cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

When will SAP Java AS for EE 6 see the light?

former_member190457
Contributor
0 Kudos

Hi all,

As far as I know, SAP's bleeding edge AS (NW73 AS) is based on EE5.

As several java AS vendors are releasing EE6 compliant products, I would like to know whether any deadline has been set for SAP's EE6 app server release.

Thanks in advance

regards

Vincenzo

Accepted Solutions (1)

Accepted Solutions (1)

Former Member
0 Kudos

Hello,

One year later we have netweaver 7.3.1 sp4, an application running under tomcat 7 , Hand try it  to migrate to netweaver 7.3.1 without success.

So when will Java Form de 6 supported?

Best regards

Oliver

rolf_paulsen
Active Participant
0 Kudos

Hi,

again half a year later, we still must be PATIENT.

Regards

Rolf

steffen_spahr2
Participant
0 Kudos

Hi,

after years of waiting for a NetWeaver 7.x that implements the (full) EE6-Standard, things have changed.

While there was a stagnation concerning the EE-Standard in netweaver-developement (7.1 - 7.4) , the EE standard itself is far advanced.

So the contempory question is: "When will SAP Java AS for EE7 see the light?" 😉

Regards

Steffen

hofmann
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

The answer will be: Never.

rolf_paulsen
Active Participant
0 Kudos

Yes, but we will never get this answer from SAP. They do not even bother to tell this to their customers.

Benny
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Not quite right. The implementation is under development and is planned to see the light in the first half of this year.

Regards,

Benny

hofmann
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

Benny,

you mean the JEE 6 web profile "plug-in" for NW or do you mean that SAP is going to release NW 7.3/7.4 with JEE6 full profile?

Benny
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

That's the plugin with web profile. From that time on we will harmonize this with the Cloud updates.

Regards,

Benny

Former Member
0 Kudos

Hi,

in June 2013, DSAG, there was the plan, that the customer can get a second OpenSource Java VM behind the NetWeaver Java VM -  what is about this plan?

Regards Oliver

rolf_paulsen
Active Participant
0 Kudos

Hi Benny,

sorry, nothing new at all, nothing that we did not yet know for at least half a year (info from DSAG).

What is included inside this Java EE WebProfile?

  • Servlet API 3.0?
  • JSP 2.2?
  • JSF 2.0?
  • JPA 2.0?
  • JSP 2.2?
  • CDI 1.0?
  • Bean Validation 1.0?
  • and finally: EJB 3.1 Lite or real EJB 3.1 ? Lite misses important features of "non-lite" (e.g. Remote interfaces, MDB)

What does this "plugin" really mean? Running a little Tomcat EE with EE 6 Web Profile inside legacy Java EE 5 NetWeaver that still does only know JPA 1.0, JSF 1.2, EJB 3.0?

Will there be an embedded mode for this plugin to extremely shorten development round-trips in eclipse, as it is known from Tomcat, JBoss, Jetty, even Websphere and WebLogic?

Finally, the interesting wrap-up of 4 years of SAP statements:


Dec 14, 2009:

"With the availability of Java EE6 it now is time to introduce it to our development, but there are no plans available (one week after release of the standard) that would tell us when this standard will be part of the product."

Apr 4, 2012:

"It is also planned to bring the features of Neo to the on premise environment afterwards. When this will happen I cannot answer."

Jan 14, 2014:

"The implementation  is under development and is planned to see the light in the first half of this year." "That's the plugin with web profile. From that time on we will harmonize this with the Cloud updates."

Not too fast. SAP plugs some Tomcat EE 6 from the SAP Cloud into the legacy Java EE 5 NetWeaver Java? And only this plug-in will be harmonized with the SAP Cloud (that is good enough with Java EE 6 Web Profile) and support Java EE 6 features?

Sounds like Tobias' answer "Never" to the question "When will SAP AS Java EE 6/7 see the light" remains correct. SAP NetWeaver AS Java itself will stay on Java EE 5 forever.

We will have to abandon WebDynpro Java anyway, and running WebDynpro on Tomcat is no rocket-science as the Demokit shows us. SAP UI5 does not need SAP NetWeaver Java either. And there are other pretty BPM tools in the world.

Disruptive step, but we know from SAP that disruptive steps may be necessary to proceed.

Regards

Rolf

rolf_paulsen
Active Participant
0 Kudos

I was just caught by the initial post of this thread -


As far as I know, SAP's bleeding edge AS (NW73 AS) is based on EE5"

- at least SAP managed to stop the bleeding...

Former Member
0 Kudos

Hi,

are there any new news about java ee6 or indeed java ee7?

Best regards

Oliver

rolf_paulsen
Active Participant
0 Kudos

Hi,

It is a gold idea to ask again after Vishal left the company. Maybe in the year after the  HANA Hype SAP will invest and care again for their existing products.

But probably they will let us work forever with outdated standards, not only JEE, but also stone aged Eclipse in NWDS.

Anyway, thanks for your post, maybe Benny has New words for us.

Regards

Rolf

steffen_spahr2
Participant
0 Kudos

Hello Benny,

are there any news about the EE6 WebProfile PlugIn?

(=> "The implementation is under development and is planned to see the light in the first half of this year".)

Regards,

Steffen

Benny
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Hello,

I'm not any longer involved with this and cannot comment on it. I will check if I can find anybody to answer this.

Regards,

Benny

rolf_paulsen
Active Participant
0 Kudos

Hi,

obviously, SAP is a large company.

Therefore, it takes weeks for an employee who was involved deeply and for a long time in the product planning of SAP NetWeaver Java at least until the beginning of this year to find anybody who can answer basic questions about further development of this product.

So large that it is not even sure if such a person can be found at all...

Anyway, everything substantial has been said before in this thread:

  1. "The answer will be: Never." (Tobias Hermann,

Regards

Former Member
0 Kudos

Hello colleagues,

who wants to take part on the mission "SAP EE7", codename "sapi7" ?

Perhaps we have the  "fortune of the brave" like the heroes, who have managed that SAP to takes up the issue "HANA". Perhaps "Big H. P." will support us.

Regards Oliver

Former Member
0 Kudos

Hello! I don't catch the phrase, what should those heroes will do? I like java 8 with lambdas, by the way

karl_kessler
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Hi Rolf,

there has been a lot of discussion around the question whether the on premise NetWeaver
Application Server
for Java will support the Java EE 6 standard! I have joined this discussion just
recently meaning I have not studied all the discussion threads. Some citations go back several years, others are new.

With respect to roadmap statements SAP has clearly formulated rules of communication and established clear templates that indicate the current feature set (“Solution Today”), the “planned innovations” for the next 12 months roughly (for on premise deliveries) and the future direction. The section on “planned innovations” is the one which is closely related to the current backlog of the development teams in terms of feature delivery. No commitment is given as to whether the planned innovations will be delivered but under normal circumstances there is a good probability to have them in the next foreseeable enhancement packages or quarterly updates. The future direction is typically more a strategic level which is touched by our senior
management team and often communicated at TechEd keynotes for example. 

Java EE 6 is not contained in the planned innovations for the on premise NetWeaver Application
Server Java. Customers get the roadmap information from SAP service marketplace and from roadmap Q&A sessions at TechEd.

We never communicated anything different. In multiple sessions and written content we
clearly communicated that innovation in on premise environments focuses on the ABAP stack while HANA Cloud Platform offers other languages including Java with support for
open standards adoption. We know that many of our customers are running AS Java based Portals, Process Integration hubs, BPM etc and we will fulfill our support commitments providing a solid foundation to run our Java based solutions. This causes a lot of significant investments
for our development support organization. For example we enabled the SAP Java VM for JDK1.4 since some customers still run Portals based on that standard. Likewise we currently look into several topics such as NetWeaver Developer Studio and newer JDKs.

But the JEE program model is not in scope here. The adoption of JEE as program model for
SAP applications, customer and partner extensions was always pretty limited (exceptions confirm the rule). We heavily pushed Web Dynpro Java, NWDI for several years etc (my team wrote a complete SAP Press book about it) but the market moved to other frameworks in the meantime. Again we fully maintain these frameworks and infrastructures including improvements to make our customers’ life easier (for example the development support is currently piloting an NWDI compliant infrastructure to supply notes, similar to SNOTE in ABAP).

Last but not least our senior management team clearly indicated the importance of cloud
based infrastructures for standards and open source adoption.

Since NetWeaver 7.3 embracing the Java EE5 was announced back in 2010 the shift towards HANA, cloud and mobile has been a recurring top level theme at all major SAP events and publications (trust me I attended all US and EMEA TechEds).

Best regards

Karl

rolf_paulsen
Active Participant
0 Kudos

Hi Karl,

thank you for your answer.


I have joined this discussion just recently meaning I have not studied all the discussion threads.

I would really appreciate that you study this thread as a whole. IMHO this should have been a topic in the transfer of the product responsibility for SAP NetWeaver Java from Benny to you.

If SAP TechEd events and SAP markteplace are the only communication channels for plannings of SAP, SAP employees might give statements like in this thread with more caution.


Java EE 6 is not contained in the planned innovations for the on premise NetWeaver Application Server Java.

In respect of the "clearly formulated rules of communication" and "clear templates" that SAP has established to communicate the planned "innvoations", this statement obviously was always true, for all the years that customers like us were stalled by statements especially by your predecessor as product manager. So I ask myself: What was the purpose he said in January 2014:

"The implementation is under development and is planned to see the light in the first half of this year." ?

Of course, Benny should answer this question. But if you asked me what is the result of this and other statements:

Trust in SAP's statements is sustainably damaged. At least SAP hazarded the consequence that customers feel stalled and got the impression that SAP obfuscated the fact that there NEVER have been concrete plannings to go to JEE 6.


The adoption of JEE as program model for SAP applications, customer and partner extensions was always pretty limited (exceptions confirm the rule).

We heavily pushed Web Dynpro Java, NWDI for several years etc (my team wrote a complete SAP Press book about it) but the market moved to other frameworks in the meantime.

Please consider both sides her.

  • SAP was too to late to take appropriate steps from the movement of the market.
  • SAP was too long stuck to the idea to impose ABAP development process to the Java development. Maybe SAP still is.
  • SAP embraced open source technologies only for a few years and missed the right moment to put a framework like WebDynpro Java Open Source.

(exceptions confirm the rule)

This is the only point in your answer where you address (at least slightly) customers like us who have the bad luck that they banked on SAP Java technology in the past. This is not much, I get the impression that SAP is mostly indifferent to these "exceptions".

Please bear in mind that your customers probably did not choose SAP NetWeaver Java as a platform for Java EE programming because they liked hazardous ventures, but based on extensive consulting by expensive SAP consultants.

Concerning the rest of your thread:

I did not claim SAP has been lazy and did not innovate. My main issue is that communication of the non-progress concerning Java EE standard went wrong in the last years, and I would appreciate that anyone inside SAP shared this impression and learned from the past.

But of course I realize that you are committed to clarity and openness in your role from now on, so let us look forward.


Since NetWeaver 7.3 embracing the Java EE5 was announced back in 2010...

I guess NetWeaver 7.1 (2008, certified EE5 2007 already) was Java EE5 already, or am I getting something wrong?

Regards

Rolf

karl_kessler
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Hi Rolf,

just to add some clarification:

You are right: NetWeaver Composition Environment 7.1 adopted the Java EE 5 standard already.

The first full NetWeaver release, however, (including Portal, Business Warehouse, BPM/CE etc) to adopt Java EE5 was NetWeaver 7.3. But I think that's now history.

Regarding the Java EE 6 related statements so far: They were not optimally coined I agree. At that time we looked into an on premise deployment option for the java stack which we used in on demand environments. However, this approach brings in a lot of other unsolved issues meaning we dropped the plan. We did not pursue the plan to enable our classical on premise AS Java stack for EE6 after we changed our Java approach (more open source, less classical SAP infrastructure).

Btw our initial approach to manage Java applications similar to ABAP in terms of repository, central build and lifecycle management etc was requested by key SAP customers ("We can only run Java applications like Portal and CE productively if they are managed like traditional SAP applications"). This mindset has changed in the meantime as we all know.

Rolf, I can follow your feedback. I mean we already had joint telcos with you and the PI/BPM folks at SAP. But let us try to look ahead and work on continuous improvements.

Regards

Karl


rolf_paulsen
Active Participant
0 Kudos

Hi Oliver,

sounds tempting. But since SAP is embracing open source technology and collaboration/partnership between RedHat and SAP seem quite established and reliable (see and video A Collaboration: redhat and SAP - YouTube linked there) we should follow SAP's strategy not to provide a future proof on-premise plattform for real and large Java EE application development on their own.

Wouldn't it be a heroic task to integrate JBoss inside SAP the way SAP NetWeaver Java is? E.g.

  • Integration with Central User Administration/Identity Management
  • SSO between SAP NetWeaver ABAP and JBoss and SAP NetWeaver Java bidirectional (that will remain as a plattform for BPM and WD Java)
  • seamless integration of WD Java (running on SAP NetWeaver Java) into business logic running on JBoss
  • ...
  • finally: a cool WD Java like theme in Apache MyFaces (if we do not switch to SAP UI5 for desktop applications
  • maybe very finally: porting WD Java runtime to JBoss.

Maybe we will even get support by SAP on this way.

If this topics are solved, we of course have a very large support from the Java community

Regards

Rolf

daniel_ruiz2
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

Karl Kessler wrote:

Btw our initial approach to manage Java applications similar to ABAP in terms of repository, central build and lifecycle management etc was requested by key SAP customers ("We can only run Java applications like Portal and CE productively if they are managed like traditional SAP applications"). This mindset has changed in the meantime as we all know.

*cough* noobs *cough*

all I could read so far is a bunch of excuses for a lot of failure on SAP side, some bla bla bla 'you will have to pay for Virgo and Tomcat if you want EE6 and rely on SAP support'.. this forum really lacks a LOL button.

hmmm, and.. I would even risk to say you used a lot of 'classical' in there.. the word is not 'classical'; being OLD doesn't make anything a 'classic' - it's more like:

- old on-premise AS;

- old SAP infrastructure;

at least now we know there are no plans for on-premise, so I'd like to thank you for making that painfully clear.

PS: nothing personal, and I even apologize in advance if the above sounds offensive to you Karl; but this thread illustrates how accurate SAP can be dealing with Java.

Benny
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Although I'm out of this I would like to comment about a special twist in this communication:


Rolf Paulsen wrote:

In respect of the "clearly formulated rules of communication" and "clear templates" that SAP has established to communicate the planned "innvoations", this statement obviously was always true, for all the years that customers like us were stalled by statements especially by your predecessor as product manager. So I ask myself: What was the purpose he said in January 2014:

"The implementation is under development and is planned to see the light in the first half of this year." ?

Of course, Benny should answer this question.

This statement implies or insinuates that I did suck this message out of my fingers. As Karl mentioned already there was a plan when I said so. The plan was changed.

My point of view was it always to share plans to make it possible for customers to plan long term. This implies that sometimes those plans are not realized. Because of that some people prefer to never share any planning information with customers and there are internal fights  around this on a regular basis which politics is the right one.

My point of view is surely not supported by customers who use such communication to connote that this is implied logically with spreading the untruth.

In other words: I am not lying to customers. I never did and I will not do so. And by the way, I never was asked to do so at SAP.

