Bönnen, C.; Herger, M.: SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer. First Edition, Bonn: Galileo Press, 2007. - German Edition first published October 2006

Today I received my pre-ordered copy of the newly published Visual Composer book from SAP PRESS. At Amazon it still has pre-ordering status but this will change for sure during the next days.

The authors:

The book is written by Carsten Bönnen who is Product Manager for Visual Composer as well as Mario Herger who works on the structuring of the new Business Process Expert community and who might already be known from his previous book SAP xApps and the Composite Application Framework.

Overview:

The book starts with a short introduction about Visual Composer (VC) as a model-driven tool, an explanation of model-driven development and where it is especially used at SAP (SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (BI), Web Dynpro, Composite Application Framework, Visual Composer). Afterwards the architecture of Visual Composer is presented, which consists of the three main components VC Storyboard, VC Server and NetWeaver Portal.

The next chapter introduces all elements available in Visual Composer. Although much of this chapter is also similarly available in the VC Modeler’s Guide and the VC Reference Guide, it provides a good overview with compact explanations and thus is a very useful starting reference for modeling own VC applications.

The focus of the book is on chapter 6 (100 pages) and chapter 7 (119 pages). Chapter 6 provides a hands-on example for creating VC applications. It presents the elements introduced in chapter 5 in action using easy understandable scenarios like the sales order scenario or the well-know flight scenario. Chapter 7 explaines the BI Kit and shows how to use the relevant tools available in Visual Composer. It also offers a few examples on how to integrate Visual Composer applications with BI UI elements and knowledge management document storages.

A more wholistic few on the creation of VC applications is taken in the application lifecycle chapter. Here aspects like transporting, down porting, upgrading, versioning, personalization, localization, testing and monitoring are examined.

The last two chapters finally shortly present three business examples from SAP xApp Analytics (Chapter 9) and the link between Visual Composer and Enterprise SOA (Chapter 10).

Chapters of the book:

(As the chapters differ very much in size, I wrote the number of pages in brackets for better orientation)

1. Introduction (7)
2. SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer (29)
3. Model-Driven Development (11)
4. Architecture and Concepts (24)
5. Visual Composer Basics (87)
6. Building Applications (100)
7. Analytical Applications (119)
8. Application Lifecycle (28)
9. Business Examples (7)
10. Visual Composer and Enterprise SOA (4)

Final Assessment:

The book has a practical focus which is supported by a lot of screenshots. All in all I recommend it to anyone who thinks about acitvely working with Visual Composer.

Categories: SAP enterprise SOA