For the past few days I've started to really use SAP's NetWeaver PI middleware system. The GUIs are Java applications, they are quite sluggish and get noticeably slower during the day, plus they don't look native to the OS and so look ugly and feel odd.
The server component is all written in Java, which thankfully I don't have to work with, but as with the GUI it's resource hungry and quite sluggish. At least they don't seem very buggy - I gather the the earlier versions were very wobbly!
On the whole I don't have to work with much Java code myself - just the results of it. However in the XML mapping core it's often not possible to use the point and drool interface to achieve what you need, so you have to resort to a Java functions to get the job done. I don't like Java - probably because it's not something I've used often - though I do keep trying to learn it, but I constantly feel that it's the wrong language for this job - Perl would be so much a better solution...
This week a consultant showed off a new super modern feature of Java that he's not really use to, looping over a list of strings without using a counter to access the items by index - he thought it so merit worthy he had to talk about it! I know Java and Perl are designed for to do different things, it's just a shame that people in SAP don't know it!
Hi
I think you'll find SAP is like MS, IBM etc, in that when they choose Java, say, over Perl, it's a deliberate decision to make things a bit and slow as possible.
And if you can't bring yourself to believe they'd do that, perhaps you're in the wrong industry
I can see the utility of Java but just not in the use case I'm working with, where any of the modern dynamic "P" languages would have been a better solution. Using Java for text processing is just painful. Perl would be so much easier for the job I'm doing, but apparently it's just "Not Standard"...
Re:SAP and Java
ajt on 2009-04-09T12:11:48
They are company not a charity... I'll agree that they are expensive and not always the best solution. In most cases companies do buy SAP then abuse it, which costs more money in the long run. If you buy SAP then you must do things the "SAP Way" or pain and suffering you will endure...
