Introduction
Welcome to my blog. I thought for quite a while about what topic I should pick for my first real blog, since obviously I want to make a good first impression to encourage readers to come back. Then I came to the conclusion that good manners actually dictate that I briefly introduce myself (for more information please take a look at my bio) and the department that I work for, and then set the tone for my blog series.
So… my name is Matthias Steiner and I’m working as a Solution Architect for SAP Custom Development; more precisely for the SAP NetWeaver Center of Excellence (CoE) within that organization. As the name indicates, the biggest part of the work we do is custom application development; where we enhance SAP’s standard solutions and build new ones to fit specific single-customer requirements. Hence, we have a very sophisticated understanding of the challenges customers face when trying to adapt SAP products to fit their needs. One could say that we actually play the role of a (not so) Independent Software Vendor (ISV).
But that’s not all… as mentioned above, I work for a part of SAP Custom Development called the SAP NetWeaver CoE, which offers a broad portfolio of services related to SAP NetWeaver and enterprise SOA. As such, we are in close contact and alignment with our colleagues from the SAP NetWeaver core development team and get our hands on upcoming releases early to validate the readiness of SAP’S composition tools; supporting SAP’s mission towards enterprise SOA.
Blog topics
So, based on the experience I’ve gained on the many projects I’ve been involved in so far, I’d like to “tell tales out of school”; sharing with you some solutions for specific problems challenges the people that I work with and I have faced in real-life projects. If it worked for us, there’s a big chance it’ll work for you too … right?
So standing in the front row in custom composite development and facing the same challenges that our customer and partners encounter in real life, I’m confident that we can share with you some knowledge, expertise and experiences that can be useful in your jobs as well. This blog is where I’ll share all that with you…
Related articles
Prior to this blog I wrote a few articles in the WIKI expert section of SDN that are related to the topic of this blog, so I’d like to take the chance to do some advertising and provide links to these articles:
- Java BAdIs describes how the Business Add-in (BAdI) concept (for those who might be unfamiliar with the term, it’s frankly speaking a concept to setup pre-defined extension points where customers can modify the processing in a modification-free manner) known from the ABAP stack can be implemented on the Java side.
Part II of this article is already in the works. It will apply the concepts discussed in part I as we port the solution to the SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment and re-factor it into a reusable framework.
- The Anatomy of Java-based Enterprise Services provides some insight on the technical design of Java-based Enterprise Services and some guidelines on how application services should be modelled when planning to publish them within a SOA landscape.
