SDN meets Labs – a short summary

Yesterday I posted I could take someone with me to Rot, I received a mail but couldn’t answer it in time. Sorry Shehryar, but you are a great mate and it was a pleasure to meet you.

Arrival from Berlin was messy as usual. Frankfurt airport was messy this morning and the traffic from Frankfurt to Walldorf even messier (but isn’t it always?)

So I was ten minutes late for the keynotes and Klaus was already in his element. Sorry Klaus, you were good, but Ivo’s demos were even better. It wasn’t the only time this day that I saw applications with selection and a nice output in the web appear within minutes. Looks like the development really wants us to think about design and not code.

Next came a session on Java development and the visual composer. I finally understood what Java is about and what the MVC really means. Thanks for this. The VC looks great at first but I wonder how much it will be used. Why do you need a portal for this? This is a big disadvantage opposed to WebDynpro.

Then came Dirk Feeken and WebDynpro for ABAP. Dirk and me had the same ABAP courses when we joined SAP somewhen last century so I had to visit this track and it was more than worth it. I’m really looking forward to seeing NW04s (as it was called in the slides – the official name will probably come at the SAPPHIRE next week).

Finally the jam sessions. This was impressive. Including an Adobe pdf into a Web Dynpro within eight minutes? No problem, even with a good explanation. Finally being able to monitor Java sessions as you can do it with ABAP? No problem. But among all the great features and gimmicks my personal highlight was the new ABAP editor. Code completion – finally. Highlighting keywords and errors during typing – finally. Displaying definitions as tooltips – the ABAP editor finally has the features I knew from my Pascal development 9 years ago. I thought about standing up to yell ‘Why so late’ but it shows that there is no idea to abandon ABAP.

It was great to meet all the people I met today. Just one more note. The SDN tracks are not recorded so you won’t see my presentation tomorrow live. Guess I’ll have to write a blog about it.

Dirk