Saturday, January 14, 2017

What version of JAVA platform does SAP support?

Most of SAP software even up to now supports Java EE 5 (former name was J2EE – Enterprise Edition) platform which was introduced back in 2006. Reason I write “even” is that fully fledged JAVA platform that was implanted to SAP products is still the Java EE 5. The truth is that SAP NetWeaver 75 supports Java 8 but only in limited modes like web profile. To surprise of many enterprise software folks out there it is needless to say that the Java EE 5 was only supported JAVA platform for years. Since SAP NetWeaver 70 and higher (7.1, 7.2, 7.3 and 74) supported only the Java EE 5 only. Therefore a move to Java 8 was a big step when it was announced in 2015 even though the Java 8 is not fully supported.

To better understand a reason of SAP it is needed to dig further into history. When SAP introduced JAVA Stack of NetWeaver (NW Java) it was more less clear that it is meant as the J2EE server to be used in a SAP environments. Acquisition of Sun by Oracle (in 2010) also didn’t attract the SAP to pay more attention to the JAVA either. Between these facts small clues are laying. One may be even dare to write that the JAVA has not been the focus of SAP. Even before cloud computing era they tried to support JAVA developers with so called Lean Java Server (LJS). That was never a real products but it later formed the JAVA server in SAP HANA Cloud Platform (HCP) which was earlier called SAP NetWeaver Cloud (and some other former names were: NetWeaver Neo or OnDemand Cloud Platform) which is cloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)) offering from SAP. Actually the SAP NetWeaver Cloud supported Java EE 6.

It is obvious that going forward to keep up with rest of the enterprise software world SAP must support newer versions of JAVA platform. It is also reasonable that JAVA underwent many changes between versions the Java EE 5 and the Java 8. Also it needs to be understood that it is not easy to support the version 8 just by releasing a new support package and without disruption of customers installed SAP NW JAVA Stacks.

More information:

2250903 - Supported JVM versions for versions of NetWeaver Java

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