This document provides an overview of Blue Ruby, which combines the Ruby programming language with the ABAP application server. It discusses the goals of Blue Ruby, including enabling agile development and facilitating the creation of "glue code" and domain-specific languages. The technical architecture allows Ruby code to run inside the ABAP virtual machine for locality. Several demo applications are highlighted and next steps for collaboration on the SDN are outlined.

1. Blue Ruby
A Ruby VM for the ABAP Web Application Server
Anne Hardy
Juergen Schmerder
Murray Spork
Daniel Vocke
SDN Mentors Webinar, 04-07-2009

2. Agenda
1. Blue Ruby – Who, What and Why
2. Use Cases for Blue Ruby
3. Technical Overview of Blue Ruby
4. Demo
5. Status and Next Steps
6. Discussion / Q&A
© SAP 2008 / Page 2

3. Blue Ruby – Who?
SAP Research Americas and China
Platform Research
Anne Hardy
Blue Ruby
Juergen Schmerder Murray Spork
(project lead)
Daniel Vocke Joseph Wang
Florian Reinhart
Su Yu
(student)
Kevin Schlieper
(student)

4. Blue Ruby – What?
Combine the best of both worlds
ABAP Application Server Ruby
Known for robustness and work process Pure object-oriented dynamic general-
isolation purpose language
Highly scalable Perfectly suited for rapid prototyping
Sophisticated software logistics and Rich and thriving community, especially
software lifecycle management among web developers
Unrivaled breadth and depth of existing Supports implementation of internal DSLs
Enterprise Applications
Evolutionary, non-disruptive extension of the ABAP VM
Runs inside the ABAP VM, does not require additional server
Sandbox approach allows consumer-specific adaptation inside
the platform, without breaking platform consistency
Experimental!
Enterprise-ready Dynamic Language Environment
Making the simple things simple and the complex things possible
© SAP 2008 / Page 4

5. Blue Ruby – Why?
Why a dynamic language? Why inside the ABAP VM?
Agile development Locality
Rapid prototyping Having code where the data is
Fast iterations Local in-process communication
Constant refactoring Unload I/O
Ideal for glue code and DSLs Landscape simplification
Duck-typing makes it easy to No separate server necessary
adapt to underlying application Central IT administration
Eval(), closures, …
Leverage
It’s a trend in the industry… ABAP authorizations
Microsoft ABAP transports
Sun …
© SAP 2008 / Page 5

6. Agenda
1. Blue Ruby – Who, What and Why
2. Use Cases for Blue Ruby
3. Technical Overview of Blue Ruby
4. Demo
5. Status and Next Steps
6. Discussion / Q&A
© SAP 2008 / Page 6

7. Programming Models Evolve
Faster Than Platforms
Timeless Software (Vishal Sikka)[1]
Best of both worlds: the flexibility of “glue code” alongside the “enterprise”
qualities of the ABAP stack
“The glue that binds”
There is no “one-size-fits-all” approach
Choose the right tool (language) for the job at hand
…scripting and dynamic languages are good for some things
…but coding core business logic in ABAP is not going away
Multi-language stacks
Flexibility in language choice whilst maintaining coherence
Industry trend: .NET now followed by Java
[1] Timeless Software: Part 2, Vishal Sikka https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/11837

8. A New Programming Model for Light-Weight
Application Extension Scenarios
Light-weight extensions: e.g. situational and departmental applications
Speed of development and flexibility are valued more than:
performance of runtime
lifecycle management
“Whether Ruby on Rails becomes prevalent
governance inside the enterprise or not - in the future
building Web applications inside the
enterprise will look a lot like it (RoR)”
Is it possible to “teach” the ABAP
-- paraphrasing Tim Bray
stack some of the tricks from
Ruby on Rails? For e.g.:
Convention over configuration
Simple things are simple - complex things are possible
Opinionated development
Do Not Repeat Yourself (DRY)
Test (or Behavior) Driven Development (TDD/ BDD)
Extendible Domain Specific Languages

9. Lazy developers want an embedded
scripting environment
Runtime benefits:
Locality: extension logic runs in the backend where the data and business
logic live
Make use of existing extension points for call-backs (i.e. ABAP calling script
code - e.g. BADIs)
Developer experience:
Simplify landscape: avoid maintaining separate infrastructure/ app servers
(e.g. Rails instances)
Don’t want to deal with low level issues such as connectivity, remoting
protocols
No need to worry about security, scalability, deployment etc.
Just get a developer account: log in, write code, test/execute

10. Why Ruby?
Could have chosen any scripting language - but:
Ruby is fun
Ruby is cool
Support for DSLs
Implementation reasons (principle of least surprise)
Enterprise Ruby developers are on the increase
In future could abstract
this into a “Dynamic
Language Runtime” (ala
the CLR in .NET) that
could support any
dynamic language

11. Potential Use Cases
Scenarios we have already experimented with:
Composing and adapting RFCs, BAPIs, Enterprise Services
Today’s demo
Exposing such composition via HTTP as RESTful services
Exposing POWL (worklist data) as an RSS/ATOM feed
Scripting Extentions to UI (e.g. floor plan manager)
Custom BAdI extensions
Batch-job scripting (e.g. Twitter alerts)
Other scenarios we will be exploring:
Bi-directional synching of business data via ATOM Pub
Test scripts for Business Objects/ Enterprise Services
Exploratory throw away prototyping
Have we missed any important use cases?

