Premature AJAX-ulation

Read this.

Security has always been a issue in newly popular technologies. But if you look back in time, you'll find that most of the tech(s) become popular due to one of the two reasons - either ease of use or ease of development and AJAX looks just too good to dump(for users) which automatically means that it'll stay in demand whether the security is there or not. So my guess is that ways of coding in AJAX will continuously improve as happened in all other langauges too (inlcuding JAVA) in a short time to come. So expect tools and coding guidelines for AJAX based applications coming out very soon. Till then just chugg along!!

Google's New Mobile Phone!!

I just came across this on Wallstreet Journal. Google is going to have it's own Mobile Phones with it's own apps and these phone could be completely free of any monthly charge!! They are planning to fund it with advertisements. Read more about it here and here.

SAPCompare with Webdynpro Comparision

I have now plugin enabled the new SAPCompare version 2.0.1. I provide two Plugins in the installation, one for comparing Classes and the other for comparing Webdynpro Components. I'll upload the action video soon on both the website and the blog. New plugins can be written very easily by inheriting the plugin base class which has all the required base methods, just add the code and voila! you are done. Some ideas for new plugins are comparing strcutures, tables etc...Mail me at ashwanigl@gmail.com if you want to write new plugins, I'll help you out in writing them.

File Locking Problem in Webdynpro ABAP

In the previous days I had been busy with my work which explains why I had been mostly off the blog.

But I have something intresting to share, I have had a problem while downloading a Excel file using Webdynpro ABAP Download link. The error message:

"The file is Locked for editing by another user. Click read only or click notify to open read only"

This caused me to try a lot of things, finally I was able to resolve it using HTTPWatch.

This issue will come up when the file you have sent to the client doesn't go as an attachment. If you have to send it as an attachment set the Behaviour attribute of FileDownload UI element to 'allowSave' by using the dropdown.

Another thing I realized during a discussion was that you should not specify the mime type as 'application/vnd.ms-excel', since this becomes Microsoft Excel specific, instead specify the mime type as 'x-excel/application'.

SAPCompare is out! Check it out here. It's a Comparison tool for ABAP Object Classes and it can compare all the classes in two different SAP systems using RFC connection. Just goto transaction SM59 in your SAP GUI and set a RFC destination to connect to the other SAP system and just run the report. That's it! Give the classname and the RFC destination, it'll compare the whole system's classes all along with the private, protected sections and the method code.

The enhancement for integrating Webdynpro ABAP components is also written now, and I have found it to be even more accurate then the comparison screen they give in the version management screen. I am changing that code for enabling plugin development, so I should have that ready in a few days. Check back again after some time to read on about Wendynpro plugin development..

sapcompare

No More HTML Viewing?

The day before yesterday I read an article on Saving View Source. Nearly all the new webpages compliant to AJAX nowadays do not offer any HTML code in thier Source. Instead they generate them dynamically at client end using Javascript thus reducing the Servers TODO list of dishing out HTML code to the requestor. The best example to see this in action is the GMAIL page. If you do a view source, you see a single line of Javascript call doing all what it wants to do.

I like this new approach even though it may require more maintenance efforts and remains difficult to debug and write during development. Why? There are certain great advantages it has:
1. It's not easy to steal your webpage's look, feel, functionality and identity (Though it is very much possible using tools like Firebug) .
2. Makes it tough to be hacked (though maybe not that much but still may be for novice it does act as a detterent)
3. A lot of Page Logic remains on the client so the responses to actions is quicker thus providing better End user experience.

Good read on Vodka

I just found this. Good eh...Then read this too.