Mmmmm where to begin....a brief history of ITS maybe and why it was and is still here? Ok....
ITS was born many years ago out of the need for SAP to provide an interface to the web. Think mid-90's.....business were all moving to the web and all the big ERPs at the time had to havea solution, come up with one quickly or get lost in the shuffle. ITS was developed as a quick fix for this (and over the years, fine tuned much better.....those initial years....ugg!) while the wild wild west of the internet settled out and matured a bit (remember, at the time, no one really knew what THE web standard would be...Microsoft, Java, etc). Soooo SAP provided this nice solution. Smartly enough, they didn't limit themselves though. There were both Microsoft (DCOM connector...which is now the .Net connector) and Java (JRfc that became the JCO connector) solutions as well...and even IDOC-to-XML via their Web Method's built "Business Connector". Sooooo even then, the possibilities were fairly open for what to use for interfaces.
Another smart thing SAP did with ITS and what made ITS so appealing to MANY is that it really leveraged the ABAPpers skills. Keep in mind, even simple HTML was new and daunting to many...especially the classic ABAPpers (just read past threads here of ABAPpers "scared to death" at the idea of having to learn JAVA....haha). Most ITS services then were either web-enabled reports(just good ol' ABAP reports with their "web enabled" switch flipped) or they were dialog based transactions with nice web templates. Writing reports and dialogs programs were nothing to an ABAPper. They simply had to learn a little HTML in order to customize web templates. Even then...SAP would generate the templates for you to give you a head start!!! So...yes, ITS had it's place at the time.
So let's skip Flow Logic and other ITS-isms of the time to jump to right now. Why is ITS still around? Well, first off, as you know, you now have even MORE options with developing interfaces for SAP....just about anything under the sun. So then why is ITS still around? A few reasons...
(1) The BEST thing ITS does and the feature that keeps it around is that it can dynamically generate ANY SAP screen(*unless noted in notes...haha)....that means no work at all...that's the webGUI service that you see. There is nothing else right now that can do that....and not a lot of other vendors that have that capability either!
(2) Lots of the past ITS built services from SAP have not yet been ported over to newer models and technologies (just think of ESS...it still lingers as ITS services in some places).
(3) Many customers have custom built ITS services they need to still support.
So where is ITS today? This part is confusing to some folks. As of WAS 6.40, a big part of ITS is now incorporated into the kernal as "integrated" or "internal" ITS. What SAP did is basically take all the good things (the dynamic screen generation) of ITS and bring it over while leaving out some of the other parts that are done better other ways now (namely, web reporting and Flow Logic). If you want to use either ITS web reporting or Flow Logic services, you will still need to intall an EXTERNAL ITS...and yes, it can live in harmony with WAS 6.40 too. 😃 So is ITS going away? Is it gone? Well, as you can see...yes and no (a good consulting answer for you). It will all depend on your need.
Lastly....you asked for "limitations". Well, I will just leave the biggest one that always comes to mind for me.....ITS is middleware....it is basically a "screen scraper" that takes/sends info to SAP (most often via transactions) and then combines that "screen data" with nice templates to pretty it up (kinda like other scripting models...ASP, JSP, etc....but not as clean). Now that true web applications have matured and evolved to this day and age, that older kinda of "screen scrape" solution is kinda past it's prime. Hey, it works...but so do lots of antique cars. haha And as a bonus one for you...ITS is very SAP-centric (read as "proprietary")...it has it's own scripting language to learn (HTMLb ...the early version) and it's own various models too...not really good if you want to build web interfaces on an open standard.
Soooo....that was my long-winded run down of my opinion and experience with ITS. I have been a champion of ITS for many years....even taught several classes on it...I look back fondly at some of the good times I had with ITS....but now, I am moving on and my days of ITS work are fewer and fewer. Just the typical life of a
"gearhead"...on to the next language! haha
I hope this helps you out.
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