Enterprise Resource Management Technology is evolving at a rapid pace with professional business applications increasingly demanding a highly scalable, reliable infrastructure that can support open Internet standards, off the shelf. A Web Application Server serves all these purposes and delivers proven scalability and performance. It also supports Web technologies and open standards, such as HTTP, eXtensible Markup Language (XML), and Java (J2EE).

SAP Web Application Server (SAP WAS) is a platform for efficient development and allows you to implement Web applications. SAP Web Application Server is a crucial component of mySAP® Technology platform. It also paves the way for implementing "Web services". WAS supports all releases of mySAP.com components (including ABAP language), any Java 2 Enterprise Edition and .NET platform. This article concentrates on using SAP WAS with Java components.

SAP Web Application Server enables new Internet paradigms to be combined with the transactional operations of ERP. SAP supports the development and operation of both Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and ABAP-based Web applications and services.

The custom development of such applications start with the creation of an environment, which provides a set of carefully matched tools to support various applications, known as Web Applications Builder. It is an object-oriented, repository-based development environment using ABAP and/or JavaScript. It supports the complete development and lifecycle of enterprise applications, and allows a user to develop new kind of enterprise web applications known as BSP applications. The core parts of these applications are the Business Server Pages (acronym BSP) and MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) objects. The concept behind BSP is similar to that of ASP (Active Server Pages) or JSP (Java Server Pages) documents that can contain code and HTML, all of which is compiled by the server upon request. You have the choice whether to use ABAP or JavaScript in your BSP documents.

SAP’s Web application Server assimilates conventional Web technologies with new ones like Web Dynpro for the presentation logic of professional business web applications. In order to implement BSP Applications, it is important to gain an understanding of the SAP Web Application Server.