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A sneak peak at the new Web Dynpro features

We all know that Thomas Jung has been working on some very cool stuff lately.
Nigel James blogged about it not so long ago, and now that TechEd and the awsome SDN Mentor Hands-On Workshop (with Rich Heilman, Dan McWeeney, Thomas Jung and Ed Herrman) is coming nearer, we finally got a sneak peak at the coolness!

Among the new features are:
• Full control drag and drop
• Sort inside the value help
• Arange columns within the value help
• Customize the screen while it runs (user customization)
• Formatted text editor, in this example for header texts (bold, italic, font-size, list for instance)
• Row-repeated output for the output of multiple addresses
• Slider to rate, the colour changes while sliding (in this example, to rate the customer)
• Pop-ins (in this example on item level of the sales order) This allows you to expand an area without having to navigate to another screen
• A new UI element: ICFExecute. To launch arbitrary applications on the desktop.
• Flash Islands

I cannot wait to get my hands on this, and I hope the Las Vegas sessions will be made available on SDN.
For those of us, who have worked with the SAP-Adobe integration for a while, these Flex components, which look like native UI elements, will take our work to a new level.

By the way, SAP built the AJAX framwork from scratch..

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Nanomonk - The First Chapter

On July 11th it was time for RedMonk/James Governor’s Nanomonk”Adobe meets SAP: Nanoconference” in London. James Ward, Adobes’s Flex/RIA evangelist was in town, so James invited those interested to come and learn more.

The conference started with James (Ward) giving an overview over the state of Adobe’s software development platform.
Adobe is in a transition, moving away from people using tools to create flash content, to people creating software on their platform. Flex has been around for about around five years and started as a way for developers to create flash content. Today that tool is a platform for software development.

There are three critical pieces in this platform:
1. Runtimes
These are the critical core technologies and the software development stack.
Web runtime, Flash player, desktop runtime, AIR and mobile runtime (yes, they are currently working on this!)
2. Tooling
Flex SDK, Flex builder/Eclipse space and many different community tools
3. Integration
How do we actually connect these client-side applications to our backend servers and services?
BlazeDS -> open source product to connect to a Java backend
LiveCycle Data Services

Seen from the SDN community perspective Adobe still plays an active part.
Andre Salazar has recently joined the community, after Mathias Zeller left to work on Genesis.
Adobe is the title-sponsor for the RIA hacker night during this year’s TechEd. (so far it is confirmed for Las Vegas)

The technical integration between SAP and Adobe continues, and worth mentioning is:

• BlazeDS/LiveCycle Data Services
• Closer integration, into the development tools we already have, for instance with the Flash islands in Web Dynpro.
• FLOB, Flex integration into BSP.
• Muse; the Flex NetWeaver Business Client. Comment from Thomas Jung: Version 1.0 is available with ERP Enhancement package 2 and higher. Version 2.0 will be used for Business by Design. Version 3.0 will take all the good version 2.0 features and bring them to the core Business Suite as well.

One of Adobe’s tasks a head is to incorporate developers, as they struggle to understand them. (they get the designers)

One of the longest discussions of the day, was the discussion about the SAP-Adobe alliance ecosystem. I covered this discussion thoroughly on SDN, hoping to get the conversation started there.

James Ward also showed us the coolness of Flex/AIR applications:
(can you imagine the effect of showing potentially new customers something like this?)

Worth mentioning is also the Conference 2.0 aspect of this event.
We were live-streaming via Ustream.tv and tweeting about it at the same time, allowing those not physically present to engage in the conversation.
We had around 15 friends watching and chatting via Ustream.tv, and another bunch following us on Twitter.

I hope this was only the first conference of many to come!

Thank you James for organizing this, thank you James for stopping by, thank you Craig for editing the footage and thank you all for the great discussions!

You can find my flickr set from the event here.

Part 1:


Part 2:

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Just some girly stuff..giggle, so true

This card from Jessica over at indexed.com, made me giggle..and blush at the same time.
So true!

It made me think of how I am when confronted with more than 3 options.
..or let’s say 5. (I like to believe I am getting better the older I get)

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ESME - Taking It To The Next Level

It is only a week ago, since I wrote my last post on EMSE, the Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment.

In this one week, we moved from loosely discussing frameworks, design and implementation on wikis and Google groups, to submitting a 6 minute video for the Demo Jam at SAP TechEd.

