SAP Mobile and Open Source
Open Source projects used within SAP Mobile
SAP NetWeaver Mobile is maybe not perfect, but never the less it is a great product! It comes with a lot of features, which makes the implementation and coding of mobile applications easy for developers. But have you noticed how much Open Source technology is used in the SAP NetWeaver Mobile environment?
Let's start with looking into the Mobile Infrastructure 2.1/2.5/7.0 client. The JSP version is coming with a Tomcat web server. Instead of writing their own web server, SAP just re-used one of the best open source implementation of the servlet and jsp standards. This Tomcat server is running on laptops and even on Windows Mobile PDAs and delivers the user interface for the mobile client. But there are also other Open Source technologies used: Crimson and Xalan for XML for example!
If we look at the OCA client for NetWeaver Mobile 7.1, the user interface is build with eSWT - developed by IBM, but available as open source. IMO, SWT and eSWT are the best UI libraries for Java ever created! They use native UI controls for the underlying operating system, that's what makes them look like a native application and rocket fast (two things that are hard to achieve with Swing and AWT). The most popular application that is based on SWT is Eclipse.
Speaking of Eclipse - on the development side we are confronted with Eclipse and the MDK (Mobile Development Kit) on the one side (MI 2.5/7.0) and the NWDS (NetWeaver Development Studio) on the other (NWM 7.1). Both tools - MDK and NWDS - are based on Eclipse, which is again an open source project. Man, if I think back to the old days ... developing Java with the Swing-based JBuilder .. that sucked big time! Today nearly all major Java development tools are based on Eclipse - NWDS, JBuilder, Websphere Development Studio, Rational, Together ...
But when you think about it ... even Java is open source now! So imaging how much more work would have been required without the use of these open source projects! It's amazing how open source has changed the way software is developed.
If I look at our own development projects, we are using open source on a daily bases - Ant and Maven for the build, SWT for the UI of MTL, iText for the creation of PDF files, POI for MS Excel creation, just to mention a few.