With kind Regards,

Benny Schaich-Lebek

Solution Management SAP SE

rolf_paulsen
Active Participant
0 Kudos

Thank you for your clarification and insight. I did not connote anything like this:

The pragraph started with

"In respect of the "clearly formulated rules of communication" and "clear templates" that SAP has established to communicate the planned "innovations"..."

meaning that beyond these rules and templates, e.g. obviously here in this thread, communication follows different.rules, motivation and intentions, as you describe.

Btw information about plans includes proactive near-term information about severe changes/abortions in previously communicated plans.

Regards

Rolf

Answers (4)

Answers (4)

junwu
Active Contributor
0 Kudos
karl_kessler
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Hi Jun Wu,

unfortunately this is a bug in the help documentation.

AS Java on premise does not support JEE 6.

We will fix this documentation error on help.sap.com asap.

Regards

Karl


Vlado
Advisor
Advisor
0 Kudos

BTW, there has never been anything like "JEE 6" or "jee 1.6" even less. It's Java EE (short for Java™ Platform, Enterprise Edition). See: About "JEE"

pk67
Explorer
0 Kudos

Hello Karl,

can you point out, what is the roadmap or timeline for support of Java EE 6 and Java EE 7 in NetWeaver AS Java on premise?


Best Regards

Peter Kain

steffen_spahr2
Participant
0 Kudos

Hello Peter,

SAP announced a new NetWeaver 7.5 Release that will be optimized to support Java 8.

But I could not find any information about the support of the EE 6 or EE 7 standard.

Is there anybody who knows more about the possible support of EE6 / EE7 in NetWeaver 7.5?

Regards

Steffen

rolf_paulsen
Active Participant
0 Kudos

http://sapinsider.wispubs.com/Assets/Articles/2015/July/SPI-a-foundation-for-the-future

Hi Steffen,

scolling here is a pain

In the above link, Karl Kessler writes:

"SAP is not repositioning new Java-based program models in the context of SAP NetWeaver AS Java. The adoption of new standards and innovative programming models are reflected in SAP's in-memory and cloud plaforms."

This is clear enough, isn't it? No EE 6, no EE 7. Let us be grateful for what we get: Java 8 and with it connection to current open source innovations and NWDS on Eclipse Luna. (Hopefully from now on as plugins so that we are not stuck to this version for 5 years again.)

And I believe Karl that adoption to Java 8 is a "major task to undertake". It is far better that this is done in good quality than to overcharge the development team with upgrade to Java EE 7.

We can just take apache olingo and develop cool SAPUI5 screens anyway.

At the end of Karl's article you can read that Java may get even more importance than "just" lift it from EE 5 to EE 7 (what would be great, anyway)

"To further support hybrid deployments, SAP is investing significant development effort into providing an on-premise runtime container for SAP HANA that is designed with Cloud Foundry principles in mind and supports Java, JavaScript (node.js), and a compatiblity layer for SAP HANA extended application services (XS), following the "bring your own language" paradigm."

IMHO the EE 5 is already a good, modern program model, compared to some other platforms.

Regards

Rolf

Former Member
0 Kudos

We are currently using the full EE5 profile of the Netweaver 7.4 java system, and were looking forward to the EE7 profile implemented in 75.  If full EE profile is not in scope, we'll need to migrate off of the SAP Java platform all together which means finding a replacement for the portal as well.

rolf_paulsen
Active Participant
0 Kudos

We were looking forward to the EE7 profile, too. It would be interesting to know what you are missing most.

E.g. JSF 2.2 will probably work with the mojarra implementatoin according to SCN threads.

Applcation side of JPA 2.0 is a trivial task using Eclipselink or hibernate (only the new methods of container classes like EntityManager.getMetamodel() do not work out of the box, you have to cast to your JPA 2.0 capable implementation, e.g. Eclipselink).

Apache Olingo to produce OData Services e.g. by annotation should work fine, too.

We will give CDI a try.

EJB and Webmethods will probably become a hard or even impossible task.

We just switched from NWDI to git/maven/jenkins and are glad about the speed, flexibility and agility of our development process.

For us, the restriction of having to stay on Java EE 5 currently does justify the migration off the SAP Java platform because we heavily make use of the integration into SAP Netweaver ABAP (e.g. user management). Java EE 7 would nave been great, but Java EE 5 works perfectly for what we have to do.

Former Member
0 Kudos

I've always been interested in using java standard over proprietary SAP frameworks, programming languages etc in the web application space.  SAP is great for the core ABAP stack, but always was behind on the web application side. 

Just brainstorming for "what is next" for us as an SAP customer.  Obviously what is next for SAP is SAPUI5, SAP Gateway, OData etc.  My problem with following SAP down this path are two fold.

  1. More servers, more complexity, more protocols, more licensing cost to be locked into something that in the end only SAP customers care about, vs staying more Java standard and open source where there are many many times more developers who contribute. 
  2. I know everyone says "it is different this time", but if we are look at SAP's track record on the web front, they switch direction every 4 or 5 years.  Internet Transaction Server, Integrated ITS, Java WD, Abap WD, SAP UI5/Fiori...  what is next?  History speaks for itself.  SAP addresses their shortcoming on the web application side by introducing something proprietary which already exists in the open source world.  At the time, the framework can seem modern/up to date, but over time they can't keep up with the rest of the IT world and soon their proprietary solution is so far behind they need to throw it out and start over.  We the customers have to pay to transition away from the old to the new solution.  Who on earth will use SAPUI5 other than SAP customers?  Even though SAPUI5 is open source, I don't seeing it making any difference.

I've started a separate thread brainstorming what it would take to move from SAP Netweaver Java to something open source like Glassfish or Wildfly to get the full EE profile SAP is no longer interested in providing.  I would love if we can get a group of minds working together to see if it is possible!

rolf_paulsen
Active Participant
0 Kudos

Hi Benny, hi Tobias,

there are some more topics on my wishlist I forgot:

1. embedded mode for NW AS Java. Most other relevant Java AppServers provide an embedded mode making development roundtrips much much shorter. E.g. IBM WebSphere, glassfish, JBoss, Tomcat, Jetty (could not find out quickly about Oracle WebLogic).

2. adapter for the testing framework arquillian http://arquillian.org/.

All other relevant Java AppServers have an adapter to easily test Java EE applications inside the runtime (list from 1 including Oracle WebLogic, see https://docs.jboss.org/author/display/ARQ/Container+adapters. The arquillian framework seems to be a new milestone in testing Java apps inside their infrastructure.

A qustion in SCN asking for an adapter is not answered at all so far (poor Elmar):

http://scn.sap.com/thread/2122286

the same for other forums.

http://www.qnasap.com/server-side-unit-tests-arquillian/

https://community.jboss.org/thread/177811

Does SAP actually not know about arquillian? SAP's engagement in Open Source could be greater in case it is useful "only" for developers and not for SAP products.

Regards

Rolf

hofmann
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

I asked via twitter about arquillian support when they released v1.0 and the only "useful" response was from the arquillian folk that pointed me to the same post at JBoss.

As long as SAP isn't going to develop something support won't be possible. But testing for Java in general isn't really what customers do / get / invest. Even the basic unit tests are rarely done. Doesn't help much to test the bean when even the POJO objects are not tested.

And from there you automatically have to go a step further and start using continuous integration, and that is now really something where you can say: more people have been to the moon than SAP customers that use NW Java are doing CI.

Second thought: I believe you can exchange Java with ABAP and get the same result.

Of course: yes, would be very nice to have.

rolf_paulsen
Active Participant
0 Kudos

I agree, JUnit testing in a "SAP-ish" project with NW AS is an exception and the comparison of SAP Java CI projects with people in the moon is adequate.

We have > 1000 (increasing) pure JUnit tests and aside less but still a lot of "bean" tests (in embedded openEJB container with several worarounds to compensate for the differences of NW AS). This is due to the fact that our team contains (is built around) very experienced plain Java (EE) developers who "grew up" in the awareness that the invest in automated tests pays off.

