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Author's profile photo Ekaterina Kruse

SAP Cloud SDK Overview

In June 2020 we have launched a brand new documentation portal which consolidates all the knowledge, feature documentation, comprehensive guides, video tutorials, troubleshooting, release notes, API documentation, and more. Please, use it as a single reference point about SAP Cloud SDK. From now on it’s the most complete and up-to-date source of information about the product.

Disclaimer: The blog posts mentioned in this overview are only applicable for the SAP Cloud SDK (Java) version of at most 2.19.2. We plan to continuously migrate these blog posts into our List of Tutorials. Feel free to check out our updated Tutorials on the SAP Cloud SDK.

Disclaimer: The SAP Cloud SDK for Continuous Delivery and its features have been merged into project “Piper”. Therefore we recommend to use the General Purpose Pipeline of project “Piper” instead of the SAP Cloud SDK pipeline. The reasoning for this change, as well as further information on how to adopt the General Purpose Pipeline are described in this guide.

SAP S/4HANA has become de-facto ERP standard with now more than 5,800 customers worldwide. It accompanies organizations across the world in their digital transformation journey that requires them to adopt best-in-class software with high agility. This is further extended by SAP Cloud Platform that gives developers the power to build and run high-quality applications that conform to the highest order of performance, security and reliability tests.

This is where the SAP Cloud SDK comes in. Making the application development experience delightful, the SDK provides you out-of-the-box capabilities, such as the simplified integration with SAP S/4HANA and Business Suite and beyond using the virtual data model for exposed APIs, abstractions of the underlying cloud platform implementation of SAP Cloud Platform, fault-tolerance, cache management, tutorials, project templates, and many more.

SAP Cloud SDK is based on the SAP S/4HANA Cloud SDK that you might know from the past. We announce this evolution and support of other SAP LoB solutions at SAPPHIRE 2019.
Find more information about this announcement in the following resources:
SAP Cloud SDK on SAP News Center
SAP Cloud SDK technical introduction blog post

The list of supported LoB solutions already includes systems such as SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Business ByDesign, SAP Cloud for Customer, and SAP Cloud for Real Estate. We are working on extending the list of supported systems and on providing users of the SAP Cloud SDK with the comprehensive documentation on the corresponding SDK components.

On a high level, the SAP Cloud SDK consists of two technical components: SAP Cloud SDK libraries and the Continuous Delivery Toolkit. Note, that you can use the SDK libraries in integration with SAP Cloud Application Programming Model, as well as independently with any framework of choice, as depicted in the figure below.

The libraries are provided for Java and for JavaScript/TypeScript in SAP Cloud Platform. The SAP Cloud SDK is available for free under SAP Developer License. Java libraries can be downloaded from Maven Central. JavaScript/TypeScript libraries are available via SAP npm repository, as described in the announcement blog post for the SAP Cloud SDK for JavaScript.

Continuous Delivery Toolkit for projects based on the SAP Cloud SDK is an open-source component and is available via GitHub. Please, refer to the following blog post containing the detailed instructions on how to set up the CI/CD pipeline of the Continuous Delivery Toolkit.

The purpose of this blog post is to provide the step by step hands on guide for developers starting their work with the SAP Cloud SDK and the Continuous Delivery Toolkit.

The table below sums up the resources and tutorial links for languages, currently supported by the SAP Cloud SDK: Java and JavaScript/TypeScript.

 

Community Update Calls on the SAP Cloud SDK

Since December 2018, we are conducting a series of community update calls in addition to our tutorials and blog posts. Here, you can learn more about the latest releases, features of the SAP Cloud SDK, and its integration with other SAP offerings.

It is live sessions, so, you can also ask experts the questions about the releases, roadmap, and specific features of the SAP Cloud SDK that are particularly relevant for your project.

Check out the details and register for the upcoming sessions following the link to this blog post.

Tutorials (JavaScript): Get Started with the SAP Cloud SDK

Tutorials for the SAP Cloud SDK for JavaScript are available via https://developers.sap.com/.

