In the last SAP-related post I presented SDN, Service Marketplace and SAP Help Portal as valuable ressources for information about SAP products, especially development based on NetWeaver. How-to guides and tutorials, for example the CAF Tutorial Center, are a further way of getting insight based on concrete examples. However, while reading all those guides, help pages and so forth, I often thought that they don’t provide me with the insight I wished to get from them. Especially the how-to guides and tutorials normally guide you on a narrow path, without looking left or right, not discussing any alternatives and not explaining why a certain route is taken. This is very helpful in case the topic of the guide exactely matches your needs but as soon as you depart one step from the path or don’t like to stupidly follow without knowing why, the help provided is very limited.

In addition to more wholistic How-To guides which explain the different possibilities of interaction between architecture layers, what I probably would need are Why-To or When-To-Use guides:

• When-To-Use CAF core instead of Integration Builder for service definition
• Why-To design workflows and processes with Guided Procedures instead of Business Workflow or ccBPM
• When-To-Use Visual Composer Web Dynpro iViews instead of Flash iViews
• Why-To access services through Visual Composer and not directly in Guided Procedures
• Why-To select this option not the other one

Categories: SAP enterprise SOA