SAP TechEd – Key takeaways for Developers

WOW – what a feature-packed keynote it has been again today… and one that certainly had plenty in share from a developer’s angle. So, let’s recap!

SAP UI5

The one announcement that got the most attention (and rightfully so!) are the news that SAP has been following up on the massive push from the community to consider open-sourcing SAPUI5. During the last couple of weeks lots of passionate community-driven individuals (incl. the SAP Mentors) have been teaming up asking SAP to look into the licensing model of its designated UI technology … and their voices have been heard:

• 13 reasons why SAP should open-source SAPUI5 by Jan Penninkhof
• And a happy birthday it was … #sitNL 5 year anniversary by Twan van den Broek et al (see below)
• Open Source SAPUI5 – Got the T-Shirt? by Simon Kemp
• [Video] Should SAP open source UI5? Hashing the issues with Appleby, Reed, and Jewett
• [Video] Keep on coding in the Free World! by Roel van den Berge

Here’s the official blog post summarizing the story and providing further info:

What is OpenUI5 / SAPUI5 ? by Andreas Kunz

For those interested to have a closer look – make sure to watch the corresponding repo on github: http://sap.github.io/openui5/

SAP River

Rumors about the revamped Rapid Application Development (RAD) toolset called River/RDL (River Definition Language) have been floating around for quite some time and now it has finally been officially announced. In a nutshell…

“SAP River intends to provide a real-time development environment for rapidly building complete native applications powered by SAP HANA and enable increased developer productivity through a simpler development process, easily maintainable source code and a clear separation of intent and yet an optimized native execution on SAP HANA.”  [Source: Official SAP Press Release]

For those interested to learn more or even get hands-on experience please refer to the following links:

• A first look at “River” by Graham Robinson
• Introducing SAP River by Daniel Wroblewski
• River Definition Language – Motivation and Key Ideas by Lior Schejter
• Test-drive SAP River
• [Video] SAP River Vision and Strategy: Introducing the SAP River Definition Language
• [Video] SAP River Language and Architecture: Introduction to SAP HANA Native Application Development

HANA for all

The ultimate goal for every platform is mass adoption and SAP HANA is no different. As such, SAP continues to collaborate with other vendors and open-source projects to make the HANA platform available to the broader developer community. We have started walking down this lane for some time now and in the past we have teamed up with open source projects such as EclipseLink and Hibernate to include HANA in these with de-facto standard ORM frameworks in the Java world. Now, we have taken the next steps by introducing a node.js connector and a Cloud Foundry service broker.

Here are a couple of links for further reading:

• Moving HANA out of its comfort zone: Cloud Foundry and SAS by Dick Hirsch
• Cloud Foundry Blog: SAP HANA Service Broker Contributed to the Cloud Foundry Incubator
• [Video] Cloud Foundry and HANA demo

The bigger picture

As always in such keynotes, the stage is reserved for new announcements and as such let’s take a brief moment to focus on a topic that may not have gotten as much attention as it deserves – there’s finally a new SAP Developer Center Master Software Developer License Agreement! This license agreement makes it easier than ever to get access to SAP technologies for developers and it has been something the community has been requesting for a long time:

• Rant: Developer Licensesby Uwe Fetzer
• Announcing the unified SAP Developer License by Jürgen Schmerder

As such, I believe it’s obvious that there’s been a lot of progress on this important topic and while we are far from being done I believe it’s more than fair to acknowledge this and be thankful for those fighting on this front! On that note, I’d truly like to give a shout-out to Anne Hardy‘s team who has been instrumental in pushing the agenda of developer empowerment in the last three years: So long, and thanks for all the fish…

Writing all this I was reminded of a SAP TechEd Live interview conducted by Jürgen, in which Ethan Jewett, Vicky Jain and yours truly share our developer experience. Watching this video now it gets obvious that there’s definitely been a positive trend…

… which for me, as a developer advocate for the SAP HANA Cloud Platform (HCP), is truly motivating to keep pushing the envelope. I’m very happy that HCP has been on the forefront of this movement with introducing free perpetual developer licenses and sharing source code under an Open-Source license on Github. We have started planning for 2014 and well it looks like it’s going to be a very busy, but equally rewarding year – stay tuned!!!

Last words

For those of you who lack the time to work through all these links provided in this post – you may want to check out this interview of Vijay and Vishal, in which they address almost all these topics: http://events.sap.com/teched/en/session/8846