When will SAP Java AS for EE 6 see the light?

[#1]

Hi all,

As far as I know, SAP's bleeding edge AS (NW73 AS) is based on EE5.

As several java AS vendors are releasing EE6 compliant products, I would like to know whether any deadline has been set for SAP's EE6 app server release.

Thanks in advance

regards

Vincenzo

[rolf_paulsen]

Hi Benny, hi Tobias,

there are some more topics on my wishlist I forgot:

1. embedded mode for NW AS Java. Most other relevant Java AppServers provide an embedded mode making development roundtrips much much shorter. E.g. IBM WebSphere, glassfish, JBoss, Tomcat, Jetty (could not find out quickly about Oracle WebLogic).

2. adapter for the testing framework arquillian http://arquillian.org/.

All other relevant Java AppServers have an adapter to easily test Java EE applications inside the runtime (list from 1 including Oracle WebLogic, see https://docs.jboss.org/author/display/ARQ/Container+adapters. The arquillian framework seems to be a new milestone in testing Java apps inside their infrastructure.

A qustion in SCN asking for an adapter is not answered at all so far (poor Elmar):

http://scn.sap.com/thread/2122286

the same for other forums.

http://www.qnasap.com/server-side-unit-tests-arquillian/

https://community.jboss.org/thread/177811

Does SAP actually not know about arquillian? SAP's engagement in Open Source could be greater in case it is useful "only" for developers and not for SAP products.

Regards

Rolf

[hofmann]

I asked via twitter about arquillian support when they released v1.0 and the only "useful" response was from the arquillian folk that pointed me to the same post at JBoss.

As long as SAP isn't going to develop something support won't be possible. But testing for Java in general isn't really what customers do / get / invest. Even the basic unit tests are rarely done. Doesn't help much to test the bean when even the POJO objects are not tested.

And from there you automatically have to go a step further and start using continuous integration, and that is now really something where you can say: more people have been to the moon than SAP customers that use NW Java are doing CI.

Second thought: I believe you can exchange Java with ABAP and get the same result.

Of course: yes, would be very nice to have.

[rolf_paulsen]

I agree, JUnit testing in a "SAP-ish" project with NW AS is an exception and the comparison of SAP Java CI projects with people in the moon is adequate.

We have > 1000 (increasing) pure JUnit tests and aside less but still a lot of "bean" tests (in embedded openEJB container with several worarounds to compensate for the differences of NW AS). This is due to the fact that our team contains (is built around) very experienced plain Java (EE) developers who "grew up" in the awareness that the invest in automated tests pays off.

Your second thought is probably the reason: What has been widely accepted for years in the Java world - only automated tests and CI can guarantee quality over the time - does not play a big role for ABAP development. I am not sure if even the meaning of CI is known to the majoriy of ABAP developers (and that mockito, arquillian and jenkins are not only cool). This influences Java @ SAP. SAP's Java dev departments will have testing evangelists, too, but maybe they are few, maybe they have to spend a lot of their time explaining theirselves and convincing deciders that CI and test automatism are no luxury (what should not be necessary in 2012).

We still have not been on the moon: We have tests but only manual test execution, no CI (in NWDI). We wil solve this, even with no help from SAP, even for the price that we leave NWDI next year.

Again: What they announced but are holding back since a year now are SAP's code examples for CI and NWDI http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/JDI/NWDI+and+Open+Source.so my hope for an arquillian adapter by SAP is almost zero.

Finally my comments to Benny's link http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-7727

The content is probably not changed since it was created 2009, there wer only format changes in the 10 versions.

The link to JPA/hibernate leads to boring old and well known document from 2009.

The link to Scripting languages is dead ("Oops, Sorry, internal server error occurred (500 error)").

The link to SDN Code Exchange leads to the place where SAP still does not exchange its NWDI CI code but ABAP2XLS...

@Benny, take this as my answer to your question "How do you like this blog?".

And the announcement from Bennyin above link in Wiki "NWDI and Open Source" from May 2011 is enough clarity about relevance of SAP's announcements for their activities in open source communities.

"Whether it is about integrating functionality not available in NWDI or using only parts of it, or even working without NWDI for various reason, there is large interest at customers and partners to do this. In the end this also makes SAP products more open and flexible. Because of this SAP organized a workshop in May 2011 to start a community based on some work already done by some SAP developers. We will put more information on this page and place according code to Code Exchange on the SDN to make it available to you."

Words.

[hofmann]

Yep, there is a lack of interest from SAP in CI/Testing. I'm currently reviewing an Ant script I coded some time ago that gives you a Dev / CI environment for SAP Java (portal) projects:

• downloads the software: tomcat, jenkins, redmine, ant, mysql, sonar, testng, ivy, etc and configures it
• gives you the ability to create via an ant script portal projects (7.0x and 7.2), that also creates the corresponding build files and jenkins, sonar, etc projects

As soon as I think it can be used by someone that is not me I will release it. Should at least help people to get started with CI in the context of SAP Java.