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

[johna69]

I have been fiddling with PHP in my spare time for a number of years and have some apps up and running. My Prediction Football scripts have had nearly 9000 downloads (a lot for me).

I was surprised and pleased to see that there is an SAP extension for PHP, I had been using nusoap to perform webservice integration between PHP and ABAP Web Services in my spare time, now I have something else to look at.

Cheers

JohnA

[Former Member]

It's really a great for me to see that at least SAP support officially PHP.

However I've been unable to put in place any web dev using PHP. I'm doing PHP in spare time for 4 years but I stick to ABAP in my job due to lack of customer needs. I hope all of this (this forum, weblogs and like) can change it!

Is it necessary to said that I like very much PHP ?

However, in addition to your demand on participating in weblog which is normal, I think that a lot of people do know PHP but never has the chance to use it in a professionnal environment. So would it be possible to run a POLL ? Something like :

PHP is for you :

- a spare time langage and nothing more

- a spare time langage but I do ABAP in real

- a spare time langage but I do JAVA in real

- I've heard of it

- I'd like to learn and develop with

etc ..

What you think of it ? I found interesting to evaluate the potential community of ABAP/PHP developpers.

[marilyn_pratt]

Hi Bertrand,

Hmm...poll? Okay, a few thoughts in this direction.

1) We have on the rare occasion polled our SDN community about their experiences with SDN. If we were to do so again, I could recommend incorporating your PHP question into a general poll question regarding programming languages. Of course this would give "future" results.

2) If I wanted something more immediate, I might hesitate to send a survey about PHP to all our 150,000 participants because that might be considered spam ;-(

3) I use (for non-professional purposes) Zoomerang! as a survey tool and it allows me to poll my academic friends who have agreed to tolerate my survey and allow me to gather results. I guess one could email the participants in this discussion forum, but again, it might be more useful to just ask for feedback in this forum.

4) You might want to start a new discussion thread here, where you pose your questions: How do you use, or would like to use PHP in the SAP context? Who would like more information about learning to develop with it?

5) I could recommend the creation of a local poll, posted on the technology page, but I don't know the precedent for such a request.

Well thanks for getting the juices going about how to handle this...will need to revisit this after sharing these ideas with others.

regards,

Marilyn

[johna69]

Hi Marilyn,

I do not know if this is something that SDN has considered, but some forum software (e.g. vbulletin) allows the users to create polls associated with their threads. The poll is visible as part of the thread and posters have the option of voting.

This may be what you are covering in point 5.

Regards

John

[marilyn_pratt]

Hi John,

Thanks for your comments. Jive doesn't support this function. I am looking to alternative solutions (point 5).

cheers,

Marilyn

[Former Member]

Hey guys, great idea polls can be very useful but in this case we already have a demand for PHP otherwise there would not have been a forum created and the effort put forth from SDN to have it's first (to my knowledge) external moderator (John Coggeshall in this case) to help out.

I can't answer for John's weblog although it has been ranked high in the Top 25 for awhile now. My 3 PHP related weblogs:

May 17, 2005 <a href="/people/sap.user72/blog/2005/05/17/php-howto-your-system-status-rz20 / HowTo: Your system status (RZ20)</a> views 191

May 15, 2005 <a href="/people/sap.user72/blog/2005/05/15/getting-started-with-php started with PHP</a> views 155

June 17, 2004 <a href="/people/sap.user72/blog/2004/06/17/php-and-sap-together-at-last and SAP, together at last?!</a> views 2512

Since May 4, 2005 the forum here has had 13 topics posted with 88 replies.

Points have already been accumlated (questions answered by more than 3 people) and at the moment only 2 topics show as not answered. From an overal percentage I would say we are one of the most active forums on SDN at the moment (proper ratios of course) with the best asked/answered ratio.

So with all of that in mind, would the poll tell us anything more than we already know? Would it enable us to make the forum better?

It would without a doubt generate more traffic or most likely would but linking to our PHP related weblogs in the developer areas or especially on the SDN home page (hint hint Marilyn) would accomplish this just as well. I mean we dominate (PHP that is) the <a href="https://www.sdn.sap.com/sdn/developerareas/technology.sdn?node=linkDnode11">Technologies</a> developer area.

Don't get me wrong, like I said I like polls but I'd hate to see us make Marilyn and all the others go through so much trouble and perhaps it not bring us any more information that we already have?

Just my two cents of course

[marilyn_pratt]

Craig,

Have you been spying on my editor's calendar? You can see that PHP does indeed dominate the technology page for the moment. This week's featured weblog is yours, Craig and I am eagerly waiting for the next installment from you and others. Unless there is a good deal more activity and content sharing PHP can be quickly unseated...

I've been looking at the speed and quality of answers in this forum and yes, statistically it is way up there for response time and interaction.

Median time to first reply 21 m !!!

Way to go you PHPers.

cheers,

Marilyn

[Former Member]

Me spying? No but haven't you been told I'm only of those addicted to SDN so I'm pretty much connected all the time

Occasionally I see things that no longer exist after a short while - maybe one day I'll join Mario in funny SDN stories to tell

As for my next weblogs I've got a few more I've started I've just got a few things going at the moment that take precedent so the next ones might be a bit delayed.

That of course doesn'T stop you from amybe writing up a weblog on the wonderful activity you as a SDN manager are seeing in this new forum

[maximilian_schaufler]

Statistics will take some time to reach a long-time-value, though it would be nice to keep the forum that active, especially the last 2 days.

Hope to start my first PHP/SAP weblog next week, in the meantime I'm currently "giving lectures" (you'll read about that in a weblog for Craig's challenge g).

[Former Member]

You've my interest peeked Max!!!

[marilyn_pratt]

Hi Max,

Of course you are correct about statistics and the need to see performance over time.

In the meanwhile, thanks for whetting our appetites for upcoming weblogs. We are ready, and it will be exciting to see the PHP/SDN Weblog thread grow

cheers,

Marilyn

[Former Member]

Now you are looking at my calendar Marilyn. My second challenge (provided the first goes OK) will be the same but including SDN and PHP in it

/people/sap.user72/blog/2005/04/27/challenge-are-you-ready