If Yan can Cook… Yan Could Code… (SAP NWDI Part I) Part I – Introduction: Yan and the perfect slice of Pizza So if you grew up in the USA and you are between the ages of 20-60 chances are you know or remember the cooking show “Yan can Cook”. It was years before the FOODTV channel got popular. Martin Yan had a great slogan and sell line too… “If Yan can Cook… So can you”. Looking back now I learned a lot from Yan. Not just cooking mind you but how to approach many things in life. Not only did Yan teach me how to make a proper meal in a time in my life where I thought that a proper meal was a corner slice of Sicilian from Joe’s Pizza on Carmine and Bleecker but Yan taught me how to use the ingredients and cooking utensils that I had in my small studio apartment in NYC. I now, after years of coding, systems work and onsite trouble shooting understand exactly what he was getting at so long ago on his cable show. Yan, if he were a coder would be an open source kind of guy. Give him a text editor, a working OS and tell him what to do and when you come back he will have built the Portal that your company had been envisioning for years. Yet I bet that if he had SAP NWDI and SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio that he could rock the WebDynpro world with his viewpoint on coding. He taught me to have an open mind about cooking and food which in turn made me a better coder and systems trouble shooter. Yan also taught me about re-usability within my kitchen, kitchen tools and even the ingredients that I was using from day to day. He was clean and efficient. Yan did not over think things and he certainly did not hide behind his certifications and awards. In my mind he is sort of the anti Alton Brown. Sure Alton knows what he is doing in his doctor coat, welding goggles and surgical gloves but the guy has a white paper for everything and I bet that he would never be able ever understand a product that was so usable right out of the box. Heck I bet Alton has certifications from every major vendor out there and is very willing and ready to show them to you; not that there is anything wrong with that mind you. Yan on the other hand is a doer/creator and has shown us in the culinary world that anyone is capable of great achievements with excellent results and I bet he also has the certifications that that goggled guy does too. This is why open source is so powerful. Imagine what old Yan could do with a WebDynpro application or Visual Composer? The sky is the limit with all the various possibilities. You see, SAP NWDI (NetWeaver Developer Infrastructure) in my mind is similar to what Yan was trying to get us all to do back in the day on his cable TV show. Use the tools that are available to us and promote re-usability again and again. SAP has adopted JAVA and J2EE for just the above reasons. They are powerful open source environments/toolsets that the industry has embraced as standards. SAP has built toolsets and plugins into such products like Eclipse for their SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio and wrapped coding functionality such as SAP WebDynpro technology into it. All of this in an environment where re-usability, functionality and ease of use is the key to our success as well as showing how we (SAP) have taken this humble open source to the next level of functionality and use. Throughout this blog series I will a take very different look at the various parts of SAP NWDI. I will compare and contrast Development Objects, Development Components, Software Components and JAVA transports from some very different perspectives. scott.braker/blog/2006/01/04/if-yan-can-cook133-yan-could-code133-sap-nwdi-part-ii