Your second thought is probably the reason: What has been widely accepted for years in the Java world - only automated tests and CI can guarantee quality over the time - does not play a big role for ABAP development. I am not sure if even the meaning of CI is known to the majoriy of ABAP developers (and that mockito, arquillian and jenkins are not only cool). This influences Java @ SAP. SAP's Java dev departments will have testing evangelists, too, but maybe they are few, maybe they have to spend a lot of their time explaining theirselves and convincing deciders that CI and test automatism are no luxury (what should not be necessary in 2012).

We still have not been on the moon: We have tests but only manual test execution, no CI (in NWDI). We wil solve this, even with no help from SAP, even for the price that we leave NWDI next year.

Again: What they announced but are holding back since a year now are SAP's code examples for CI and NWDI http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/JDI/NWDI+and+Open+Source.so my hope for an arquillian adapter by SAP is almost zero.

Finally my comments to Benny's link http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-7727

The content is probably not changed since it was created 2009, there wer only format changes in the 10 versions.

The link to JPA/hibernate leads to boring old and well known document from 2009.

The link to Scripting languages is dead ("Oops, Sorry, internal server error occurred (500 error)").

The link to SDN Code Exchange leads to the place where SAP still does not exchange its NWDI CI code but ABAP2XLS...

@Benny, take this as my answer to your question "How do you like this blog?".

And the announcement from Bennyin above link in Wiki "NWDI and Open Source" from May 2011 is enough clarity about relevance of SAP's announcements for their activities in open source communities.

"Whether it is about integrating functionality not available in NWDI or using only parts of it, or even working without NWDI for various reason, there is large interest at customers and partners to do this. In the end this also makes SAP products more open and flexible. Because of this SAP organized a workshop in May 2011 to start a community based on some work already done by some SAP developers. We will put more information on this page and place according code to Code Exchange on the SDN to make it available to you."

Words.

hofmann
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

Yep, there is a lack of interest from SAP in CI/Testing. I'm currently reviewing an Ant script I coded some time ago that gives you a Dev / CI environment for SAP Java (portal) projects:

  • downloads the software: tomcat, jenkins, redmine, ant, mysql, sonar, testng, ivy, etc and configures it
  • gives you the ability to create via an ant script portal projects (7.0x and 7.2), that also creates the corresponding build files and jenkins, sonar, etc projects

As soon as I think it can be used by someone that is not me I will release it. Should at least help people to get started with CI in the context of SAP Java.

Former Member
0 Kudos

refer to PAM (Product Availability Matrix)

Former Member
0 Kudos

I'm sorry but I can't find any information on this subject in the PAM

For instance, I can't see when CE 7.4 will be delivered.

thanks

Former Member
0 Kudos

Then it must have not been plan as of now.

As soon as delivery date is planed it will show up in PAM.

rolf_paulsen
Active Participant
0 Kudos

This question was asked more than 1.5 years ago. In a reply on this thread from 2009, Benny Schaich-Lebek stated that "there are no plans available (...) that would tell us when this standard (Java EE 6) will be part of the product."

This was understandable in a situation when ramp-up of 7.20 started, but now 7.30 is GA for months and there are still no plans? Are there any plans to make plans?

Compare to other great Java EE application servers:

IBM WebSphere: Java EE 6 support released in Juli 2011

Oracle WebLogic full Java EE 6 support was announced for the end of 2011, key APIs are already available since Jan 2011 (JPA 2.0, JSF 2.0 etc).

NetWeaver is late.

Former Member
0 Kudos

SAP is not late:

Giving the size of the company, it woult take much time to release support for Java EE 6 , if it intended to.

I think SAP does not want to put its eggs in the JAVA Basket.

rolf_paulsen
Active Participant
0 Kudos

No, SAP could not be later with their communication about the Java EE 6 timeline.

IMHO Oracle and IBM have a significant size, too And as companies of this size they did not deliver Java EE 6 support in a few months, but it was a process with steps like JPA 2.0 and - most important - communication with their customers showing that they are working on it and that they have an interest to let users take advantage from the new, more lightweight EE 6 standard. Compare this to SAP.

You write: "t woult take much time to release support for Java EE 6 , if it intended to". Conclusion: They obviously do not intend it, they put only the minimum in the "Java basket". The improvement of the Java EE 6 standard is not even worth a timeline that is communicated to their customers. Compare this to Java EE 5: SAP NetWeaver was one of the first Java Application Servers that supported Java EE 5.

steffen_spahr2
Participant
0 Kudos

We are developing our web-applications on Tomcat 7 JDK1.6 based on JSF 1.2 / 2, Trinidad, CODI (CDI).

We spent a lot of time in migrating this web-applications to run on Netweaver in our production environment.

For over one year we are now waiting to get an information if / when SAP will support EE 6.

Our web-applications are constantly being devolped and are now are using JSF 2, JPA 2 (EE 6), RichFaces, IceFaces, Vaadin, ....

Our efforts to try to use JSF 2 (MyFaces / Trinidad) on NetWeaver failed because there is neither a support / interest from SAP nor big experiences with the NetWeaver in the MyFaces-User-Group.

So, the most of our new developed or updated web-applicationen have abandoned the NetWeaver production environment.

I am really disappointed. Looking back, the earlier investigations in the migration to NetWeaver were not worthwhile.

And I am really not sure, if there are plausible reasons for moving these web-applications back to NetWeaver in the future when there maybe is a EE 6 support.

My appeal to SAP:

Please provide informations about the future plans of the NetWeaver development and support your customers, if they want to use or integrate modern / popular technics (like JPA 2, Resfulf Services, JSF 2, CDI,... ) on NetWaever.

Benny
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Hello Steffen,

the new OnDemand Cloud Platform, currently called NetWeaver Neo which is in beta now and planned to be released in the second half of 2012 does support Java EE 6 Web Profile and further implementation of the standard is planned.

It is also planned to bring the features of Neo to the on premise environment afterwards. When this will happen I cannot answer.

During the last two years our Java development has concentrated on the delivery of an on demand cloud based environment.

Regards,

Benny

rolf_paulsen
Active Participant
0 Kudos

Hello Steffen,

thanks for your post! At least we are not alone!

@Benny Schaich-Lebek: Hello!

Java EE 6 Web Profile only? This is not much. The remainding Java EE is not yet begun(?), only planned with no preliminary schedule for the "on premise" environment. Very disappointing.

Let me cite your post in http://scn.sap.com/message/8528073#8528073 and compare it to your current statement:

Dec 14, 2009:

"With the availability of Java EE6 it now is time to introduce it to our development, but there are no plans available (one week after release of the standard) that would tell us when this standard will be part of the product."

Apr 4, 2012:

"It is also planned to bring the features of Neo to the on premise environment afterwards. When this will happen I cannot answer."

Best regards

Rolf

daniel_ruiz2
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

Hi,

I'm curious.. Since you have everything running on Tomcat (and I believe you can easily deploy the same solution on any decent EE server) why would you want to use NWCE?

@Topic: Since Oracle acquired Sun "Java" has not been the focus of SAP - and I believe it never really was.

D.

steffen_spahr2
Participant
0 Kudos

Hi Daniel,

because we are using a lot of SAP products, our systems/servers were hosted at the "SAP HOSTING".

It was never our aim, to operate servers in our company. Our company has the focus on the development of software and is not a professional hosting provider.

So we decided to use the Netweaver Java Stack (we are also using the SAP Enterprise Portal) as the runtime engine for all our java based web applications.

In present a lot of things changed:

-    we have a different hosting provider, because SAP Hosting will close

-    we (temporarely) operate some of our web-applicaiotns on Tomcat 7 servers in our company

Regards

Steffen

hofmann
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

Hi,

I believe much of your (justified) frustration stems from your perception of NW Java. As NW Java is a J2EE server that supports many standards, compared to the J2EE servers from Oracle, IBM, etc it is a server meant to be used in a SAP environment. While Websphere is positioned as a server that you can use for everything and therefore is developed to be used for everything, the primary focus of NW Java is for: provide a web / Java environment for SAP.

