Friday, October 24, 2008

The SAP Web Application Server Architecture

As I promised in yesterday's blog, I will tackle more on the internals of the SAP Web Application Server Architecture.

Just like any other web servers, the basic function of the SAP WAS to dynamically create web pages on the fly depending on the preferences specified by the end user. The SAP WAS is high end commercial application meant to manage the complexities and rich features of most of SAP's business software solutions. The SAP WAS integrates the J2EE environment with parallel support for Java and ABAP using a common database in one server.

There are four major blocks representing the main functions of the SAP Web Application Server:
The Internet Communication Manager (ICM) – the component is an independent process that takes care of all communications between the Web Application Server and external supporters over intranets or the internet. It supports many standard communication protocols including HTTP, HTTPS, and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). The ICM is built on a stable and robust infrastructure and communication is being carried out over a communication channel named memory pipe which is of high performance and memory based. This components anticipates huge bulks of enterprise data as SAP is basically designed to scale to any company size. The ICM can improve a website's performance significantly by using an active and dynamic caching technology.

The Business Environment – this component takes care of all business contents and the enterprise' underlying logic which is published with the use BSP/JSP. All existing components like business object can be used for the business logic. Both the ABAP Environment and the J2EE Environment are in this component.
Connectivity – this component is used for integrating third-party products, tools, and applications in the Web Application Server and makes sure that there is intensive support for many open connectivity standard. Because of the Connectivity building block, the Web Application Server can provide for a comprehensive technical interoperability across all SAP and third-party components. For exchanging information across disparately platforms, Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), an XML-based protocol, is employed by the Web Application Server.

Relational Database – Relational database are everywhere in the SAP suite of applications. In fact, most of SAP is about data and databases. Anyway, the Web Application Server can use an exhaustive repository in exchanging all sorts of enterprise data, including the sensitive ones. It also offers a sophisticated set of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) tools for successful deployment of web services.
So there it is, the architecture behind the SAP Web Application Server. But don’t get me wrong, it may look like four simple blocks but when you dig deeper into each of the details, you will be amazed with all the sophisticated functionalities that they can offer. You must bear in the mind that this is the most important component of the SAP Netweaver and the Netweaver is the very foundation of all of SAP's applications.

Until tomorrow, I look forward to having a fruitful weekend today. Thanks to the internet, I can monitor my business while lying on the beach.

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