[bobx11]

Having worked with SAP via ABAP and Java back in the day (and hating it) I can still feel the soul of SAP through these web apps. They still feel incredibly slow and bloated for what they do. Their market dominance is driven by the FUD of other technologies unfortunately, so they need to create their own front-end javascript framework to keep the mystique going about how computer systems are complicated without SAP. On the other hand, when the SAP people retire I'd imagine they'll be completely out of business because no CTO in 20 years is going to get behind an SAP implementation as they work today.

[gwu78]

"Java... web apps... incredibly slow... bloated... market dominance... FUD... front-end javascript framework... keep the mystique going..."

"completely out of business"

The end.

[skriticos2]

The company I contract for is currently rolling out a big SAP installation. Yes it's a big company, yes it's all the enterprise nightmares you heard about and no, SAP won't go out of business any time soon.

Not even COBOL is completely phased out here and most stuff is Java developed at some offshore location. Enterprise is a very, very weird place. And yes, IBM won't starve any time soon either.

[droopyEyelids]

It will be called SalesForce then.

[jedmeyers]

As if SalesForce is any better.

[smtddr]

I dunno where the SAP hate comes from. In my days of AT&T, SAP was the best thing going on. It was the one thing that actually worked reliably. I loved using ABAP and SAPjCO[1] to do all kinds of cool things. I thought the design of SAP was amazing for the complexities it had to deal with. Of course, our HRP1001 table had over 8 million rows. Someone probably had to buy some very expensive hardware to keep SAP running fast.

1. http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw04/helpdata/en/6f/1bd5c6a85b11...

P.S., I wish other programming languages would consider implementing a table variable like ABAP has; allowing me to run SQL against it. http://sap-core.com/articles/basis/abap/abap-variables/