I'm in the middle of a "Quality Management" project at work for the factory. I've done some Perl code already and it's clean and good. I've done some SAP ABAP code and it's as clean as ABAP gets and it's as good as it gets. I'm actually happy with the evil shell script I had to hack to make the Perl and SAP bits talk.
The final big problem is getting our pumps to download their test data directly into the SAP QM system. The pumps speak a proprietary line orientated language over RS232 (print and read). Alas I have to make this all work on Windows client systems which I try to avoid these days and I'm short on time...
Life would be so much easier on Linux or Unix...
http://realterm.sourceforge.net/
I had a look, it's very busy and not that well laid out. In the end I didn't need it as I discovered that the pump only speaks on baud rate and that piece of information was not available when I started the exercise. Once I had the baud rate and an external program that talks to the pump I was able to get Perl to converse with the pump.
The hard part now is getting Perl on Windows to talk to KSH on AIX called from SAP R/3. I suspect installing Apache and running my Perl application under CGI is the easy way to do this without having to build the whole application in a standalone Perl daemon (service).
Still having to use Windows is like having an Emery Paper Enema...
