First of all, I would like to state, that I am not a real big fan of SAP. From a technology point of view only. This changed slightly with the avalability of SAP applicationserver Java 7.x. This was the first appserver which has a satisfying standards compliance and a fast behaviour from a developers point of view. Beside this, I always liked the Netweaver Developer Tools for Java. Based on Eclipse the "Workbench" was always comparable to other vendors products or even products from the open source community. If you ever did SAP development with Java, you probably came across another favorite of mine. The WebDynpro framework for Java. Beeing a composite and sophisticated framework for UI development it gave SAP applications a common look and feel in the Java world. As you might have guessed this is only true for the NetWeaver platform. Running it outside their own applicationserver was not possible. Very frustrating at all. This again forces you to keep special knowledge about another framework up to date to deliver value. As a developer you already know about thousands of other solutions to keep track with.
Now things seem to move on with this.
A recent blogpost from
Benny Schaich-Lebek, a product specialist at SAP NetWeaver product management gave voice to the community and wrote about his thoughts about WebDynpro for open source.
To make it very clear: I'm not in the place to decide for such a step, I'm not even working for Web Dynpro itself. I'm more like a catalyst here, giving voice to the community who does not want to confront SAP with a maybe uncomfortable wish. Let me say so much: many people inside the company likde this idea very much.
