SAP Netweaver

As long as I am developing custom software based on SAP, I have always had
the need (or maybe desire) to play around with some new functions or try
something out that I didn’t want to do in a regular SAP enviroment, either
because it would jeopardise operation or just didn’t have anything to do with
the current project or business.

Previously SAP had several types of licenses available that could meet this
demand:

• SDN Trial licenses
• SAP Discovery server
• Netweaver Developer subscription

However, there was always a catch:

• No recent ABAP stack
• License expirations and the hassle of re-licensing
• High costs that would need management buy-in and business-cases
• Geographic availability

Introduction of Individual Developer Licenses

There is good news! SAP has promised to come up with Individual Developer
License that could put an end to many of the limitations of the previous
licenses. These Individual Developer Licenses were planned to be available in
either November or December this year.

During the Teched I learned about some excellent benefits:

• Available world-wide
• Contains a recent ABAP stack as well as a Java stack
• License does not expire
• Available for free

As with the previous license there are some caveats as well, but I can
understand where they come from and aren’t as limiting as the previous issues.
Rui Nogueira told me that they didn’t call it an “Individual Developer’s”
license for nothing. They don’t want companies to run productive applications on
it and also wouldn’t like to see ISVs to develop products on it. Not only would
it cause legal issues in the area of liability, but there are other and better
licenses available to fulfil that need. For my personal hacking and
experimenting with SAP’s latest development environment, this license is a
perfect fit though.

Wish-list

Although I might be too too late with my wish-list regarding this license, it
may not hurt either:

• Availability of both an ABAP and Java stack with CE. Inclusion of PI and
  BW would be a nice bonus.
• Updated to the latest versions: 7.2 Java and 7.0.2 ABAP.
• Links to SDN Code Exchange (maybe just Subclipse for Java, and a
  derivative of SAPLink for the ABAP development)

During the SAP Teched 2009 most session were about new versions of SAP Netweaver or SAP Netweaver components. During these sessions the version numbers in which these features would be available were mentioned, but every time it seemed to be a different version than the other speaker was talking about. The list below gives an idea of some of the permutations that I have heard:

• 7.0 Enhancement Pack 1 / 7.0 Enhancement Pack 2
• 7.0.1 / 7.0.2 / 7.1.1
• 7.1 / 7.2

I’m not sure about how other folks received this version-puzzle, but it started to dazzle me. Especially when my junior colleague (he will probably slap me after he read this for calling him that) was asking about these versions, of course I couldn’t show that I was probably just as confused him. Fortunately, I was able to apply some logic to those version numbers and made a nice story out of that was actually not too far from reality.

Eventually, Thornsten Franz confirmed that our best guesses were actually quite close. As I can imagine that more folks would have the same questions, or would apply similar logic, but still not know how the versions correlate, I decided to write this down in a blog:

A few years ago, Netweaver 2004s was released and not much later rebranded to Netweaver 7.0. To avoid more confusion, I’ll take that as a starting point

Development on both the ABAP stack and Java stack were both proceeding and the besides support packs, enhancement packs were introduced. Contrary to support packs, enhancement packs would add new functionality to the system. Because of that, Enhancement Pack numbers are reflected in the version number, while support packs are not.

This means that 7.0 Enhancement Pack 1 is the same as 7.0.1, so that’s where the current version of the ABAP stack get its version number from. A new Enhancement Pack is planned for the ABAP stack, so soon we’ll have 7.0 Enhancement Pack 2, 7.0.2 in short.

At the same time, a larger “enhancement” was implemented at the Java-side of the house. While 7.0 was still running on Sun’s Java 1.4 release, the new version was based on Java EE 5 (the enterprise edition of Java 1.5). As upgrading the engine is quite a big step, SAP branded this version 7.1. Very quickly after 7.1 was released, Enhancement Pack 1 was released: 7.1.1.

According to rumours, the version after SAP ABAP 7.0.2 and SAP Java 7.1 was supposed to be version 7.2 which would be released in one big Netweaver release. Instead of individual components, a new version of all Netweaver components would be bundled in a big-bang. It seems however, that this isn’t feasible and that the Java stack will be released before other Netweaver components are ready. The first suite that is probably going to benefit from this is Netweaver CE, which is planned to be out by the end of the year.

Summary: