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

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hello,

One year later we have netweaver 7.3.1 sp4, an application running under tomcat 7 , Hand try it  to migrate to netweaver 7.3.1 without success.

So when will Java Form de 6 supported?

Best regards

Oliver

[rolf_paulsen · Accepted solution]

Hi,

again half a year later, we still must be PATIENT.

Regards

Rolf

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi,

after years of waiting for a NetWeaver 7.x that implements the (full) EE6-Standard, things have changed.

While there was a stagnation concerning the EE-Standard in netweaver-developement (7.1 - 7.4) , the EE standard itself is far advanced.

So the contempory question is: "When will SAP Java AS for EE7 see the light?" 😉

Regards

Steffen

[hofmann · Accepted solution]

The answer will be: Never.

[rolf_paulsen · Accepted solution]

Yes, but we will never get this answer from SAP. They do not even bother to tell this to their customers.

[Benny · Accepted solution]

Not quite right. The implementation is under development and is planned to see the light in the first half of this year.

Regards,

Benny

[hofmann · Accepted solution]

Benny,

you mean the JEE 6 web profile "plug-in" for NW or do you mean that SAP is going to release NW 7.3/7.4 with JEE6 full profile?

[Benny · Accepted solution]

That's the plugin with web profile. From that time on we will harmonize this with the Cloud updates.

Regards,

Benny

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi,

in June 2013, DSAG, there was the plan, that the customer can get a second OpenSource Java VM behind the NetWeaver Java VM -  what is about this plan?

Regards Oliver

[rolf_paulsen · Accepted solution]

Hi Benny,

sorry, nothing new at all, nothing that we did not yet know for at least half a year (info from DSAG).

What is included inside this Java EE WebProfile?

• Servlet API 3.0?
• JSP 2.2?
• JSF 2.0?
• JPA 2.0?
• JSP 2.2?
• CDI 1.0?
• Bean Validation 1.0?
• and finally: EJB 3.1 Lite or real EJB 3.1 ? Lite misses important features of "non-lite" (e.g. Remote interfaces, MDB)

What does this "plugin" really mean? Running a little Tomcat EE with EE 6 Web Profile inside legacy Java EE 5 NetWeaver that still does only know JPA 1.0, JSF 1.2, EJB 3.0?

Will there be an embedded mode for this plugin to extremely shorten development round-trips in eclipse, as it is known from Tomcat, JBoss, Jetty, even Websphere and WebLogic?

Finally, the interesting wrap-up of 4 years of SAP statements:

Dec 14, 2009:

"With the availability of Java EE6 it now is time to introduce it to our development, but there are no plans available (one week after release of the standard) that would tell us when this standard will be part of the product."

Apr 4, 2012:

"It is also planned to bring the features of Neo to the on premise environment afterwards. When this will happen I cannot answer."

Jan 14, 2014:

"The implementation  is under development and is planned to see the light in the first half of this year." "That's the plugin with web profile. From that time on we will harmonize this with the Cloud updates."

Not too fast. SAP plugs some Tomcat EE 6 from the SAP Cloud into the legacy Java EE 5 NetWeaver Java? And only this plug-in will be harmonized with the SAP Cloud (that is good enough with Java EE 6 Web Profile) and support Java EE 6 features?

Sounds like Tobias' answer "Never" to the question "When will SAP AS Java EE 6/7 see the light" remains correct. SAP NetWeaver AS Java itself will stay on Java EE 5 forever.

I ask myself: In medium-term, is there a considerable advantage of staying on SAP NetWeaver Java that is Java EE 5 at its heart over moving straight to e.g. JBoss? The latter has its Tomcat inside, too, but fully certified Java EE 6 compatibility and will probably have fully certified Java EE 7 compatibility when SAP will finish its EE 6 WebProfile plugin...[WFLY-469] Parent Issue for Java EE 7 Support - JBoss Issue Tracker

We will have to abandon WebDynpro Java anyway, and running WebDynpro on Tomcat is no rocket-science as the Demokit shows us. SAP UI5 does not need SAP NetWeaver Java either. And there are other pretty BPM tools in the world.

Disruptive step, but we know from SAP that disruptive steps may be necessary to proceed.

