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Recently there's been more and more activities out there regarding why and how to use the LAMP stack connected to enterprise business applications. As I just read two articles (this one and this one) concerning how SAP and its competitors approach this topic, I started thinking about whether today's state of the art architecture, namely SOA or more precisely how SAP applies it, enterprise SOA is a competitor of LAMP and especially scripting languages and frameworks (Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Rails, Groovy and Grails etc.) or they are rather complementary. My conclusion is that both approaches can be valid but the latter one seems to be more viable in the long run.

Why am I telling that?

As it can be seen from the articles mentioned, SAP is supporting LAMP much less than others. And it has a good reason. While for example PHP's history is full of being used for implementing (mostly small, partly large) websites with some business logic but almost no so-called backend functionality, ERP and other enterprise applications of SAP are run mostly by huge or at least big enough companies. If you consider old versions of ERP systems or smaller customers that don't want to invest in the Java stack of Netweaver, the only two ways of extensibility are changing ABAP code or use any language that has RFC connector and call BAPIs or whatever. Having this situation, in most of the cases it's not only feasible but maybe one of the best options is to use Scripting in a Box, choose your favorite scripting language and go ahead.

Nevertheless, if you have to implement something for a bigger company and/or on top of a newer version of MySAP that includes Java stack, probably it's better to utilize the capabilities that SAP provides. I'm telling this because of two main reasons: number one is that Java as a platform is in my opinion much more designed to be the base for applications having a relatively high architectural complexity; and number two is that SAP delivers various modeling and development tools and runtime environments, the so-called Model-Driven Architecture (for example Enterprise Portal, Composite Application Framework including Guided Procedures, Visual Composer), that make it easier and more cost-efficient to produce custom applications on top of the MySAP suite (or later on, the Enterprise Service Repository).

Last but not least, don't misunderstand me: as a skilled programmer I like very much scripting languages, mostly Perl, sometimes I don't even understand why operating systems have other user interface than bash or ksh :), but the trend, that probably none of us can turn back, is to empower more and more people with less and less technology skills to implement or adjust business processes implemented with IT systems quicker and easier.

However, I don't fear that we as programmers will lose our jobs in the next 300 years or so 🙂

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