Note: While this blog post was originally published in 2018, it's been updated for 2020 and now also for 2021 thanks to great help and input from the excellent iwona.hahn. Take a few mins to have a fresh look through, as you'll find that many items have been updated. And don't forget to "share & enjoy"!
There's been a lot of activity and interest around CAP for SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), not least during the last couple of years of SAP TechEd events, and also as it coalesces into a fundamental technology in the cloud development stack. I thought it would be useful to provide an overview of the key resources, for folks who are wondering how to get started.
Briefly, CAP for SAP BTP is a framework of tools, languages and libraries, some from SAP, some open source. With these tools, languages and libraries you can efficiently and rapidly build enterprise services and applications in a full-stack development approach. It guides you along a golden path of best practices, allowing you to focus on your domain while relieving you from tedious technical tasks.
You can find core documentation for CAP in capire.
Begin with the Getting Started section, as that will take you through the basics as well as detailing some best practices and reference material.
You can also find what's new in the new Release Notes section.
SAP Developer Center
In the SAP Developer Center, there are missions, tutorial groups and tutorials.
In the beginner-level mission "Take a Deep Dive into OData" there's a tutorial group "Build Your First OData-based Backend Service" which gives you a high level taster.
If you're feeling more adventurous, or more hungry for knowledge and insight, there are a couple of complete missions available too:
The mission Build a Business Application Using CAP for Node.js guides you through developing a business application using CAP. Start on your local environment and deploy to the cloud.
If you're of the Java persuasion, there's a similar mission you may like - Build a Business Application Using CAP for Java:
You can also find other tutorials tagged with "SAP Cloud Application Programming Model" via this URL:
https://developers.sap.com/tutorial-navigator.html?tag=software-product-function:sap-cloud-applicati...
and you'll be presented with appropriately filtered content like this:
SAP Community
Here on the SAP Community you'll find an array of posts talking directly or indirectly about CAP. You can find the complete set using the tag:
SAP Cloud Application Programming Model
Daniel's post "Introducing the new Application Programming Model" is a great place to start.
There's also a dedicated topic page which you should definitely check out: https://community.sap.com/topics/cloud-application-programming - this has all sorts of links including a summary of the latest blog posts and also the latest Q&A, which you can get to directly too via the tag specifically for CAP related questions and answers.
SAP TechEd sessions
CAP has proved to have been a popular topic in the sessions and in the corridors at SAP TechEd over the last couple of years.
2019
There was an array of sessions at SAP TechEd Barcelona - check out the Agenda Builder to find out more.
Here are a couple of them:
The exercise material "spaceflight" for CNA376 is on GitHub for both Node and Java.
If you're wanting a brief overview of CAP, you could watch this brief (7min) interview between the wonderful gregorw, and me, from SAP TechEd 2019 in Barcelona: CAPM for Developers, Barcelona 2019:
2020
There is a great session from christian.georgi SAP Cloud Application Programming Model Evolution – What’s New [DEV103] which is a lecture session with all the news on both the Node.js and Java runtimes.
Tools
If you have a look at the exercises for CNA376 you'll see they're for a Node.js (JavaScript) runtime. As well as tools and features for the Application Programming Model being available in the SAP Web IDE Full-Stack, there's also an extension for Visual Studio Code.
Read more about this SAP CDS Language Support extension in joerg.mann's post "Introducing Core Data & Services (CDS) for VS Code" and grab it from the Visual Studio Marketplace - find out more in the tools section of the CAP documentation.
There's also a short (12 minute) video which gives an overview of all the great features of this extension: An overview of the SAP CDS Language Support extension for VS Code
What's more, there's CAP support in the new SAP Business Application Studio too!
Other media
On SAP's unofficial community podcast, Coffee Corner Radio, there's a 16 minute pod bite (#5) where I interview rui.nogueira on the Application Programming Model.
On SAP CodeTalk, there's a short interview with Ian Thain and me talking about CAP at a high level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhEpcB7x4UA
On the SAP Mentors GitHub organisation there's a repo representing CAP community activity - check it out at bit.ly/cap-com.
If you like to learn by watching folks hack around on screen, and perhaps also take part, then you probably want to check out the Hands-on SAP dev series of live streams which cover all sorts of SAP development topics including of course CAP. Check out the recordings of past episodes here: bit.ly/handsonsapdev#replays.
That's what comes to mind to me this evening - if there's anything else (please let me know) I'll add it to this post as and when it appears or occurs to me.
Happy hacking!
Updates:
11 Oct 2018 - added link to SAP CodeTalk interview; added link to Java exercise materials for CNA376
21 Dec 2018 - replaced reference to the original user tag applicationprogrammingmodel with the new tag SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (hat tip to mike.doyle4 for the reminder)
03 Jan 2019 - added info on finding tutorials by tag via a URL (hat tip to a.pfohlmann). Also added info on how to see what's new with the Application Programming Model, via an answer in the Community Q&A from jijoroyjacob
25 Mar 2020 - major update with huge help from iwona.hahn
28 Sep 2020 - new location for VS Code Extension
16 Feb 2021 - more great updates thanks again to iwona.hahn
There's been a lot of activity and interest around CAP for SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), not least during the last couple of years of SAP TechEd events, and also as it coalesces into a fundamental technology in the cloud development stack. I thought it would be useful to provide an overview of the key resources, for folks who are wondering how to get started.
