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In this section, you are provided with an overview of the main concepts behind the Composite Application Framework (CAF).

The CAF is a standardized platform for developing composite applications. It consists of a comprehensive environment that includes:

  • Programming abstractions.
  • A programming model.
  • Metadata.
  • Tools to support the development and deployment of composite applications.

This SOA-based (Service-Oriented Architecture) environment allows developers to build applications, which leverage the whole SAP NetWeaver stack without the need to feed low-level APIs. This way, developers can focus on implementing the business logic of a composite application.

CAF focuses on enabling the business logic layer of a composite by providing capabilities to integrate and enhance existing services and business objects, as well as to create new services. The CAF service-oriented architecture and the standardized object access allow for uniform treatment of business processes as services and business objects independent of the underlying system. CAF integrates the elements of all the SAP NetWeaver integration layers to facilitate the creation of new business solutions across people, information, processes and application object repositories.

The following graphic illustrates how CAF fits into the overall architecture of a composite application built with SAP NetWeaver.

Composite Application Architecture and CAF

Integration Aspects

As a core technology for composite application development, CAF needs to integrate seamlessly with the underlying service enablement layer as well as with the UI and process layers, which use CAF services. For this purpose, CAF uses standard technologies such as Web services for both service consumption and provisioning, thereby enabling loose backend coupling and reuse of the services it provides. Backend connectivity to SAP systems is also enabled by means of remote function calls (RFC).

Capabilities

CAF consists of the following main elements:

Design Time

The CAF design time is integrated into the SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio. It includes the service modeling tools for creating and modeling business objects, application services, and for importing and exposing external services.

Runtime

The services that you build with CAF are deployed and run on the Application Server (AS) Java. They use the runtime infrastructure for enterprise beans (EJB container), as well as the built-in persistency and security capabilities of the server.

To enable service configuration at runtime, CAF provides a Web-based interface that enable you to test services created in the perspective, set up user authorizations and access rights, and configure external services.

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