I am happy to announce the first (known) customer success story of the SAP NetWeaver Server Adapter for Eclipse.
The Sysco Corporation has a project that needs to build applications on Adobe Flex 4 and still deploy them from the IDE to their SAP NetWeaver CE 7.1 EHP1 application server. The Adobe Flash Builder 4 is a set of Eclipse plug-ins that require Eclipse 3.4+ to install. Unfortunately, the SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio 7.1 EHP1 ships with Eclipse 3.3 and this prevent the installation of the Flash Builder plug-ins on top of it.
Luckily, Sysco founds the SAP NetWeaver Server Adapter for Eclipse and now successfully run Eclipse 3.5 + Flash Builder 4 and deploy on the SAP NetWeaver 7.1 EHP1 server. They also provided valuable feedback that led to the improvement of the server adapter's deployment mechanism.
Here is what John Toman says about the Sysco story:
Our company is currently involved in the conversion to SAP and we have adopted Adobe Flex 4.0 for building out the user interface components for our customers and suppliers. We’re using NetWeaver CE 7.1.1 application server and the corresponding version of NWDS, but it does not support Flex 4 (requires Eclipse 3.4 or newer). Additionally, SAP NWDI currently does not support the Flex components (MXML, Action Script). These constraints forced us to turn to base Eclipse (3.5) for the Flex integration into the IDE. As we started configuring the IDE we discovered the SAP Server adapter for Eclipse was not able to deploy applications to a remote server. I contacted the development team responsible for the server adapter and within one day they had provided a solution. Shortly after we discovered an issue with deploying large applications. Again, the SAP Labs development team went to work and within days had developed, tested and released a solution. We’ve had several minor issues since and the SAP team has consistently responded to our requests in an extremely timely manner, with high quality results, every time. We would not have been able to meet our project goals and objectives without the turnaround SAP Labs provided. It is refreshing to find a vendor that provides the kind of results as SAP Labs.
More information about the server adapter and its current state can be found on the wiki page.
