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At TechEd 2023 today, SAP’s rolling out some cool updates to the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). The goal? To make the development experience even better and boost app development with SAP’s technologies.
With monthly releases for most tools and services it’s hard to keep up with what’s new. In this blog, we’re diving into all the fresh feature highlights on SAP BTP for all you developers out there.
The Hottest News
Introducing SAP Build Code
SAP Build Code provides a turn-key development environment tailored for JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, CAP, and SAPUI5 developers. It integrates coding, testing, application management, and more, making application development more efficient. SAP Build Code is combining SAP Business Application Studio with the most essential services and SDKs on SAP BTP.
With the integration of Joule, the innovative AI copilot of SAP, SAP Build Code enables automatic generation of application code, data models, services, and sample data. Using SAP Build Code ensures adherence to the best practices and guidance outlined in the SAP BTP Developer’s Guide.
The SAP BTP Developer’s Guide
The SAP BTP Developer’s Guide is a comprehensive manual designed to navigate the process of creating business applications on SAP BTP. Drawing from proven practices and technologies, the guide offers a blueprint for SAP business applications and extensions, automated SAP BTP infrastructure setup, and integration strategies. Emphasizing efficiency, it endorses the ABAP Cloud and SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP) as the top architectural choices, ensuring seamless integration with SAP BTP services.
Check out the SAP BTP Developer’s Guide
Highlights Development Environment
SAP Business Application Studio
The team has been busy, SAP Business Application Studio has evolved a lot in the past year. Some of the most recent highlights include a one-click method of creating multi-tenant CAP applications simplifying the development of SaaS solutions. Additionally, developers can now easily access and consume standard events from both SAP S/4HANA Cloud and on-premise in the SAP Business Accelerator Hub via the Service Center, with the system handling all the complex background processes. With HANA tools integrated into the SAP Business Application Studio, developers can seamlessly create and deploy database, analytics, and intelligent data applications directly from SAP BTP to SAP HANA’s on-premise environment. Additionally, our UI development tools now support the creation of SAPUI5 extension projects, enabling modifications to both the views and logic of SAP Fiori apps.
Read about all highlights from 2023
Highlights UX Technologies
SAPUI5
SAPUI5 has introduced several new updates to improve both the developer and end-user experience. Firstly, there’s now extensibility for ABAP Cloud with SAPUI5 flexibility adaptation projects, allowing developers to customize SAP S4/HANA Cloud applications’ user interfaces for more streamlined workflows. Secondly, with the new TypeScript support, developers can create SAPUI5 and SAP Fiori elements applications more efficiently, ensuring a modernized development experience and enhanced code quality. The modular core enhancement of SAPUI5 focuses on improving the startup performance of standalone SAPUI5 applications, leading to faster startup times. Lastly, the update of the Horizon visual theme of SAP Fiori is set to provide comprehensive visual and interaction design improvements for both SAPUI5 and UI5 Web Components, aiming to greatly enhance the user experience, contrast, and overall accessibility.
Learn about SAPUI5 in SAP Build Code
SAP Mobile Services
SAP Mobile Services is continuously enhancing its offerings to cater to the evolving digital workspace. Emphasizing security, it has advanced its app management capabilities, integrating features like Device Compliance Check and Clipboard Protection. These enhancements not only ensure secure data access on personal devices but also provide administrators with streamlined governance, enable UI adjustments without code changes, and reduce dependency on external Mobile App Management providers. Furthermore, the mobile development kit has been extended, offering metadata extensibility for multi-tenant apps built by SAP like SAP Maintenance Assistant, allowing developers to customize SAP’s standard mobile apps to their organization’s needs.
Highlights Development Frameworks
SAP Cloud Application Programming Model
The SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP) is advancing at a rapid pace, primarily through strategic service integrations. These integrations now deliver simplified consumption of Change Tracking and the SAP Audit Log service. Worth noting as well, CAP Java has upgraded to Java 2.0. This not only boosts performance by integrating with SpringBoot 3 but also underscores our commitment to keeping pace with tech advancements. CAP’s expansion further includes open-source connectors for databases like SQLite and PostgreSQL, giving developers more database options to choose.
Dive deeper into the CAP updates
SAP Cloud SDK
In the last quarter of 2023, the SAP Cloud SDK for Java will be open-sourced. This step is a testament to SAP’s dedication to transparency and fostering a collaborative spirit within the developer community and the broader SDK user base.
SAP Cloud SDK simplifies the development of extensions on SAP BTP that can seamlessly connect with any SAP application. Designed for developers, the SDK is available in both Java and JavaScript/TypeScript flavors. It’s deeply embedded within the SAP Cloud Application Programming Model, serving as an important connector to SAP software. And with its shift to open source, users can feel confident about the longevity and security of their application investments on SAP BTP, especially as more components of the ecosystem adopt an open licensing approach.
Highlights ABAP on SAP BTP
SAP BTP ABAP Environment
As part of the upcoming release in November 2023, SAP BTP ABAP Environment will receive new capabilities in various product areas. In the context of code analysis, leveraging the ABAP Test Cockpit (ATC), it will be possible to use SAP BTP ABAP Environment as central check system to run checks from an on-premise system. Additionally, the new OData service consumption model will facilitate the integration and consumption of external OData services by offering generation of artefacts based on an EDMX input file. Furthermore, it will be supported by the ABAP RESTful Application Programming Model (RAP) to provide read-only tree views in SAP Fiori elements, covering scenarios in which visualized data is arranged in a tree hierarchy. Lastly, the ABAP Debugger will be able to display memory consumption of debugged applications via the new ABAP Memory view.
As this summary only covers a high-level overview of most important new features, stay tuned for all details of release 2311.
Check out all SAP TechEd 2023 sessions covering SAP’s developer tools and frameworks in our
Application Development and Automation content track