The Village View

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Closet I'll ever come to being a gamer

I have very little interest in gaming. The last gaming "console" I used regularly was the Atari. But my colleague Craig Cmehil, who himself is always doing cool stuff with SAP (look Mom, it brews coffee!) pointed me to this.

Seems a couple of guys at an SAP customer rigged up the remote of a Wii to a Ruby on Rails app that was connected to SAP BW. Check out their filmed demo on the link above.

Now, you may say, why do I need this? Fair point, but what I think it shows a couple of interesting points:
- There is a community around SAP (SAP Developer Network) and they are doing innovative, non-traditional things (again you can argue about usefulness of this particular item, but it does speak to innovation). There are 700k registered members of SDN. And for those of you interested in the topic of accessing the code, keep in mind, SAP customers have access to SAP source code.
- This wouldn't have been possible without SAP's efforts around working with and supporting newer technologies such as scripting languages. SAP could still do much more to publicize how much work has been done around using and integrating new technologies. Currently, it seems its competitors are doing a better job of painting it as "closed" and themselves as "open." The reality is somewhat different.

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