swarup.sawant

    4 Posts

    Hi All,

    This week I will complete approx.1 year working experience in PI7.1. From since long back I was working with XI2.0, 3.0 and am had saw the revolutionary changes throughout the year.

     

    Long back....not couple of years, precisely a year back... 18th September 2008, 1st time I had started my Journey on PI 7.1 system. In SAP TechED 2007, Bangalore, 1st Time I had experienced the flavors of PI7.1 and was impressed with the new features comparing with XI2.0/3.0. PI 7.1 was on peak during this time (of course it’s still on pinnacle..:-)).

    My friend Nathan had created my login ID on newly installed PI system. As someone had said, “Life is too short, so eat the dessert first.” All I had was to simply obey it and after that, for next few of months, I was underground. Engaged myself in exploring the key aspects of PI7.1.

     

    During this period, I had smelled various flavors of the SAP’s so called ESB (PI 7.1). The list of starts from introducing the NWA instead of Visual Admin and then XML validations, New Lookup facility in Mapping, Service Registry, PCM (Process Component models), GDTs (Global Data Types), Using Folders in PI 7.1, AAE(Advanced adapter engine), Decision Steps in BPM and so on….. long lasting list.

     

    I hate to brag, but there's one talent that I have that made me to explore the PI7.1 features very quickly. I can grab a new piece of PI features in the morning, implement it during a coffee break, and know how to use the basic features by lunch. A few tacos and hours later, I can have several of the advanced features down pat.

     

    Shhhh ... here's a secret. Now I'm going to tell you one of the ways I learn XI/PI so quickly. I use one best feature from the menu bar….i.e. Help (SAP help i.e. self help).

     Use of SAP Library made most of things easy. Now there is couple of good blogs/articles available on SDN that talks about PI7.1 features and also extended those till upgrade with EHP1. But I am sure the indications in SAP Help might be the birth place for it. Well I believe this is the global truth …:-). But I thought, it’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness by ignoring the SAP help documents.  

    Ooops, I'm definitely losing my train of thought here. I should not only stuck up with SAP help, but also continue with the various experimentations with PI 7.1, that helped me to get the correct feel of granularity and depth of PI 7.1. The various experimentations in PI/XI are important to gain the control over it.

     

    I started doing various POCs (Proof of Concepts) to investigate the acceptance of these features in current Business Process. These POCs helped me to give better solutions/proposals for the existing Business processes, particularly usage of RFC/DB lookups in SAP GRC NFE 1.0 - New Solution Introduction & Implemention Best Practices Implementation work, usage of single service for multiple operations, UDDI and Service Registry (currently working on this). Also the integration POC of with PI various mainframe systems, oracle/db2 was a good experience.

     

    PI 7.1 was considered as ESB but I am still not convenience with it. I had experienced couple of limitations comparing with other mature tools such as WBI, Message Broker and Mercator etc particularly in case of Error handling. That gives me another direction to do more research work and ASAP will come up with detail analysis.

     

    Objectively, I have to admit that the learning path I’m using is not undervalued, but may have scope to widen the horizons to have broad perception towards PI.

    Hi All,

     

    I had created the below article long back and thought of sharing with all. It talks about

    various trends that have been followed in the history of integration architecture.

     

    Daryl Plummer, a managing vice president at Gartner had said,  

    "SOA is not something you chose to do. It will happen to you whether you chose it or not" 

    With this indication, SAP has provided a new dimension - E-SOA, with tremendous potential for customers and partners. Trends in SAP like ESOA, ESB, EDA (Event Driven Architecture), BPM have made the integration as backbone for the ideal architecture. This ground-breaking change leads to hold the attention of most of the CIOs and IT Managers. 

    Since mid-1990s, there are rebellious changes observed with the technologies used for various integrations starting from ALE-EDI-IDO, EAI and have still continued up to PI 7.1 EHP1 & 2.  

    To understand the future trends, it's important to be familiar with the major integration approach that SAP had followed till date.  There are numerous articles/papers available about the these integration models which had made my life simple and prohibited from going in depth with these models, Most of those articles have the similar attempt to define this transition as below 

    Point to Point  --> Hub & spoke --> ESB 

    Well, how SAP can be exception for it? No of course not, SAP had followed similar line of attack. The SAP Integration trends are as below

    1. Point to Point Integration
    2. Hub & Spoke Integration

    Service based Integration

     

    image

     

    PS Note : The trems mentioned in above diagram indicates several products & protocols. (For e.g. "SAP" indicates various SAP products such as SAP ERP, BW, EP etc.) 

