SAP introduces Simple Sample Applications for SOA

SAP has been shipping enterprise services for the SAP Business Suite for more than three years now. Within this timeframe, we built the Enterprise Services Workplace (ES Workplace) to provide customers and partners an environment to discover, test-drive and run all the enterprise services shipped ready-to-use by SAP together with its Business Suite applications. And we built the Enterprise Services Wiki (ES Wiki) where even people who are not SAP-savvy can browse through a comprehensive portfolio of business scenarios SOA-enabled by the SAP Business Suite, and learn about the value SOA adds to their business processes.

However, it appeared that with the number of abstraction levels the number of possible error sources increases. This makes enterprise services significantly more complex to understand than plain web services or other APIs, and this is why customers and partners request sample applications which demonstrate consumption of enterprise services with SOA technology from SAP as a starting point for own development projects.

So what our teams are going to do is build and publish sample applications for the most commonly used existing enterprise services based on various SAP consumption technologies, such as SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer or WebDynpro Java and ABAP. These Simple Sample Apps will be made availabe ready-to-run in the ES Wiki and ES Workplace environment, together with technical documentation, coding, implementation models and IDES demo data. SAP customers and partners will be able to download and install these applications locally and test them against the back-end systems of the hosted ES Workplace testing environment.

Among the first samples will be Create Maintenance Request, a little app that does what it says: Creating maintenance requests by reading equipment data via the Read Individual Material enterprise service, reviewing these data for creating the request, using the Create Maintenance Request enterprise service, and finally get a confirmation for this request with the help of the Read Maintenance Request enterprise service, as depicted in the following graphics:

 All these services are included in the Maintenance Processing. ES bundle for SAP ERP 6.0. The application has been modeled and implemented using SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer.

Going forward, you will find entry points for Simple Sample Apps in each ES bundle description in the ES Wiki, such as the Maintenance Processing ES bundle, in the section for sample coding. Plus, you will find a link in the Where-used-section of the ES Workplace every time you browse the documentation of an enterprise service that is part of a Simple Sample App. In a separate view of ES Workplace, you will find a scenario description of the app, together with links for test-driving the app rightaway, or downloading documentation or the software component archive itself:

We carefully listen to our customers and partners, and to independent developers. Therefore we are eager to know whether this new asset would help you understand enterprise services consumption and get your SOA projects started more quickly. You can find more details in the Collaboration Workspace of the Enterprise Services Community at https://cw.sdn.sap.com/community/esc/cag16.

Simple Samples will be officially released soon, please stay tuned.