In this tutorial series, we will focus on learning SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP).

CAP is a framework, that would not only guide developers, but also take away some of the more technical or foundational tasks to help them focus on their business logic. Business logic is the key differentiator for what you are developing.

SAP CAP is both open and opinionated. The programming model is a combination of tools, languages, and libraries that will help you build enterprise-grade services and applications.

The goal is to guide developers and minimize boilerplate content, so they can focus on what's important the business logic.

As you can see in this graphic, we support both open-source and SAP tools and technologies.

Components of CAP

    1) Core Data Services (CDS) is the data modelling infrastructure. CDS is known as the backbone of the programming model, as it provides the means to capture service definitions and data models, queries, and expressions in plain object notations.

    2) Service SDKs - It supports libraries available for both Java and Node.js, which can be used to provide and consume services through synchronous and asynchronous APIs. The SDKs include out-of-the-box integration to lower-level platform services, such as authentication and credential-flows or on and off-boarding of SaaS tenants.

    3) SAP BAS, Fiori Elements, SAP HANA - SAP BAS is the IDE of choice, there is Support for SAP HANA and SAP Fiori Elements.

Design Principles

When it comes to design principles, there is open and opinionated concept.

It's open because it gives you choice. You can choose which technology to use, you can select your architecture pattern, you can pick and choose the parts of the programming model that suit your development needs best. But it's also opinionated, because we provide but it's also opinionated, because we provide for you to follow SAP’s recommended approach.

Zero Lock-In

You can choose any technology of your choice, that there is no locked-in, mandatory path with this programming model. To build your UI, you can use SAP Fiori Elements, or you can use any other alternative technology as well.

Non-Intrusive

The programming model is non-intrusive, i.e. it is completely free of assumptions. Here the main goal here is to reduce boilerplate code, which would be the same regardless of the architecture or methodology you choose.

Platform-Agnostic

You can build applications in a way that is independent from the underlying cloud infrastructure. To achieve this by using an API-first approach that avoids hard wiring to any given technology.

Let’s understand with an example Hello World application using CDS and node.js using SAP BAS as IDE.

I hope you are well versed with the basics of SAP BAS. If you aren’t, please check my previous blog on introduction to SAP BAS and setting up.

Introduction to SAP BAS

Setting up SAP BAS

This is the home page of SAP BAS.

Now lets define a service in the srv folder and name it as say.cds

Now, we need to implement the service. To do so, we create another file say.js.

Now, go to the terminal and we can run our little hello world application.

So using cds run, we should get a running service.

We can edit the url to run our hello world request. 

 

And we'll see the value returned as "Hello world".So I hope you learned how to build a small HelloWorld application using CDS and node.js on SAP BAS. In the coming blogs, we will explore more about CDS and SAP CAP.

In this blog we will get to know more about this new platform to develop Applications, i.e. SAP Bussiness Application Studio.

SAP has come up with new cloud-based development environment i.e. SAP Business Application Studio, for multi-cloud environment. SAP Business Application Studio is a very powerful development environment, tightly integrated with the SAP Cloud Platform and well suited for developing business applications.

It provides you desktop-like experience in the cloud. Design of this studio is influenced by Microsoft Visual Studio code, making the developer productive. This is suitable from basic level developer to Full-Stack developer with full control development environment from back-end to front-end.

This would be the only environment for all kind of applications, by replacing all below tools into one tool SAP BAS.

• SAP UI5 / FIORI apps using templates and elements – webIDE Full-Stack
• HANA Native – XS & XSJS – HANA webIDE & HANA Studio
• ABAP on Cloud – RESTful Application Programming – Eclipse with cloud system connectivity
• Cloud Application Programming (CAP), Node.js & Java apps – Eclipse, Atom

Key benefits:

• Single environment for all kind of applications.
• No local installation & setup required
• No JRE dependency
• Industry best practices for developers without switching to multiple applications
• Integration with API HUB, on-premise, on-cloud.
• Provide the flexibility for all the developers, for e.g. templates, Git, Mock servers, OPA5 testing for FIORI apps, etc.
• Enhances the productivity with direct command execution through integrated command line.
• Run configuration feature makes it an easy option and offer single click to simulate the test in locally or deploy your app on cloud directly

Target Audience:

• UI5/Fiori developer
• ABAP developer (Planed in future version)
• Native HANA developer (Planed in future version)
• Node.js (in future version) developer
• Java application developer
• RESTful Application programming (RAP) dev
• Cloud Application programming (CAP) dev

Hope this short intro to SAP BAS was helpful. Check my next blog where I will show how to setup SAP BAS, create a UI5 application, add a launchpad module for SAP UI5 application and deploy to Cloud foundry from SAP Bussiness Application Studio.