October 28, 1997
SAP's Business Framework is a family of products delivered by SAP and third parties that form a component-based, integrated, and open application software solution. With the Business Framework, SAP ships technologies that allow the automatic, seamless integration of products, both on a technical and on a business level. While the business-level integration focuses on a common business understanding of various products or components, the technical interoperability across networks is the fundamental prerequisite for building component-based solutions. With the DCOM Component Connector, SAP and Microsoft have built a means for the seamless and tight technical interoperability of components on the basis of Microsoft's Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM). This paper discusses the benefits of using the DCOM Component Connector to both corporations and their developers. The DCOM Component Connector will be shipped by SAP in the R/3 4.0 time frame.
Today, customers are challenged with increased competitive pressure through globalization, turbulent markets, and ever-growing demands with respect to quality and time-to-market. Companies react to these challenges by taking a detailed view of their complete business system, which includes the consumer, their business partners, and their own internal business units. This business ecosystem is dissected into discrete business activities, which represent the services that are needed to satisfy customers' needs. The business ecosystem approach represents a huge opportunity to identify cases for incremental value chain innovation and business integration, which can lead to improved flexibility and competitiveness.
The Business Framework delivers on SAP's vision of business ecosystems. It enables customers to assemble their business solution, which seamlessly integrates business components delivered by SAP and other vendors. Business components themselves provide a dedicated business functionality as an encapsulated software product through defined and consistent interfaces. Integrated business components provide a new dimension of maintainability, because they allow customers to upgrade parts of a system step-by-step instead of upgrading the whole system at a single point in time.
For a long time, the integration of components delivered by different vendors required specialized knowledge in various, widely differing environments and often was an expensive, manual integration process. With R/3 4.0, SAP ships technologies like the DCOM Component Connector with the Business Framework. The DCOM Component Connector, the result of a joint effort of SAP and Microsoft, allows the automatic, seamless integration of products on the basis of Microsoft's DCOM.
In particular, the DCOM Component Connector provides the following benefits for corporations:
These benefits strengthen the role of SAP as the backbone for your component solution. With the Business Framework, SAP integrates products from different vendors, legacy, and newly created applications to provide every customer with a dedicated business solution.
The Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) enables COM software components to communicate directly over a network in a reliable, secure, and efficient manner. DCOM is designed for use across multiple network transports, including Internet protocols such as TCP and HTTP. DCOM is based on the Open Software Foundation's DCE-RPC spec and will work with both Java™ applets and ActiveX® components through its use of the Component Object Model (COM). DCOM is a fast, native object transport for Windows NT and Windows® 95. DCOM is also being licensed to technology vendors through the Open Group as well as through Microsoft, and is currently available from several vendors on UNIX and other platforms.
The Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) is based on COM and uses DCOM for component-to-component communications across a network. MTS itself is a component-based transaction processing system for developing, deploying, and managing high-performance, scalable, and robust enterprise, Internet, and intranet server applications. The MTS defines an application-programming model for developing distributed component-based applications. It also provides a run-time infrastructure for deploying and managing these applications.
The rich business processes of R/3 can natively be brought into Windows. However, the integration is bidirectional, that is, the DCOM Component Connector also integrates the vast number of COM components transparently into R/3.
Distributed business components implement business logic in possibly various separated run-time environments for improved deployment flexibility. However, even for multiple systems developers need to have a single system image for efficient development. To date, this integration has been achieved manually. The DCOM Component Connector provides a commodity platform, delivering distributed features at low cost, because it
The Microsoft Transaction Server is designed to work with any resource manager, including relational databases, file systems, and image stores, that support a transactional two-phase commit protocol. This enables businesses to leverage existing investments in UNIX and mainframe data stores. The DCOM Component Connector integrates the wide range of SAP's business components into this environment and eases the customer's integration efforts.
The DCOM Component Connector also automatically integrates COM transaction support with SAP transactions. This transaction support is transparent to the application programmer and provides the R/3 class reliability to the distributed business application programmer. This transparent support frees developers from explicitly programming low-level transaction control primitives into their applications.
The DCOM Component Connector allows developers to focus on the development and deployment of business components by freeing them from the need to cope with the traditional obstacles in cross platform integration. In particular, the DCOM Component Connector
Security is automatically synchronized between SAP R/3 and the COM environment. The DCOM Component Connector leverages the Microsoft Transaction Server distributed security service that is integrated with Windows NT security. This makes it easy to prevent unauthorized access to business applications, even in the distributed environment, and avoids an explicit logon to R/3 when business functionality is invoked.
The DCOM Component Connector delivers a series of features that drive down the effort and cost of building and integrating distributed business applications on the basis of Microsoft's DCOM technologies. These features offer a new dimension of openness and performance, enabling developers to focus on building business logic in the environment that they are familiar with—be it ABAP Objects or COM—with a high potential of reuse across the business process chain. The result is shorter development time and easier integration of components extending R/3 running on Windows NT and other platforms.
If you would like to know more about the Business Framework, the DCOM Component Connector, and other advanced technologies, please visit us on the Web at http://www.sap.com. For more information about Microsoft COM and DCOM technologies, please go to http://www.microsoft.com/com/.