SAP HANA XS and node js

Last week I had the privilege to attend my first SAP Tech Ed.

I had heard about some of the possible new features and also eager to learn more on the new features. One that caught my attention due to my main work stream is the addition to Nodejs into the XS world initially on SP11.

While I was waiting for a session on the new Extended Application Services hands on workshop, I attempted to learn more about nodejs and learn what this was all about.

As I understood from Thomas Jung and other colleagues in the room, is that Nodejs is a framework that will allow us to do web development local to our developer machines instead of having to have everything on the SAP HANA repository.

disclaimer:
there may be more advanced things as well that could be done, however, this is just to showcase how simple it is..

It took me less than 30 mins to set this up.

3 things I really liked from nodejs

1) simple and easy way to run a web app in a dev environment

2) easy way to separate web apps, web services, etc into their own node processes – smaller processes = run faster

3) nodejs has many modules that are available for everyone and they are very easy to use

I look forward to learning more and more on nodejs and be able to contribute more

example:

1) you would create a simple nodejs app by writing text to the screen

2) same exercise from above, however, running a sample index.html file which could be your SPA app

before being able to run this app, you would need to run the nodejs javascript file from above from your command line

and be able to see it from your windows task manager

similarly you would run a restful web service which returns JSON and following the same steps from above return a JSON response  from another nodejs thread (notice different port number on this service)

happy coding!