Presenting SAP Build Apps at a Glance

Your company wants to enable business users – who know best about everyday processes and how to improve them – to develop their own SAP extensions and apps, and to more closely collaborate with IT professionals in the development process.

SAP Build Apps (formerly SAP AppGyver) is a visual development solution to create enterprise apps without writing code. It lets you:

• Create apps by dragging and dropping prebuilt components and then configuring them to your needs.
• Connect to all types of back-end data, including SAP systems, via SAP BTP destinations.
• Create application logic, also by dragging and dropping flow functions and configuring them.

SAP Build Apps is primarily used to design mobile apps, so by default, the canvas where you build the app is the shape of a mobile phone. But you can set the canvas to any shape you want, so you can also design for tablets or web applications.

For developers or business users with some coding experience, SAP Build Apps also enables writing small JavaScript modules when such enhancements are needed.

Applications can be considered to have two technical parts:

• Front-end, the part that runs on the user's machine, generally in the browser or in an app on the user's phone. This part manages what the user sees and has the logic to perform actions based on what the user does.
• Back-end, the part that is maintained on a server that is called by the front-end, and which contains the data for the application and can contain logic that must run on the server.

SAP Build Apps lets you build either Web & Mobile Applications (the front-end UI and event logic) and Application Back-ends (back-end data and server-based logic).

Sometimes all or most of your data comes from SAP or external systems, and all of the logic can be done on the front-end. But many times, your app must manage its own data – extra business data not stored in the SAP system, user preferences, or a history of user actions, just to name a few possibilities. For these, you can build your own back-end for your app.

IT developers have always built applications. Now, SAP Build Apps also enables the business user to join in building or collaborating on building applications to improve a company's business processes.

What's more, SAP Build Apps comes with the ability to share projects, so business users and professional developers can work on the same app together, vastly speeding up the time to develop that app.