Friday, May 31, 2013

Some key take-aways after attending SAP CodeJam

On April 24th, SAP held a CodeJam session on Gateway within the Netherlands. The event was well attended, actually full-booked. The session was in particular interesting due the presence of Gateway guru Andre Fischer.
Some of my personal take-aways of this Gateway CodeJam:
  1. I was surprised that still a large group of SAP developers do not really know [of] SAP NetWeaver Gateway;
  2. As of NetWeaver 7.40, Gateway is an integral part, no longer deployed as add-on;
  3. Gateway as platform stabilizes. It's now on Gateway 2.0 SP6, with SP7 expected in July. With that, the platform is mature and stable; and far less need for continuous new updates / deployments;
  4. Change in Gateway licensing: for each SAP named user in the backend, Gateway [usage] is free-of-charge;
  5. Focus of the Gateway Product team (development) is now on Gateway-as-a-Service aka in the cloud. This beholds the GW-HUB; GW-backend will (have to) remain on-premisse;
  6. GW-HUB can co-operate with a lower version GW-backend. This is of importance in case of deploying GW-HUB on a dedicated system, and from there connecting to / exposing the SAP business systems in your landscape. New Gateway developments / features are largely focussed on the GW-HUB level (Gateway-as-a-Service as a clear example), GW-backend on the other hand is relatively 'out-engineered'. The downwards compatibility enables end-organizations to update the GW-HUB in case of a new version / feature set on the dedicated gateway server [which has only a technical / integration role; it does not contain business functionality], without necessity to also roll-out a system update on the NetWeaver servers that do service business capabilities [and for which the business is rightfully reluctant towards changes and thus downtimes];
  7. Gateway Client is not only of usage for us / Gateway Service developers; but also for SAP Support. It enables SAP Support to execute and examine the behavior of [custom] Gateway Services via the already in-place SAP GUI logon. No need to provide SAP Support with access to Gateway Services on http / network level;
  8. When you test/execute Gateway service directly from a browser (e.g. Internet Explorer), use QueryString '?sap-ds-debug=true' to render the received response as HTTP page, and inspect the request + response [headers, cookies, body];
  9. For consuming Gateway Services within Microsoft context, Andre told me that Gateway can now utilize Kerberos Single Sign-On, through SPNego. Prerequisites are that the backend is on NetWeaver 7.31 or later, and that the company has SAP NW SSO 2.0 license.

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Gateway useful transactions

SAP Netweaver Gateway – Useful transactions, a visualized explanation of some of the most relevant transactions used for administrating and developing Gateway Services.