Access individual tutorials following the links below or via the tutorial mission:

Get Set to Use SAP Cloud SDK for JavaScript

Get Started with SAP Cloud SDK for JavaScript

Create Your First Application with SAP Cloud SDK for JavaScript

Deploy Application to Cloud Foundry with SAP Cloud SDK for JavaScript

Tutorials (JavaScript): Build an Address Manager with the SAP Cloud SDK’s OData Virtual Data Model

Access individual tutorials following the links below or via the tutorial mission:

Build OData Queries with the SAP Cloud SDK’s Virtual Data Model

Use OData Navigation Properties with the SAP Cloud SDK’s Virtual Data Model

Create OData Entities with the SAP Cloud SDK’s Virtual Data Model

Update OData Entities with the SAP Cloud SDK’s Virtual Data Model

Delete OData Entities with the SAP Cloud SDK’s Virtual Data Model

Tutorials (Java): Get Started with the SAP Cloud SDK

Step 1 with SAP Cloud SDK: Set up

Step 2 with SAP Cloud SDK: HelloWorld on SCP Neo

Step 3 with SAP Cloud SDK: HelloWorld on SCP CloudFoundry

Step 4 with SAP Cloud SDK: Calling an OData Service

Step 5 with SAP Cloud SDK: Resilience with Hystrix

Step 6 with SAP Cloud SDK: Caching

Step 7 with SAP Cloud SDK: Secure your Application on SAP Cloud Platform, CloudFoundry

Step 8 with SAP Cloud SDK: Secure your Application on SAP Cloud Platform, Neo

Tutorials (Java): Learn about Other Core Components of the SAP Cloud SDK

Step 9 with SAP Cloud SDK: Implement and Deploy a Frontend Application

Step 10 with SAP Cloud SDK: Virtual Data Model for OData

Step 11 with SAP Cloud SDK: Virtual Data Model for BAPI

Step 12 with SAP Cloud SDK: Logging with SAP Cloud SDK

Step 13 with SAP Cloud SDK: Automated Testing

Step 14 with SAP Cloud SDK: Continuous integration and delivery

Step 15 with SAP Cloud SDK: Static Code Checks

Step 16 with SAP Cloud SDK: Quality Checks

Step 17 with SAP Cloud SDK: Monitoring

Step 18 with SAP Cloud SDK: Your Multi-Tenant Application in SAP Fiori Launchpad on SAP Cloud Platform Cloud Foundry

Step 19 with SAP Cloud SDK: Mocking calls or how to develop an extension without an S/4HANA system

Step 20 with SAP Cloud SDK: Create and Deep Insert with the Virtual Data Model for OData

Step 21 with SAP Cloud SDK: End-To-End Tests Against Secured Applications

Step 22 with the SAP Cloud SDK: Extensibility, Type-safe Expand, and Dependency Injection with the Virtual Data Model for OData

Step 23 with SAP Cloud SDK: Performance Tests

Step 24 with SAP Cloud SDK: Autoscaling of the Continuous Delivery Toolkit on Kubernetes

Deep Dives (Java): Specific Technical Topics

An End-to-End Story on the Virtual Data Model using the Business Partner API

What is what? Your quick reference to Communication Management, and Identity & Access Management Artifacts in S/4HANA

Cloud Platform Abstractions in the SAP Cloud SDK

Continuous Delivery Pipeline for SAP Cloud SDK Based Projects

Executing BAPIs inside S/4HANA On-Premise from your Cloud Application

Extend your Cloud Foundry Application with Tenant-Aware Persistency

S/4HANA Connectivity – Made Simple

Leverage Principal Propagation via OAuth 2 when consuming a Business API from S/4HANA Cloud

Tenant and User Aware Microservices Communication via REST APIs

Generating Java VDM for S/4HANA Custom OData Service

Calling an OData Service from a Web IDE Project using the SAP Cloud SDK

Use the SAP Cloud SDK in the Application Programming Model for SAP Cloud Platform

Quickly build a prototype with SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation, SAP API Business Hub, and SAP S/4HANA Cloud SDK

