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Former Member

Dear Cracks,

I wrote this code more then 6 months ago and as it is still not legacy, I decided to write this blogpost. :wink:

In the tutorial above, I will show you how easily you can get data out of your HANA database with NodeJS. The application is written in a way that you can deploy it on CloudFoundry.

Why Hana?

Hmm...I think it is not necessary to describe here why to use HANA :wink: I mainly do it, because it is super fast and has a lot more to provide then just the database.

Why NodeJS?

"Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices." Holger Koser @kos wrote a NodeJS HANA driver, which is also open source and available on Github. The driver alows you to connect to your HANA DB and write powerfull applications in common javascript.

Why CloudFoundry?

In the cloud era, the application platform will be delivered as a service, often described as Platform as a Service (PaaS). PaaS makes it much easier to deploy, run and scale applications. Some PaaS offerings have limited language and framework support, do not deliver key application services, or restrict deployment to a single cloud. CloudFoundry is the industry’s Open PaaS and provides a choice of clouds, frameworks and application services. As an open source project, there is a broad community both contributing and supporting CloudFoundry. As it is open source, you can find the whole code on Github. Internally we have CloudFoundry running in a production grade, this is mainly why I go into CF here.

Let's get the party started

This tutorial shows you how to deploy an application which uses openUI5 as frontend, NodeJS as backend and SAP HANA as database. Regulary SAP and SAP databases need a huge landscape which is not really fast and needs a lot of customizations. A big advantage of this use case is the very fast SAP HANA database. We use it directly from our NodeJS backend without any middleware. Because of this architecture we're able to request our data really fast.

This is the architectural overview:

https://camo.githubusercontent.com/8bf6a0e9bd808ca364f31df77eeafbc6694c4400/68747470733a2f2f73332d65752d776573742d312e616d617a6f6e6177732e636f6d2f7377697373636f6d2d6974732f6e6f646a732d68616e612f6172636869746563747572652e706e67

Here is to mention that you can use every CloudFoundry based PaaS not only our Swisscom Cloud also i.e. Pivotal Web Services.

To demonstrate the fast usage of HANA we provide a freestyle fuzzy search(wikipedia) over three columns and a big amount of data. Follow the tutorials to understand how it works.

Watch a Demo here.

There are two different types of this tutorial, they are linked on github as I only want to maintain it at one point:

  • Kickstarter steps: a short introduction on how to use this repository and what you have to do when you clone it -> Link.
  • Step by step tutorial: you learn to setup a NodeJS application and how to use a database service in Cloudfoundry -> Link.

As enhancement you can also deploy a mobile frontend in an addition layer, see the source code and steps here.

What do you think about the combination of SAP HANA and NodeJS?

I also wrote a demo app with which you can search through your PDF's, would be happy to write a blog post about that, if you're interested in NodeJS and HANA.

Looking forward to your feedback,

Lukas

@Github

@Twitter

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