12. Vision: A Different Type of Developer
(to what SAP usually caters for)
Can Blue Ruby open up the ABAP stack to non-ABAP Developers?
In this context it is important to understand how the sandboxing concept
allows us to restrict what a Blue Ruby developer can do (but we will come
back to that)
A new persona
Line-of-business developers
Casual (non-professional) developers
Close to “the business” - have significant domain expertise
Programming may not be their full-time job - but they are comfortable doing
simple scripting (macros in Excel, Visual Basic in Office apps)

13. Platform-as-a-Service on the inside
INSIDE THE ENTERPRISE OUTSIDE THE ENTERPRISE
PROVIDERS
IT SERVICE
IT Dept.
Both IT Dept. and
Coghead are service
providers to LOB
PLATFORM
Internal
Order
...
Mgmt.
PaaS
SAP Business Suite
Internal PaaS allows LOB to create their External PaaS allows LOB to
own services and data-feeds from the create highly collaborative web-apps
backend
Customers/
Line-of-Business
Partners
© SAP 2007, , CSG/13

14. Agenda
1. Blue Ruby – Who, What and Why
2. Use Cases for Blue Ruby
3. Technical Overview of Blue Ruby
4. Demo
5. Status and Next Steps
6. Discussion / Q&A
© SAP 2008 / Page 14

15. Blue Ruby Architecture
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16. From Ruby to ABAP
© SAP 2008 / Page 16

17. Blue Ruby Virtual Machine
© SAP 2008 / Page 17

18. Blue Ruby
Building Blocks
Blue Ruby Compiler
Towards a self-hosting Ruby environment
Blue Ruby Runtime
Extends the ABAP VM to support Ruby
Blue Sec
Policy-driven security ensures platform integrity
Blue Bug
A Ruby developer needs a Ruby debugger
Blue Ruby IDE
SAPGui or DHTML (or your own)
BRIL
Secure Bridges
Blue Ruby Intermediate
Sandboxed access to ABAP Applications
Language – a representation of
Blue FS a dynamic program the ABAP
VM understands
A database-backed virtual file system with
RESTful and WebDAV access
© SAP 2008 / Page 18

19. Agenda
1. Blue Ruby – Who, What and Why
2. Use Cases for Blue Ruby
3. Technical Overview of Blue Ruby
4. Demo
5. Status and Next Steps
6. Discussion / Q&A
© SAP 2008 / Page 19

20. Agenda
1. Blue Ruby – Who, What and Why
2. Use Cases for Blue Ruby
3. Technical Overview of Blue Ruby
4. Demo
5. Status and Next Steps
6. Discussion / Q&A
© SAP 2008 / Page 20

21. Implementation Status – the good news
Completeness Performance
Language
82
11%
647 Success
89% Fail
Core lib
1381
32%
Success
2873
Fail
68%
© SAP 2008 / Page 21

22. Implementation Status – the bad news
Completeness Performance
Fibonacci (20)
Stdlib
Time (ms)
1870
0%
2000
1500
Success 1000
Not tested
100% 500
15 10
0
MRI ABAP Blue Ruby
Count to 100000
Rails? not yet
3000
Time (ms)
C-libs? No!
3000
2500
2000
<your favorite> not yet 1500
(probably)
1000
16 11
500
0
MRI ABAP Blue Ruby
© SAP 2008 / Page 22

23. Existing Blue Ruby demo applications
Rails Application Atom/RSS Reader
Coghead Application Blackberry Twitter
© SAP 2008 / Page 23

24. Next steps – SDN Collaboration
Trial system available outside SAP firewall
Terms: NDA / trial agreement required for non D/I/C-Users
If interested – talk to us: anne.hardy@sap.com, juergen.schmerder@sap.com
Series of Weblogs planned on SDN
Code examples on how to use Blue Ruby
From simple snippets to full-blown application
Feedback highly appreciated
Would a scripting environment for ABAP be useful?
How would you use Blue Ruby?
What is missing?
Deeper involvement (get copy of source code) might be possible
If interested – talk to us: anne.hardy@sap.com, juergen.schmerder@sap.com
© SAP 2008 / Page 24

25. Agenda
1. Blue Ruby – Who, What and Why
2. Use Cases for Blue Ruby
3. Technical Overview of Blue Ruby
4. Demo
5. Status and Next Steps
6. Discussion / Q&A
© SAP 2008 / Page 25

26. Thank you!
© SAP 2008 / Page 26

27. Grid
© SAP 2008 / Page 27

28. Definition and halftone values of colors
SAP Blue SAP Gold SAP Light Gray SAP Gray SAP Dark Gray
Primary color palette
RGB 4/53/123 RGB 240/171/0 RGB 204/204/204 RGB 153/153/153 RGB 102/102/102 100%
Dove Petrol Warm Green Warm Red Violet/Mauve
Secondary color palette
RGB 68/105/125 RGB 21/101/112 RGB 85/118/48 RGB 119/74/57 RGB 100/68/89
100%
RGB 96/127/143 RGB 98/146/147 RGB 110/138/79 RGB 140/101/87 RGB 123/96/114 85%
RGB 125/150/164 RGB 127/166/167 RGB 136/160/111 RGB 161/129/118 RGB 147/125/139 70%
RGB 152/173/183 RGB 154/185/185 RGB 162/180/141 RGB 181/156/147 RGB 170/152/164 55%
RGB 180/195/203 RGB 181/204/204 RGB 187/200/172 RGB 201/183/176 RGB 193/180/189 40%
Cool Green Ocher Cool Red Warning Red
Tertiary color palette RGB 158/48/57
RGB 73/108/96 RGB 129/110/44 RGB 132/76/84
100%
RGB 101/129/120 RGB 148/132/75 RGB 150/103/110 85%
RGB 129/152/144 RGB 167/154/108 RGB 169/130/136 70%
RGB 156/174/168 RGB 186/176/139 RGB 188/157/162 55%
RGB 183/196/191 RGB 205/197/171 RGB 206/183/187 40%
© SAP 2008 / Page 28
2007

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