This morning's keynote is from Heinz Roggenkamper, VP of Development at SAP Labs. His team does R&D at SAP, as a way of introducing the rest of SAP to possible futures. They've been looking at Cincom Smalltalk as one of those possibilities.

A Smalltalk test was done using a duplicate invoice finder problem as a test. They were pleasantly surprised at how quickly they got to a working proof of concept with help from Heeg. Those three weeks included a one week training class. One of the big take aways for them was that they felt like they understood the domain better at the end of the process.

They did a second proof of concept in a project called xCarrier, which deals with supporting shipping management: selecting the carrier, etc. They implemented an awful lot of the rule engine in 3 weeks, and got the proof of concept integrated with ABAP and Java components (web services). Georg Heeg picked up at this point to explain how things went from the Smalltalk side:

The approach taken was the classic one - model the known domain, and learn the rest of it as you go. This involved very short iterations with constant feedback. For the integration piece, a connection between Cincom Smalltalk and SAP NetWeaver (SAP's Web Services piece) was built by Heeg's team.

What does SAP like? They like the fast feedback from customers, and the ability to build executable case studies. Right now, they are using Smalltalk as a learning/exploratory tool rather than as a deployment tool.

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