Introduction
Finally, I've had some time to sit down and reflect on the SDN meets labs event in waldorf. My biggest regret was not showing up in the gathering on the monday in Markstube. Reports say that there were about 20-30 persons and as far as I know it produced some really good discussions (like why XML sucks). My only excuse is that I didn't arrive at my hotel before 23.30 after a long journey, but still I ought to have come. I will definitively participate in a similar social event in any future events.
Sessions
In general the session were very good. However, having attended TechEd last year, I felt that too many of the sessions were repeating what I'd learned there. Generally, I also would have prefered even more demos during the sessions, but of course time was a limiting factor. I didn't experience that any of the sessions were cut short, which was the case in Palo Alto, and there was both opportunity and time to ask question (which is often where you learn the most). I've picked out a couple of sessions which I will comment briefly on:
ESA
The session on Enterprise Service Architecture was well executed. It finally gave some meaning to the ESA term which has been popping up everywhere. Unfortunately, the business objects which are needed for implementing this require a modification in the wsdl file format, which means that unless this is passed through the standards body, interoperability with other platforms will be reduced. Hopefully, one of the 40-50 people SAP has working in standards comitees can manage to reconcile these changes. Profiling
My favorite session of all, was Detlev Beutner's Profiling iviews with JProbe. It was great to see a person so enthusiastic about the subject at hand. For those who didn't participate in the session, Detlev profiled the administration console page for SAP Enterprise Portal which has four iviews. First only at method level, but then he should how to get a line by line code break down. (This requires the source code). By basic optimization of a for loop he managed to improve the load time by almost 25%. Impressive indeed.
On basis of this demo, I would suggest to SAP that they release the source code of the entire portal (as they will do for the new webdynpro version of ESS/MSS), and start a contest for optimizing the portal. I truely belive that this will significantly improve the performance of the portal, which all SAP EP customers would benefit from.
Conclusion
I hope and believe SDN meets labs is an event that will continue to exist and evolve in the years to come. It is always exciting to meet with people using the same technology as you and see what they have gotten out of it. And when you also get to see what SAP has got cooking, you've got an unbeatable combination.
However, it might be seen as rather ironic that I spent a good time of the event discussing ruby on rails and "java is the new cobol" (this statement is of course from DJ), but these are the sort discussions you get when you put too many programmers in one building.
See you next year
