Welcome!

[Former Member]

Hello SAPers!

Welcome to the new forum focused on working with SAP from PHP. Before we continue give me a moment to introduce myself. My name is John Coggeshall, a Senior Technical Consultant at Zend Technologies, the company responsible for the Zend Engine powering PHP. I've been involved with PHP for about 8 years now and am the author of a number of books and articles on PHP technologies published worldwide. So I've been doing this for awhile, but I have to say you never really hear much about SAP and PHP working together. That was why I was happy to lend my time to a new PHP/SAP-focused blog and moderate this new SAP/PHP forum. If you're interested in my blog you can find the link to it here:

/people/john.coggeshall/blog/2005/05/04/zend-and-sap-team-up-to-promote-php

As your moderator I'll be floating about answering questions and encouraging discussion about any PHP related topic. Of course, feel free to bring SAP into the discussion as well! It's also been rumored that the SDN is an incredibly vibrant and involved community, so I'm really looking forward to getting this section off the ground.

So, with that said, welcome!

Cheers,

John

[Former Member]

Hi all,

my background in PHP goes back to mid 2001, when I started to look into WebCMS for my thesis. From then on I helped out in the Postnuke project and later in the Xaraya project.

As for SAP, I learned some ABAP in lectures during my studies of information systems (Wirtschaftsinformatik).

Since mid 2002 I work as full time ABAP developer at a company in southern Germany, that is an SAP development partner.

Basically, working on PHP/SAP isnt something you can do in your free time. The hard part is getting access to an SAP system. I ordered the Netweaver 2004 DVD for Linux, which was free, and installed it on a box with 256MB RAM, cuz I dont have anything better at home. It ran, but you couldnt really work with it.

And at work, you normally dont get either the time to work on PHP, or the administrators to allow you fiddling with the systems they need to maintain.

So its a difficult technology combo, imho.

And since the ABAP/Webdynpros are on the horizon for SAP ERP2005/7, its kinda hard to convince a traditional ABAP company to invest into PHP knowledge and build up new PHP solutions from scratch.