GW+RFC vs Backend for Service Development
I keep hearing questions about the choice of system for the service development. I thought it’s useful to share my views with the community and receive inputs from other experts. Based on my experience i have put together below comparison between backend based service development vs GW+RFC based service development.
|
Backend |
Gateway/RFC |
|
|
Modeling |
Data Dictionary objects can be used for creating the model, and thus making the development quicker and type conflict error free |
No access to DD objects, and hence modeling has to be done from the scratch. Type conflict issues has to be taken care while doing the development |
|
SAP’s Approach |
Majority of the services developed by SAP uses the backend as the service development environment. |
Very few services, are developed using the gateway-RFC approach as business scenario demands multiple backend systems – MY Inbox App |
|
Service Provisioning |
Services can directly consumed by HCP/SMP or other consumption enabled systems |
Can be consumed, however adds additional interface point and can affect the performance |
|
Features |
Top and Skip functionalities are performance effective as they are applied to the DB query |
Top and Skip is applied on to the RFC output and thus not utilizing the full benefit of the feature |
|
Guideline |
Existing classes/code (Assistance Classes from webdynpro ) can be reused directly |
Moving away from Class/Methods approach to FM based approach. Though there are already data provider classes available (Assistance classes) from Webdynpro, they can’t be used directly as the development approach demands RFCs |
To conclude, backend is the system to choose for service development unless there are multiple backend systems involved in the data consumption.
Thanks,
Prasanna