EAI Blog

The course Web site provides the needed information for accessing the Web services and other project resources.

Look under the project section and the resources on the bottom. You will find links to the Web services (including access keys) and the project cheat sheet.

Technorati : BUS ADM 438, BUS ADM 746, EAI

This week we started looking at how Web services can be leveraged in SAP XI.

The first step was to look at how to expose functionality available in SAP XI (i.e., getting a product list through if_ProductList_SYN_OUT) as a Web service. The steps were demonstrated in class. However, I strongly encourage you to go through the Exposing Web Services from SAP XI yourself to get the process down ... again be careful to correctly create that service URL!

To complete the exercise you need to download the MyProductCatalogSite.zip and extract it on your local machine.

There is also an exercise for consuming Web services with XI . We will discuss this in our upcoming session ...

I have now copied to "Cheat Sheet" to the project folder on the G-drive. This document has some helpful information for the project.

By the way, I did a quick search for a "hotfix" from Microsoft for the WSDL parsing issue in Visual Studio 2005 that can be installed on Vista (or Visual Studio 2008) ... no luck so far. It is quite unfortunate that Microsoft can't get this right. Perhaps SAP XI doesn't produce the WSDL in the most common way, but it works with all the Web services testing tools that I have used (SOAP Sonar (Crosscheck Networks), SOAPScope (Mindreef), and XML Spy (Altova). While SAP has not been perfect with its implementation of Web services, this time its Microsoft's problem ...

... and I am still reading your papers and it will be probably until the end of the week, before I can give you feedback. We will discuss the reading, which was due today in the next class session, so keep your thoughts (and the email with them) regarding your questions/lessons.

MH

Technorati : BUS ADM 438, BUS ADM 746, EAI, SAP XI, Web services

Based on the blog entries I saw so far, it appears that most of you liked the online format and that the exam went reasonably well. And Yes, there is the danger in an online open book exam to spend too much time on finding the perfect answer and then running a bit short at the end. There is still value in preparing before taking the exam.

Everyone should have received some feedback regarding their term paper. Please let me know if you need further guidance.

Mary seems to appreciate the SAP XI mapping tool based on her past experience with mappings. In this week's lab everyone will put the tools to the test. ... Let's see how that goes!

MH

Technorati : BUS ADM 438, EAI

Happy Birthday ... XML!

Well, it is a belated birthday wish ... The actual "birthday" was already on Feb 12th, but anyway XML is 10 years old and the W3C is celebrating (read more)

Jason pointed this out earlier last week in his blog entry and a link to an article about XML.

MH

Technorati : BUS ADM 438, BUS ADM 746, EAI, XML

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It looks like the first steps into SAP XI were not too difficult, as Lab #2 was completed much faster than I anticipated. It will get a bit more complex however, as you may notice when we start with mappings. But it is also more fun ... I think!

Also their seems to be some interest in integration and SAP based on experiences made at the career fair.

Paper

I have gotten some promising paper proposals and everyone (except for two who did not submit a proposal until now) should have gotten an email with some feedback. It looks like CORBA and AJAX are "hot topics". I have asked two students to find an alternative topic to CORBA.

Please make sure you read the instructions on the Web, particularly related to the length of the paper.

Midterm Exam

The exam is ready to go for both class sections ... you need to wait until the start date though, which is Wednesday morning. BTW, don't freak out when you submit the exam. The score you will see right after submitting the exam is incomplete, as there are several questions that need to be graded manually!

More in class ...

MH

Technorati : BUS ADM 438, EAI

XML etc.

I mentioned that as a software developer you will be confronted with XML sooner or later. It was good to see some blog posts that supported this statement.

Did anyone go to the career fair. It was pretty crowded both with job seekers and employers needing to fill positions. It was also good to see so many companies with opportunities in IT. I would be curious to know, if anyone had a conversation with a potential employer regarding integration or SAP.

I only mentioned virtualization on the side, but Jonathan's blog post provided some interesting insight how virtualization is being adopted, not just on servers, but also PCs.

Also regarding the paper, I would like to make you all aware of the fact that we have access to Gartner Research at UWM. As Michael pointed out in his post, it is a great resource to find out about technology and current trends.

Blogging

As it is possible to "loose" the blog entry you are working on in the editor, either by navigating away from the editor or by just taking a long coffee break, as Steven painfully discovered, I suggest the following for longer entries: Write the words in a the text editor of your choice, then copy them into the blog editor and then worry about images and formatting. Even better, use an offline blog editor (I use Zoundry). Then you a) don't have to worry about "loosing it", b) can write something and post it later (i.e., airplane), c) can manage multiple blogs through one interface.

More later ...

MH

Technorati : BUS ADM 438, BUS ADM 746, EAI

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Well, it is snowing again ... but the thing that makes it more interesting this time are the pond size puddles on our local Whitefish Bay streets that are slowly but surely turning into skating rinks.

So if everyone makes it to class we will dig more into XML and Web services and then explore different types of Middleware.

Some of you already worked through the little XML exercise and liked how Visual Studio supports working with XML. I also think for basic XML editing the Visual Studio tools work well. For more sophisticated XML work there are specialized tools such as the Altova XML Spy or similar tools out there.

The issues with the Web sites for 746 students should be fixed now as well. So everyone should be able to create their lab #1 project on the server. If you did develop your project locally first, it can be copied to the server quite easily using the "Copy Web Site" feature in Visual Studio. Just keep in mind that if you move your Web service somewhere else, all clients with references to this service need to be modified accordingly (i.e., you need to recreated the Web references)!

See you in class ... and get there safely!

MH

Technorati : BUS ADM 438, BUS ADM 746, EAI

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