Intro to portal development
I am an ABAP programmer who would like to move into portal development. Where should I start?

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SAP has released two Portal Development toolkits (PDK) each targeted at a specific release of SAP Enterprise Portal. The version for EP 5.0 can be run without the installation of EP 5.0, whereas the EP 6.0 PDK requires that you have a local installation of EP 6.0. I recommend starting with the EP 5.0 PDK as you can do full development and deployment into the Tomcat servlet container to test.

EP PDK 5.0 can be found at this URL:
https://www.sdn.sap.com/sdn/downloaditem.sdn?res=/html/PDK50_download.htm.

You might also want to check out SAP's WebDynpro development framework. WebDynpro is SAP's next generation development platform for building Web-based SAP applications. Their future plans include the full integration of WebDynpro applications within the Enterprise Portal.

A preview version of the NetWeaver technology stack can be downloaded here:
https://www.sdn.sap.com/sdn/downloaditem.sdn?res=/html/software_download.htm.

This was first published in March 2005