Preparing your development SDK and environment

SAP provides a software development kit, the SAP Cloud SDK, to facilitate the developer work. The SDK contains a set of libraries to easily interact with the APIs at a higher level, hiding technical communication details.

SAP Cloud SDK was developed to reduce the effort of building extension applications for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, providing Java & JavaScript libraries plus a tool sets for developers, such as fault-tolerance, cache management, and tutorials and project templates.

It provides partners, customers, and internal SAP development teams with possibilities for lightweight consumption of OData services from SAP S/4HANA On-Premise and Cloud, discovery of existing OData services, built-in tools for developers, such as, cache management, API metering, latency and fault tolerance, and deliverables for developer productivity, such as, project blueprints, example applications, and tutorials.

We will now explore the technical features of SAP Cloud SDK.

You can use SAP Cloud SDK within any development environment, for example, Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ Idea, or Eclipse.

SAP provides its own dedicated Integrated Development Environment (IDE), the SAP Business Application Studio (SAP BAS), which is available as a service on the SAP Business Technology Platform.

The SAP Business Application Studio is based on Eclipse Theia, which is a free and open-source IDE framework for desktop and Web applications, based on Visual Studio Code.

The user experience with SAP BAS is extremely similar to Visual Studio Code and Theia.

On top of the Theia "basement", SAP BAS includes a complete set of ready to use extensions that support the needs of application development with SAP technologies and tools, for example to work with SAP Fiori, SAP HANA, SAP CAP, SAP Workflow, and other.

Additional information about SAP BAS can be found in the SAP Discovery Center at https://discovery-center.cloud.sap/serviceCatalog/business-application-studio