Integrate SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain using Hyperledger Fabric into a SAP Cloud SDK application

Production-ready integration of SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation services with an SAP S/4HANA side-by-side extension built with the SAP Cloud SDK

An End to End story of the integration of an OData service with SAP Conversational AI (also known as Recast AI)

Integrate SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain using MultiChain into a SAP Cloud SDK application

Convenient Consumption of SAP S/4HANA SOAP APIs

Experimental serverless CI/CD with SAP Cloud SDK Continuous Delivery Toolkit

Migrate SAP Cloud SDK Based Applications from SAP Cloud Platform Neo Environment to Cloud Foundry

Consuming Messages representing Business Events from SAP S/4HANA Cloud

Access any REST service with the SAP Cloud SDK

Step-by-Step: Consume REST Service API with SAP Cloud SDK

Create an application with SAP Cloud SDK to integrate with SAP SuccessFactors

Releases

With the SAP Cloud SDK, we follow the bi-weekly release strategy. We always recommend to migrate to the newer version of the SDK after its release, as each release enriches the feature set and improves the product. Below you find the links to the release notes providing details on the SAP Cloud SDK releases. Each release is also accompanied with a release blog post, providing more detailed information on the main new features, as well as the information on how to migrate to new versions. You will find links to the corresponding release blog posts in release notes:

Interested to discover more?

We also recommend you the following resources in addition to the tutorials and deep dives:

 

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      18 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Claudio Mauri
      Claudio Mauri

      Hi Ekaterina,

      provided tutorials show how to write very simple applications and how to call OData Services provided by S4/Hana. That's ok, let's say that this way we can access S4/Hana at business logic level. But what about customization of S4/Hana GUI ? And moreover, how does S4/SDK cope with Sap Web IDE ?

      Thanks in advance for your reply.

      Author's profile photo Ekaterina Kruse
      Ekaterina Kruse
      Blog Post Author

      Hello Claudio,

      thanks for your question, you definitely raise important topics.

      The SDK provides a friendly environment for developers of SAP S/4HANA extensions on SAP Cloud Platform. Technically, it means that you have a set of libraries that can be used to connect your S/4HANA system (On Premise or Cloud Edition) from SAP Cloud Platform, retrieve the data using provided query builders and S/4HANA connectors and process the result. While you develop your application, you can extend the business logic and the data model (using SAP Cloud Platform Persistence Service). All OData services that are exposed in the SAP S/4HANA can be accessed using the SDK in the SAP Cloud Platform. By this means, we can develop extensions for the business logic, as you have correctly mentioned. Customizing of the SAP S/4HANA is indeed an interesting topic, which can be potentially addressed in the later releases. However, it is currently out of scope in the SAP S/4HANA Cloud SDK.

      SAP is also working on integration of the SDK with the SAP WebIDE by incorporating corresponding java project templates. More information and updates will follow during the general availability release.

      Author's profile photo Anbusivam S
      Anbusivam S

      Hi Ekaterina,

      Will it make sense to use this SDK for non S4H Extension scenarios (ie., for standalone reuse services)?

      Thanks & Regards,
      Anbu

      Author's profile photo Sander Wozniak
      Sander Wozniak

      Hi Anbu,

      the S/4HANA Cloud SDK strongly focuses on building side-by-side extensions for S/4HANA on the SAP Cloud Platform. Nevertheless, you can use certain aspects like our support for easy testing and mocking of the Cloud platform environment for standalone scenarios. Whether using the SDK for building your services makes sense strongly depends on your individual requirements.

      Regards
      Sander

      Author's profile photo Tri Minh Le
      Tri Minh Le

      Hello  Ekaterina,

      Does the SDK require developers to have Java background to use it?

      I'm newbie to Java application development. Do you have any resources that could explain more about the SDK?

      Thanks in advance.

      Tri

      Author's profile photo Ekaterina Kruse
      Ekaterina Kruse
      Blog Post Author

      Hello Tri,

      current version of the SDK is aiming for Java developers of side-by-side extensions for S/4HANA on SAP Cloud Platform. We are planning to support other programming languages with the SDK in the future. Did you investigate the tutorials, linked in this blog post? The blogposts in the "Tutorials" section, would be the best starting point with the SDK from the developer perspective.

