Exposing And Consuming Web Services by SAP

You can consume Web Services by SAP framework for web services and also expose RFC as Web Services without any need of external integration tools like SAP netweaver xi.
One of the most impotent things in SOA solution is the ability to monitor the traffic.
There is a great logging tool out of the box which is provided as part of SAP WAS, SOA Management. it's provide information on the calls time and also it's can capture the requests/responses.

The process of consuming or exposing Web Services is not difficult at all, it evolves work with:
- Wizards : Creating the BAPI objects or exposing existing RFC.
- BAPI : Developing the Web Service proxy for consuming, working with objects and types created by the Wizard.
- SOA Management : Deploying the WSDLs/Exposing RFC , configure the logs.


There is some interoperability issues that you need to keep in mind when going for this solutions:

- We didn't find a solution for consuming an existing WSDL as an interface and implement it.

- xsi:nil attribute is not supported, opened OSS, waiting for SAP response.

- You can't generate custom Namespace.

There are more...

The throughput was much more faster than thru XI. (10 times faster).

In conclusion it is more than possible to expose SAP structures and types as standard Web Services and to consume them.
So if synchronous solution is suite for you you don't need to use adapters or XI.

If you need help on this fill free to contact me for forward details.