Everhart, Glenn From: Norm Donovan X5678 [Norm.Donovan@Vishay.Com] Sent: Saturday, July 04, 1998 12:38 PM To: Info-VAX@Mvb.Saic.Com Subject: Re: No SAP on VMS - another opportunity lost ?? |> Keep in mind that even if SAP wants to go back to VMS, they won't get |> the people to do it. Since there is no workstation VMS, there are no |> students with VMS experience. | |NO students? Now there is a scary thought. There are still more than |enough qualified professional, and experienced software engineers to |port the current SAP to VMS. Why use kids? | |Also, given VMS Support for standards, I wouldn't be at all surprised |if you couldn't compile and link the SAP Code base on the first pass. | |Q SAP is written in 1% C, 99% ABAP-4. ABAP-4 looks something like structured COBOL (PL/1?). How many students learn ABAP in school? Knowledge of VMS or UNIX or NT is not required to be an SAP programmer. The original port of SAP to VMS was done by one senior guy, with a 1-2 supporting programmers. No students. The problem is not porting the C core of SAP, its the scripts (startup, backup, shutdown, etc.) and the environment linkages (TCP/IP,, network stats, security, etc.) all which are VMS-specific. Let me give you one example. SAP runs server processes on the server. When a user wants to read a data file they can either read it from the client or on the server. If the read is done from the client then the client's security system insures that the client has access to the file, but what about the case where the server is doing the read? Server reads are needed for batch jobs which have no clients logged in. How does the server "know" that it has the rights to read the datafile? Since the server process must service many users it runs with all privs. This means that it cannot use file system security because it can read anything. SAP's solution is to emulate the OS security system of the server in the SAP server process. SAP will ask who is the user trying to access the file and does the user own the file? If they do, they get access. Now lets expand this to a VMS environment where the file is owned by a resource identifier and access is granted via an ACL. Do you think that SAP is going to build all of the logic of understanding these VMSisms into their server process? Well lets just say that they didn't. What I said for reads applies to writes as well. In early releases of SAP on VMS a user could extract a report with the name: SYS$MANAGER:LOGIN.COM and SAP did it. BTW, the above restriction would apply to any other OS's security enhancements, unless the porting crew emulated the full security model in the server code. I am not sure how any client-server system handles this issue. The point of all this is that there are many more things to consider when porting an application to an OS than compiling C code. Does this means that supporting SAP on VMS is impossible? No way. DEC would have to provide a solid team both to do the work and to support SAP tech support whenever they ran into problems though. Norm