IMHO because of this you don't get easily new features for NW Java, because: what will JEE 6 bring to how you can access SAP backend data? You get CAF, designed for exposing SAP information into a SAP system. You get a WD runtime. If you want to consume a BAPI that's really easy with NW Java, doing the same with Tomcat is way more complicated, as you first have to find out what other software you need to make the connection, the mapping, etc.

For opening up NW Java for other use cases, SAP gives us now NW Cloud. And there you get a state of the art Java environment. Why? Because NW Cloud is not only there to expose SAP data, it is also for writing state of the art web applications (and is competing with other Java cloud platforms that offer way more than NW Java).a

rolf_paulsen
Active Participant
0 Kudos

Hi Tobias,

probably you are correct concerning the perception of NW Java. But I disagree in several points

- NW Java was one of the first AppServers that supported JEE 5 standard. It supports ALL JEE 5 standards! This does not mtach a platform only to be used to access SAP backends. You write  - "For opening up NW Java for other use cases, SAP gives us now NW Cloud." No - SAP already gave us the NW Java for ALL JEE 5 use cases!!! (There is no "a little JEE compliant" like no "a little pregnant)

- Forget CAF fot nontrivial use cases.

- WD Java runtime: There is no further active development.

- Consuming a BAPI with Tomcat is not difficult, see WD Java Demokit for Tomcat. What do you need? A JCO Jar...

- You write: "NW Cloud is not only there to expose SAP data, it is also for writing state of the art web applications (and is competing with other Java cloud platforms that offer way more than NW Java)" I do not think so. As Benny writes, NW cloud supports the "Java EE 6 Web Profile", a very small fraction of JEE6. And still no timeline when we can expect e.g. EJB 3.1 and simply JPA 2.0. SAP keeps giving us the runaround.

- My main bone of contention is the lack of any concrete statements about the timeline for JEE 6 support (and this is going on for NEO). Compare the statements of Benny from 2009 and now (and I do not blame Benny as the announcer). This is communication of SAP with their customers. I could accept if they said "sorry, NW Java is mature and we will never add any EE6 features". But the current state of the communication is not only frustrating, it is almost unbearable.

Regards

Rolf

hofmann
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

I understand your frustration, but I believe you misinterpreted the intention of NW Java. As it offers J2EE 5, it was never actually placed as a full J2EE server that competes with Oracle, JBoss, IBM, etc. It was, is and will be a Java server for your SAP environment. I never actually saw someone from SAP actively putting NW Java as the better J2EE product. It was more like: oh, and when you do not want to have 2 J2EE servers in your landscape, you can use NW Java as your solely J2EE server. Some of the features SAP implemented looked more like: "yes, we do have it too" so SAP passed the pre-requisites checklist from big SAP customers (in the way Windows supported POSIX).

If you are developing applications that heavily depend on J2EE6, why NW Java at all? The common use case for NW Java is developing a web UI for backend data, the portal and publishing BI reports. Do you really need J2EE 6? With all its features when you use NW Java? For instance, JPA is nice, but in most use cases the data is stored in an ABAP system, not in the Java system.

Actually: what kind of applications do you develop? Sounds interesting.

0 Kudos

I've been developing JEE 1.4/5 on SAP NW AS for five years now and I'd like to share my views on this subject.

The idea that SAP's Java AS should not be considered as a full fledged AS but just as a thin UI layer before the rock-solid Abap AS is pretty far from my opinion of SAP's NW AS.

I believe it is a great product which has been/can be used even on its own.

However I'd like to know whether Tobias has gained this insight from official SAP documents/manuals. It would be very important to find out whether NW AS is supposed to be really considered a full AS or not.

Thanks

rolf_paulsen
Active Participant
0 Kudos

Hi Nick,

a very good point. Let's read what SAP itself writes about its product:

Look here:

http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw73/helpdata/en/4a/c49b2318e122ade10000000a42189b/content.htm

"The SAP NetWeaver Application Server is fully compliant with the Java EE 5 standards. You can develop enterprise applications as Java EE 5 modules, and thus benefit from the numerous advantages the new (remark RP: new?) standard introduces. Besides the runtime support, the SAP NetWeaver Application Server provides development support for Java EE 5. The SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio provides convenient tools for developing, deploying, and debugging Java EE 5 applications."

and here:

http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw73/helpdata/en/0d/a3bb3eff62847ae10000000a114084/content.htm

"Application Server Java  

Purpose

With the Java EE 5 certified application server that SAP provides you can develop Java EE applications based on the newest (remark RP: text stems from NW 7.30!!) Java EE standard as well as migrate existing J2EE applications.

The Application Server Java (AS Java) comprises features for ensuring its robustness, scalability, and supportability, such as configurable session failover support, built-in load balancing support, fast and robust shared memory based on request handling, and robust monitoring and unique supportability of non-functional problems based on SAP's own Java VM features.

The server offers full support of the latest Java EE 5 features, updates, and adjustments for simplifying the development of enterprise applications, such as EJB 3.0 (RP: new?), the new JSF 1.2 (remark RP: "new" would be JSF2.x), the new Java Persistency API 1.0 (RP: new would be 2.0), the updated Web services stack, and more. It provides an implementation of the Service Data Objects (SDO) 2.1 standard simplifying data programming for applications and frameworks, support for development of standard-based portlets, and a job scheduler implementation. With the Java Connector Architecture (JCA) 1.5 and full Java EE 5 Web Services support it enables connectivity to SAP and non-SAP backend systems and services."


Indeed, the SAP NW Java does not deserve to be restricted to the use case of a UI-layer for data stored in ABAP backends, it was designed as a fully featured and robust runtime and was never "sold" by SAP with any restrictions. It is a full Java EE5 App Server with some "goodies" that ease integration into SAP landscape, mainly WD Java, easy WS ABAP Integration via service groups an ABAP endpoint definition, BPM, and last but not least: Integration to SolMan.

NW AS would not be as powerful as it is if it was designed as an ABAP presentation toolbox.

In our project, we use NW Java in thisfull Java EE5  manner: application database with JPA (via EclipseLink), security via mapping of JEE 5 Roles in EJBs to UME actions, WS to SAP and non SAP, etc.

And it is really working fine even in large batch processes, maybe faster than ABAP batches because no enqueue lock are slowing down paralellism.

Nick, SAP and I consider the NW AS a full AS

BTW this is the greatest answered thread I have read so far

Regards

Rolf

hofmann
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

Nick,

I came to my conclusion after working for some time with NW Java and the use case of a pure J2EE 5 standalone rarely crossed my desk. And when it showed up, it was in the context of: "we already have a J2EE server, can NW Java replace it".

As being standard compliant is important in the selling phase ("yes, we support, yes, you can, yes we are standard") in reality most apps do note make use of JEE 5. Developers tend to use the spring framework or to a platform that is better documented with a more vibrant developer community.

hofmann
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

Rolf,

of course AS Java is a full Java application server. Never said something else. But IMO this is more by accident or side product to get it sold more easily by clients. For developing JEE applications in a NW Java standalone I'd be interested in knowing exactly why AS Java was chosen as the preferred platform. Because of JEE 5?

For Java applications you get other servers with a greater user community, more examples and at a more attractive price, with a faster release cycle and support for newer Java versions (and with less memory usage).

steffen_spahr2
Participant
0 Kudos

Hi,

thank you all for the interesting discussion.

I just want to add our intention, why we are using the netweaver (java stack) in our company.

We started with the decission to use the SAP enterprise portal in our company, because we have a lot of SAP based products in our company and the integration of these products (WebDynPro ABAP, BP, CRM, ZBV, SSO, ...) was well supported by the SAP EP.

