Up next are Ralf Ehret of SAP, and Taylan Kraus-Wipperman of Heeg, talking about the Smalltalk to NetWeaver connection project.

What does this enable?

• SAP can use Smalltalk for exploratory modeling
• SAP customers can use Smalltalk with SAP
• Provides a standard way of integrating Smalltalk and SAP in a project

This provides a connection to all SAP back end services, and is a first step to being a part of the SAP Enterprise Service Architecture [ed: maybe the enterprisey types will notice :) ].

This is all built on the industry standard WSDL/SOAP model. This allows Smalltalk to invoke RFC-enabled modules. The NetWeaver Connection makes Smalltalk a first class citizen inside the SAP NetWeaver world - it allows anyone to use Smalltalk with or instead of Java and ABAP.

The Smalltalk side is built on top of the WS* stack on VW. With that, it's a demo of the xCarrier project, using the SAP order system and the VW Transportation Zone system (the VW piece of the xCarrier project). The steps:

• Process incoming order
• Find business partner
• Get TPZ for incoming order
• Use TPZ for truck load planning

The demo shows an SAP application talking to VW via the WS* stack - you can see a similar thing in one of the screencasts I did recently. This stuff is going to be available (beta) with VisualWorks 7.5. There's future development going on: deeper access to the SAP BAPI repository, automatic access to RFC function definitions, and access to the Enterprise Service Repository.