Portal Development in SAP

It has been awhile since I wrote anything about work. I am part of the team that is writing the new enterprise portal (EP) for my company. The new EP will be developed using SAP. My plan is to discuss the process of developing portlets in SAP as I learn about it.

The first thing to note is that you have to be a member of the SAP Developer's Network (SDN) to get access to the downloads required to do portal development. SAP uses Eclipse but with special class files and plug-ins. The plug-ins allow the creation of par files (portal archives) which can be loaded into EP. So the first steps are to download and install Eclipse and then download and install the Eclipse plug-ins. This version of the plug-ins requires Eclipse 2.1. We are using JDK 1.3 for development.

Next step... develop a simple iView (portlet) using the SAP provided class files.