SF Bay Area Chapter of ACM Meeting & Talk: Blue Ruby – The Ruby way to talk to SAP Business Applications May 21, 2008

Dynamic languages like Ruby are getting more and more attention and have proven that they allow to build programs faster and more effectively in an agile environment than traditional strong-typed languages. Ruby has a great potential to become a next-generation application programming language. At least there is a wide-spread opinion, that whatever will be the next-generation language, it will be very close to what Ruby is today.

With Blue Ruby, SAP Research wants to establish an environment, which will allow to develop and execute Ruby programs in business applications as effective and robust as today's SAP's proprietary ABAP programs, but combined with the agile and light-weight methodologies, which you would expect with a dynamic language.

Blue Ruby could be a potential extension mechanism for proprietary business applications. The strong typed and less agile concepts of ABAP allow to build the robust business application platform components, which then could be combined in a light-weight, loosely-coupled and agile manner using a dynamic language like Ruby. In this talk, SAP Research Scientist Juergen Schmerder will explain the Blue Ruby Virtual Machine and SAP Research's approach to establishing a strong and secure package and isolation concept between Ruby and ABAP programs. He'll show examples of how to call ABAP from Ruby and vice versa, provide light-weight HTTP access to ABAP Functions and also consume the Enterprise Services offered by SAP's brand new Application Platform.

About the Speaker

Juergen has been working for SAP for a looooong time - since 1999. In September 2007, he packed his stuff and moved from Heidelberg, Germany to the sunny Bay Area, where he joined SAP Research to work on the application of dynamic languages, in particular Ruby, to the SAP universe. Prior to that, he explored several groups within SAP as a software architect. Before joining SAP he learned about the SME market, working as a consultant for one of the ERP solutions that turned out to compete with SAP: Microsoft Navision. Somehow he managed not to loose his passion for simple solutions thoughout the nine years of working in a company as complex as he never imagined. Juergen holds a degree in Mathematics from the University of Augsburg, Germany, a California driver's license and a FC Bayern Muenchen membership. For those truly more interested in the talker than in the talk, he will have a CV available.

Official Website: http://www.sfbayacm.org/events/2008-05-21.php