NWDS stands for SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio. It is an extended version of the famous Eclipse aimed to help developing applications to run on SAP NetWeaver platform under Java stack. Anyway, it assumes that you installed and ran the NWDS on your personal computer. In other words, you should be the Administrator or is in Administrators group. As a result, you may not be able to run NWDS if you are not in either case.

Ubuntu is one of the most popular in recent years. I like Ubuntu over other distributions because of its near-constant release date, says 6 months. However, 6 months seem to be too short for enterprise applications. They don't want to upgrade OS every 6 months or so. That is a reason why Dapper Drake must be long term support. However, there is another important reason between Dapper, Edgy and later release including the latest Feisty.

SAP NetWeaver is one of a cool and complete platform for large-scale enterprise backoffice. There are so many components especially in the recent version which Java development is mainstream. That's why SAP has to distribute Technology Preview to anyone interesting to learn by themselves for wide-range users, e.g., administrator, developer, manager and etc. Another benefit is to test the product world-wide as a beta test so that all testers will generate bug reports to the community.

Anyway, all previews are not the real products and there is no professional support. We have to learn how to solve issues ourselves. I just got one issue during trying test Design Time Repository for large-scale development team. The problem occurred when I tried to import development configuration in NWDS.

Import configuration failed:Could not create mountpoint for SC in compartment example.org_APPL_1: Could not create remote path /dtr/ws/Application/example.org_APPL/dev/inactive/SCs/example.org/APPL/_comp/TopLevelDCs/ (Internal Server Error).

Developing web applications on Apache Tomcat is very easy including ones interact with DBMS or even SAP. The key component is JDBC driver and SAP JCo. However, common problem is about deploying the application. If you installed JDBC driver or SAP JCo improperly on Apache Tomcat, you may run it as long as you don't redeploy the application again. Whenever you redeploy the application or deploy another application using the same driver, all applications will crash immediately because the driver was not loaded properly (it was already loaded).

According to previous article about SAP JCo 2.1.7 and Apache Tomcat, I later got some trouble to run real applications based on SAP JCo APIs. I'm sure that the code is absolutely correct. Anyway, I always got NullPointerException. There are several thread talking about this issue.

One of the most web application server in open source community is Apache Tomcat. The latest stable version is 5.5.20. It is possible to develop a web application that tightly interfaces to SAP R/3 or its components via SAP JCo aka SAP Java Connector. Its latest version is 2.1.7. It is a little bit tricky to run SAP JCo inside Apache Tomcat on Linux.