Regards

Rolf

[rolf_paulsen · Accepted solution]

I was just caught by the initial post of this thread -

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

- at least SAP managed to stop the bleeding...

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi,

are there any new news about java ee6 or indeed java ee7?

Best regards

Oliver

[rolf_paulsen · Accepted solution]

Hi,

It is a gold idea to ask again after Vishal left the company. Maybe in the year after the  HANA Hype SAP will invest and care again for their existing products.

But probably they will let us work forever with outdated standards, not only JEE, but also stone aged Eclipse in NWDS.

Anyway, thanks for your post, maybe Benny has New words for us.

Regards

Rolf

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hello Benny,

are there any news about the EE6 WebProfile PlugIn?

(=> "The implementation is under development and is planned to see the light in the first half of this year".)

Regards,

Steffen

[Benny · Accepted solution]

Hello,

I'm not any longer involved with this and cannot comment on it. I will check if I can find anybody to answer this.

Regards,

Benny

[rolf_paulsen · Accepted solution]

Hi,

obviously, SAP is a large company.

Therefore, it takes weeks for an employee who was involved deeply and for a long time in the product planning of SAP NetWeaver Java at least until the beginning of this year to find anybody who can answer basic questions about further development of this product.

So large that it is not even sure if such a person can be found at all...

Anyway, everything substantial has been said before in this thread:

1. "The answer will be: Never." (Tobias Hermann, Jan 6, 2014)
2. "Yes, but we will never get this answer from SAP. They do not even bother to tell this to their customers." (Rolf Paulsen, Jan 7, 2014)

These statements still hold today. Both.

The only obviously wrong statement came from SAP:

"Not quite right. The implementation is under development and is planned to see the light in the first half of this year." (Benny Schaich-Lebek, Jan 13, 2014)

...after a long sequence of announcements concerning this topic that SAP did not keep, e.g.

"As I said before, it is abolutely IN the plan to bring the capabilities of NetWeaver Cloud to the on premise world also." (Benny Schaich-Lebek Jun 5, 2012 2:46 PM)

These statements are documented in this thread and prove that statement 2. is correct.

Regards

Rolf

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hello colleagues,

who wants to take part on the mission "SAP EE7", codename "sapi7" ?

Perhaps we have the  "fortune of the brave" like the heroes, who have managed that SAP to takes up the issue "HANA". Perhaps "Big H. P." will support us.

Regards Oliver

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hello! I don't catch the phrase, what should those heroes will do? I like java 8 with lambdas, by the way

[karl_kessler · Accepted solution]

Hi Rolf,

there has been a lot of discussion around the question whether the on premise NetWeaver
Application Server for Java will support the Java EE 6 standard! I have joined this discussion just
recently meaning I have not studied all the discussion threads. Some citations go back several years, others are new.

With respect to roadmap statements SAP has clearly formulated rules of communication and established clear templates that indicate the current feature set (“Solution Today”), the “planned innovations” for the next 12 months roughly (for on premise deliveries) and the future direction. The section on “planned innovations” is the one which is closely related to the current backlog of the development teams in terms of feature delivery. No commitment is given as to whether the planned innovations will be delivered but under normal circumstances there is a good probability to have them in the next foreseeable enhancement packages or quarterly updates. The future direction is typically more a strategic level which is touched by our senior
management team and often communicated at TechEd keynotes for example. 

Java EE 6 is not contained in the planned innovations for the on premise NetWeaver Application
Server Java. Customers get the roadmap information from SAP service marketplace and from roadmap Q&A sessions at TechEd.

We never communicated anything different. In multiple sessions and written content we
clearly communicated that innovation in on premise environments focuses on the ABAP stack while HANA Cloud Platform offers other languages including Java with support for
open standards adoption. We know that many of our customers are running AS Java based Portals, Process Integration hubs, BPM etc and we will fulfill our support commitments providing a solid foundation to run our Java based solutions. This causes a lot of significant investments
for our development support organization. For example we enabled the SAP Java VM for JDK1.4 since some customers still run Portals based on that standard. Likewise we currently look into several topics such as NetWeaver Developer Studio and newer JDKs.