At this time we used the NetWeaver Devolper Studio 2.0 an NetWaever 7.0.

So for all developements, that uses "special features" of the SAP-Portal (SSO-Login-Moduls, Portal Applications (PAR), Customer Parameter Provider, .. ) we used the NetWeaver Developer Studio and NetWeaver 7.0 .

But for all other J2EE / EE developments we decided to use tomcat 5 / 6 with Myfaces 1.2, JCO, WebServices (axis 1.4), Log4j - SAP-Logging-Bridge,...) as the development platform with a standard eclipse 3.x installation.

The development was much light-weight. Starting / Stopping (for degugging) of a local tomcat server ist much quicker (few seconds) than on a local netweaver. In the NetWeaver Developer Studio 2.0 a lot of the eclipse features were disabled (CVS -support,...).

So, only for the generation of the EAR-File, for testing and production we used the netweaver-platform, because it was the only productive java (j2ee) engine we had.

I know that with the NWCE (7.1) platform some things have changed. But most of our java developer prefer a lightweight development engine, like jetty, tomcat, ... 😉

Regards

Steffen

0 Kudos

Spring is easily one of the most interesting frameworks out there but it can be used on NW as well (at least for the core part which I've tested) if JEE5/6 is not well suited to one's needs. So IMHO the need for a framework other than JEE is not a reason to rule NW out as an AS for the standalone use case.

As far as the developer community is concerned, I agree with Tobias that the crowd of JBoss/Liferay/WS/... enthusiasts cannot be matched by the limited number of NW AS developers.

However, it must be said that JEE6 includes several improvements over JEE5 which were driven by innovation brought about by new technologies such as Spring itself. It would be great to have Spring-like features in a supported way, as opposed to be on your own importing libraries into NW.

This sums up again to saying: JEE6 for NW is badly needed!

rolf_paulsen
Active Participant
0 Kudos

Hi Tobias,

the stagnancy in support of SAP NW AS for newer Java versions is becoming obvous for customers since one year only. Remember, SAP NW AS was JEE 5 compliant long before JBoss. http://www.sap.com/corporate-en/press.epx?pressid=6780

Java EE 5 indeed was a major reason to choose this platform in 2009. We expected SAP to continue supporting latest standards.

JEE is the common and leading industry standard e.g. in insurance and banking, not Spring.

We chosed NW AS because in all EE 5 AS, it was most suitable to our needs.

Steffen mentioned the reasons: SAP EPortal integration (SSO, Portal themes, UWL) and the LnF of WD Java that is similar to SAP GUI and looks like WD ABAP. And there was no other AS to be replaced at our customers. I do not know any other UI framework with a comparable integration (unfortunately, icefaces and vaadin lack the SAP tradeshow theme)

In 2009, the (missing) future evolution of WD Java was not obvious, too.

I disagree that SAP NW AS Java is JEE 5 "more by accident or side product to get it sold more easily by clients". SAP is an active member in the JCP (OK, they voted abstain for LEE 6 because of some licence reasons http://www.javaworld.com/community/node/3770)

I agree more that NW AS Java is JEE compliant "by history".

I know that projects like ours that use the NW AS extensively as a full JEE 5 AS are rare . But coming back to the topic: Does this excuse SAP silently to stop invest into the guaranteed future without any concrete statements for our plannings?

Regards

Rolf

rolf_paulsen
Active Participant
0 Kudos

Hi Steffen,

in development mode, we are using NWDI (cannot go with normal eclipse because of WD Java) but are testing business logic with openejb container embedded. Works fine.

I am interested in the JSF framework / tools in your project. JSF out of the box is so poor compared to WD Java.

Rolf

hofmann
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

OK Rolf,

now you are confusing me. You chose NW Java because of JEE5 or because of the SAP use cases like WDJ, Portal, UWL, but no ABAP system connected? It was more because of the Look and Feel and WDJ or because of the JPA, EJB, etc features that come with JEE?

When it was because of the LnF and you are using WDJ, well, going away from NetWeaver will be complicated and cost intensive, same when you are using the portal for integrating other SAP products.

When it's 100% JEE5 apps, well, then migrate to another AS. Theoretically it should work without too much work.

And I won't really hope for JEE6, as right now you only get the web profile with Neo, and as Neo  is using Tomcat, I won't be surprised if SAP is using TomEE. And how they will port that to NW AS Java??

Benny
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

I know that with the NWCE (7.1) platform some things have changed. But most of our java developer prefer a lightweight development engine, like jetty, tomcat, ... 😉

Did you know that you can change the configuration of any NetWeaver Java AS to a minimal configuration that basically makes it a Tomcat (I think EJB still will be there) with a startup time comparable to that one?

Of course you lose BPM and all other advanced services that way....

Regards,

Benny

Benny
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Tobias Hofmann wrote:

And I won't really hope for JEE6, as right now you only get the web profile with Neo, and as Neo  is using Tomcat, I won't be surprised if SAP is using TomEE. And how they will port that to NW AS Java??

I'd say: wait and see 😉

What would you say if there would be a connected LJS (the SAP version of TomEE) running in a NetWeaver environment?

Regards,

Benny

Benny
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Tobias Hofmann wrote:

I understand your frustration, but I believe you misinterpreted the intention of NW Java. As it offers J2EE 5, it was never actually placed as a full J2EE server that competes with Oracle, JBoss, IBM, etc. It was, is and will be a Java server for your SAP environment. I never actually saw someone from SAP actively putting NW Java as the better J2EE product. It was more like: oh, and when you do not want to have 2 J2EE servers in your landscape, you can use NW Java as your solely J2EE server.

Hi Tobias,

sorry, but I have to strongly disagree with your point of view. It is true that we very often shied away from positioning the NetWeaver Java AS directly against competitive products in the past to "not start a server war" (original sound of s former high manager) among other vendors who where partners of SAP and still are.

The situation has changed that we now have a strategy to also position SAP technology on the market as such. Due to changes in the Java market many of our customers are now considering to consolidate their systems and ask us for conditions how this can be done for Java applications.

We did support this in the past, we do and we will.

If you ever encounter somebody from SAP who says different let me know the person and I will personally convince him/her about the positioning.

With kind regards,

Benny Schaich

Solution Management

SAP NetWeaver Foundation

Benny
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Rolf Paulsen wrote:

- My main bone of contention is the lack of any concrete statements about the timeline for JEE 6 support (and this is going on for NEO). Compare the statements of Benny from 2009 and now (and I do not blame Benny as the announcer). This is communication of SAP with their customers.

Regards

Rolf

Hello Rolf,

the lack of any concrete statements is rather a result of legal issues than our unwillingness to talk about it. Any statement about this can result in severe damage on SAP and therefore there are strict rules how and when we can talk about time-line.

I can say there is a concrete plan to implement the full Java EE 6 to NetWeaver Cloud. I cannot say when this will happen, as this may be immediately interpreted as a binding message although I would post a legal disclaimer with it...

Nevertheless, what I can say is that NetWeaver Cloud is planned to go general availability second half this year and will launch with the current features that are well known. The intention is to ship rather earlier than later...

Due to the nature of NetWeaver Cloud the plan is to add new features at least every quarter. This development will go on as soon as we have a GA version.

You are allowed to speculate...

Regards,

Benny

steffen_spahr2
Participant
0 Kudos

Hello Benny,

I have heared, that the netweaver has a Tomcat core.

But I have never heared, that it is possible to change the configuration in a way, that it has an lightweight behaviour like Tomcat or Jetty.

Is there a central customizing application, where I can deactivate / activate features like jsf, ejb, jpa, ... ?

In the past I only have tested the "developer workplace version" of the netweaver 7.0 engine in combination with the database an the netweaver developer studio.

