Right from the beginning SAP StreamWork provided a rich setup of APIs which allow developers to integrate their applications with SAP StreamWork or to enhance SAP StreamWork with additional business tools. The knowledge on how to use the APIs is currently a little scattered: several blogs exists which teach you how to get around some of the challenges and in addition a pure API reference is available at https://streamwork.com/developers. We want to change this and provide the developer community with the information they need at one central location. We want to make it as easy for developers to get started with development using the SAP StreamWork APIs. Please read ahead to learn more about what we have planned.
SAP already has one central location to share information with a developer community that is widely accepted: SDN. So we will not invent something new for SAP StreamWork but leverage the existing infrastructure. Let me briefly explain which of the SDN tools we want to use and which kind of information you can expect to find.
- SDN Community: the StreamWork Developer Community was already established some time ago. We want to continue using this community as the central entry point to information on the StreamWork APIs. We want to make sure that this page becomes more active so that our community can make it back into the left side navigation menu.
- Forum: like our SDN community, the has been around for a while. We want to give it more attention from SAP side to get the forum going and thereby ensuring that the community reaches a critical mass where developers can help each other.
- Wiki: We will setup a Wiki for StreamWork integration topics. The Wiki will contain step-by-step instructions for all our APIs, include some guides (e.g. on performance), provide useful links that help with certain topics (like around OpenSocial), cover documentation which goes beyond what is currently being available at https://streamwork.com/developers (for example the various INPUT_XML and RESPONSE_XML files using by the StreamWork Integration API) and we also want to include some flow/architecture diagrams when we think they will help in understanding the API. Whenever we introduce a new topic we will start it in the Wiki to be able to involve the community in further improving the content.
- Blog: Finding blogs for the SAP StreamWork API was difficult. With this blog we introduced a new blog category "StreamWork". This will make it a lot easier to find blogs on the StreamWork API. We will do some clean-up work an make sure that already existing blogs will also show up in this new category.
- Article: We also plan to make use of articles. To be able to easily find articles on the SAP StreamWork API we will introduce a new topic. As stated above: new topics will start in the Wiki. When the topic reaches maturity we will publish articles on those topics.
- eLearning: In some cases providing short and snappy e-learning sessions along with written documentation can be beneficial. However, eLearning modules are currently not on the top of our backlog.
- Code Exchange: The easiest way to understand and learn an API is to look real coding, play around with it and enhance it. Therefore we also plan on setting up a Code Exchange project where we will share some code and ask the community to enhance it further.
Of course we will not be able to provide all this tomorrow. However, you should see our Wiki early in Q2. More important: you will see our Wiki grow significantly in Q2 to contain the step-by-step instructions for all the APIs. In addition we want to setup the Code Exchange project in Q2 and we are already in touch with developers who built applications using the APIs and talk to them about sharing their experience via a blog.
Stay tuned and visit the StreamWork Developer Community to get all the information which I outlined above.
