The New SAP BusinessObjects RESTful SDK: What It Means to You
Overall Satisfaction with SAP Business Objects
We use BusinessObjects to deliver reports on a schedule basis to management as well as provide adhoc and drill through reporting to staff to help make accurate decisions. The ability to join data between different data sources without users having to touch the data is an important features. We collect data from several legacy systems including databases that were linked throuh MS SQL Server and SOAP Web services through a single Universe to provide a single view of the business to users.
Pros
- Designed for Crystal, Web Intelligence and the BI Platform, the RESTful SDK (RSDK) is the next-generation application programming interface (API) for manipulating and interacting with reporting content residing on your BusinessObjects server.
- For starters, it means no more jar files. Or, if you are a .Net developer, merge modules and or .dll files. The RSDK is based on a lightweight, refreshing platform that literally requires no installation. All it requires is knowledge of a handful of URLs and configuring your BOE server for web services (which is already configured by default).
- With the newest versions Windows AD Single Sign on is configurable with your custom application with much less time and effort.
Cons
- In classic Java/.Net SDK programming, as a programmer you would interact with an object model. But with the Retful SDK consisting a vast array of API calls, there are many waus to call the application that may or may not get your application the expected result. There needs to be more examplesof actual javascript based calls.
- Prior to BOE 4.0 SP6 there as little parity with the JAVA/.NET SDK so an upgrade to BOE 4.1 is necessary to get the majority of functionality available.
- We have built our own SAML, OAuth, Active Directory, SiteMinder and Ping Identity Connects through to BusinessObjects. I would expect these will be come part of the API in the future.
- Jaspersoft
We found the community, support and talent pool more accessible with SAP BusinessObjects than JasperSoft. Independant forums such as BOB at (http://www.forumtopics.com/busobj) plus sites form SAP such as SCN (http://scn.sap.com) provide most of what we need to overcome an issue requiring research. Support Tickets are relatively easy to setup and are responded to quickly.
Comments
Please log in to join the conversation