The first in a three-part series about O'Reilly editor chromatic's experiences with SAP NetWeaver CE is now live on the O'Reilly Network:
Does Enterprise Development Have to Be Painful? (Exploring SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment, Part One)
The article leads:
Despite the buzz about social networking, mashups, collaborative filtering, machine learning, and everything else grouped under the convenient label of Web 2.0, writing business software seems to be business as usual...
Then chromatic takes us through a quick tour of challenges of enterprise-wide software in general (for example, "Business software isn't going away. If you're a consultant or a small ISV, you probably make money writing, customizing, and maintaining software of this sort. Maybe your platform isn't J2EE or ABAP, but learning an extra tool and platform gives you and your customers more options..."), followed by reasons to try SAP NetWeaver CE in this context, and a blow-by-blow account of his first installation "milestone" odyssey, finally concluding:
I have a lot to learn to write applications with SAP NetWeaver CE, but I'm past the first hurdles, and that gives me a lot of confidence that things will make a lot of sense in context from here. While the download-and-go score is much less than the simple aptitude install build-essential I normally use on a new machine, the immediate out-of-the-box capabilities are greater. Writing software this way may be much easier than I thought.
Expect two more articles in the series on using SAP NetWeaver CE to build and deploy an application soon.
