Introducing SAP Business Application Studio (BAS)

SAP Business Application Studio is a professional developer tool tailored for efficient development of business applications and extension of SAP solutions. With the set of high productivity tools, SAP Business Application Studio aims both to harmonize and simplify the developer experience, helping developers to gain more productivity with SAP Business Applications development. It is an SAP BTP service that offers a modern development environment tailored for business application development. You access the development environment using your internet browser. Nevertheless, it provides a desktop-like development experience.

In terms of service subscriptions, you can choose between the two service plans: "Free" for Free Tier and "Standard Edition". Visit the SAP Discovery Center to find all available commercial models. In addition, you can also check the respective availability of the 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.

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.