computers should be less friendly

Just got confirmation that I will be able to speak at SAP’s Analyst Summit. As it stands right now I will be talking about two topic areas, Netweaver Visual Composer and Ruby on Rails. Certainly two fairly divergent topics, yes, but they highlight two interesting areas of foray for SAP. If you don’t know Visual Composer is a way of creating Flex based applications using a very well designed SVG development environment. The dev env allows you to very easily whip together Flash based “composite” ( SAP speak for applications that both present and update date ) applications using RFC calls to an ABAP system or even web services. This notion of web services and openness is at the heart of how SAP is starting to position their Netweaver platform and in keeping with this SAP has begun to “support” connections to scripting languages.

At the forefront of this scripting language support are two guys, Piers Harding from the community side and Craig Cmehil from the evangelist side. Piers can be credited with creating most of the scripting connectors (ruby, python, perl) and Craig can probably take a lot of the credit for getting this stuff on someone important’s radar. I got involved pretty late in the game only ever writing a little bit of python for some file management stuff, I latched onto RoR because of it’s ability to create rich, attractive web front ends with almost no effort, which is what I will be showing in my second presentation at the Analyst Summit.

So, if you are going to be at the Summit drop by and check out my presentations or drop me a line so we can meet up.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 6th, 2006 at 10:02 pm and is filed under RoR, SAP, Visual Composer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.