anyway.

The bigger problem for me was getting to run the SAPGUI for Java, so that I could install the evaluation license from SAP. The solution to the problem was quite simple, although not easy to find, at least not for me. I added the 32 bit JVM to my 64 bit Ubuntu installation via apt-get as explained in this blog entry, and then created a wrapper script to set the environment variables as explained on the bottom of this page. I remember that I also got the DBIF_RSQL_INVALID_REQUEST database error at some point, but inspired by the comment at the end of Re: DBIF_RSQL_INVALID_REQUEST in SAPLSDOC Func Module DOCU_GET I modified my /etc/hosts file and everything worked fine.

I think these are all the resources that I used for my little installation experiment!? Like with my OpenOffice.org / ODF Support in SAP Software, I'm always interested in feedback. I'm also open to ideas regarding what other open source topics I should investigate and blog about in the future. For example, are you interested in open source scripting languages? Again, just let me know!

OpenOffice.org / ODF Support in SAP Software

Erwin Tenhumberg — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 07:20:25 GMT

Since this is my very first blog entry on SDN, I first probably should briefly introduce myself. My name is Erwin Tenhumberg, and I recently joined SAP. In my role as an Open Source Program Manager in the Global Ecosystem and Partner Group I'm looking into all kinds of Open Source related topics. Before I joined SAP, I worked at Sun Microsystems where I was deeply involved in Open Source as well. At Sun my focus areas included OpenOffice.org and the OpenDocument Format (ODF) in addition to things like Open Source business models. In this and future blog entries I want to explain how various SAP products integrate with different open source technologies. In addition, I hope that you will write comments to my blog entries, so that I can get a better understanding of the level of open source technology support that SAP customers and developers would like to see within SAP products. Finally, I will use my blog to report about SAP's contributions to the Open Source world like SAP's contributions to Eclipse or the Open Source related investments by SAP Ventures. Due to my past involvement in OpenOffice.org and ODF, I was curious to find out if and where the SAP products already support the ISO standard OpenDocument Format. I was happily surprised when I found out that ODF is already supported by the SAP List Viewer component (also known as the ABAP List Viewer or ALV), which is used many many times in all kinds of areas for displaying tabular data in a grid. The SAP List Viewer component allows exporting to ODF spreadsheet files in addition to Microsoft Excel files. This feature is available on systems with release numbers 6.40 and higher and works for all 3 members of the SAP GUI family including the SAP GUI for Java. For more details about the feature please take a look at the SAP Note 876916 (https://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/876916)! For example, this SAP Note lists details about supported releases and required support packages. In order to illustrate how this feature works, I provide some kind of step-by-step tutorial including screenshots below. I first thought about doing a screencast, which I still might decide to do later, but then I realized that it might be easier for others to test the feature, if they can easily follow each single step. But don't worry! The export feature is very easy to use and intuitive. For the simple test / demo I will use a simple test report that should be available on every system. Thus, it should be easy for everybody to test the feature. O.k., let's get started! First, a SAP GUI has to be started, and one has to login into a system. Again, please keep in mind that the release number has to be 6.40 or higher. After the ABAP Editor has been started via the transaction SE38, we enter the report name "BCALV_TEST_GRID" ... ... and click the "Execute" button: In the following screen we can simply accept the defaults ... ... and press the "Execute" button again: Now some airline / airfare data is displayed in an SAP List Viewer grid: We can call the export feature simply by clicking the "Export" button from the toolbar right above the grid: Clicking the button brings up a dropdown menu from which we select the top item, i.e. the one called "Spreadsheet": In the dialog that pops up next, we select the middle option for the creating an OpenOffice.org / ODF spreadsheet file: Now we have to select a directory and file name for the to-be-exported ODF spreadsheet file: Once we have clicked the "Save" button, OpenOffice.org gets started and the SAP List Viewer data shows up in the OpenOffice.org spreadsheet application Calc. Since the application gets started via the mimetype assocation, this export feature should also work with any other application supporting ODF including KOffice or IBM Lotus Symphony. BTW, the ODF export feature of the SAP List Viewer component includes support for sub-totals and totals. In cases where the SAP List Viewer component contains address information, it's also easily possible to create form letters from the exported data. In order to do so, one simply has to create a new text document in OpenOffice.org and call the built-in Mail Merge Wizard: In step 3 of the OpenOffice.org Mail Merge Wizard, ... ... one simply has to click on the "Select Different Address List..." button ... ... to add a new address list file by clicking "Add..." ... ... and selecting the ODF spreadsheet file that we created earlier: