The fundamental promise of SOA is that IT solutions will become more flexible. Things that used to be hard or impossible will now be easy or at least possible. SOA lifts the hood on enterprise applications in a more profound and extensive way than BAPIs did, but with a standard approach that is being adopted by every vendor. This means that re-usable services will now become a pipeline to let information and functionality flow to places it never could before.

Wide acceptance of web services standards is the key accelerator. Because both service providers and service consumers will be speaking the same language, new recipes for meeting users needs will quickly emerge. One of the most important recipes combines enterprise services that are being released as part of SAP enhancement packages with widget frameworks from SAP and other vendors.

Here's how the recipe works:

Enterprise Services + Widgets = Radically enhanced access to information from enterprise applications.

Here are the details:

Enhancement Packages and the Enterprise Services Wiki

The enterprise services that are part of enhancement packages are documented in the <a href="

https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/wiki?path=/display/ESpackages/Home">Enterprise Services Wiki</a>. There are close to a hundred of these bundles containing thousands of services that are documented in the wiki.  These services provide the raw materials, the access to information and functionality from all over the SAP Business Suite.

The Enterprise Services Wiki is different from most technical documentation at SAP in a way that makes it extremely useful to people using services to create widgets. The wiki not only describes the interfaces of the services and links to WSDL descriptions in the Enterprise Services Workplace. The wiki also describes use cases that show how to put the services to work. And unlike any form of documentation at SAP, because the information is published on a wiki users can weigh in and comment and add their own use cases and sample code as well. (Check out the Technical Document Management Connectivity and the Foundation for Collaborative Health Networks ES bundle for examples of sample code.) 

The enterprise services in each enhancement package show the difference between SAP's approach to SOA and that of almost every other vendor. SAP is delivering a fully productized SOA, a set of implemented services described in a repository. This dramatically reduces the governance challenge and accelerates time to value. Most other vendors provide toolkits and wish you well in the task of building services.

But services are raw materials. The second part of the recipe creates the value.

Widgets, Widgets, Everywhere

Widgets are the realization of the dream of plug-and-play user interfaces. Widget environments provide a canvas for a user interface on which small chunks of content and functionality, widgets that is, can be assembled. In the fancier widget environments, the widgets on a particular page can be aware of each other and raise events that the other widgets can react to. In this way, a widget that allows you to set your zip code for the weather can tell any other widgets on the page that a new zip code has been entered so they can change their information as well.

Google has widgets, Yahoo has widgets, and SAP has several ways that widgets can be put to work.

Eclipse-based Enterprise Widget Framework

If you want to get started right now then you can try out the SAP Widget Foundation and an Eclipse plug-in for widget development. Both are available on SDN under a 90 day test and demo license.

• Go to: https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/widgets for an overview of widgets at SAP
• Go to: https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/downloads and on the left side you see widgets;
• Go to: https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/downloads?rid=/webcontent/uuid/b03b6544-c741-2a10-8999-ed04eb2b2c71 for the tools and foundation available for the community to download
• Go to: https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/widget-gallery to find community submitted widgets

Using this widget framework you can create widgets that run in Yahoo! Widget Engine, Apple Dashboard, and Windows Vista Gadgets.

AJAX-based Widget Composition Platform

Rooftop is the code name for an AJAX-based widget composition platform. It enables business users to pull together services from SAP systems, from the web through standards such as RSS and from third party systems. The Rooftop platform is available to all users within SAP for an extended test.

Portal Mashups based upon Rooftop are the way that this widget creation functionality will arrive in the hands of users.  This software will be available to pilot customers end of 2008 according to Alexander Dreiling of SAP Australia. Rooftop powered software was been presented by Henning Kagermann and Hasso Plattner in their keynotes at SAPPHIRE 2008 in Orlando last week.

Rooftop is also behind an internal effort to create Enterprise Mashup and Dashboard Widgets. SAP has implemented a range of widgets for productive use within the company that have been described in blogs by Alexander Dreiling here:  https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/5598 and here: https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/5700.  Both blogs include screenshots and a description of the widgets.

Putting the Recipe to Work

The hard part of putting this recipe to work is understanding the services. The means taking a trip to the Enterprise Services Wiki and determining which services provide the access to the information you are looking for.

I sat through several presentations that referenced functionality from enhancement packages in general and enterprise services in particular. At every session, someone asked: How do I get these? The answer is that if you have SAP ERP 6.0 they come as part of the bargain. If you are on earlier ERP releases the only way is to upgrade or to try them out using the Discovery System.