Day: 5 May 2006

No More Coding?

This week has been a bit of a fast track when it comes to training. As well as spending two days on a SAP XI (Exchange Infrastructure / EAI) training workshop, I have had some time to check out JBoss SEAM. The SAP XI stuff relates to the Client needing to upgrade their existing EAI platform (eGate) to a newer version. As it will eventually involve recoding of all interfaces, due to no backward compatability, they are taking the opportunity to look at other platforms. And since 80% of their systems are SAP based, XI seems to the the natural and logical solution. So the workshop I attented was aimed at gaining a high level understanding of the product. It's sold as something related to J2EE, but in my opinion isn't really related to J2EE. Sure it lives inside a J2EE app server, but as far as the developer is concerned, all they do is create a toolbox of objects (data structures, mapping rules, business processes, etc). And this is all done graphically! Then they hook it all together and configure it. OK - I haven't done anything hands on, nor seen anything complex done, but I am sure that does involve writing a bit of Java at some stage. Out of interest, mappings are done using XSLT, which is run on the data structures which are defined as XML docs. I also spent time looking at JBoss SEAM, which is a project that combines your database, Hibernate (ORM), Ant…

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