To be part of this team has been an amazing experience, and I have gained much from it, both on a professional and on a personal level.

I will write more about my experience in the next couple of days, I just wanted to present our video for now.

Further ESME blogs on SDN:
Dennis Howlett
Abesh Bhattacharjee

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ESME - Social Enterprise Messaging Experiment

Earlier this year I saw this picture (from Sapphire) with the words SAP, Innovation, Enterprise 2.0 and Enterprise social networking together and it got me thinking.

A couple of weeks later, during one of the recent Twitter downtimes, some of us ran to the newly started Plurk, to let the world know what we were doing.
Of course that wasn’t so easy without an API in place, so that didn’t last long.
It was however just enough time for ESME - Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment - to be born.

ESME started off from one Plurk conversations (or here as RSS).
Now 20 days later, the project has already come so far, that the architecture and design ideas are being discussed in detail.

What I have found interesting and fun in this process, is that we have only used microblogging and collaboration tools to plan this project. Not once did we call each other or use IM.
20 people from all over the world have put their names on the ESME SDN wiki page (even though some are involved as “listeners”), so logistically it has not been an easy task.

Though through using tweets with a 140 character limitation and the wiki when we needed to go into details, we have built an architecture, the foundations of UIs we want to use, the implementation, discuss the social network aspects and think of scenarios where such a tool would be useful.
If someone had told me even just a year ago, that something like this would be possible, I probably would have laughed at them..
This has been an amazing experience so far, and I hope this is just the beginning!

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Twitter and Summize

I found this update on the Twitter Status blog this morning interesting:

“The replies tab remains disabled today as we rework some of the queries that were causing problems yesterday. This has also been reflected in the sidebar of the status blog for the web features.
One way you can see replies directed to you is to search on Summize. You can search for “to:username” to see all updates directed at you.”

Twitter now encourages us to use third-party services, for functionalities they cannot deliver themselves anymore.

I know they have partnered with Summize before, for instance during Steve Job’s recent keynote (you can read about it here), to reduce their database load.

But this time they are outsourcing a basic functionality of their own system, which makes me wonder what is left of what Twitter once was?

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Just a thought I cannot stop thinking about

It amazes me how busy I am wishing Twitter was back to normal again these days.
It just feels so awkward after so many months of using third party apps, that I had to revert to my browser to tweet again. I even had to go back to m.twitter.com on my iPhone.

By now, realizing that IM and Track will still be offline a while, all I wish for is an API that allows 70 req/hour again. I feel like half-a-person without the tweets trickling into Twitterrific/Growl.

Twitter have one of the most open APIs around, and I also think this was part of their recent headaches. (getting crushed by API calls)
We all gave our Twitter credentials to any third-party app that came along and looked interesting. We had a zillion different Twitter clients, Twitter search, Twitter karma services and we wanted to try it all out.

A while ago I listened to the Gillmor Gang discussing Twitter once again.
We all know Steve’s “obsession” with Track, so part of the conversation somehow got lost, and I haven’t been able to stop reflecting about this part ever since.

Chris Messina brought this up while discussing OAuth:

” So, you don’t actually have specific control to say, “I want to turn off access from Twitterific.”… You know, it’s like Flickr provides a great model of how you can turn on and off access from different services. This is just an example of one of the things that if we had it, I think Twitter would not only be providing greater value, but it would be demonstrating a level of user control over the use of this system that would actually be, I think, leading to greater resilience.”

I don’t know why this model haven’t been discussed.
I can only speak for myself, but in light of the recent problems, I would happily turn off Twitter access to at all the different services and clients I have tried out in the last months. I don’t even know myself anymore how many apps and services receive my tweets.

Implementing a flickr-like model, where you can see which third-party applications you are using and remove the permission for these if necessary, would be fantastic.
As a user it is a great way to control where your credentials go and it wouldn’t hurt Twitter’s API either.

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Watch Google I/O videos online

Google hosted a two day developer event, Google I/O, in May this year.
It was Google’s largest developer event so far, and was filled with sessions on how to build the next generation of web applications with Google and other open technologies.

It is now possible to watch the technical sessions online here.

There are 77 videos all together, and they cover a wide range of subjects.
AJAX and JavaScript, Maps and Geo, Social applications, APIs and Tools and, finally, Mobile are all represented. What I found most interesting were the videos about Android, this introduction for instance or Inside the Android Application Framework.