Preparing your Development SDK and Environment

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to explain the utility of SAP Cloud SDK for simplifying developers' work

Understanding SAP Cloud SDK

SAP provides a software development kit (SDK) called the SAP Cloud SDK to make developers' jobs easier.

The SDK contains a set of libraries that simplify interacting with APIs at a higher level by hiding technical communication details.

The SAP Cloud SDK was developed to reduce the effort of building extension applications for SAP S/4HANA Cloud. It provides Java and JavaScript libraries, as well as a set of tools for developers, such as fault tolerance, cache management, tutorials, and project templates.

The SAP Cloud SDK enables partners, customers, and SAP internal development teams to easily consume OData services from SAP S/4HANA Cloud, discover existing OData services, and use built-in developer tools such as cache management, API metering, latency and fault tolerance.

It also provides deliverables to improve developer productivity, such as project blueprints, example applications, and tutorials.

An image with three sections: The first section is titled ‘Quick start.’ It represents efficient project initiation using the SDK’s best practices, including example applications, templates, and documentation. The second section is titled ‘Built-in Quality.’ It emphasizes ensuring high-quality developed applications by leveraging platform capabilities such as persistence, authentication, and multi-tenancy. The third section is titled ‘Simplified future migrations.’ It suggests that building applications now will facilitate simplified migration to different backend versions and platforms supported by SAP in the future.

SAP Cloud SDK technical features

SAP Cloud SDK allows developers to connect to all types of SAP S/4HANA systems, both in the cloud and on-premises. It provides a type-safe Java and JavaScript representation of the SAP S/4HANA virtual data model, which frees developers from having to write boilerplate code to construct HTTP requests and handle responses. The Java and JavaScript APIs also make it easy to explore available SAP S/4HANA services directly in the IDE.

An overview of key features in the SAP Cloud SDK. The image contains three separate text boxes with headings and descriptions underneath each. The headings are ‘Integration with SAP S/4HANA,’ ‘Abstraction for SAP Business Technology Platform,’ and ‘Caching Management.’ Each box describes a different aspect of the SAP Cloud SDK’s functionalities.

In addition, the SDK offers mechanisms for tenant- and user-isolated caching, as well as enterprise-specific adaptations of selected open-source frameworks for functionality such as multi-tenant-aware feature toggling.

SAP Cloud SDK is more than just a set of technical tools for effective extension development. It is an end-to-end development, continuous testing, and continuous delivery framework. The framework provides onboarding capabilities in the form of guidelines, training, project templates, extended documentation, and examples. To ensure high-quality standards, the SDK provides integration with a resilience and fault-tolerance framework, as well as code analysis and testing support.

An informative image displaying three distinct sections that discuss aspects of SAP Cloud SDK. The first section, titled ‘Latency and fault tolerance,’ explains how the SDK ensures latency and fault tolerance by integrating corresponding libraries for isolation of points of access to remote systems, services, and third-party libraries while stopping cascading failure and enabling resilience in complex distributed systems where failure is inevitable. The second section, ‘Extension components,’ describes the SDK’s extension to the core and SAP S/4HANA modules, providing several extensions with pre-use cases layered on top of best-of-breed technologies focusing around certain technical or business domains. The third section, ‘Ensuring Quality,’ highlights that the SDK provides an attractive development environment to efficiently develop extensions for SAP S/4HANA on SAP BTP while ensuring established quality standards regarding performance, resource load, and operations.

Choosing your IDE

You can use the SAP Cloud SDK in any development environment, such as Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ IDEA, or Eclipse.

Logos of five integrated development environments (IDEs): Visual Studio Code, SAP Business Application Studio, IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, and Theia.

SAP also provides its own integrated development environment (IDE), SAP Business Application Studio (SAP BAS), which is available as a service on SAP Business Technology Platform.

SAP BAS is based on Eclipse Theia, a free and open-source IDE framework for desktop and web applications that is similar to Visual Studio Code, since it is based on the same source code.

SAP BAS provides a user experience that is very similar to Visual Studio Code and Theia.

Screenshot of the SAP Business Application Studio

In addition to the core Theia features, SAP BAS includes a complete set of ready-to-use extensions that support the needs of application development with SAP technologies and tools, such as SAP Fiori, SAP HANA, SAP CAP, SAP Workflow, and more.

You can find more information about SAP BAS in the SAP Discovery Center at https://discovery-center.cloud.sap/serviceCatalog/business-application-studio

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