BSP are the right technology for a web app developer working with an SAP backend! You can optimally combine your HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ajax, XML and XSLT skills as a web designer if you serve your content from an SAP system with Model-View-Controller based Business Server Pages.
In this book, you will learn
- to write highly efficient stateless applications - "stateless" meaning that the user-session context is not kept in the server's memory;
- how to work with self-defined tag libraries to do specific rendering. You will become acquainted with the Z tag library, an extension for UI elements like buttons, input fields, tables in the SRS look and feel. For a demo app, see http://bsp.mits.ch/buch/ztaglib_demo/main.do - find the coding of the rendering classes on http://bsp.mits.ch/code/wtag/z?stylesheet=wtag_z.xsl
- how to enrich the clientside UI logic of your apps using clientside rendering with XSLT and Ajax
- how to write Model-View-Controller (MVC) based web applications; realizing a strict separation of these three layers and thus keeping your apps more flexible, maintainable and extendible.
I invented an own MVC-frameworkwhich is an extension of the SAP standard framework. Main feature of this framework is that it is aware of the different "panels" an application may have. A panel stands for a collection of ressources - models, views and components - that have to be available at a particular stage of the application. This concept reduces repeated code for view and model generation in the controller classes. Also, models are not obliged to subclass from some standard model - instead, they are characterized by an interface ZIF_MODEL. This leaves the model's hierarchy tree free for application-specific requirements.
The framework and the tag library containing specific rendering are used at MIGROS, a big Swiss retailer, for their own version of the SAP retail store (SRS). SRS is the core web transaction for store employees in a SAP for retail system. While in the standard running on an ITS, MIGROS decided to put the application on the Web AS, with BSP as technical basis. This was a very successful project. At MIGROS, we are facing 6 Mio requests per month. Due to the efficient architecture, these requests can be served with an average response time of approx. 400 ms - faster than the average GUI transaction!
The framework and the tag library are available for free under http://bsp.mits.ch. This page is thought as a companion to the book. It also contains a code area with all the code exposed in the book and articles with a more detailled discussion of some topics mentioned in the book.
The book appeared in January 2007 at dpunkt Verlag, Heidelberg. See the publisher's website of the book with some sample chapters in PDF, and the table of contents.
Have fun!
- Rüdiger