SAP Code Jam at University of Notre Dame – Building mobile applications !!

I (Milton) from the RIG team conducted a 5 hour SAP Code Jam on developing web / mobile applications using SAP UI5 and the various services offered by the HANA Cloud Platform at Innovation Park located at the University of Notre Dame on Nov 1st.  This Code Jam was well received by all of the participants.  The participants were mostly students pursuing various majors from the University of Notre Dame.  All Code Jam participants were part of the Notre Dame App Challenge that encourages building an app from the ground up.

The Notre Dame App Challenge provides students, faculty and staff a chance to build web and mobile applications that would empower their community.  Individuals or teams can participate in this App Challenge and can compete for over $10,000 in prizes.  The App Challenge started Sep 12th, 2016 and will conclude March 31st, 2017 and is open to all students, faculty and staff at the University of Notre Dame.  It is funded by the University and SAP provides technical assistance throughout the process.  This special Code Jam is an integral part of the App Challenge process.

This Code Jam demonstrated the various services offered by the HANA Cloud Platform – especially the SAP Web IDE.  Participants were introduced to SAP UI5 (SAP user interface for HTML5) – which is a collection of JavaScript libraries that helps developers build desktop and mobile applications that run in a browser.  In addition to the technical content, information on IT jobs and their impact on society was also covered.  This gave participants a holistic idea of the applications that they can build and also provide significant impact on the society in terms of betterment of the community.

HANA Cloud Platform is an open platform-as-a-service offering from SAP that provides unique in-memory database and application services.  It allows developers to rapidly build new applications or extend existing applications.  Since HANA Cloud Platform is a broad offering that encompasses several technologies – the Code Jam focused more on building web and mobile applications using SAP Web IDE.

To demonstrate the capabilities of SAP UI5 and SAP Web IDE, an end-to-end use case was designed and hands-on exercises were created for the same.  The Code Jam had 3 major sections to it.  The first section concentrated on introducing the participants to the basics of SAP UI5 – in particular the data binding concept.  The second section involved using project templates to build the web application.  Participants were then able to utilize their data binding knowledge from the previous section to customize the web application that was created using the templates.  The third section involved converting the web application to run natively on a mobile phone as a hybrid application using Cordova as the container.  Participants were shown how easy it is to build fully functional mobile applications using SAP technologies.  Due to time constraints, accessing device peripherals using plugins from the mobile applications were not discussed.

All participants were able to complete all of the exercises.  This provided participants with context that hopefully will translate into more efficient application building in terms of coding, developing and bringing enriching apps to the community.

The preliminary feedback from participants has been exceedingly positive.