CORA in practice: developing a ROA based iPhone App connecting with SAP: Part II

Authors: Wilco Menge, Maarten Engels

Note: This blog post has been previously published on coramodel.com and on the front page of sdn.sap.com.

Introduction

This blog post is the second in a serie of two describing the findings and lessons learned of applying the CORA model in a software development project. This project is based on a demo scenario, and CORA is used as a tool to support architecting software.

In the first blog post the demo scenario and it’s background were described. Also, the actual mapping of components in the demo scenario onto the CORA model were shown. In this blog post we present the findings and lessons learned from this project. Also  CORA’s benefits and our next steps in the project are outlined.We start with the mapping on the CORA model.

CORA in practice: developing a ROA based iPhone App connecting with SAP: Part I

Authors: Wilco Menge, Maarten Engels

Note: This blog post has been previously published on coramodel.com and on the front page of sdn.sap.com.

Introduction

This blog post is the first in a serie of two describing the findings and lessons learned of applying the CORA model in a software development project. This project is based on a demo scenario where CORA is used as a model to support architecting software.

In this blog post the post the demo scenario and it’s background is described. Also, the actual mapping of components in the demo scenario onto the CORA model is shown. In the second blog post we present the findings and lessons learned from this project. Also  CORA’s benefits and our next steps in the project are outlined.

Background

During the last two years or so, Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA for short [1]) has become more and more common as an alternative for other application styles such as n-tier and SOA. In particular, the rise of so called “Web 2.0” applications on the Internet contributed greatly to the popularity of ROA as an implementation of the REST architecture, in particular due to it’s simplicity and it’s light-weight.

We became curious: what would ROA do in an SAP environment? Could ROA be an alternative for SOA? We already knew others were working on communicating with SAP through REST, but we wanted to take it one step further: we wanted to see whether we could make ROA work in a real life application that could really provide value to users!