The Background Story
Those who closely follow this space may remember the blog posts about "Granny's Addressbook", a sample application created by a company called Open Software Integrators for the purpose of teaching how-to develop Spring-based Java applications. This sample applications was used as a reference to compare several PaaS offerings in the market - see Which freaking PaaS should I use?
Unfortunately the SAP HANA Cloud Platform wasn't on their radar back then, but once we heard about their comparison and the demo app we took our chances and deployed the app to our cloud platform. It run right away, w/o any modifications required. harald.mueller, Chief Product Owner of the JVM-based Runtime capabilities of the SAP HANA Cloud Platform, shared his experiences in a blog post: Which freaking PaaS should I use (1/2)?
Yet, he did not stop there and instead tinkered with it a bit more to "make the app a bit more enterprise ready!"
"This time i will not just deploy the applications as is but have a look into the source code and make the app a bit more enterprise ready (hey we are SAP ;-)." - Harald Müller [REF]
Andrew Oliver (the original author) noticed our efforts via Twitter and responded with a dedicated blog post titled "The best-run Granny's addressbooks run on SAP". This is how the idea of "Enterprise Granny was born"...
Enterprise Granny
The idea is simple: let's take this simple sample application and make it enterprise-ready. It's Maven-based and uses the popular Spring framework - a very common archetype out there - and as such seems like the perfect fit to showcase how-to port an existing Java application and optimize it for the SAP HANA Cloud Platform. We'll take it easy at first and apply a few subtle changes touching upon the most common development tasks like implementing logging/tracing, exception handling, I18N and so on. Later on, we may want to enhance the application to demonstrate how-to best leverage the capabilities of the SAP HANA Cloud Platform. In short: we'll have plenty of fun with it!
Note: I'm fully aware that the original intent of the application was purely for training purposes and that some of application's shortcomings are on purpose for educational reasons. Matter of fact, I'm considering to make a few common mistakes myself along the way in order to correct them at a later point in time for the exact same reason! As such, please do not mistake me talking about shortcomings in the original app as criticizing OS Integrators or their develovers!
There's no spoon - but a fork!
As you hopefully know we have started to publish a variety of open-source samples on our github page: sap.github.io or (github.com/SAP respectively). Consequently I did fork the original repo (repository) in order to create a new branch for Enterprise Granny.
You can find it here: https://github.com/SAP/cloud-enterprise-granny
Those of you who are interested to follow-up on this journey are more than welcome - and don't worry: we'll take it easy and enhance the app step-by-step! After all, the whole purpose of this exercise is to provide you with some guidance on how-to develop great cloud applications based on Open Source.
The best way to be informed about new chapters is to subscribe to this document:
http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-42001
Happy coding everyone!!!
PS: Of course we all know that there's only one person who can legitimately call herself "Enterprise Granny", which is the one-and-onlymarilyn.pratt aka "Grannimari". In more than one way this can be considered a hommage to her and her ways of sharing with the community and hence I hope she doesn't mind us (re-) using that title :wink:
