Today has been good. For the last few weeks I've been running Debian Linux at home. Nothing is perfect out of the box, but so far it's been a very good experience. I've got all the functionality I had before, and lots extra.
Today I got Piers Harding's SAP::Rfc module to work. I don't know why it didn't work before, but it means that we can kill the evil Java monstrosity that is the SAP Business Connector off. It's quite an amazing module really, you connect to a SAP system, ask for the interface to a Remote Function Call, this comes back as a Perl structure, you fill in the values you want, and then ask SAP to run it, and you get back another Perl structure with the answers in it. It's very fast, and seems very easy to use. Compared with the BC Server, where you have to send it an XML file, wait while it slowly parses XML into SAP, then slowly converts SAP into XML, which it sends back. The Java XML parser is hideously slow when compared with LibXML in Perl, and the BC Server IDE is the biggest pile of sh*te you have ever seen.
All things considered I'm a happy camper today!
Amazon.co.uk, even delivered my order, it only took them three weeks for 4 items that were all on 24 hour availability, I'd hate to order anything that's on a few days notice.....
