Inside SAP’s Skunk Works
TAKE NOTE (Insights into the SAP solution and technology)
Skunk Works: is an official alias for Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs(ADP), formerly called Lockheed Advanced Development Projects.
Skunk Works Project: is one typically developed by a small and loosely structured group of people who research and develop a project primarily for the sake of radical innovation.
Enter now SAP’s chairman, Hasso Plattner, who 20 years ago designed a computer program that supercharged SAP AG’s growth, has been pursuing another breakthrough that could determine the software giant’s fate.
The 68-year-old engineer is trying to take advantage of cheaper memory chips in servers to speed up complex business calculations and allow companies to do in seconds what currently can take hours or days. The aim is to allow executives to quickly access and analyze business data even on hand-held devices.
For his bet, Mr. Plattner decided to do an end run around SAP’s corporate research-and-development department with thousands of engineers. Instead, he recruited a bunch of university students in this small city outside Berlin. Working in a converted East German railway building dubbed “the villa”, these T-shirt-clad 20-somethings built the prototype of Mr. Plattner’s new product.
If Mr. Plattner succeeds, he hopes to revolutionize business computing again and put his main competitor, Oracle Corp., on the defensive. But if he fails, SAP could end up stagnating in an industry full of bigger and richer tech adversaries.
Read the full WSJ article here
UNDER DEVELOPMENT (Information for ABAP Developers)
The New Enhancement Framework
The Enhancement Framework Technologies
No matter if you create an enhancement point or a BAdI as an enhancement option provider, or if you implement an existing enhancement option (be it implicit or explicit), what you create must fit into the structure of the Enhancement Framework in a way that enables you to collect and organize the enhancement options and their counterparts on the implementation side. This means that the explicit enhancement options and all enhancement implementation elements (enhancements) have to be part of containers, which also serve as transport objects.
In this final part of the blog, I will explain what these containers are and how they are structured. At the end of it, you should know all you need about organizing enhancements options and enhancements.
Q&A (Your Questions answered)
Q.Is it possible to create objects dynamically? So that the name of the class is set via parameters and also get access to the methods and attributes of the class?
A. You can create object of a class at run time by using the CREATE OBJECT with a TYPE addition. You use field symbols to gain access to methods and attributes of the class after you have instansiated it. The trick is to get by the syntax checker. (see below)
FIELD-SYMBOLS: <fs_attr1> TYPE ANY TABLE.
* Interface
DATA: oref TYPE REF TO zifsx_ztable_easy01.
* Super Class
DATA: oref2 TYPE REF TO zclsx_ztable_access01.
DATA: l_class TYPE string.
DATA: l_class_casted TYPE string.
DATA: l_method TYPE string.
DATA: l_attr1 TYPE string.
CREATE OBJECT oref TYPE (l_class).
l_class = ‘ZCLSX_ARMY_LOA_ACCESS01’. “<= Child Class
l_method = ‘GET’.
l_attr1 = ‘G_IT_ZTABLE’.
IF oref IS BOUND.
oref2 ?= oref.
ASSIGN oref2->(l_attr1) TO <fs_attr1>.
MOVE <fs_attr2>[ ] TO <fs_attr1>[ ].
l_method = ‘CHECK’.
CALL METHOD oref->(l_method).
ENDIF.
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