Key Tools used to Develop Native SAP HANA Cloud Applications

SAP Business Application Studio is a SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) service that offers a modern development environment tailored for efficient development of business applications for the SAP Intelligent Enterprise. There is no software to download and install as it is a web browser based tool and all updates and new features are added by the cloud provider.

In SAP Business Application Studio, you are provided with one or more development spaces.

A development space - usually referred to as a dev space- is a development environment that contains all of the tools, capabilities, and resources needed for developing your application. Each type of application requires a different development environment and there are many dev spaces that are provided by SAP that already contain the tooling required to get started quickly. You can later add additional tools to supplement the development. For example, if you want to develop and consume SAP HANA calculation views from your application code, you could add the Graphical Calculation View Editor extension to your dev space.

Caution

Be careful not to confuse development spaces with Cloud Foundry spaces. Developers work in development spaces to create applications. Once an application is developed, it is deployed to a Cloud Foundry space.

SAP Business Application Studio is very similar to Microsoft Visual Studio. They are both powerful integrated development environments (IDE) and have a similar look and feel. It is possible to develop BTP applications using either. But SAP Business Application Studio is equipped with various tools and templates specially built for developing business applications in the SAP environment.

The SAP Business Application Studio includes graphical editors for the various development artifacts such as Fiori elements and calculation views, plus text editors for writing code. There is even a Cloud Foundry command line interface (CLI) to execute commands directly.

You can enrich the SAP Business Application Studio with tools that will help you develop faster and more efficiently, such as code assist, static code analysis, and code formatting.

Note

SAP Business Application Studio is often referred to as BAS, but this is not an official SAP acronym.

Git is a source code version management tool. It is used in SAP HANA Cloud development projects to enable:

• Backup of source code

• Provide a complete change history of source code

• Provide branching and merging capabilities

• Traceability and audit (e.g., linking a change request to a code change)

Watch this video to learn about the challenge of continuous development.

Watch this video to learn about team development using Git.

Git manages the complete history of all changes to source files and it is possible to roll back to any point in time. A key term used in Git is a commit. When a developer is satisfied that their content is ready, they commit one, but more often multiple, related source files, to the Git repository. Each commit references the previous commit and so a history of commits is built. It is possible to view the time-line of all commits and to return to any version of the source code anywhere along the commit history.

Application development used to be linear. Which meant that each developer could not start until the previous development stage had completed. But with Git, developers can work in parallel. A powerful feature of Git is branching. A developer can create a new branch so that their commits follow a separate path than other developers. AT some point in the future the brahcnes can be merged so that all developments are combined. Of course, there may be conflicts, but Git also manages conflicts by highlighting these to developers who can then resolve these.

Git is built right into the Business Application Studio so that the developer can fetch and commit source files from Git repositories in the same place where the work on their code development.

SAP HANA database explorer allows you to query your SAP HANA Cloud database and view information about your catalog objects.

The SAP HANA database explorer provides the following functions:

• A catalog browser - View the definitions of all types of catalog objects, for example: tables, views, stored procedures, functions, and synonyms. Also, view the content (data) of your tables and views.
• An SQL console - Create SQLScript procedures and queries, and then execute them or analyze their performance using the SQL analyzer.
• An SQL analyzer - View detailed information on your queries and evaluate potential bottlenecks and optimizations for these queries.
• An SQL debugger - View the call stack, set break points, view and evaluate expressions and variables.

The database explorer can be launched from multiple places including:

• Business Application Studio
• SAP HANA Cockpit
• SAP HANA Cloud Central
• SAP BTP Cockpit

The database explorer can connect to the SAP HANA Cloud database and also to the Data Lake.