Section 20.4. Which technology standards does SAP NetWeaver support?
20.4. Which technology standards does SAP NetWeaver support?SAP NetWeaver incorporates a comprehensive stack of technology standards that SAP intends to extend as additional standards become stable enough for production use. The platform, with a declarative, model-driven environment that both programmers and business analysts can use to develop business solutions, builds upon existing service-oriented architecture (SOA) and web services standards. These standards fall into the following categories:
SAP actively participates in many of the organizations that are responsible for developing these and other standards, including:
20.4.1. How do portability standards help customers to build IT solutions?Portability standards assure that customers have a range of choices when it comes to implementing each layer of the technology stack. These standards protect investments in applications softwaresoftware that is usually developed in-house at considerable expense. The standards accomplish this by essentially decoupling customers' apps from particular brands of database management systems and operating systems. This decoupling enables customers to port their apps between any of a variety of different IT environments with relative ease. From its earliest days, SAP has made the inclusion and support of portability standards a key element of its value proposition. For example, SAP R/3now mySAP ERPhas always been able to run on multiple computing platforms. Now, this portability has been carried to SAP NetWeaver, which is certified to run on multiple platforms, including:
SAP NetWeaver can also be used to build applications that will work with databases such as IBM's DB2 and Informix, Microsoft's SQL Server, and MaxDB. 20.4.2. What is SAP's relationship to industry-specific standards groups?SAP develops solutions for specific industries and participates in many industry-specific standards groups. Some of these groups are listed in Table 20-1. Since these groups define business processes, data formats, and choreographies between businesses connected over the Internet, these organizations are of extreme importance for SAP. ESA has support for industry best practices built in and is interoperable with the most common industry practices as defined by these groups. Many of SAP's customers are members of these groups and SAP is engaged in critical dialog to contribute to the next generation of interindustry business processes, which are required to master the challenges of the global economy of the 21st century. Global supply chains, interoperability, and the quest for new efficiency within cross-industry business processes are the driving forces behind these groups.
SAP is using what it learns from its ongoing work with these groups to ensure that technology standards initiatives in the W3C, OASIS, and WS-Ias well as the functionality of the SAP NetWeaver platform itselfreflect the specific needs of each vertical industry. SAP also makes its practical development experience available as a resource to vertical industry standards groups that are looking to adopt core components for semantic standards, web services, and XML for technology standards. SAP is a member of the RosettaNet Executive Board and drives standards development at all levels. SAP is also a part of the RosettaNet Architecture team. EPCglobal is concerned with the worldwide development of the radio frequency identification (RFID) standard. SAP is contributing heavily to the development of the EPCIS specification, which describes how to access RFID event data from trading partners. This specification defines integration in the supply chain. GS1 GDSN? (Global Data Synchronisation Network) is an automated, standards-based global environment that enables secure and continuous data synchronization, allowing all partners to have consistent item data in their systems at the same time. The SAP NetWeaver Master Data Management (SAP NetWeaver MDM) solution supports the 1SYNC specification. SAP Research is also a strong contributor to the Athena project, which develops new tools and methodology for interoperability in the European Community. It is funded by the European Commission. SAP is also actively supporting the foundation of the European Interoperability Center (EIC). 20.4.3. Are standards tested to ensure they provide interoperability?Once standards are developed, each one must be tested to make sure that it achieves the interoperability between different vendors' systems that it was originally intended to foster. To ensure that ESA-based business solutions interoperate with solutions from other vendors, SAP runs tests with major platform vendors such as Microsoft and IBM. SAP also is a board member of WS-I, which includes companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, BEA, Oracle, and others. WS-I members collaborate on developing profiles that describe how web services specifications should be used together. SAP is also chair of the WS-I Sample Applications Working Group, which builds applications solely for the purpose of testing and proving that different suppliers' solutions can interoperate. These partners in turn support all ESA-related standards. 20.4.4. Which additional standards will ESA support in the future?SAP intends, over time, to expand aggressively the range of standards supported by ESA, its goal being to make it as easy as possible for customers and software partners to adopt ESA as their primary development platform. SAP foresees a steady flow of new potential candidates in all three main areas of standards: technology, portability, and semantics. As it has in the past, SAP will work closely with customers and partners in deciding which standards to choose for inclusion in the ESA definition. Two good examples of the kinds of new standards that are becoming available for ESA support are Service Component Architecture (SCA) and Service Data Objects (SDO). Devised by a consortium of software makers including SAP, IBM, BEA Systems, and Oracle, these two specifications jointly address problems arising from the fact that it is increasingly difficult to construct standalone information systems. Today, most systems are connected to a collection of other systems running in different processes, different servers, and sometimes, different companies. Different elements of business logic often need to be accessed via different middleware technologies, each dependent on a context-specific association with certain software elements. Likewise, sources of data tend to produce result sets that vary in their organization and format, coupling business logic with data access. SCA and SDO are designed to keep developers insulated from the complexities of this situation and thereby enable them to build new composite apps with relative ease. SCA specifies a programming model that assures a much-welcomed independence of business logic from middleware such as EJB, JMS, JAX-RPC, and JCA. This means that with SCA, an element of business logic may participate in different assemblies (systems) that each use different middleware technologies. SDO, meanwhile, provides a data manipulation model that is decoupled from physical data sources. This enables components to exchange composite data sets assembled from disparate data sources, which may be relational, XML, or API based, for instance. SCA was designed following the principles of SOA and provides the means to compose autonomous assets that have been implemented using a variety of technologies and that expose a service contract. SCA enables location and activation transparency: the business logic or system encapsulated within service components and behind its contract can be reused and composed very efficiently into new solutions and systems, thereby facilitating the construction of connected systems. Version 0.9 of the SCA specification was published in November 2005. It will take about one year before a final 1.0 version is published. Version 2.0 of the SDO specification was published in the same timeframe and the consortium is working toward a 3.0 version for the end of 2006. |
EAN: 2147483647
Pages: 265