My web experience with SAP MII Workbench

It took me a month to be frustrated by using SAP MII Workbench. Though the tool is good for building SAP MII business logic transactions, I find it to be pathetic when it comes to editing other web files such xml, html and xsl.

My SAP MII work is equally divided between developing web interfaces and business logic transaction.  I spent more than half of my time at work cursing because the Web Editor that comes with SAP MII was worse than Windows' Notepad. 

I had never done any professional web development. My introduction to professional web development was through SAP MII and that did not inspire me.

After struggling with a few web pages I asked my colleagues how they have managed to cope with their development experience so far. The answer was common across both experienced developers and those who had just started. They all used their favourite web editor and then copy and pasted the file back to SAP MII Workbench.  Unbelievable especially if you have worked for huge development companies.

You probably guessed what my next step was. Yes, I looked online for how other developers have coped with this development process.  After I came across this,  http://scn.sap.com/thread/1927542  thread I stopped looking further and changed course.

I started looking for some third party plugins that have been developed. The closest I got to something was this http://plugins.netbeans.org/plugin/40461/mii-deployer.

At this point there were only two options left. Either wait for SAP to come up with something better or develop my own plug-in that will take care the html editing.  In the next blog I will write about the advances I have made to access the SAP MII Server and how to add new files to the project outside workbench.