For the development an a local workstation, it was a good decision. But starting and stopping the engine tooks always some minutes;-)

Does it still exist for Netweaver 7.3 ?

Regards

Steffen

rolf_paulsen
Active Participant
0 Kudos

Benny Schaich-Lebek wrote:


I'd say: wait and see 😉

No problem, we are used to wait for >2 years now...

Benny Schaich-Lebek wrote:

What would you say if there would be a connected LJS (the SAP version of TomEE) running in a NetWeaver environment?

Regards

What does LJS mean?

Why do you develop a SAP version of TomEE with the risk to be stuck to an older version whereas Apache proceeding?

More questions coming into my mind:

TomEE is compatible with openEJB which is EJB 3.1 already - will we be able to use it?

Did you consider an OSGi based architecture and including eclipse standards like jetty? I cannot really imagine a java cloud solution without the flexibility of OSGi.

Rolf

steffen_spahr2
Participant
0 Kudos

Hi Rolf,

I just want to answer your question concerning "JSF tools".

1)

In the first project phase, we used MyFaces 1.1 with tomahawk. It was our aim, to have the same look (and feel) as our WebDyn Pro / ABAP developments.

So we wrote our own CSS-Classes for the used UI-Components and we changed existing components, like the JSF-calendar.

We had no special tools. We just used eclipse (facelets) / NWDS and CTS+ as the sap-transport-system (no NWDI).

There are some Eclipse Plugins for the visualisation of jsf navigation and layout-design, but I really don't need / use them.

(Rem: In JSF you have the possibility to write your own components or use component libraries like Trinidad, ICEFaces, ICEFacesMobile,.... I don't think that it is poor. It is different. In WebDynPro ABAP you have no chance to write your own UI Components. Have you ever tried to use WebDynPro ABAP on Mobile Clients;-)  )

Since netweaver 7.11 there is a SAP Components Library for JSF !!!

(We never used it, but maybe it is interesting for you.)

http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nwpi711/helpdata/de/48/633b22a7323c87e10000000a42189c/content.htm

The SAP Component Library for JSF provides seamless integration with the look and feel of SAP Web frameworks like Web Dynpro or Business Integration. It is suitable for both developing applications from scratch, and for migrating existing applications developed with usage of JSF 1.2 standard components to the SAP look and feel.

2)

In the second project phase we used MyFaces 1.2 with trinidad, because trinidad supports "partial rendering" (ajax), the skinning technic and charts. And we also  have a chance to use netweaver 7.1 - 7.3 (EE 5 /JSF 1.2) as our production platform. (We never have done it;-))

http://example.irian.at/trinidad-components-showcase/faces/pages/demoStart.xhtml

(Rem.: Do you have an partial rendering / ajax support in WebDynPro ?)

For dependency-injection, bean-validation we use MyFaces-CODI.

http://myfaces.apache.org/extensions/cdi/index.html

3)

In future we will switch to JSF 2 und have a closer look at component libraries that have a good support for mobile clients.

I believe that the netbeans IDE has a much better support for JSF-Development than eclipse. So maybe we well switch to netbeans IDE.

Regards

Steffen

Benny
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Rolf Paulsen wrote:

What does LJS mean?

Sorry, thats' "Lean Java Server", the actual Server in NetWeaver Cloud.

Why do you develop a SAP version of TomEE with the risk to be stuck to an older version whereas Apache proceeding?

Oops, wrong perception. I meant this is a complete open source built server.

More questions coming into my mind:

TomEE is compatible with openEJB which is EJB 3.1 already - will we be able to use it?

Interesting question. On NetWeaver Cloud it is impossible to deploy OSGi bundles, of course. In an on premise version this should be possible. But we have to see what are the consequences...

Did you consider an OSGi based architecture and including eclipse standards like jetty? I cannot really imagine a java cloud solution without the flexibility of OSGi.

As I said it currently is not possible to add OSGi bundles as a user (as far as I know). Whether this is planned or not I have to ask in development

rolf_paulsen
Active Participant
0 Kudos

Benny Schaich-Lebek wrote:


Did you know that you can change the configuration of any NetWeaver Java AS to a minimal configuration that basically makes it a Tomcat (I think EJB still will be there) with a startup time comparable to that one?

Of course you lose BPM and all other advanced services that way....

Regards,

Benny

Hi Benny,

a real "Must Have"!

Please provide us with the documentation. Unofficial or unsupported does not matter at all.

Regards,

Rolf

hofmann
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

Benny posted a blog about this a few years back (yes: years). It is legendary as he confused MB with KB . Just look up the blog in his personal space, should be under the content tab somewhere.

But when you need tomcat functionality, why not use tomcat directly instead? Having a fast servlet container to do fast deployment + test is a must, but the trend is already going further: continuous integration. Would really like to see someone from SAP posting howto's, plugins for CI servers that allow automatic deploy of EARs to NetWeaver.

hofmann
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

Benny,

where actually are you disagreeing? I said: SAP did not positioned NW Java as a JEE server in the market and you said: we did so in not to start a server war. That's more or less the same.

When did (or will) SAP change that position? And is this change focused on Neo or valid for on-premise too? For Neo it should work, for on-premise this will be interesting, as a lot of people already positioned and sold NW Java to clients as the JEE server for your SAP Java developments. There you'll have some serious work to do.

LJS vs TomEE: what are exactly the benefits of LJS (and no, it's more enterprise ready does not count). NW on-premise with Tomcat/LJS? Why not, works for JBoss. But how will this be released in an acceptable way for on-premise? This change is too much for a EHP, we'll have to wait for CE 7.4?

Benny
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Tobias Hofmann wrote:

Benny,

where actually are you disagreeing? I said: SAP did not positioned NW Java as a JEE server in the market and you said: we did so in not to start a server war. That's more or less the same.

It sounded a little bit more aggressive on me. We actually never said to customers that our server is meant for SAP environments only. The impression that there is a general positioning rather comes form SAPs background of being an application company and therefore rather positions applications than technology. For sales this is a no brainer.

When did (or will) SAP change that position? And is this change focused on Neo or valid for on-premise too? For Neo it should work, for on-premise this will be interesting, as a lot of people already positioned and sold NW Java to clients as the JEE server for your SAP Java developments. There you'll have some serious work to do.

The big difference between application and technology sales is that you need technology sales people for this. Those entered the company with the acquisition of Sybase and recently have been integrated into the general SAP sales troops. I'm confident that SAP customers also can use NetWeaver AS Java for all general Java tasks.

LJS vs TomEE: what are exactly the benefits of LJS (and no, it's more enterprise ready does not count). NW on-premise with Tomcat/LJS? Why not, works for JBoss. But how will this be released in an acceptable way for on-premise? This change is too much for a EHP, we'll have to wait for CE 7.4?

LJS basically IS a Tomcat. Due to the new paradigm at SAP development we put as much open source into it as possible and in case there  is non SAP specific development even that is contributed. To my knowledge there are a couple of monitoring and connectivity features that may not be contributed, but I'm even not sure about this.

How to put this into on premise is a challenge, that is true and I'm not talking details as everything I would say is subject to change - And I'm not participating in development discussions on a daily basis...

Regards,

Benny

rolf_paulsen
Active Participant
0 Kudos

Hi Benny,

thank you for your insights.

