The story of SAP NetWeaver Cloud Labs

Today, SAP NetWeaver Cloud Labs has taken off. “Boarding procedure” gives you an idea what’s it all about… But how did it start? Let me tell you the story behind the plane “SAP NetWeaver Cloud Labs” and give you a glimpse into its flight schedule.

It’s December 2011 and SAP NetWeaver Cloud has reached a high adoption within SAP. Not only did teams build application on top of it, but also developed extensions for the platform and enhance its tooling. Both kinds are two great “types of luggage” we want to take with us on our journey, but there was no dedicated channel for sharing them with the community inside and outside SAP. Many people inside SAP thought how to improve the situation and after several exciting discussions, the idea of SAP NetWeaver Cloud Labs was born: a dedicated channel to co-innovate on ideas extending SAP NetWeaver Cloud.

Since then it took us 6 months to get SAP NetWeaver Cloud Labs internally off the ground: On 2012-06-22, we announced the first stopover “SAP NetWeaver Cloud Labs has taken off internally”. Many people were involved in making this happen, but the most important ones are the developers contributing their passion and coding. Today, 4 more months later, our plane is ready for external boarding—for you the community outside SAP. You’re all invited to join an exciting journey and (maybe) you like to check-in with your own piece of luggage?

Several pieces are already on board: The first one we’re unloading from the plane for you at SAP TechEd 2012 Las Vegas is the SAP NetWeaver Cloud Add-On for Spring Roo. Wondering what’s the Add-on for Spring Roo is all about? Let’s see what Michael, one of the great guys behind the add-on, wrote (Follow him on Twitter to stay in the loop):

“Spring Roo is a Rapid Application Development (RAD) framework maintained by SpringSource. We have created add-ons for Roo to make it easy and comfortable to use Roo with the SAP NetWeaver Cloud platform. Use Roo to create a basic web application and deploy it to the SAP NetWeaver Cloud in minutes. Roo generates 100% pure Java code, packaged as a standard Maven project, so it is easy to handle and extend. Import it in your favorite IDE like Eclipse and start extending it, or write a mobile app connecting to the REST interfaces to your data, that Roo can automatically create for you. Try it out, and learn how Roo can help you kick starting your ideas.”

Stay tuned and be ensured, there’s plenty more to come.

Now that we got the plane off the ground (Thanks to all of my colleagues who made this possible. Great job, guys!), it’s time for me to take a break… so I hand over the flight control to Matthias Steiner and take some weeks off. After TechEd 2012 Las Vegas, I’ll start my private journey back to Europe—the other way round the globe: Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Frankfurt, and Berlin. So, if you want to catch up at any of my private “stopovers”, just ping me @larskarg.

And now, there is only one thing left: Follow the journey of the plane, board it and have fun! 😉 Meet us at the next stopover: SAP TechEd 2012 Madrid.