Me at SAP TechEd

Today I was at SAP India for the SAP TechEd 2007 Bangalore, Community Day. I know that SAP enjoys a huge community base in India and this event was a testimonial to that. Me, Anirudh & Sunil from the Flex Team where there at “RIA Innovation Track”, which was one of the Breakout Sessions at the Commuity day. We were joined by Aravind from ZOHO, Craig Cmehil, Abesh Bhattacharjee, Thomas Jung and our very own Mrinal Wadhwa from SAP.

I started with an introduction to RIA and to the Flex Technology and its advantages. The Mrinal took over and did an introduction to AIR. What I really liked about his presentation is the fact that it was done in AIR 🙂 We showed some cool demos and I think we really captured the audience’s attention.

What happened in between was that we overshot our time and spilled into Craig’s Session. But Craig generously asked us to continue and said that his session on “Twitter meets NetWeaver” could be found on SAP Dev Net or SDN. Then, Thomas Jung just came in and stole the show after that. He introduced FLOB. FLOB or “Flex On BSP” project represent a library of SAP BSP Extension Elements that generate Adobe Flex instead of the standard BSP Extension output of HTML and JavaScript. It is really awsome and you had to be there to see it. What makes it even more impressive is that his idea is very simple.

An empty, compiled SWF file is loaded into the Flash Player within the Browser. UI elements are then added to the framework via JavaScript and the Adobe Flex/AJAX bridge (FABridge). This allows for a simple interface relying only on JavaScript to manipulate the User Interface. To make the process even easier, these BSP Extensions encapsulate the JavaScript and map concepts to BSP friendly constructs. BSP Server Side Eventing and Data Binding are both supported even with the Flex User Interface Elements. This is available as an open-source project on Google Code.

Aravind also introduced the cool ZOHO APIs that you can play around with. Then it was Abesh’s turn to show a cool demo of how to “Jazz up your xMII UIs using Flex“. It was a neat demo with him connecting to an SAP backend to get data into a Flex DataGrid and then into a LineChart.

We then ran short of time and so I promised to share my code and do a e-seminar of how to write it. Here’s fufilling the first part of the promise. Here’s the application code of the Flex App…

Application | Code

Assets: data.xml | background Image

I will ask Mrinal to post his AIR Code too. I will try to record the eSeminar asap and get it out to you guys…