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SAP is one of the most biggest player in ERP market. It has its own language called ABAP/4. Since naturally, SAP R/3, the main product line, is 3-tier architecture, says database, server, and client, you it also has its own client aka SAP GUI. However, the world has changed to web so SAP pushed lots of effort to provide programming interface in popular languages; Java and .NET. IMHO, Java and .NET are only suitable for large enterprise and they absolutely consume resources. You need big machine to run Java and .NET. By the way, the user’s requirements are many more simpler. They just want a simple web interface to back-office data, some of them are in DBMS and some of them are in SAP R/3. SAP Enterprise Portal is too big for this situation. PHP is just enough.

Fortunately, there are efforts to provide wrapper interface to SAP RFC, e.g., SAPRFC for PHP, SAP-RFC for Perl, Python SAP RFC, and SAP RFC for Ruby. These implementations are done by non-SAP so they are not supported by SAP. Anyway, the situation is going to change. Craig Cmehil, a SAP staff, has just released Scripting in a Box 0.0.1 last week. Even this package is just a result of free time, it has a potential that SAP is going to officially support additional languages. Note that version 0.0.1 has only PHP and Perl. Python and Ruby are on the way.

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