Developing complex Web applications for a move to R/3

Developing complex Web applications for a move to R/3

We are about to move from R/2 to R/3 and at the same time we're developing complex Web-based applications to communicate with our ABAP application that will have to be reshaped too. Should we use XI, turn these ABAP into J2EE apps, develop them further or run them in a J2EE app server?

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Complex Web applications should be developed on best-of-breed Web technologies. These include Apache's HTTP server, Enterprise Java, and an open source Web framework, such as Struts or Tapestry. If you have already begun development on the Web front-end or will need to integrate with an existing Web-based application, develop Java components that communicate with SAP using SAP's Java Connector, JCo.

XI is designed to provide Web services that are commonly used for asynchronous, system-to-system communication. JCo allows your Web application to communicate synchronously with an SAP program via RFC or BAPI interface. This guarantees that your users will have the best possible response time and allow them to quickly edit and submit requests to SAP. Conversely, if you have a great deal of custom ABAP or need to develop custom ABAP to communicate directly with specific SAP functions, Business Server Pages (BSP) allow you to create Web applications with ABAP and HTML.

This was first published in June 2005