Section 20.3. Which technology standards does SAP support, and how do they help build IT solutions?

20.3. Which technology standards does SAP support, and how do they help build IT solutions?

Technology standards encourage interoperability at various levels of the stack. SAP supports technology standards associated with the Java programming language, web services, and the XML Schema Definition (XSD) language, to name just a few. This enables customers to design, develop, and deploy highly flexible composite applications that sacrifice nothing in terms of execution speed, functions, or security.

Consider, for example, the SAP NetWeaver Application Server (AS), a central component of SAP NetWeaver. It is fully compliant with the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) standard. This platform also supports all of the major Java technologies, including:

• EJB

• The Portlet Specification (JSR 168)

• The Java Management Extensions (JMX) Specification

• JAX-RPC 1.0 for Web Services communication

SAP has been a member of the Java Community Process since 2001, and since 2002 it has been a member of the J2EE/J2SE Executive Committee, which guides the entire Java development process. It works with other leaders in the industry, such as IBM and BEA, on advancement of new Java standards such as Service Data Objects (SDO) and Service Composition Architecture (SCA). These specifications will define the future standards on how to build composite applications based on services.

Further bolstering SAP NetWeaver's support of standard technologies is the fact that it is built on Eclipse, the open source software development environment. By using Eclipse's integrated set of programming tools, SAP customers benefit from the sizeable Eclipse ecosystem. Indeed, SAP's development community is the second largest Eclipse-based community in the world. SAP is a member of the board that governs the Eclipse Foundation and it takes an active role in guiding the evolution and development of Eclipse as a whole.

20.3.1. What's an example of a critical technology standard?

Reliable messaging is one good example of a critical technology standard. Reliability in messaging comprises several factors. The first is simply that when a message is sent from a source to a destination, it doesn't get lost, even if it is sent over an inherently unreliable medium such as the Internet. It arrives at its intended destination within a certain time limit. In various business scenarios, it is additionally important that only one copy of a message is processed by the destination, in the expected sequence of messages, even if the source retries sending the message over and over again. For example, a purchase order must not be processed more than once; otherwise, more than the intended amount of goods and services will be ordered.

The mechanisms for ensuring this reliability have traditionally been designed into the applications operating at each end of such an electronic transaction. But now, with the rise of a standard called Web Services Reliable Messaging, or WS-RM, applications are no longer burdened with such details. Instead, as implemented in ESA, a facility within SAP NetWeaver takes care of it according to the rules of WS-RM. The advantage is that developers have one less task to bother with; they can simply trust SAP NetWeaver to ensure the reliability of messages whether exchanged between SAP applications or with applications from other vendors.