While SAP Netweaver Gateway is a product not often discussed at keynotes, events and in the media, it is a integral part of the innovative products being launched at SAP and is core component of SAP Fiori. If you are interested in taking advantage of some of the new free Fiori applications to drive value with your ERP investment, understanding SAP Netweaver Gateway is not optional, but rather a requirement.
In a summary, Netweaver Gateway is a ABAP developed add-on powering applications like SAP Fiori, SAP Mobility Platform (SMP), and even Duet Enterprise. This small, but very important component gives your company the ability to turn your monolithic, big and heavy backend systems into lightweight, simple, consumable web services.read more
A local tech company – Tresata recently sponsored a 24 hour hackathon in Charlotte around big data in the retail space. It was a ton of fun. I think I was the only person who brought along their own monitor, but I was quite prepared 🙂
My experience with statistical analysis, python and Jupyter was quite limited, so I decided to focus my attention on building a mobile focused use case with some big data integration and I ended up winning the innovation award. A pretty cool pair of Google Glasses 🙂
Here is the app I developed and presented:
And here are all my scribbled the notes/commands/datasets from the event:
emacs test.scala
eval-tool test.scala –hdfs –input bsv%/sample/data_with_headers/hackathon_data_headers –output bsv%upc_countsread more
I was recently working on developing a couple of XSOData services for Metric² when I realized that it would be pretty helpful to have a way to develop, test, explore services and queries. I wrote a similar tool for SAP Netweaver Gateway and the iPad a couple years ago, and decided to model it with some similarities, but having the ability to build it directly into HANA using XS, would add some nice integration benefits.
Proximity was Part 1 of an exploratory app for Javelin Solutions, a local SAP consulting company. We developed the app to push out into the market and the team at Javellin did the marketing and sales to promote and utilize it as a tool for gaining some exposure and an entry for their consulting services.
Part 2 of the app was a Field Service Engineer which focused more on the engineering aspect.
Mockups of the project along with the brief below were provided to the team for approval, and the subsequent screenshots are from the released app.
Being a technology and innovation evangelist the Gartner hype cycles have exposed and introduced me to variety of new technologies which I was not aware of.
Trigger – announcement Peak – talks and discussion Disillusionment – people realize its not available now Slope – Technology/innovation supports it
This is what we will be developing in this blog ….
Over the past few years Node.js has really caught my attention. The simplicity of Javascript with server side processing, Non-blocking-IO, Event Driven, and simple integration always intrigued me as a great combination for enterprise applications. (Somehow it sounds similar to HANA XS Engine 😉 )
A couple months ago I ran into a similar problem to Jon-Paul Boyd (HANA Forum Post) in which I wanted to use XS Engine for websocket/persistant connections to my HANA Instance, but due to the support not being included in SPS6, I decided to look elsewhere, and ended up using Node.js to fulfill this requirement.
In the past, while developing HANA/Node apps, I resorted to creating a XSJS App which really just acted as a middleware layer to push and pull data from my HANA DB, until recently I noticed a great blog post from Ingo Sauerzapf which piqued my interest. The blog mentioned that Holger Koser had created a HANA DB Client for Nodemaking life extremely easy to connect to HANA directly from Node. I thought it would be good share the small project I developed using Node.js and this new client with the community in the hopes that others will share their experiences with the technology.
This blog is not necessarily an introduction to Node.js development as there are some nice tutorials and examples out there from Tobias Hoffman and Alessandro Spadoni. The blog is intended to cover a small app developed in Node.js and shows the development process behind it, taking it from conception through to reality. I encourage you to download a few of these components, and also the example out. This app, similar to another app I developed called Metric²(which you can read about here), it is a web based widget showing some friendly KPI’s on the performance of your HANA Instance. The app gets streaming data from our HANA backend displaying this in a friendly, simple dashboard. The dashboard is designed to be shown on a large format monitor in a Ops or IT center and can also very easily be modified to show any KPI’s relevant to your business or needs.
Requirements:
SAP HANA Instance (e.g. AWS Developer Image)
Node.js installed (this does not need to be on the HANA box but same network with access to the HANA port – normally 30015).
Node Dependencies
We will also use a couple of helpful dependencies from the node community including Socket.io, Express and obviously hdb. Installing these packages is as simple as running “npm install hdb”. Once you have the dependencies installed we can start creating our app.
App Design
For me, I always start mocking up in my favorite Image IDE (Photoshop), I used this image as inspiration for my app. I liked the simplicity, clean layout with focus on the numbers at the bottom. In our case, we will add a small chart in the center, giving us a basic visual representation of the numbers being displayed:
In this case I decided to use Twitter Bootstrap to help with some of the layout/formatting of the page as well as some mundane tasks like Modal popups. From a coding perspective I started out developing the Single paged “index.html” file, doing my best to stick with my mockup which I previously created. I was sure to “id” all of my elements on this page as we will be updating these values from our node.js backend. This aspect of node development is strictly “traditional” web based development. No need to work with Node or any server for that matter. Once you have your page rendering the way you want, we can move on.
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