XP Recap: Innovation and Development @ SAP TechEd 2022

The biggest news during the keynote was the return of SAP Build. SAP Build was the no-code prototyping tool in SAP’s portfolio several years ago. It is now replaced by the new SAP Build which consists of three components:

• Work Zone – the place where you can build business sites to access your in-cloud and on-premise business applications whether standard or custom
• Apps – The rebranding of SAP AppGyver with an added persistency layer where you can build no-code apps
• Process automation – the rebranding of SAP intelligent RPA (iRPA) which enables you to define a sequence of connected workflows, activities, and tasks to automate business processes using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and built-in functionalities for dedicated applications such as MS Office, SAP GUI, and many more
  
  The SAP Builders Program is there to help people get started with SAP Build with a free tier SAP Build environment. It is already available and most of SAP Build can be used there free of charge. SAP Build Work Zone will be offered in two editions: standard and advanced. SAP Build Work Zone standard edition is known today as SAP Launchpad service and will be renamed as of January 2023. SAP Build Work Zone advanced edition is built on top of the standard edition, known today as SAP Work Zone.

The central development tool to be used on BTP is Business Application Studio (BAS) where almost any BTP (pro-code) development can be done. SAP BAS is the preferred IDE to develop apps and extensions on BTP, because all the core technologies from SAP are in that environment. Accompanied with all the necessary design-time and run-time services. It integrates best to SAP data and provides content and best practices for developers.

The benefits of using SAP BAS at the center of the architecture are:

• It reduces implementation time
• Local cloud-based development availability
• Defaults linters
• Powerful wizard templates
• Better integration with SAP (like MDK)

Looking at mobile app development, BAS also offers features like Out-of-the-box offline operation.

Also, some new features were added to increase developer efficiency, for example the Data model editor to easily create data models in BAS and deployment to mobile services for Mobile development.

BAS now runs on Code OSS, the same open-source solution that Microsoft Visual Studio Code uses. It is a friendly and integrated community interface. This enables developers to use VS Code plugins from the VSX open registry in BAS. Also, there are many wizards that can be used to speed up development besides the ones that were already there.

The SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP) was also a big topic at TechEd. The following new features have been added to CAP:

- Feature toggles and extensibility are added (on entities) allowing to:
- Extend entities from SaaS application
- Extend Entities within an application and make the extension available for specific tenants using feature toggles
- Possibilities to deploy to Kyma runtime and Kubernetes
- Improvements on TypeScript and intellisense support
- Open API/Swagger exporter
- Graph QL support
- Improvement on Compositions and performance

Another big announcement in this area was the fact that CAP model will be open-sourced starting with the surrounding packages, and possibly (but not definitely) the core parts. Postgres support will be added as well due to a high demand for it.

Customization can be done on various levels of a customer perspective where features can be added by:
- The provider of the SaaS application and enabled using toggled
- Built by partners based on the SaaS application
- Built by the customer on top of the SaaS application

Composition apps can be built using different packages:

- Reuse apps and services
- Feature packages enhance models with new fields
- Content packages add content like ISO codes, currencies, …
- Extension packages are discussed before
- Integration packages integrate more easily with systems like S4Hana, Success Factors

During the session “Monitoring and Ops Automation for Your Cloud Application and SAP HANA Cloud” SAP Automation Pilot was introduced. It can be used to automate DevOps tasks on the Business Technology Platform (BTP) like monitoring, HTTP Requests and trigger procedures like Database and Application Lifecycle Management. A catalogue of predefined commands is delivered with the tool which enables you to execute several standard tasks on the SAP BTP. A practical use case for this tool is to monitor if your BTP application is still online and report any problems via the Alert Notification Service which also runs on BTP.

TypeScript is now also supported when developing apps in SAPUI5. This is an optional layer on top of JavaScript, which gives a couple of benefits. TypeScript features better code completion, it reduces code errors by enforcing the declaration of typed values, it has in-place API references, so you can look up the documentation of an API. TypeScript is a lot stricter than JavaScript and is therefore easier to refactor or maintain.

Did you know that our recent Hunkemöller Clientele App was built using TypeScript?

Read more blogs on SAP TechEd 2022

Our expert Lars van der Goes and his team also wrote a recap about Data & Analytics @SAP TechEd 2022. You can read it here.