Business Scenario
Your company plans to develop extension applications on the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). Your software developers have different devices and operating systems, but they need a common development environment for their work that runs independently of their technical system setup. The development environment should provide all tools for modern cloud development, especially the specific tools required for business application development in the SAP ecosystem.
Introduction to SAP Business Application Studio
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.
For a comprehensive overview of SAP Build Code we recommend our Learning Journey: Creating Applications and Extensions using 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.