Complete Development Environment

[Keanu5348]

Hi colleagues,

Some time ago, I asked already a question about IDEs for Java. One of you recommended Eclipse (which is in my opinion really great). Now I need a little more

We are planning to set up a development in Java using R/3 as backend. In the future there will be a team of a couple of developers for this project. Now I wonder if somebody could advise me, which components are necessary and reliable to do such a team development in Java-R/3. How to set up a development environment using which components? What is your experience? Thanks.

Best regards,
Zeno2

[Christian4831]

Hi Zeno2,

what kind of application are you going to develop - maybe a web application?
First of all you need an evironment (maybe some kind of a shared file server) where all your project files (Java classes, XML configuration files, et cetera) will be stored. In our team we have a good experience using Perforce as a file database for our project. This tool provides several good functionalities like file locking, file history and so on.

Second, you need an installation of JCo for your environment. You can download it http://service.sap.com/connectors. The installation and configuration of JCo needs to be done manually - as far as I know, there are no installation scripts existing right now. How to intall and configure JCo was descibed in another thread in this forum.

If you develop a web application, I would recommend the Jarta Struts Framework as your web application' s process logic controller. Struts is in short a Java implementation of the MVC paradigma especially designed for web applications. It is quite easy to configure and is very fast and robust. As far as I know we had no real problems with it. You can find Struts here: http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/index.html. For testing purposes, you need to install a servlet container. I would recommend Tomcat rather than SAP's InQMy since it is robust and fast. A downside of Tomcat is that it quite hard to configure. A big advantage of Tomcat is the very fast remote debugging functionality - you can use the great debugger of Eclipse to debug your web application.

I hope I could have helped you,

regards,

Tim

[Keanu5348]

Hi Tim,

thanks a lot. That's much more I expected But I have one more question: I heard about the SAP J2EE-Engine. What about this? Is it not more safe, to use the SAP J2EE-Engine instead of Tomcat?
Thanks.

Regards,
Zeno2

[Walter4536]

Hi,

@Tim: Sorry, but I don't agree with you concerning InQMy from SAP! We had great experience with it. It is very easy and fast to install and configure and also very fast and robust. Furthermore there's a tight integration possible with IDEs like Eclipse (and of course other) and a lot of other tools provided by SAP. I am sure, that this is not possible with Tomcat.

Regards,
Stefan

[Christian4831]

Hi,

@steff with my prediction -

For testing purposes, you need to install a servlet container. I would recommend Tomcat rather than SAP's InQMy since it is robust and fast.

- I never intended to compromise SAP´s InQMy because its a great product for professional Java Web Applications. What I meant is that for local testing purposes its just a little bit to big. So for example debugging is not as performant as with Tomcat because it's slimmer thus you are able to test a little bit faster with it. But indeed Tomcat's downside is that it isn't recommended by SAP for developing web application's based on R/3 products.
@zeno2 To summarize my opinion: Try and test both servlet containers to evaluate which fits best for your application

regards,

Tim