If I have worked farther in IT, it is because I was moving on the higher and higher abstractions of systems. Sir Isaac Newton might turn in his grave if he read my mutation of his famous quote. But what I said is so true. It is so true that Bruce Eckel started his famous Thinking in Java with "The progress of Abstraction".
Today when I look back at my career and things I have done it seems to me that I have also been elevating myself with this sort of abstraction. My first love was BBC Micro. These little computers used Motorola 6502 and had hopping 32kb of RAM. After a brief stint with BASIC on these machines I moved on to assembly of 6502. It was quite fun for a geek in 8th Standard. Later I used the 8086 assembly in engineering school. Pascal, C etc. also came during this period.
Then I programmed some in CGI-Perl. In fact two of the blogging sites I publish are powered by Perl. But now coming to the real thing. With the release of NW04 and WebDynpro. That bar in this abstraction game has been again raised. Just think about a single iView based on WebDynpro fetching info from a SAP CRM system and you will be amazed. Let us break this
- iView is being viewed in a browser which is running on top of an OS using the network.
- iView was served by Portal Server via Page Builder. iView is created inside WAS on the WebDynPro Runtime
- PRT or Portal Runtime is also in these layer
- WAS is running on top of JVM
- JVM is running of top of OS
While I might have exaggerated few things above. But you would agree with the layers of abstraction involved. Isn't it magic how every thing works when it works 😄
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