I'm going to try the latest trial version of SAP NetWeaver 2004s Java and ABAP on a virtual machine based on VMware Server. First of all, I have to download all packages from SDN.

SAP is such one of the most complex ERP on earth. It is designed for extensibility and scalability, especially in cluster environment. As a result, most services are accessible via internet protocol aka TCP/IP. So, you have to know IP address and port for such a service, e.g. J2EE. This is a bit funny. SAP uses wide range of TCP/IP ports.

Just a note to obtain SAP RFC SDK. You need it if you want to develop any kind of SAP RFC from external subsystem like Perl, PHP, Python, or Ruby. If you are mainly working on Windows platform, precompiled DLL should be sufficient. Unfortunately, Linux platform is very complex due to various core libraries so usually, you need to recompile RFC for your programming language by yourself. Well, it is not easy to find SAP RFC SDK but I found a helpful thread.

I have just got a package sent from U.S. There is a T-Shirt from SDN team inside that package plus a short message as follow.

Thank you for your patience in waiting for your SDN T-Shirt. The enormous success of SDN - we tripled the number of members while discussion forum activity exploded 6x during the past year - outpaced our ability to keep-up with the T-Shirt distribution process. We’re working to make the process smoother and faster, we appreciate your contributions in the past, and we encourage you to keep contribution to the SAP developer community on SDN.

I wrote A Visual Installation Guide on Sneak Preview SAP NetWeaver 04 ABAP Edition. By now, there is the newer version so it should be updated to match the new instalation wizard. Anyway, the new version is very similar to the old one. There is no noticable difference during installation. I will just let you know about my machine.

In some cases, you might want to completely uninstall the Sneak Preview SAP NetWeaver 2004s Full ABAP Edition. Yes, it is possible. Below is my procedure that you may follow. Note that I will not touch default unless it is necessary so please leave them untouch if I don’t explicitly specify new values.

1. Open folder \SAPNW2004sSneakPreviewABAP\Installation_Master
2. Run UNINSTSAP.BAT
3. Specify Profile Directory to C:\usr\sap\NSP\SYS\profile and press Next button