Hey everybody, and welcome to Diamond. We're all pretty excited about launching the Business Objects Developer Community this week. I'm going to get right down to business with this post and not waist too much of your time that will hopefully be spent reviewing the content on the site.If you just want to know where to find samples without reading my samples rant, scroll down to the bottom of this page.
A majority of the feedback that we received from customers and employees who work with customers was that they just want to have good access to sample applications. I've always found this kind of funny since I personally know of hundreds of samples that are available to anyone who is developing with our SDKs. I recently met with the developer support team in Vancouver (which I was recently a member of) and once again the feedback was Customers want more samples and they want to be able to find them easier . So it finally dawned on me, maybe its not the customers fault, maybe its not as easy find samples as I thought.
Business Objects generally provides two types of samples. The first set of samples I would call proof of concept samples. These samples are generally prepared by groups like pre-sales consultants and product managers to prove that a certain SDK can get the job done for a specific business purpose. These samples are great for validating your purchase and helping you to feel confident that you to will also be able to create the application that your "use" case requires.
The problem with the first type of sample is that it can often be so nicely developed with proper programming techniques that it is hard to follow what is happening in the code. It may be difficult to find the code that sets parameters if the sample is 600 lines of code contained in 30 files.
The second type of sample is the "code snippet" sample. These samples are usually prepared by the Customer Support teams at Business Objects. These samples are simple and to the point. They teach simple principles like how to set report parameter values and pass login credentials to the database. There are literally hundreds of these samples. The trick can often be finding them all.
What I decided to do was post as many samples as I could in a logical tree format on the community site developer forum. I've organized the samples in what I thought would be a logical tree format. If you think this format doesn't make any sense, then too bad I've already done it. Just joking! The community site is going to be a living breathing thing that will change as customers require it to.
You can find the sample you need by answering the question asked by each node in the tree. The questions are:
- Will I be creating a desktop or web application?
- What programming language will I be using?
- Which Business Objects product do I have?
There are currently more than a hundred samples published on the Developer forum and there will be more to come. Please feel free to add your own samples to the list. If you have questions or comments about the samples post them to the comments area of the forum post in which the sample is contained.
Finding the samples:
There are a number of ways to find the samples:
If there are any samples you think we are missing add a comment to this article and I'll make sure that they get uploaded to the forum.
Read the white paper comparing the BusinessObjects Enterprise SDKs
