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HenningH
Advisor
Advisor
We have recently announced the SAP Cloud SDK as the easiest way to interact with SAP solutions when developing Cloud-native applications. The SAP Cloud SDK allow you to leverage SAP solutions in your Cloud-native application and quickly fulfil business requirements. While the news article about the announcement gives the high-level overview, this blog post goes into the technical details and the relationship of the SAP Cloud SDK to the SAP S/4HANA Cloud SDK, which you may already know.



Learn all about the SAP Cloud SDK at SAP TechEd 2019 - in more than ten sessions on different aspects.








The SAP Cloud SDK represents the next step in the evolution of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud SDK. Since its release 1.5 years ago, the SAP S/4HANA Cloud SDK has successfully helped customers and partners across all industries to move to the cloud with SAP S/4HANA and SAP Cloud Platform.

For example, Leonardo De Araujo, CTO of SAP partner Beyond Technologies, highlighted the usefulness of the SDK for their projects when stating “SAP S/4HANA Cloud SDK significantly enhanced the development … we have been able reduce to development by up to 50 percent.”


Now, the SAP Cloud SDK does the same for SAP solutions in general. The SAP Cloud SDK reduces development effort, improves quality, and helps adopting Cloud-native best practices. All while being available free of charge under SAP Developer License.

Overview of SAP Cloud SDK


Over the past year, the SAP S/4HANA Cloud SDK has continuously expanded in scope to be more generally applicable and useful. Already since some time, the SDK has thus been helpful beyond pure extensions to SAP S/4HANA. Developers of many applications, not only SAP S/4HANA extensions, appreciate its features such as the OData VDM generator for creating clients for OData APIs or the generic SAP Cloud Platform abstractions for transparently leveraging services and capabilities of the platform.

With the transformation to the SAP Cloud SDK, we make these capabilities a central corner stone of the SDK and bring the experience of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud SDK to many other SAP solutions such as SAP SuccessFactors, SAP C/4HANA, and SAP Business ByDesign. Of course, developers focusing on SAP S/4HANA extensions can rest assured that supporting SAP S/4HANA will remain a top priority for us as well.

The new name shall reflect that the SAP Cloud SDK supports developers of SAP customers and partners with a consistent offering that makes it easy to develop and deliver extensions to many SAP solutions, in Java and in JavaScript/TypeScript. Use the SAP Cloud SDK to consume services and messages* of many SAP solutions in the Cloud and on-premise, access services of SAP Cloud Platform, and continuously deliver Cloud-native applications on SAP Cloud Platform.

Like the SAP S/4HANA Cloud SDK before, partners very much appreciate the new SAP Cloud SDK, as their statements referenced in the news article show. To quote just one of them:

“[…] We are sure that the SAP Cloud SDK will become a key enabler for the whole SAP ecosystem, helping all the SAP offerings to grow closer together […]” says Helmut Koenigseder, IT Architect at msg.


The SAP Cloud SDK integrates well with the larger Cloud ecosystem of SAP.



Cloud-native applications developed with the SAP Cloud SDK can be deployed on SAP Cloud Platform. They will connect to other SAP solutions and use services of SAP Cloud Platform, mostly via the SAP Cloud SDK. The SAP Cloud SDK can be used with any programming framework, and is also part of the SAP Cloud Application Programming Model. Within the programming model, the SAP Cloud SDK is used for consuming remote services of SAP solutions and SAP Cloud Platform. The continuous delivery toolkit of the SAP Cloud SDK offers out-of-the-box continuous delivery for applications on SAP Cloud Platform, based on project “Piper”.

For more details on the relationship of the SAP Cloud SDK to other SAP offerings, study our FAQ.

When to Use What


While the APIs of SAP solutions are specific to their business capabilities, the SAP Cloud SDK aims to make their consumption consistent and straightforward. The following list outlines when to use which capability of the SAP Cloud SDK, depending on the SAP system your Cloud-native application communicates with, and references further information for each capability. You may want to read on to the next section, though, to know the best place to get started with the SAP Cloud SDK.












As you can see, there are options for a lot of scenarios where you want to access different SAP solutions. How to start with the SAP Cloud SDK?

Where to Start


If you have already used the SAP S/4HANA Cloud SDK before, simply continue using it and explore the options outlined above to connect to other SAP solutions and services on SAP Cloud Platform. The usual places to find information remain available, and what you have learned about using the components of the SDK remains valid. For the specific capabilities beyond SAP S/4HANA, follow the links of the previous section.

If you are new to the SAP Cloud SDK, the following information resources will prove helpful to get started, after which you can use the information from above specific to your usage scenario.

  • If you are developing in Java, the tutorials referenced in our overview blog post are the best starting point. They explain how to setup your project and begin using the SAP Cloud SDK in Java. The tutorial on building a SAP SuccessFactors extension with the SAP Cloud SDK describes end-to-end how to leverage the SAP Cloud SDK to connect to one sample SAP solution.

  • If you are developing in JavaScript, you can find the tutorials here. They contain step-by-step instructions for projects developed in JavaScript or TypeScript on how to use the SAP Cloud SDK for JavaScript, which was released a few weeks ago.

  • After following these tutorials for Java or JavaScript, you are all set to leverage the continuous delivery toolkit of the SDK. You can then continuously deliver and deploy your application to SAP Cloud Platform, based on the corresponding blog posts.

  • Of course, the SDK consists of modular libraries which you can also add to existing applications. Just include the corresponding Java or JavaScript libraries as dependencies into your project.


As the SAP Cloud SDK is based on the previously existing SAP S/4HANA Cloud SDK, be advised that the current versions of the SAP Cloud SDK (as of May 2019) are 2.16.0 (Java), and 1.2.1 (JavaScript), respectively.

Outlook


As you have seen, the SAP Cloud SDK today supports communicating with many SAP solutions. For some, the SDK provides modules out-of-the-box, for others, you generate client libraries and use them together with the SAP Cloud SDK. In the future, we plan to support more SAP solutions out-of-the-box with modules of the SAP Cloud SDK. Furthermore, we plan to add additional tutorials on specific SAP solutions in order to help you use the features available today.

For both, please let us know which other SAP systems are most relevant to you via s4sdk@sap.com.

Please bear with us while we adapt to the new naming in different places –some blog posts, tutorials, and other pages may still contain the name SAP S/4HANA Cloud SDK while we update them over time. The content applies to the SAP Cloud SDK as well.

If you wonder about the technical artifact names which sometimes refer to SAP S/4HANA where in fact functionality is generic: be advised that we plan to update those in our next major version. This new major version will also bring additional benefits, some of which may require to migrate your code. Stay tuned for more details soon. In the meantime, start using the SAP Cloud SDK today, as explained above.

If you have any open questions, look at our FAQ and do not hesitate to reach out to us. We are looking forward to your feedback. We hope that you enjoy the SAP Cloud SDK and find it useful in developing Cloud-native applications. SAP solutions have much to offer, and with the SAP Cloud SDK you can leverage them easily from your source code.

 




* As of now, only for messages from SAP S/4HANA Cloud

** For illustration purposes only, just the SAP solutions mentioned in the text have been tested with the SAP Cloud SDK as of now.