A long time ago I wrote a application server for SAP. It was written in Perl for an Apache/mod_Perl system on a Linux box. On the SAP side it communicated using the CPAN SAP::Rfc module to SAP using standard SAP RFC communication, and to the human user using web pages templated in CPAN Template Toolkit 2 engine.
Built on this application server we built a web process that automated standard SAP Service Managment. The users hated using the SAP GUI but were perfetly happy to carry out the exact same processes if it was presented to them in a web browser!
Because the backend process are all standalone ABAP function calls it allowed us to very easily test and deploy the solution without having to deal with the complexity of a combined system (e.g. ITS or using Business Connector).
We have used the system now for many years, so sucessfully that last year we used the same appserver to create a realtime report from our manufacturing system to show on the intranet. It's possible that we may use the same app server again to create notifications on our intranet.
Our solution may not be SAP standard WebDynpro, but it has the advantage that it worked when we need it, it's a lot faster than WebDynpro (when we compared the two) and it still works prefectly well on our recently upgraded ECC06 boxes.
Given that we may use the code base again, it's probably worth dusting it off, upgrading it all to the latest code on CPAN and the latest version of SAP's Rfc SDK. It may be it may even be worth releasing on CPAN so others can use it...
