Last night to kick off SAP TechEd Boston we had the Demo Jam. Even though it was a very long day, the croud was really enthusiastic. For some pictures from the Demo Jam, have a look over on Flickr. However most intersting was the outcome of the Demo Jam. The second place winner was the example of SAP workflow on the Blackberry device. Not only was this a really cool technology example, but I found the underlying technology espeically interesting - BSP. That's right - of all the slick new technology that was shown, it was good old BSP that was used (and only about 15 lines of code at that) for building a real-time interface to SAP workflow on a Blackberry device. I have been getting a lot of questions about the future of BSP vs. WebDynpro and I think this demo gives an excellent example where the two can co-exist in the toolbox of any ABAP developer. The ability of BSP to imbed any HTML or JavaScript and to run statelessly, makes it a perfect way to build a quick solution such as this. Overall this was an excellent example of Keeping It Simple. The big winner of the evening was the new ABAP editor and the new functionality in the Debugger. Amazingly among all the talk of ESA, WebServices, Java and WebDynpro - the thing that gets a croud of geeks most excited is the new ABAP editor! It makes sense however, because ever single ABAP programmer can immediately benefit from the enhancements to the editor. But now the big drawback - the new editor is only available in NetWeaver04S (webAS 7.0 or ERP2005). This release won't be generally available until next spring. Even then how many customers can really go out and upgrade right away. Of course the new editor will be years away still for most customers. They joked in the demo jam that it has taken 20 years for us to get color coding in the ABAP editor - well for most customers we have a few more years to wait. How, after winning the demo jam in Boston and Vienna, can SAP not consider back porting the new editor to at least WebAS 640. There is obviously huge customer interest in the development! Let's continue to due our part as customers - by thanking and supporting the ABAP workbench group at SAP and by continuing to ask SAP to give them the resources to consider back porting this enhancement.
