If you were at SDN Day in Vegas or hung out in the clubhouse for any substantial period odds are good you heard about “Scripting Languages.” If you stumbled across Ryan Lowe
and were totally confused, you should probably start with this Wikipedia Link and then head over to read the Poignant Guide to Ruby and finally an Onlamp Article about Ruby on Rails, don’t worry about the second guy he is a little nuts, but a lot of fun to read. With all of that learnin’ that out of the way, you might wonder what any of this has to do with SAP. Well nothing really, Ruby and the Ruby on Rails community have absolutely nothing to do with SAP. Which I personally look at as a good thing, but if you don’t believe me you might want to read the rest of this blog. If you happened across my “Birds of a Feather Session” in the clubhouse or came to SDN Day and went to my Rails session, you might have seen me demo a Time Management system I wrote for my group using Ruby on Rails backended by a BW System. If you didn’t get to see it, here it is again. First, just a quick recap about what the heck you just saw, or saw last week: the names in the bottom left hand corner are people who work in my group basically, I just take a name and drop and drop them onto a project. Once the AJAX update finishes I can then use the bar that appears to set the start and end week for that person on that project. Again in the background AJAX is updating a BW cube, then in the lower right hand corner is a web template with a query that is running on the cube that I am writing to, which helps me level the resources as the year goes on. In a future blog I will walk though how I built such a thing but first I want to talk about what is the big deal with this Ruby on Rails(RoR) stuff. The first positive of RoR is it’s ability to improve developer productivity. Yes, I know we all have already learned ABAP, but I couldn’t have written all that AJAX and drag and drop stuff in ABAP in the 2 days it took me to build the RoR application. The reason it was so easy to write is due to the way RoR applications are built. RoR forces you into using a MVC framework for your web applications, not only is this just good programming it also allows the framework to make some great logical leaps that really help you out. RoR really pushes the idea of “Convention over Configuration,” a simple example is that in a controller you have a method normally in that method somewhere you have to tell the controller what view to call, however in RoR if you name a view associated with that contro2ller the same name as the method RoR just links the two together and calls it automatically. Yes, of course you can override this if you want, but hey they were just trying to help you out. Another really great tool built right into the RoR framework is the ability to code unit and integration tests right into the development environment. This really allows you to tear your application apart, rebuild it and make sure it still passes all the tests it did before you ripped it apart. This testing tool really speeds up development and helps drive errors out. You can even use this system really do test-first development. Finally, the last point is that RoR isn’t ABAP, some might say this makes you less productive and in the short term I might agree but, in the long term you will be a faster, better developer and embracing the RoR framework now allows you to not only find talented ABAP developers but also talented RoR developers and like Woody Allen said, “[Using two technologies] immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night.” The other major area RoR helps your organization is in an area Shai himself said, we all need to work on, “Thril[ling] your Users.” If you showed the attached demo to an ABAP developer and said, “That’s an SAP system,” odds are pretty good they might think you are nuts and stop speaking to you all together ( don’t try this on your boss -- it won’t work ). However, show this to your actual end users and they might just kiss you. There is no easy way inside the bounds of normal SAP to make web based UIs that look like that, without dedicating a substantial amount of time to it, ask the SAP BI 7.0 developers. The reason RoR makes this so easy is it’s linking to a javascript library known as script.aculo.us which is based on the prototype library. These libraries are used all over the web and are very flexible a pretty much rock solid. Inside RoR you can make very simple calls to these libraries that do everything from the drag and drop stuff you saw in the demo to those slider bars to set the weeks all the while using the same script.aculo.us library to generate AJAX calls to the backend BW system. There are even more benefits of using RoR however, I will leave all that up to your own imagination at this point, given all the information you’ve read from the 1st paragraph. Suffice to say that using the Ruby on Rails framework along with Piers Harding’s connectors can make your developers better.. Special thanks to Cote'
for the title of this blog.
and were totally confused, you should probably start with this Wikipedia Link and then head over to read the Poignant Guide to Ruby and finally an Onlamp Article about Ruby on Rails, don’t worry about the second guy he is a little nuts, but a lot of fun to read. With all of that learnin’ that out of the way, you might wonder what any of this has to do with SAP. Well nothing really, Ruby and the Ruby on Rails community have absolutely nothing to do with SAP. Which I personally look at as a good thing, but if you don’t believe me you might want to read the rest of this blog. If you happened across my “Birds of a Feather Session” in the clubhouse or came to SDN Day and went to my Rails session, you might have seen me demo a Time Management system I wrote for my group using Ruby on Rails backended by a BW System. If you didn’t get to see it, here it is again. First, just a quick recap about what the heck you just saw, or saw last week: the names in the bottom left hand corner are people who work in my group basically, I just take a name and drop and drop them onto a project. Once the AJAX update finishes I can then use the bar that appears to set the start and end week for that person on that project. Again in the background AJAX is updating a BW cube, then in the lower right hand corner is a web template with a query that is running on the cube that I am writing to, which helps me level the resources as the year goes on. In a future blog I will walk though how I built such a thing but first I want to talk about what is the big deal with this Ruby on Rails(RoR) stuff. The first positive of RoR is it’s ability to improve developer productivity. Yes, I know we all have already learned ABAP, but I couldn’t have written all that AJAX and drag and drop stuff in ABAP in the 2 days it took me to build the RoR application. The reason it was so easy to write is due to the way RoR applications are built. RoR forces you into using a MVC framework for your web applications, not only is this just good programming it also allows the framework to make some great logical leaps that really help you out. RoR really pushes the idea of “Convention over Configuration,” a simple example is that in a controller you have a method normally in that method somewhere you have to tell the controller what view to call, however in RoR if you name a view associated with that contro2ller the same name as the method RoR just links the two together and calls it automatically. Yes, of course you can override this if you want, but hey they were just trying to help you out. Another really great tool built right into the RoR framework is the ability to code unit and integration tests right into the development environment. This really allows you to tear your application apart, rebuild it and make sure it still passes all the tests it did before you ripped it apart. This testing tool really speeds up development and helps drive errors out. You can even use this system really do test-first development. Finally, the last point is that RoR isn’t ABAP, some might say this makes you less productive and in the short term I might agree but, in the long term you will be a faster, better developer and embracing the RoR framework now allows you to not only find talented ABAP developers but also talented RoR developers and like Woody Allen said, “[Using two technologies] immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night.” The other major area RoR helps your organization is in an area Shai himself said, we all need to work on, “Thril[ling] your Users.” If you showed the attached demo to an ABAP developer and said, “That’s an SAP system,” odds are pretty good they might think you are nuts and stop speaking to you all together ( don’t try this on your boss -- it won’t work ). However, show this to your actual end users and they might just kiss you. There is no easy way inside the bounds of normal SAP to make web based UIs that look like that, without dedicating a substantial amount of time to it, ask the SAP BI 7.0 developers. The reason RoR makes this so easy is it’s linking to a javascript library known as script.aculo.us which is based on the prototype library. These libraries are used all over the web and are very flexible a pretty much rock solid. Inside RoR you can make very simple calls to these libraries that do everything from the drag and drop stuff you saw in the demo to those slider bars to set the weeks all the while using the same script.aculo.us library to generate AJAX calls to the backend BW system. There are even more benefits of using RoR however, I will leave all that up to your own imagination at this point, given all the information you’ve read from the 1st paragraph. Suffice to say that using the Ruby on Rails framework along with Piers Harding’s connectors can make your developers better.. Special thanks to Cote' for the title of this blog.
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