But the JEE program model is not in scope here. The adoption of JEE as program model for
SAP applications, customer and partner extensions was always pretty limited (exceptions confirm the rule). We heavily pushed Web Dynpro Java, NWDI for several years etc (my team wrote a complete SAP Press book about it) but the market moved to other frameworks in the meantime. Again we fully maintain these frameworks and infrastructures including improvements to make our customers’ life easier (for example the development support is currently piloting an NWDI compliant infrastructure to supply notes, similar to SNOTE in ABAP).

Last but not least our senior management team clearly indicated the importance of cloud
based infrastructures for standards and open source adoption.

Since NetWeaver 7.3 embracing the Java EE5 was announced back in 2010 the shift towards HANA, cloud and mobile has been a recurring top level theme at all major SAP events and publications (trust me I attended all US and EMEA TechEds).

Best regards

Karl

[rolf_paulsen · Accepted solution]

Hi Karl,

thank you for your answer.

I have joined this discussion just recently meaning I have not studied all the discussion threads.

I would really appreciate that you study this thread as a whole. IMHO this should have been a topic in the transfer of the product responsibility for SAP NetWeaver Java from Benny to you.

If SAP TechEd events and SAP markteplace are the only communication channels for plannings of SAP, SAP employees might give statements like in this thread with more caution.

Java EE 6 is not contained in the planned innovations for the on premise NetWeaver Application Server Java.

In respect of the "clearly formulated rules of communication" and "clear templates" that SAP has established to communicate the planned "innvoations", this statement obviously was always true, for all the years that customers like us were stalled by statements especially by your predecessor as product manager. So I ask myself: What was the purpose he said in January 2014:

"The implementation is under development and is planned to see the light in the first half of this year." ?

Of course, Benny should answer this question. But if you asked me what is the result of this and other statements:

Trust in SAP's statements is sustainably damaged. At least SAP hazarded the consequence that customers feel stalled and got the impression that SAP obfuscated the fact that there NEVER have been concrete plannings to go to JEE 6.

The adoption of JEE as program model for SAP applications, customer and partner extensions was always pretty limited (exceptions confirm the rule).
We heavily pushed Web Dynpro Java, NWDI for several years etc (my team wrote a complete SAP Press book about it) but the market moved to other frameworks in the meantime.

Please consider both sides her.

• SAP was too to late to take appropriate steps from the movement of the market.
• SAP was too long stuck to the idea to impose ABAP development process to the Java development. Maybe SAP still is.
• SAP embraced open source technologies only for a few years and missed the right moment to put a framework like WebDynpro Java Open Source.

(exceptions confirm the rule)

This is the only point in your answer where you address (at least slightly) customers like us who have the bad luck that they banked on SAP Java technology in the past. This is not much, I get the impression that SAP is mostly indifferent to these "exceptions".

Please bear in mind that your customers probably did not choose SAP NetWeaver Java as a platform for Java EE programming because they liked hazardous ventures, but based on extensive consulting by expensive SAP consultants.

Concerning the rest of your thread:

I did not claim SAP has been lazy and did not innovate. My main issue is that communication of the non-progress concerning Java EE standard went wrong in the last years, and I would appreciate that anyone inside SAP shared this impression and learned from the past.

But of course I realize that you are committed to clarity and openness in your role from now on, so let us look forward.

Since NetWeaver 7.3 embracing the Java EE5 was announced back in 2010...

I guess NetWeaver 7.1 (2008, certified EE5 2007 already) was Java EE5 already, or am I getting something wrong?

Regards

Rolf

[karl_kessler · Accepted solution]

Hi Rolf,

just to add some clarification:

You are right: NetWeaver Composition Environment 7.1 adopted the Java EE 5 standard already.

The first full NetWeaver release, however, (including Portal, Business Warehouse, BPM/CE etc) to adopt Java EE5 was NetWeaver 7.3. But I think that's now history.

Regarding the Java EE 6 related statements so far: They were not optimally coined I agree. At that time we looked into an on premise deployment option for the java stack which we used in on demand environments. However, this approach brings in a lot of other unsolved issues meaning we dropped the plan. We did not pursue the plan to enable our classical on premise AS Java stack for EE6 after we changed our Java approach (more open source, less classical SAP infrastructure).

