And even more on Thomas Jung… This time he teams up with “Mr. ABAP “(I thought that was Horst Keller? – so there is more than one) Rich Heilman to give us a book on “Next Generation ABAP Development”.

“ANOTHER book on ABAP ?”, I hear you shout. Now before you yawn and click away, check out Thomas’ blog post on SDN or read this:

“The structure of this book reflects the workflow of a development project. The first half of the book focuses on creating the data and application logic layers and then service-enabling them. The second half of the book focuses on creating the user interface layers.”

Sounds very promising ! Now let’s pick out some bits from the table of contents:

Chapter 3: Data Persistence Layer
In this chapter, we’ll build the logic that controls the persistence of application data. We’ll start by generating persistent object classes for the underlying data dictionary tables created in Chapter 2. Then, we’ll build a set of business object classes to hide the inner technical details of the Persistent Objects. In addition to the new technology of Persistent Objects, we’ll show you how to use ZIP compression on large strings.

ZIP Compression on large strings?! Wehey.

Chapter 4: Consuming a Web Service
Not all project data will originate from one centralized system. For example, in the sample application, some data will be stored in a legacy system and accessed remotely via Web Services. In this chapter, we will examine the process for generating a Web Service proxy object and integrating this proxy into the data persistence layer.

VERY nice !

Chapter 5: Shared Memory Objects
After some analysis, it will become apparent that the sample application has some static data that will be accessed repeatedly. In this chapter, we will describe how you can provide the best performance by structuring the data access for this type of data into an ABAP Shared Memory Object.

Now which ABAPer hasn’t been at this point and wants help with it? My wallet is opening slowly…

Chapter 7: ABAP and SAP NetWeaver Master Data Management
This is the first of our “What-If” chapters. Here, we look at an alternative approach to the project where our master data is modeled and stored in SAP NetWeaver Master Data Management (SAP NetWeaver MDM), instead of the local Data Dictionary. This chapter will focus on how we would alter the data persistence layer to read this data via the SAP NetWeaver MDM ABAP application programming interface (API) instead of directly from the local database.

It doesn’t get more “now” than this!

Chapter 11: Classic Dynpro UI/ALV Object Model
In this chapter, we turn our attention to user interface logic. In the sample application requirements, there are a group of internal users who are full time SAP GUI users and who need powerful reporting tools. Therefore, we’ll learn how to build a classic Dynpro screen on top of the Model View Controller (MVC), which uses the ALV Object Model for its reporting output.

Chapter 12: Web Dynpro ABAP
Since most of the sample application’s users are not SAP GUI users, we’ll look at how you can build a Web Dynpro user interface for these users. This chapter will focus on real world Web Dynpro applications that contain multiple component usages, ALV integration, and table popins.

Sounds already as if this is a book written by people who know what is required out there now – and what is going to come fairly soon. Especially Chapter 11 is something I come across a lot in my day-to-day work. But there is one more….

Chapter 16: RSS Feed Using an ICF Service Node
In this chapter, we’ll examine how Internet Communication Framework (ICF) Service Nodes can be combined with XML processing in ABAP to produce interesting Web 2.0 type projects. As the final example of the book, we’ll implement an RSS Feed using these technologies.

Right, this is probably not something that most companies would use right here and now, but RSS feed implementation will soon become very commonplace for most ERP installations and not just for a chosen disruptive and experimental few. Still, a very interesting topic indeed.

On the whole – I am thrilled and can’t wait until the beginning of August when this book comes out – it says the “book hits the shelves” on SDN, but there must be a misunderstanding, maybe it’s SAP’s shelves?.

Jung and Heilman crammed all this into 330 pages and a CD with examples, which suggests that not too much detail is provided. The 17 chapters cover a mighty lot of ground. have written a total of 485 pages, which seems ample considering they are covering a mighty lot of ground here. But let’s wait and see.

[UPDATE] Whilst sappress.com announces the book for release in August 2007, I managed to order an english version of it at Galileo Press (SAP PressGermany). Let’s see what happens Stefan Proksch, technical editor of Galileo Press kindly explained in the comments why Galileo Press released the book already. He also told me that there will be a German version of the book, to be released in August this year.