A few weeks ago I had the opportunity and pleasure to meet with my development colleagues at SAP Labs, Bulgaria in the amicable city of Sofia. In one of the meetings I had we talked about sailing in Las Vegas. No, I am not talking about enjoying the recreational activities at nearby Lake Mead. I mean SAP TechEd ‘07 session CE108 - SAP NetWeaver Application Server Java – Reliable Sailing. When I found out about this session I was very excited. In fact, if I did not have speaking conflicts, I would definitely take the time to attend this session myself. However, since I was able to sit down with the creator of this session and learn about it, I can give you some highlights so you can make sure to put it on your agenda for TechEd.
What, you ask, does sailing have to do with Java? Well this session is about the Java engine robustness features in the SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment (CE). As explained in the session “[t]he Java foundation of SAP NetWeaver CE is like a ship” and “[y]our Java applications are like passengers on this ship”. So, if you have a robust Java foundation, you can reliably sail the ship…get it? And, at the end of the day, reliable sailing for business applications is what we all want. Also, in case you are not necessarily interested in CE, you can still be interested in this session since the Java in CE will also be the Java in the next SAP NetWeaver release.
One of the biggest issues with running business applications on Java is that Java was not designed for it in the first place. Java was designed for embedded scenarios where we normally have one parallel user. But, in business scenarios several concurrent users work with multiple applications. Or, as one of my scott.braker/blog likes to say, Java was made to run your microwave, not your corporate finance applications. Since we do run corporate finance applications on Java, though, this session will let you know about what SAP has built to make Java more robust and enterprise application friendly. For example, the Java in CE provides session isolation to reduce the impact of an application failure. What does this mean? Well, with SAP NetWeaver 7.0, active and inactive sessions reside together inside the local memory of the Java VM. There are only few processes/VMs because of the high memory footprint and, therefore, a high number of active sessions inside one VM. With CE we will have several VMs and, therefore, only a few concurrent sessions inside one process. The active and the inactive sessions are separated from the memory point of view. The result is a complete change in behavior when there is a session crash: in SAP NetWeaver 7.0 all of the sessions – active and inactive – are lost; with CE only the active sessions are lost so the other sessions can continue in another VM. CE108 will tell you about the Java engine architecture design, how to configure it, and how developers can create applications that take advantage of it. For the administrator, this session will also let you know about advanced alerting, monitoring and analysis features that are provided with CE, all in the name of robustness, and, reliable sailing!
All-in-all this looks to be a great session. Check it out, and I’ll see you in Las Vegas…