Btw our initial approach to manage Java applications similar to ABAP in terms of repository, central build and lifecycle management etc was requested by key SAP customers ("We can only run Java applications like Portal and CE productively if they are managed like traditional SAP applications"). This mindset has changed in the meantime as we all know.

Rolf, I can follow your feedback. I mean we already had joint telcos with you and the PI/BPM folks at SAP. But let us try to look ahead and work on continuous improvements.

Regards

Karl

[rolf_paulsen · Accepted solution]

Hi Oliver,

sounds tempting. But since SAP is embracing open source technology and collaboration/partnership between RedHat and SAP seem quite established and reliable (see and video A Collaboration: redhat and SAP - YouTube linked there) we should follow SAP's strategy not to provide a future proof on-premise plattform for real and large Java EE application development on their own.

Wouldn't it be a heroic task to integrate JBoss inside SAP the way SAP NetWeaver Java is? E.g.

• Integration with Central User Administration/Identity Management
• SSO between SAP NetWeaver ABAP and JBoss and SAP NetWeaver Java bidirectional (that will remain as a plattform for BPM and WD Java)
• seamless integration of WD Java (running on SAP NetWeaver Java) into business logic running on JBoss
• ...
• finally: a cool WD Java like theme in Apache MyFaces (if we do not switch to SAP UI5 for desktop applications
• maybe very finally: porting WD Java runtime to JBoss.

Maybe we will even get support by SAP on this way.

If this topics are solved, we of course have a very large support from the Java community

Regards

Rolf

[daniel_ruiz2 · Accepted solution]

Karl Kessler wrote:

Btw our initial approach to manage Java applications similar to ABAP in terms of repository, central build and lifecycle management etc was requested by key SAP customers ("We can only run Java applications like Portal and CE productively if they are managed like traditional SAP applications"). This mindset has changed in the meantime as we all know.

*cough* noobs *cough*

all I could read so far is a bunch of excuses for a lot of failure on SAP side, some bla bla bla 'you will have to pay for Virgo and Tomcat if you want EE6 and rely on SAP support'.. this forum really lacks a LOL button.

hmmm, and.. I would even risk to say you used a lot of 'classical' in there.. the word is not 'classical'; being OLD doesn't make anything a 'classic' - it's more like:

- old on-premise AS;

- old SAP infrastructure;

at least now we know there are no plans for on-premise, so I'd like to thank you for making that painfully clear.

PS: nothing personal, and I even apologize in advance if the above sounds offensive to you Karl; but this thread illustrates how accurate SAP can be dealing with Java.

[Benny · Accepted solution]

Although I'm out of this I would like to comment about a special twist in this communication:

Rolf Paulsen wrote:

In respect of the "clearly formulated rules of communication" and "clear templates" that SAP has established to communicate the planned "innvoations", this statement obviously was always true, for all the years that customers like us were stalled by statements especially by your predecessor as product manager. So I ask myself: What was the purpose he said in January 2014:

"The implementation is under development and is planned to see the light in the first half of this year." ?

Of course, Benny should answer this question.

This statement implies or insinuates that I did suck this message out of my fingers. As Karl mentioned already there was a plan when I said so. The plan was changed.

My point of view was it always to share plans to make it possible for customers to plan long term. This implies that sometimes those plans are not realized. Because of that some people prefer to never share any planning information with customers and there are internal fights  around this on a regular basis which politics is the right one.

My point of view is surely not supported by customers who use such communication to connote that this is implied logically with spreading the untruth.

In other words: I am not lying to customers. I never did and I will not do so. And by the way, I never was asked to do so at SAP.

With kind Regards,

Benny Schaich-Lebek

Solution Management SAP SE

[rolf_paulsen · Accepted solution]

Thank you for your clarification and insight. I did not connote anything like this:

The pragraph started with

"In respect of the "clearly formulated rules of communication" and "clear templates" that SAP has established to communicate the planned "innovations"..."

meaning that beyond these rules and templates, e.g. obviously here in this thread, communication follows different.rules, motivation and intentions, as you describe.

Btw information about plans includes proactive near-term information about severe changes/abortions in previously communicated plans.

Regards

Rolf