  1. at first back to the original topic: My prediction about NetWeaver AS Java (CE) /conclusion for our further plannings is that there will be no update to Java EE 6 for several years. Instead of an evolution of the SAP Java platform towards a single unified core that runs inside both, onDemand and onPremise, SAP is focussing on a new (and in many repects "lean") product for the "SAP cloud" and leaves users/developers of the existing "onPremise" AS Java with what they have today. Probably, in the near future, NW AS Java is supported in a completely different division/continent than "LJS Neo".It would be great to have TomEE & addidtions as basis for AS Java 7.40 - but I do not expect this. SAP obviously is not making great plans with NW AS Java any more(maybe a consequence of the fact that many customers are still on <=7.11), but NW AS will lose more and more relevance as Java EE AppServer. Stagnancy means regress. SAP is product driven, not technology driven, so it is not seen as a problem that there are two different runtimes for an identical techological pupose (running Java EE apps).
  2. Since HANA and EclipseLink are the core of SAP cloud perststence services: Where can we get the HANA EclipseLink platform to use it in the onPremise NW AS Java? Or does LJS cloud use an existing DB platform?
  3. OSGi: So plans have changed shortly? See slide four "Deployed using OSGi bundles and/or WAR application packaging" http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/10359565-a46e-2f10-0ba1-8646d8a12...
  4. Interesing for legal reasons: Are there cloud servers (planned) hosted in Germany?
  5. The LJS in SAP cloud is a Tomcat EE with few SAP specific add-on (e.g. onPremise connectivity). It will be interesting to see if SAP can compete with etablished providers for e.g. JBoss AS (openshift) with a large open source community behind. Why should customers choose SAP cloud? Will SAP UI 5 and on Premise connectivity be enough? SAP will definitely not build up a comparable open source community.

Regards

Rolf

Benny
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

/conclusion for our further plannings is that there will be no update to Java EE 6 for several years.

Correction: I only can guarantee this for this year.

Instead of an evolution of the SAP Java platform towards a single unified core that runs i

nside both, onDemand and onPremise, SAP is focussing on a new (and in many repects "lean") product for the "SAP cloud" and leaves users/developers of the existing "onPremise" AS Java with what they have today.

As I said before, it is abolutely IN the plan to bring the capabilities of NetWeaver Cloud to the on premise world also.

(maybe a consequence of the fact that many customers are still on <=7.11), but NW AS will lose more and more relevance as Java EE AppServer.

We are happy that more and more customers change to NetWeaver 7.30 and it's follow up version, as we encourage customers to go there. For a lot of customers the cloud business is not yet an option today and for those we continuously deliver updates for the on premise world.

so it is not seen as a problem that there are two different runtimes for an identical techological pupose (running Java EE apps).

We very well know that this is a challenge. But at the same time it would be a waste of resources to develop the same software twice. Thus we think about how we can move smoothly. As long as you keep developing standard Java, there should not be any problem to later move to a complete on premise Java EE environment.

Where can we get the HANA EclipseLink platform to use it in the onPremise NW AS Java? Or does LJS cloud use an existing DB platform?

Even if you develop for NW Cloud, this means local development, with a small local database. The idea is to be able to develop independently with JPA as a standard base. Currently NW CLoud uses a Sybase DB and it is planned to have the Hana connections ready in the second half of this year.

OSGi: So plans have changed shortly? See slide four "Deployed using OSGi bundles and/or WAR application packaging"

Hmm, seems I missed this. Looks like I was wrong here.

Interesing for legal reasons: Are there cloud servers (planned) hosted in Germany?

We do have data centers in the USA and in Singapore too, but for now they are located in Germany.

5....

Of course, I'm not speculating who does what in the market and hope the best for the company I am with to live long and prosper 😉

Regards,

Benny

hofmann
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

Why exactly do you need JEE6? OK, its a standard since 2009, but is it really a requisite to have a JEE6 certified Java environment to develop state of the art Java applications?

On my wishlist (or bucket list, depends on your view on the future of NW AS Java) for NW OP come other things first, like CI, Spring and a large and active community that shares examples.

rolf_paulsen
Active Participant
0 Kudos

On the top of my JEE wishlist are concrete plans. It is time for a timeline 🙂 as a sign that NW AS Java is not going to become a lame duck.

Then JPA 2.0 e.g. programmatic detaching of entities (would be a simple exercise to change EntityManager interface to JPA 2.0 for 3rd party JPA providers)

CDI (who really needs spring with CDI)

JSF 2.0 allowing use of state of the art UI frameworks (IceFaces) - the experiments with JSF 2.0 in SCN threads all end without success.

This does not mean that CI and an active community would not be more important for us than JEE6, too! But an activity about CI (in NWDI) at SAP hibernates before it began - see http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/JDI/NWDI+and+Open+Source

The examples and demo from a web conference about CI never have been made available. ("We will provide needed code in Code Exchange and a link to it as soon as this happens." Last edited May 27th, 2011)

So I do not see much chance of success to insist in this topic. A large and active community that shares examples - great imagination, but as this example shows, in some cases it is very difficult for SAP itself to share code. This would be necessary for an active community. It would require invest from SAP. Hopefully "The SAP Cloud" changes SAP internally and contributes to an active community - but not too likely while you get only a 90 days trial.

Benny
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Tobias Hofmann wrote:

On my wishlist (or bucket list, depends on your view on the future of NW AS Java) for NW OP come other things first, like CI, Spring and a large and active community that shares examples.

How do you like this Blog?

regards,

Benny

hofmann
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

Benny,

I like it very much as it reflects perfectly the current state of the Java community for NW OP at SAP.

rolf_paulsen
Active Participant
0 Kudos

Tobias, you are brilliant!

hofmann
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

, your blog link does not work. Can you please post the correct link? Thanks.

Benny
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

OK, I actually meant this one: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-7727

Or the whole space http://scn.sap.com/community/open-source

And there is some news pending, which I will place as soon as I have the OK in the next weeks.

Regards,

benny

rolf_paulsen
Active Participant
0 Kudos

I like this one -unfortunately not very known:

http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-29056

BTW historical event within the last weeks:-)

SAP finally finished implementation of Java EE 5 (JPA 1.0) in NW 7.30 by implementing the method javax.persistence.spi.PersistenceUnitInfo.addTransformer(ClassTransformer transformer) and now is fully Java EE 5 compliant.

This allows 3rd party JPA persistence providers (e.g. EclipseLink) to use dynamic bytecode manipulation ("weaving") inside the container. Today the patch successfully passed our first tests (see SAP Note 1686302 for details).

Regards

Rolf

daniel_ruiz2
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

Hi,

NW 7.1 is EE Compliant, not 7.3 - At least 7.3 is not listed in Oracle's website - can someone please clarify which version is compliant?

Regards,

D.

SandipAgarwalla
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

Daniel

AFIK, NW7.3 is JAVA EE5 compliant.

Regards

Sandip

rolf_paulsen
Active Participant
0 Kudos

Yes, all versions greater or equal 7.1 are Java EE 5 compliant. The EE5 spec is 6 years old now.

NW 7.3 still is not Java EE 6 compliant (= no EJB 3.1, JPA 2.0, CDI, new WebProfile), that is what this thread is about.

Regards

Rolf

steffen_spahr2
Participant
0 Kudos

Hi,

since 10.05.2013 the next release of SAP NetWeaver generally available (GA) to the public: SAP NetWeaver 7.4!

Looking inside the technical description for the java-stack, I found the announcement:

SAP NetWeaver 7.31 SP Java and SAP NetWeaver 7.4 Java are based on the same internal codeline meaning they are identical.

=> NW 7.4 is also EE5 compatible, not EE6 😞

=> Today the only SAP-NetWeaver that supports the EE 6 WebProfile is the SAP NetWeaver Cloud;-)

Regards

Steffen


Benny
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
0 Kudos

Steffen Spahr wrote:

=> NW 7.4 is also EE5 compatible, not EE6 😞

=> Today the only SAP-NetWeaver that supports the EE 6 WebProfile is the SAP NetWeaver Cloud;-)

Regards

Steffen


Correct.It is in the planning to have the Cloud version in NetWeaver as a plugin. I'm currently working on an announcement.

Regards,

Benny

Former Member
0 Kudos

Hi,

I'm also very interested in knowing the roadmap of SAP on this subject.

Will SAP CE 7.4 be JEE6 compliant?