Connecting SAP and PHP – Ramindu Deshapriya. SAP is said to be the most comprehensive and widely-used Enterprise Resource Planning system ever.
Due to its widespread use, SAP users and developers come across a variety of situations where they need to connect an installation of SAP to a different platform/programming language so that the data and data interpretations contained in relation to that installation can be accessed by that platform or programming language. Hence a myriad of SAP connectors for different programming languages have been born. PHP, being the most widely used server-side programming language on the web, is one of the most probable languages that would need to connect to SAP at some point or the other. For this, the extremely handy SAPRFC module for PHP has been developed.
This post will discuss an end-to-end implementation of the SAPRFC PHP module and explain how to connect SAP to the module as well. The first step is to go to the above link and download the complete saprfc package. OpenUI5. What is it? OpenUI5 is an Open Source JavaScript UI library, maintained by SAP and available under the Apache 2.0 license. OpenUI5 lets you build enterprise-ready web applications, responsive to all devices, running on almost any browser of your choice.
It’s based on JavaScript, using JQuery as its foundation and follows web standards. It eases your development with a client-side HTML5 rendering library including a rich set of controls and supports data binding to different models (JSON, XML and OData). View it! Check out our Explored application for controls running on phones, tablets and desktops, the interactive control playground for controls running on desktops as well as a number of sample applications Get it! It’s FREE. Get started! Try the Hello World, read the Developer Guide and refer to the API Reference. Contribute! You can help making UI5 better by reporting or analyzing bugs or by contributing bug fixes or new features. Getting started with PHP. My intention here is not to tell you how to program or anything like that, it's simply to help you get started with the whole PHP thing that of course in terms of SAP.
Again, I'm no expert with PHP, in fact I guess you could say I am still a newbie myself. I've been playing around with it now for about 2 years and originally I said that I would avoid it. It just so happens that I'm flexible and I learned how flexible it was and things just took off from there. So let's get to it shall we? There are 3 things you need to get started with PHP for SAP development, oh and if you remember my bag you'll know I am a big fan of those cost free solutions.
So please go out there and download each of those items so we can move along. I'm not going to go through each line of the config just the ones related to connecting PHP to it. I set the PHPRC variable, I believe this is only for the PHP 5 version but don't quote me on that. SAPRFC Homepage.