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hofmann
Active Contributor

I attended the MOOC course Next Steps in SAP Hana Cloud Platform from open SAP. In case you did not participate, the course is going to be offered again already next month.

The course topics include native Hana development, HTML5, git, SAML, oAuth and Cloud Portal. As always, attending the course is not really hard as you can access the material when you want during the week and only have to submit the weekly assignment until its deadline. Rui is not a bad presenter on topics around Hana Klaus Portal and while most of the content can be consumed passively, it is a good idea to have Eclipse started up to go through some of the excercises. Nice side effect: you get a local repository of projects you can use for future references.

What about the course content? When I saw that there is a new HCP course I was happy to be able to learn more about HCP. Git and HTML5 looked nice as well as web APIs. Things I really wanted to see more about.

Git

Short: too much git. 2 weeks of commit, push, tag, brances. I understand that SAP is proud of having git support in HCP, and publishing a HTML5 site to HCP is now really easy. You do not even have to take of setting up a git repository. HCP does that for you. Going into detail on git commands is nice for real developers working in real teams. But in case you are more on the architecture site or your team is composed mostly of just you, 2 weeks is simply too much. Besides, I’d liked to have seen more information on Gerrit in this context.

HTML5

The HTML5 app showed is using SAPUI5, but the part of SAPUI5 was not really elaborated in the details it deserves, leaving you with a SAPUI5 application without knowing how the page actually works. You substitute a small Javascript fragment, but what exactly it does is left to you to find out. There will be an open SAP course on Fiori coming which should solve that problem.

Web API

The content presented was about SAML, oAuth and how to protect the API and writing a (native) mobile client. To be honest, I thought that this section will be about Apache Olingo and Jersey for creating REST interfaces. Exposing JPA to REST/JSON/ODATA guidelines is what I expected to see.

What else

On my I wish list for the next HCP course is:

  • Foundation: PaaS and IaaS topics to explain how HCP is working and what standards are used (CloudFoundry, OpenStack)
  • PaaS: explaining how to write a HCP application that runs on other PaaS solutions like Google. Or how to migrate an AWS Beanstalk application to HCP.
  • Continuous integration: Developing an application is nice, but you have to test it, automate the deploy and gather statistics and KPIs. Learning from SAP on how to use maven together with HCP in an CI environment like Jenkins is high on my list. The currently shown developer model may be what you see in reality, but in the context of a course a (new) development paradigm should be teached.
  • Olingo and Jersey: what are the options to expose JPA data in a RESTful way with HCP?
  • Maven
  • Testing: Unit testing, specially on how to use Arquillian to test JPA apps on HCP, performance testing, etc.
  • A full end-to-end solution. Hana native development to expose data via OData, having a Java application for storing and retrieving other data, integrate an on-premise system via HCC, write a SAPUI5 app and access it via web and a mobile device.
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