My vision/pipe dream: Building an application server…
For a long time, I have dreamed of building an application server for business software, one which simplifies many aspects of the software development process.
SAP Business Intelligence with Elasticseach and Kibana
After having played around with Elasticsearch for indexing PI payloads and indexing ABAP source code, and especially after seeing the new (and now just-released) Kibana 4, it occurred to me that Elasticsearch would actually be great for business intelligence reporting.
Classy headings in your code with ASCII art
Sometimes source code modules get very big. You can argue that this should never be the case, if you modularize your code properly, but the fact is that they do. And when they do, they sometimes become difficult to read.
File Drop Target for SAP GUI Apps
This year (I wanted to say “This Christmas”, but that is still a long way away) surprise your users with something nice: A file drop target for your ABAP applications. It’s easy – I’ll show you how.
The human aspect of computing
There is a side to computing in which developers of software try to appeal to so-called average users. The idea is to make software friendly and easy to work with. Most people who are confronted with computers very quickly have an emotional experience when something doesn’t go as was hoped for. They can quickly lose heart when confronted with some message indicating that things didn’t quite work out, that there was some slight mishap or a hiccup.
Us, ourselves and you
If there was one change I could make to the English language, it would be to have two words for “we”; one meaning “us including you” and one meaning “us excluding you”. Think of all the confusion that would avoid. For starters, that persona non grata (some would say spare wheel) would quickly get the message when you say: “We (excluding you) are going to the pub now”.
Of significance too, but of lesser importance perhaps, would be singular and plural versions of “you”.
Of course, if you combine the two, you would have four variants of the phrases covering the different cases of “we” stated above.
If the shoe doesn’t fit…
The decade of the 90s was the heyday of ERP systems. Of course, the history goes back much further. Look at SAP, for example, who started in the early 70s by producing “one size fits all” solutions. This was of course a radical departure from the norm up to then, in that most companies wrote their own systems from scratch. SAP recognized a need in the market for such solutions, as the same solutions were being written over and over again. While I imagine that this worked quite well for accounting software like SAP’s first product, R/1, covering other aspects of business is and has been a different story.
Trying out WYSIWYG in MediaWiki
In my last publication, I made rather a big fuss about being able to use WYSIWYG in a wiki, or at least, that I thought it a vital requirement to drive usage of a wiki (something to that effect anyway). So I went ahead and tried one of the documented solutions for adding WYSIWYG capability to MediaWiki.
Wikis in the workplace
If it were up to me, I would require all documentation on a project to be done in a wiki. I mean everything. For example: documenting business processes, problems and their solutions, people’s contact details, system details, project issues, project processes, ideas, proposed ways of doing things, FAQs, etc. What stops you from putting meeting minutes into a wiki? I guess nothing, provided you can implement some form of access control, which fortunately, good wikis provide.
What makes a platform?
Some time ago I was contemplating the concept of a platform. It is a term that is bandied around quite a bit, but I’m not sure if a formal definition exists (other than something flat on which you can build or place something). I am speaking of course of platforms in the software world; perhaps the right term to use would be “application platformâ€.