    Point to Point Integration

    Point-to-point integration is used when a sender has to send a message to a single receiver (that is, a 1:1 relationship). This kind of integration is straight forward way to integrate the A2A or B2B.  The Point to Point roots are always preferable for lower budget. Unfortunately the enhancements/changes for these kinds of interfaces are not flexible-enough and may become the show stopper in modifying the Business processes. It is important to realize that point-to-point interactions themselves are not bad. Still the problem lies in the custom integration, created for point to point interactions because every new application with sender receiver point would need to create its own separate integration. For large scale integration this kind of architecture will be not supportive. Even it would be very difficult to support in future for those interfaces. Definitely I should agree as Point-to-point offers short-term savings, but long-term pain. ALE-EDI-IDOCs used the point to point connection in early days. Even the huge Data load across the SAP and non-SAP systems have followed the Point-to-point communication in many cases.  

    Hub & Spoke Integration

    Hub-and-spoke architectures consist of a centralized hub which is integrated with the various applications via spokes i.e. with the use of various adapters or connectors. The integrations of various applications or Business processes are deployed on the top of existing systems with re-usability approach. As a hub, the middleware Integration tools like EAI, PI has stepped up to the task of providing a interaction point between applications. Middleware can provide generic interfaces with which all integrated applications pass messages to each other. Each interface defines a business process provided by an application. With this Hub & Spoke architecture it is easy to imply the various message transformations, conditional routings etc. across multiple applications based on the requirements. 

    Service based Integration 

    SAP NetWeaver had delivered an enterprise service bus (ESB) that enables service bus based integration between A2A & B2B. It is a distributed service architecture based on Web services standards which is based on Open Standards and provides various features like flexible security framework, intelligent routings, message transformations and many more. Service Based Integration could be compatible with all features provided by other traditional models. In this integration these features are spread over the distributed landscape. Like the various services could be hosted in separately deployable container i.e. in ESR and published via Service registry which can be used across various landscapes.

    Thus one way or another, we will definitely agree that for those companies and organizations pursuing an SOA, the shift towards an ESB-based infrastructure is a major step in this evolvement.

    SAP has nice efforts to give the ESOA as approach to make this revolutionary step successful with minimal risk

    PS Note: There are still some different opinions about the SAP integration products being consider as complete ESB, but it's not in the scope of this article. There are couple of discussions available in forum on this.

    I was doing some R&D with Java Web start settings and got some different settings that could make fun while working with the applications based on Java Web Start. As PI consultant I have enjoyed lot with these settings while working with Integration Builder. 

     

    Generally if you have observed, while opening the Integration Repository or directory (IR/ID), the Java Web Start get started. The main purpose and benefit of Java Web Start is to synchronize the libraries (jar files) between your computer (client) and the XI server. So, if there is a new patch installed on the XI server, Java Web Start will download the effected library files from the server to your computer before IR or ID is started. 

     

    You might have always come across these below screens at start-up of Integration Builder,

     

    image

     

      OR

     image   

    If you are bored with these regular splash screens as startup for IR or ID and wish to change it as something like below.... It's job of few mins….:-))

     

    image

    image

    You can play with these screens while opening the IR or ID. 

    See below steps  :
    1. Goto C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.6.0_03\lib\deploy

    Here your initial path “C:\Program Files\Java” may be different based on your client systems. 

     

    image

     

        2.   Here you will get one .jpg image “splash.jpg”.

        3.  Select your customized image and rename it as “splash.jpg”.

     

        4.  Replace the image in the above path mentioned in Point 1 (“C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.6.0_03\lib\deploy”)

     

        5.  Don’t forget to take back-up of this image to retrieve it back. (just again replace the image with original one).

     

        6. Now just close your application which is based on Java Web Start and re-start it…and have fun…with your own images as startup for IR or ID.

     Note:

    1. The image size should not be preferably more than 100 KB.
    2. These splash screens will be applicable for local PCs only where you did the changes.
    3. The changes in splash screen will be applicable to all Java Web start based applications.
    4. These settings will not affect any of the functionality or feature of Java Web start in your current application.
    5. I have confirmed about these settings from Java Web Site, you can't alter any other screens apart from this start-up screen.
    6. If you wish to do more customization then you need to develop your own Java Web start tools and that would be very complicated development.