I would like to give a short summary of what happened on the SDN Day in Amsterdam, the 17-th Oct. 2006.
After the breakfast Mark Finnern gave us a welcome to the event and presented the schedule. We started with a power networking session: Four 20-minute Sessions with Six SDNers per Table. As I was sitting at the Scripting Languages table, I would like to share some impressions of the atmosphere there. We talked much about the emmerging SAP Scripting Tool and how much value it will bring to all scripting projects that plan to utilize SAP backend systems. We discussed Gregor Wolf's contest and he was so kind to inform us that his test system is also available inside the SAP corporate network, so all SAP employees now can participate too. Gregor works for Siteco Beleuchtungstechnik GmbH and the award they offer for the contest is a Siteco Vistosa task light. More information about the contest can be found at SDN Contest: SAP on Rails in a real Business Application. Another key discussion was held with Björn Schotte, the chief editor of PHP Magazine, Germany, presenting also his company Mayflower Gmbh. He shared some visions on business applications of PHP and stated that PHP is definitely enterprise ready.
Then after a very short pause we started the SDN breakout sessions (3-5 in parallel). I visited the sessions of Gregor Wolf, André Labahn, Björn Schotte and after this I cooperated for the breakout session of Frank Mittag.
Session 1: Connecting Typo3 to R/3 Enterprise via Web Services with Gregor Wolf from Siteco Beleuchtungstechnik GmbH Siteco Beleuchtungstechnik GmbH currently implements a customer service centre into it's Typo3 based website. Typo3 is an Open Source Web Content Management system based on the Scripting Language PHP. The application will allow Siteco's customers to directly check price & availability of products from the backend R/3 Enterprise system, quotations, orders and delivery status. The backend connectivity uses Web Services utilise the PEAR SOAP Package.
Session 2: SAP supports Scripting Languages with Andre Labahn from SAP. This session will provide you with more insights on how SAP is supporting scripting languages.
Session 3: Scripting Languages PHP and Enterprise Software with Björn Schotte (Chief Editor from PHP Magazine). This session showed us a brief history of PHP and PHP in Germany. Some enterprise applications of PHP were discussed. Björn Schotte was the opinion that PHP is definitely enterprise ready and he proved it with an example of a system that his company has created for Siemens.
Session 4: Scripting Languages Tool with Frank Mittag and Vasil Bachvarov (me) from SAP SAP will provide a open source tool to the scripting development community that is supporting the access to SAP Backend Systems via RFC/BAPIs and Webservices. See the concept and demo of the tool and discuss this with SAP Development. There was a pretty interesting discussion about the tool. Since the time for the last session shrinked with some minutes we had to be very quick, but Frank Mittag did a great job and succeeded to explain the basic concept of the SAP Scripting Tool and show it in action for the tough time constraint. There were a lot of questions from the audience but it was already 18:30 and we stopped at this point. There would be a second chance for questions on thursday when Frank had the opportunity to make a more complete and comprehensive walk-through of the project.
Then we gathered in the meeting hall and Shai Agassi held a speech and made a summary of the event.
The evening finished in the BoomChicago theater where everybody received a delicious meal, drinks and a great amount of fun with the ChicagoBoom comic crew.
I would like to thank all people that made this event come true! See you soon in Bangalore.
