Introducing JADS - A SAPUI5 Development Web Server

[brenton_ocallaghan]

What is JADS

JADS is a by developers for developers light-weight web server designed to cater specifically for SAPUI5 development with OData proxying.

Background

I do quite a bit of work with SAPUI5/Fiori and web development and one of the challenges for every machine I work on is getting the environment setup - naturally every machine is slightly different so that can take some time but the basics never change - you will always need to:

- Be able to access a SAPUI5 installation (sometimes multiple)

- Be able to develop locally but proxy OData/REST calls to another server

- Be able to see web server logs when something is not quite right

JADS is not designed to be a production server but rather a local developer server where they can tweak these scenarios easily & quickly.

Where did JADS come from:

JADS was born out of an interest by me to try out Node.js, a lightweight runtime which is built on top of Chrome's JavaScript run-time. I started to play with the framework on my commute over 2 days using the scenario of SAPUI5 development. Once I realized I was creating something that I might actually use on a daily basis I decided to get it to a stage where it worked and release it to the community.

Where is JADS now and where is it going

Right now, I am releasing JADS version 1 which works for standard web development and OData proxying to a SAP System. My next goals for features include:

- Specific support for the customization of SAP Fiori apps

- Pass-through of SAP Auth requests through the proxy to the client

- Adding a folder listing feature for directories

- Support for proxy PUT and POST requests (need to add the body payload)

I am open-sourcing the code behind JADS in the hope that if I have missed anything (guaranteed I have! :smile: ), others can contribute to suit their scenarios. The JADS source can be found in my github repository https://github.com/bocallaghan/JADS

I hope this is useful for somebody else and any comments/suggestions are most welcome,

Brenton.

P.S. in case anybody is wondering - JADS = Just Another Development (web) Server