Hello folks, I am standing here outside at the stairs of the SAP Headquarters in Walldorf, Germany and I am waiting for the CAF development minister to give a press conference on the latest news about the CAF 1.0.
Aaahh, here he comes! Dressed in short pants, "SAP TechED 93 Speaker" T-shirt and Birkenstock shoes, the minister walks out through the revolving door into the hot Walldorf summer.
SDN: Pardon me, Minister. A question which is hot in the development community: When will the CAF be available?
Minister: After a thorough discussion with the cabinet, the Queen of SAP NetWeaver and my friend, the Development Minister of WebDynpro, we will have available the CAF version 1.0 in August for pilots. I also want to take this opportunity to thank our developers that spend all their days and weekends...
SDN: ...thank you. I heard rumors that there were changes in the CAF in the last few weeks?
Minister: Rumors are sometimes based on facts, although I don't exactly know the rumors you heard - but - yes, we made some changes. The most obvious change was the merge of the Object Layer with the Service Layer. The parties involved agreed on renaming the Business Objects to "Entity Services". Now there will be three service-types in the CAF: External Services for RFC and Web Services, Entity Services for the persistency and life-cycle methods, and Application Services, which contain the business logic. With the relentless commitment of our developers, spending all their days and weekends...
SDN: ...thank you. What does the Application Service Modeler look like?
Minister: It's grey with red dots. My wife selected the red dots.
SDN: Uhmm, what I meant was, what functionality does it provide?
Minister: It comes with some marvelous functionality. The modeler allows you to create application services and the operations by using existing entity and application services. The generated coding then includes the method-bodies and all supporting interfaces, imports, implementations. The method-bodies can then be filled by developers with custom business logic in Java. Application services can be defined as stateless or stateful session beans and be exposed as Web services themselves. In total we have 11 fields, 2 radio buttons, 3 tree and 2 grid controls and one coding box in the modeler, wrapped by 4 tab strips. The developers in Sofia, Minsk and Walldorf were really working hard on getting this done in the last few days and weekends and...
SDN: ...yes, very well, sir. Could you please tell us more about External Services?
Minister: With pleasure. CAF enables you to import definitions of RFCs and Web services and make them available on the framework for composite applications. This way they can be used in the Entity and Application Services and a developer gains the complete power of reusing code from existing applications. Entity Services therefore can use data from backend systems and don't necessarily need local persistency. Our developers...
SDN: ....yes, yes. What about CAF and XI?
Minister: Thank you for that question. CAF-based applications can integrate with XI through Web services. Many of our developers worked hard....
SDN: ....yes, yes, yes. Any news about UI patterns?
Minister: That's a question that I've been waiting for. I can proudly announce some additional patterns that we are going to deliver with the first shipment. The most interesting pattern is called "Flextree" and is more or less a tuned up table-tree control. Very nice. My wife and my dogs also like it. The developers have done a....
SDN: ...thank you. Is there a final statement for today that you want to give to the developer community?
Minister: Yes, there is. We plan a sneak preview version of the CAF 1.0 designer to be shipped in SP7 for SAP NetWeaver 04. All developers did a great job and I want to use this opportunity...
SDN: ...to thank you. That's great news. Thank you very much for the interview!
