This SAP PRESS Essentials guide, Mastering SAP NetWeaver XI—Programming, is intended to complement and enhance the topics that were not discussed in further detail in the book Mastering SAP XI—Administration, 1 since that book focused on other areas. This Essentials guide can be regarded both as a practical guide to pro- gramming and as an ideal addition to the aforementioned book. This time, our focus is on development. As in the practical guide for administration, we will make extensive use of a real-life example that you can reproduce yourself with relatively little effort in a minimal installation. For developers, a minimal installation consists of SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio (NWDS), which is based on the development environment Eclipse; SAP Partner Connectivity Kit (PCK) for the development of adapt- ers; Subversion and Subclipse for version management 2 ; and Apache Ant as an indispensable aid that acts in the background. For each of the development tools speci- fi ed above, this book contains an extensive and com- prehensible description of their functions as well as the Web addresses you need to download the tools free of charge.