If Yan can Cook… Yan Could Code… (SAP NWDI Part II) Part II – Food Courts, Recipes/Planning and the Swedish Chef Syndrome Welcome to “If Yan can Cook… Yan Could Code… (SAP NWDI Part II)”. If you would like to go back and start this series from the beginning please follow this link: If Yan can Cook... Yan Could Code... (SAP NWDI Part I). So whether you are eating at a large fast food restaurant chain, a hotdog cart on 58th and Broadway or at a Mall Food Court you are a consumer of a Software Component of some sort with the place of purchase being the User Interface that brings you the food that you are purchasing. Sounds crazy right? Well think about software architecture for a moment and then think about how you cook. When you put together a meal you always start with a recipe of some sort. The recipe is a known equation that you have stored in a cookbook, index card box or binder that is within your personal home library. This is great for you but potentially not so great for people that come to your house, love the food but cannot get a hold of the recipe. Or, if you are sharing the cooking detail with another person you may only have one copy in your library to use so only one person can have access to the recipe at any given time. This is where mistakes are made and food becomes ruined and/or not cooked to the recipe requirements. Over the last few years on the Internet a quiet revolution has taken place when it comes to recipes. Sites have popped up all over the place with recipe stockpiles. You can input a new recipe, read an existing recipe and even alter and comment on existing recipes without damaging the original recipe. BRILLIANT! If only things were so easy in the JAVA coding world. I liken the early JAVA coding/development environment to how I described above the sharing of kitchen/cooking duties of a recipe. It is almost always a total and complete nightmare in my opinion to cook with someone else. I mean honestly, I do not want these people playing mucky muck with my kitchen, my recipe library or my ingredients. Everybody has their own recipe library and way of doing a recipe and it almost never works out well in the final result when there are just too many cooks in one environment. This in the end causes the consumer or eater of the meal to complain back to the food server or in this case the User Interface which then in turn filters back to the disgruntled Muppet like Swedish Chefs (the software developers/designers). You know, it really isn’t the Chefs fault. They work the best with what they have. NWDI has dealt with this multiple Swedish Chef issue in a simple and useful way in my opinion. If you look at the basic SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio installation you can get a decent idea of what I mean. This essentially gives every raw chicken flinging flour tossing nightmare of a Swedish Chef developer their own development/JAVA environment to work and to test their code in. What is so great about that you ask? Well think about it for a moment. Alright then, if you give every developer their own environment then they cannot wreak havoc on yours. This is great. They cannot crash your JAVA environment. They won’t slow your instance down to a crawl. Every Swedish Chef has their own kitchen to fling flour and raw chicken in. That solves the kitchen issue but we still have an issue with everybody having to share the same recipes. If I want to cook in my kitchen and another Swedish Chef checked out the recipe I want to cook I am out of luck until they check that recipe back into the library. So this is where I will go back to that recipe stockpile idea. Within NWDI we have something called the DTR (Design Time Repository). If you have had to sit through any of my lectures at TechEd or ASUG and actually stayed awake during them you will remember that I probably said 1,001 times that the DTR only knows files and folders. In cooking terms this is the library that contains your recipes. It also contains everything that you will need to get your food out to the table from an ingredient point of view. The best part is in my opinion that all of the Swedish Chefs can share the information in it (Files and Folders… Get it?). They can check items (libraries etc.) out and use those items in their Kitchen. Oh… and so can you. So no one Swedish Chef is locking another Swedish Chef out of any of their perspective kitchens. Don’t you see it? NWDI gives you one resource repository for all developers. Now that is pretty slick. The DTR is sort of a Sous-chef that the Development Architect or Development Manager has enabled to make sure that everything is set up and ready to use when the Chefs come in to the office/kitchen to code/cook. It is uniting the various Swedish Chefs to be unified and succeed rather than constantly have to side step each other in a single kitchen. scott.braker/blog/2006/01/11/if-yan-can-cook133-yan-could-code133-sap-nwdi-part-iii