      Best regards,

      Ekaterina

      Author's profile photo Tri Minh Le
      Tri Minh Le

      Hi Ekaterina,

      Thank you for your reply.

      I did go through tutorials. They're very helpful.

      Tri

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      There is a link to here from:  https://github.com/SAP/cloud-s4-sdk-examples/blob/master/README.md

      Stating as below:

      • Cost Center Manager App as explained in the tutorials

      The cost center manager app is not referenced in this page.

      Author's profile photo Ekaterina Kruse
      Ekaterina Kruse
      Blog Post Author

      Thanks Darren, we have adapted the README to the latest state of the example projects and tutorials.

      Author's profile photo Vaibhav R
      Vaibhav R

      Hi Ekaterina,

       

      Are the SAP S/4 HANA business applications developed using UI5/Fiori Javascript or are they developed using Java.

       

      Thanks

      Vaibhav

      Author's profile photo Ekaterina Kruse
      Ekaterina Kruse
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Vaibhav,

      both architectures are used also by SAP: There is a portfolio of applications developed with UI5/Fiori, there are also applications that require more sophisticated backend logic, such as SAP RealSpend, SAP Financial Statement Insights and others (see more apps like this developed by SAP and partners in SAP App Center). Those include additional backend logic that can be developed with e.g. Java or JavaScript using the SAP S/4HANA Cloud SDK.

      Ekaterina

      Author's profile photo Mike Doyle
      Mike Doyle

      Hi Ekaterina, thanks for maintaining this great ‘homepage’ for the S4SDK.  Will you be updating the JavaDoc link to the 2.9.0 release of the SDK?

      Is there an easy to switch versions once you are in the JavaDoc?

      Deep Dive 12 is great but it would be fantastic to have some more content around combining the Cloud APM with the S/4HANA Cloud SDK.  For example, you might talk about interpreting a $filter request for your own service, which you then apply to the S/4 service.  It took me quite a while to work this out.

      Thanks, Mike

       

       

       

      Author's profile photo Ekaterina Kruse
      Ekaterina Kruse
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Mike, the version of the JavaDoc in the blog post is updated (thanks for noticing). At the moment, this is no easy way to switch between the versions of JavaDoc in help.sap.com, we will consider this for the future improvements.

      As mentioned in the comment to another blog post, we have some more integration topics with APM in the pipeline, so stay tuned 🙂

      Author's profile photo Krzysztof Grzymala
      Krzysztof Grzymala

      Hello,

      Is there anything planned to provide SAP Analytics Cloud extensions in the SAP Cloud SDK?

      If so, can you give some examples?

      Regards,

      KG

      Author's profile photo Henning Heitkoetter
      Henning Heitkoetter

      Hello,

      currently we do not have specific plans to support SAP Analytics Cloud in the SAP Cloud SDK.

      If you let us know what you would be looking for in terms of SAP Analytics Cloud support and describe your requirements in a bit more detail, we can consider this.

      Thanks,

      Henning

      Author's profile photo Tikeer Guo
      Tikeer Guo

      Hi Ekaterina Kruse,

      Great blog to collect all together, it is very helpful, thanks a lot for your effort.

      By the way, as this blog is posted in 2017, the content in this blog is valid for now 2021? Thank you.

       

      Best regards,

      Tikeer

      Author's profile photo Frank Essenberger
      Frank Essenberger

      Hi Tikeer,

       

      your idea is correct and a lot has been happening and created in the last four years. Ekaterina changed the team and position. I think the best way to start is our central documentation:

       

      https://sap.github.io/cloud-sdk/

       

      from there you find the latest tutorials and documentation in one place.

       

      Best

      Frank

      Author's profile photo Tikeer Guo
      Tikeer Guo

      Hi Frank,

       

      Thanks a lot for your quick reply. Have a nice weekend.

       

      Best regards,

      Tikeer