Running SE80 on my Android

[former_member182046]

Let me just share something with you very quickly. Perhaps you’ll find it as amazing as I do.

Recently, I got my first smartphone, an Android. (Here’s the blog about publishing my first Android app: Proudly Presenting the SAP Mentors Outreach Mobile App for Android – Connect with SAP Mentors at SAP...).
Today I installed the SCN trial version of the AS ABAP 7.0 EhP 2 in the Amazon EC2 cloud. (By the way, handling virtual machines in the Amazon cloud is much easier now than two years ago, when I blogged about Composition in the Cloud: Run your own SAP NetWeaver CE 7.1 EHP 1 in the cloud (Part 1 of 3).)

When you run a Windows machine at Amazon EC2, you can access its desktop through a Remote Desktop Connection. The protocol is called RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol), the same protocol you use when you connect to a Windows Terminal Server. Unfortunately, the firewall rules at my workplace block RDP traffic so I cannot log on to my Amazon instances from work.

But – it occurred to me to search the Android Market for RDP clients. And indeed I found a number of free RDP client apps. The first one I tried makes me so happy that I didn’t even bother looking at the other ones. It’s called PocketCloud and it allows me to sign on to the desktop of any windows machine on the internet that provides the Windows Terminal Server service.

This means that I can access the desktop of my Amazon instance from my smartphone. How cool is that? I actually used this to control the status of my SGEN run without having to power up my laptop.

Fig. 1: SGEN on my Android

Of course I couldn’t resist the temptation to launch SE80 (even before SGEN was through) and write a small ABAP program in honour of Thomas Jung's hilarious 2009 blog about the AS ABAP running on the iPhone.

Fig. 2: SE80 on my Android

Is that fun or what? Now while people who see you sitting in the bus, crouched over your smartphone, think you’re texting someone or reading blogs, you can be coding in ABAP.

Actually, there’s a problem with the keyboard mapping (at least in my case) because the American keyboard layout is displayed but when I type, characters appear according to the German keyboard layout. But that should easily be fixed or worked around. In the meantime, I used the Android’s speech recognition as a very special input method - works pretty well with ABAP. 🙂

Fig. 3: Dictating your ABAP code