“Why not run an unconference for SAP developers and consultants in London.”

SAP Inside Track London 2009

We had both been to SAP Community Days and thought we could pull something off. So we hustled together a venue and a wiki page to handle the signups and sessions.

It was a lot of fun. So much so that this year we are repeating the whole process.

This year we have managed to secure IBM Southbank as a venue. Thanks to a lot of help from Zoe Slattery. 

The date is April 4 and there is a small charge of £10 to cover the lunch. (Signup quickly in March for the early bird rate. In April it will rocket to £15!)

There are several SAP Mentors coming to the event from Europe so it is a great chance to hear from them and particularly the ESME team.

Ant Phillips from IBM will be presenting a session on connecting SAP up with Project Zero, the community version of Websphere sMash. The other sessions planned for the day are on the SDN Wiki.

One of the  sessions is a discussion on certification. This has been a hot topic in the SAP community lately. New Mentor Michael Koch is currently running a survey on how certification relates to contractors. You can complete this survey here and it would be great to see some good results from that survey at the unconference.

You can follow the fun in twitter at @SAPInsideTrack.

One of the great benefits of these days is the networking and conversations with people in trenches.  In credit crunched times such as today these can be even more valuable than official training sessions and (dare I say it) certification.

If you would like to come along to meet the mentors, participate in the sessions, run a session for yourself there is still time to signup.

Paul James (no relation) did a very interesting talk on RESTful interfaces and there was great discussion on the finer points. The slides from the talk will no doubt be up here very soon. I want to follow up on the references and url’s from the last couple of slides.

My take away from the talk is that an API published on a page like this does not make an interface restful. It needs to obey the 5 laws which you will find on the presentation when it is uploaded or by searching for REST.

I also had a great chat with Rob from IBM Hursley who is working on Project Zero. They are creating a lightweight Ruby/ PHP engine that can call Java like the PHP/Java bridge and similar to Quercus in some ways. This might be a way to 1. get BIRT to play nicely with PHP and 2. Get wordpress playing with SAP

Having said that project zero doesn’t need a server as it is self contained. It doesn’t need to be deployed on a Java Webserver be that Netweaver or Tomcat.

I also caught up with Demian and he was a happy man as his latest project Kindo was techcrunched yesterday and the servers coped with the spike in traffic.

I have played with Kindo and it is a nice way to enter you family tree. It is designed to enter the living family so it can remind you about birthdays etc and prompt you with links to Amazon and flower shops etc.

Although it can enter past family that probably won’t do much for the business case.

I also caught up with some guys I have seen for ages and got some feedback on my SAP presentation I did at short notice in December.

Just remember the Annual London Conference is coming up on 29/02. Remember to register.