Briefly, CAP for SAP BTP is a framework of tools, languages and libraries, some from SAP, some open source. With these tools, languages and libraries you can efficiently and rapidly build enterprise services and applications in a full-stack development approach. It guides you along a golden path of best practices, allowing you to focus on your domain while relieving you from tedious technical tasks.
You can find core documentation for CAP in capire.
Begin with the Getting Started section, as that will take you through the basics as well as detailing some best practices and reference material.
You can also find what's new in the new Release Notes section.
SAP Developer Center
In the SAP Developer Center, there are missions, tutorial groups and tutorials.
In the beginner-level mission "Take a Deep Dive into OData" there's a tutorial group "Build Your First OData-based Backend Service" which gives you a high level taster.
If you're feeling more adventurous, or more hungry for knowledge and insight, there are a couple of complete missions available too:
The mission Build a Business Application Using CAP for Node.js guides you through developing a business application using CAP. Start on your local environment and deploy to the cloud.
If you're of the Java persuasion, there's a similar mission you may like - Build a Business Application Using CAP for Java:
You can also find other tutorials tagged with "SAP Cloud Application Programming Model" via this URL:
https://developers.sap.com/tutorial-navigator.html?tag=software-product-function:sap-cloud-applicati...
and you'll be presented with appropriately filtered content like this:
SAP Community
Here on the SAP Community you'll find an array of posts talking directly or indirectly about CAP. You can find the complete set using the tag:
SAP Cloud Application Programming Model
Daniel's post "Introducing the new Application Programming Model" is a great place to start.
There's also a dedicated topic page which you should definitely check out: https://community.sap.com/topics/cloud-application-programming - this has all sorts of links including a summary of the latest blog posts and also the latest Q&A, which you can get to directly too via the tag specifically for CAP related questions and answers.
SAP TechEd sessions
CAP has proved to have been a popular topic in the sessions and in the corridors at SAP TechEd over the last couple of years.
2019
There was an array of sessions at SAP TechEd Barcelona - check out the Agenda Builder to find out more.
Here are a couple of them:
- CNA376 "Build Applications with the Programming Model on SAP Cloud Platform" - hands-on workshop (2hr)
- CNA652 "Less Than One Hour to a SaaS Application with SAP Cloud Platform" - CodeJam (mini-edition) (1hr)
The exercise material "spaceflight" for CNA376 is on GitHub for both Node and Java.
If you're wanting a brief overview of CAP, you could watch this brief (7min) interview between the wonderful gregorw, and me, from SAP TechEd 2019 in Barcelona: CAPM for Developers, Barcelona 2019:
2020
There is a great session from christian.georgi SAP Cloud Application Programming Model Evolution – What’s New [DEV103] which is a lecture session with all the news on both the Node.js and Java runtimes.
Tools
If you have a look at the exercises for CNA376 you'll see they're for a Node.js (JavaScript) runtime. As well as tools and features for the Application Programming Model being available in the SAP Web IDE Full-Stack, there's also an extension for Visual Studio Code.
Read more about this SAP CDS Language Support extension in joerg.mann's post "Introducing Core Data & Services (CDS) for VS Code" and grab it from the Visual Studio Marketplace - find out more in the tools section of the CAP documentation.
There's also a short (12 minute) video which gives an overview of all the great features of this extension: An overview of the SAP CDS Language Support extension for VS Code
What's more, there's CAP support in the new SAP Business Application Studio too!
Other media
On SAP's unofficial community podcast, Coffee Corner Radio, there's a 16 minute pod bite (#5) where I interview rui.nogueira on the Application Programming Model.
On SAP CodeTalk, there's a short interview with Ian Thain and me talking about CAP at a high level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhEpcB7x4UA
On the SAP Mentors GitHub organisation there's a repo representing CAP community activity - check it out at bit.ly/cap-com.
If you like to learn by watching folks hack around on screen, and perhaps also take part, then you probably want to check out the Hands-on SAP dev series of live streams which cover all sorts of SAP development topics including of course CAP. Check out the recordings of past episodes here: bit.ly/handsonsapdev#replays.
That's what comes to mind to me this evening - if there's anything else (please let me know) I'll add it to this post as and when it appears or occurs to me.
Happy hacking!
Updates:
11 Oct 2018 - added link to SAP CodeTalk interview; added link to Java exercise materials for CNA376
21 Dec 2018 - replaced reference to the original user tag applicationprogrammingmodel with the new tag SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (hat tip to mike.doyle4 for the reminder)
03 Jan 2019 - added info on finding tutorials by tag via a URL (hat tip to a.pfohlmann). Also added info on how to see what's new with the Application Programming Model, via an answer in the Community Q&A from jijoroyjacob
25 Mar 2020 - major update with huge help from iwona.hahn
28 Sep 2020 - new location for VS Code Extension
16 Feb 2021 - more great updates thanks again to iwona.hahn
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