Recently it has come to people’s attention that there is a website www.sap-abap4.com out there with a lot of very interesting content … which seems to have been completely “lifted” from the SAP Developer Network (SDN) and reproduced verbatim, except that in each case the original author name has been removed! Lots of discussion is [...]
This is a bit of a hand-wavy post, but I wanted to get my thoughts down. Recently there’s been a spate of interest around interaction with devices, applications and systems … via a chat-style interface. This is nothing new, of course. Bots have existed on the IRC networks for a long time. The venerable Purl, [...]
‘Coffeeshop‘ is a lightweight, REST-orientated HTTP-based publish/subscribe implementation that I’ve been working on for the last few days. It is a culmination of: an early and long-standing interest in pubsub a fascination with using HTTP properly, i.e. as an application protocol, not a transport protocol an excuse to experiment in the area of webhooks a [...]
I remember back in the ’90s joking with my friend Piers When I see the first book on SAP hit the bookstores, it’s time to move on In those days there were no books on SAP, and I was still in shock from receiving SAP documentation properly printed and bound — in the early days [...]
I wrote a blog entry on SDN almost two weeks ago entitled “SAP and Open Source: an analysis and letter to SAP and Shai“. It followed the flurry of comment that was made after Shai made some alarming statements regarding SAP and Open Source at the Churchill Club. My angle was that Shai was complaining [...]
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about where SAP is going and what SAP is doing today, especially in the light of where it went and what it did in the past. To be honest, the thinking has been triggered by frustration at the nuts and bolts of SAP technical matters, particularly in the area [...]
Using OSS notes on SAP’s service portal is extremely cumbersome. I used Greasemonkey to hack the UI to make it a little better. I had written it up on my SDN blog: Hacking the SAP service portal to make OSS notes better but forgot to mention it here. Piers had just complained to me that [...]
In May I was approached by a chap at SAP in Walldorf who wanted to ask me some questions on blogging (I have a blog over on the SAP Developer Network) for an article he was writing for an SAP-internal magazine. One of the questions was “Why do you write two blogs?“. I wrote a [...]
At this year’s Sapphire in Boston, Shai Agassi came out with some astounding and questionable views on free and open source software: “Open-source technologies such as Python and PHP, to name just two, are of great interest to college students and younger people with a passion.“ He goes on to point out the distance between [...]
It’s the end of the week that saw the SDN Meets Labs down in Walldorf. There was plenty of interest (apparently over 300 people attended, way more than in the similar event held in Palo Alto earlier this year) during, before and after (lots of reviews on the ‘planet’ SDN weblog collective). But despite this [...]