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SAP always is an interesting case. It gets close to zero love from HN, yet the platform has some interesting engineering. For example, they had their own langu

SAP always is an interesting case. It gets close to zero love from HN, yet the platform has some interesting engineering. For example, they had their own language that abstracts and operates directly over a database. They had their own drag and drop UI builder, that compiles down to a HTML page or a desktop widget - which is again not an ordinary feat. They view code as data, as in even the UI is stored as a configuration and not as some Java code. They had their own VCS back when Git didn’t exist. Of course, all these weren’t best of their class, but they sure did get there ideas right. All these must have been interesting engineering concepts back during its time, yet there hasn’t been much tech literature on how they accomplished it or what inspired them to. At least not that I know of. Now that open source is on fire, of course a single company cannot catch up with the pace these open source softwares are racing ahead. Companies like Zoho and Salesforce are able to catch up because they do two things right. #1. Cloud #2. Adopting open-source and making a clever mix of proprietary engineering The next SAP or Oracle will certainly be companies that get those two things right.

asc_jiji 7y ago
I agree with everything you said, they did some pretty neat stuff! the problem is that they started getting things wrong(from the development perspective) somewhere along the way, not sure if due to backwards compatibility or due to massive lock-in's with their own technology. SAP right now is making a move on cloud using SCP and as open source goes, openUI5 exists. I don't have much to say about SCP, just that the company I'm on decided to not use it, basically because we don't see advantages and to avoid future lock-ins About openUI5, I honestly dislike it, the most useful features of that framework are locked inside SAPUI5(a supersetof openUI5) and pull requests are managed by a branch of the company itself and they are pretty harsh on it. SAP documentation on it can be bad and is entirely biased towards deploying things inside SAP or SCP, which is pretty annoying
- strictnein 7y ago
  Worked at SAP. We had to use SAPUI5. Felt like it was created by a cadre of bitter enterprise Java (yes, Java, not JS) devs.
sebazzz 7y ago
Isn't SAP just a plain example of the Inner Platform Effect?
- dfox 7y ago
  It isn't. Because when they started, there wasn't any "outer" platform the speak of. The platform underlying SAP is essentially an way to have mainframe-like development environment (updates of almost anything without restart, declarative UI library, minimal overhead for inactive users...) on something that isn't a mainframe.
rushabh 7y ago
ERPNext is a full featured Open Source ERP (GPL V3, not open core) with reasonable traction. https://github.com/frappe/erpnext https://github.com/frappe/erpnext Disclaimer: check my bio

asc_jiji 7y ago

I agree with everything you said, they did some pretty neat stuff! the problem is that they started getting things wrong(from the development perspective) somewhere along the way, not sure if due to backwards compatibility or due to massive lock-in's with their own technology. SAP right now is making a move on cloud using SCP and as open source goes, openUI5 exists. I don't have much to say about SCP, just that the company I'm on decided to not use it, basically because we don't see advantages and to avoid future lock-ins About openUI5, I honestly dislike it, the most useful features of that framework are locked inside SAPUI5(a supersetof openUI5) and pull requests are managed by a branch of the company itself and they are pretty harsh on it. SAP documentation on it can be bad and is entirely biased towards deploying things inside SAP or SCP, which is pretty annoying

strictnein 7y ago
Worked at SAP. We had to use SAPUI5. Felt like it was created by a cadre of bitter enterprise Java (yes, Java, not JS) devs.

sebazzz 7y ago

Isn't SAP just a plain example of the Inner Platform Effect?

dfox 7y ago
It isn't. Because when they started, there wasn't any "outer" platform the speak of. The platform underlying SAP is essentially an way to have mainframe-like development environment (updates of almost anything without restart, declarative UI library, minimal overhead for inactive users...) on something that isn't a mainframe.

rushabh 7y ago

ERPNext is a full featured Open Source ERP (GPL V3, not open core) with reasonable traction. https://github.com/frappe/erpnext https://github.com/frappe/erpnext Disclaimer: check my bio