Introducing SAP Business Application Studio (BAS)

SAP Business Application Studio is a development environment designed for optimizing the creation of business applications and extending SAP solutions. It offers a set of high productivity tools that harmonize and simplify the developer experience, enhancing productivity for business application development. SAP Business Application Studio is a service of SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), offering a modern development environment which is easily accessible through your internet browser, providing a desktop-like development experience.

SAP Business Application Studio is one of the pre-configured essential services included with SAP Build Code. Providing a turn-key environment for various functions such as coding, testing, integrations, and application lifecycle management, SAP Build Code combines generative AI with runtime and design time capabilities, built-in enterprise solution integrations, DevOps, and application life cycle management. SAP Business Application Studio is the integrated development environment within SAP Build Code.

Regarding service subscriptions for SAP Business Application Studio, there are two service plans to choose from: "Free" for Free Tier and "Standard Edition". For information on all available commercial models, visit the SAP Discovery Center. Furthermore, you can verify the availability of SAP Business Application Studio for your hyperscaler provider and region.

If you already know Microsoft Visual Studio Code and you access SAP Business Application Studio for the first time, you might notice many similarities. That is because SAP Business Application Studio is based on the open-source version of Visual Studio Code ("Code - OSS").

The development environment offers you all tools required for your business application development, including a command line and editors optimized for different use cases.

At the heart of SAP Business Application Studio, there are the dev spaces. The dev spaces are isolated environments in the cloud containing tailored tools and preinstalled runtimes per business scenario, such as SAP Fiori, SAP S/4HANA extensions, workflow applications, mobile applications, and more. Technically, a dev space is implemented as a Kubernetes Pod, with multiple containers providing the tools and extensions. Check out this blog post for more technical information about dev spaces.

When creating a new dev space, you choose a pre-configured development environment based on the type of application that you want to build.

The following dev space types are available:

SAP Fiori

Develops SAP Fiori applications based on various environments, including Cloud Foundry, ABAP Cloud, and SAP S/4HANA.

Full Stack Application Using Productivity Tools

Easily develop, test, build, and deploy apps using the high productivity tools.

Full Stack Cloud Application

Builds business services, business applications, and extends SAP S/4HANA, for example, by using the SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP), SAP Fiori, and Java or Node.js.

SAP HANA Native Application

Builds and deploys native SAP HANA applications or analytical models.

SAP Mobile Application

The SAP Mobile Development Kit (MDK) lets you customize, deploy, and manage your customized iOS and Android apps in the cloud.

Basic

Contains the SAP basic tools extension.

Each dev space type comes with a set of built-in extensions that are required for the respective application scenario. You can select additional extensions to enhance your space via the built-in marketplace. Due to its open source nature and the close resemblance to Microsoft Visual Studio Code, SAP Business Application Studio also lets you integrate Visual Studio Code-compatible extensions from the Open VSX Registry. It is possible to create multiple dev spaces per user, depending on the chosen application plan.

SAP Business Application Studio has the following benefits at a glance:

• Provides a managed, preconfigured, hosted environment, optimized for SAP application development.
• Can be centrally administered with tools, repositories, systems access, and company policies.
• Offers a set of productivity tools, tailor made for SAP application development.
• Provides guidance that helps developers to ramp up easily into SAP technologies.
• Develop applications based on SAP opinionated technologies (SAP UI5, SAP HANA, SAP Mobile Development Kit (MDK), SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP), SAP Fiori Elements, and best practices for application development.
• Provides a consistent development experience across SAP development technologies.
• Simplifies technical complexity by describing application logical components (Data Base, services, UI components) rather than files and folders.
• Integrates with existing SAP solutions, systems, and services.
• Provides easy access to Visual Studio Code-compatible extensions from open source Open VSX Registry.
• Full SAP enterprise product support.

You can now explain the key capabilities of SAP Business Application Studio, and its basic advantages over similar offline development environments like Microsoft Visual Studio Code. Also, you know what a dev space is, and which benefits it brings, in regard to application development in the SAP ecosystem.