SAP CodeJam in Sydney – HANA Cloud Platform

I wanted to share my experience hosting the first HCP CodeJam in ANZ on May 18^th 2016. We were fortunate to have the support from Emil Aleksandrov – HCP Product Manager who travelled all the way from Bulgaria. It was great to see about 20 participants gathering at one place to learn more about HANA Cloud Platform (HCP).  We kick started the day with an overview of the SAP’s PaaS – HANA Cloud Platform and the services which are available within HANA Cloud Platform.

Emil also provided some information around the roadmap and some insights into HANA XSA and Cloud Foundry.

We discussed upon the significance of the development tool Web IDE (which is now a service in HCP) and created a mobile application based on existing Fiori templates. There were few participants who didn’t have much of web development experience, but still found it easy to use Web IDE to quickly build a simple application and view it on their mobile devices. We also talked about how easy it is for anyone to get their own HANA Multidatabase container (MDC) with a click of a button in their HCP trial account. This was well received by everyone, as quite often we don’t get access to a latest HANA DB to try out some of the new features. This would be perfect for someone looking to build brand new applications on HCP. All the participants created a HANA XS application on top of their HANA MDC. We spoke about the significance of Core Data Services (CDS) and how to use this design time language to create runtime HANA artefacts. Participants learnt how to create various HANA artefacts using CDS and also XS OData services which get consumed by SAPUI5 views and controllers developed using HANA Web IDE.

We had a break for lunch were some good food was provided. It was great to see participants interacting with each other sharing some of their experience around HANA Cloud Platform.

Soon after lunch we began to work on something more interesting. Participants were provided access to SAP BusinessObjects Cloud (formerly known as Cloud for Analytics). We explored on using HCP HANA DB as an agile data mart and consumed this data to create rich visualizations using SAP BusinessObjects Cloud. We spoke about the various connectors available to connect with different data sources and demonstrated how to use HANA Live connections to communicate with HCP HANA DB. Participants also got to download the HANA SHINE contents (available on github) and upload them into their own HANA DB to be able to generate sample data models which could be used as data source for SAP BusinessObjects Cloud.

Towards the end of the event, we focused on few IoT demonstrations where we introduced the participants with the IoT services which are available on HCP. We spoke about configurations required to enable and setup the IoT services for a HCP account and also demonstrated few prototypes. We had a Raspberry PI connected with Temperature and Light sensor which was streaming the sensor data to an application hosted on HCP via Web Sockets. We also showcased how one could use a smaller device like the ESP8266 micorcontroller (connected to an ultrasonic distance sensor) to stream the calculated distance to an application on HCP. Participants very really excited to see something LIVE in front of them and they were really able to appreciate some of the capabilities available in HCP.

We closed the event around 4pm and it was great to hear some good feedback. Participants liked working in smaller groups focused on a particular topic and they were keen to have more such events. It’s a busy week in Australia with lot’s of events around HANA Cloud Platform.

Thanks to all the participants, Emil Aleksandrov and Krishna Dalal and the team for another successful codeJam.

Looking to host a codeJam in your city? Follow this post. Also, don’t forget to check out the out the new SAP Developer Center.