With the general availability of SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory at SAPPHIRE 2019 SAP provided developers with some first improvements to build extensions more quickly. Being it on SAP Cloud Platform or in the SAP C/4HANA Foundation.

Since then SAP has added additional capabilities for developing extensions on SAP Cloud Platform. This includes

• the support of all communication scenarios for SAP S/4HANA Cloud
• the possibility to add SuccessFactors systems to the newly introduced “Systems” menu in your global account of SAP Cloud Platform
• the better usage of the SAP Cloud SDK inside extensions built with SAP Cloud Applications Programming Model

The goal: making the development of extensions on SAP Cloud Platform easier.

SAP is making the various components working together better and better to provide developers with a great experience when developing extensions on SAP Cloud Platform.

This was also shown during a live demo at SAP TechEd 2019 keynote in Las Vegas:

SAP Cloud Platform provides various components and concepts to support the building of extensions:

• SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory
• SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP)
• ABAP RESTful Programming Model (RAP)
• SAP Cloud Platform Enterprise Messaging
• SAP Cloud SDK
• SAP Web IDE
• SAP Cloud Platform API Management
• SAP API Business Hub
• SAP Cloud Platform Workflow

Connect securely & quickly

SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory is the cloud-native extensibility framework for the Intelligent Enterprise and ensures you can connect SAP LoB solutions to SAP Cloud Platform in an standardized and secured way.

Those capabilities are based on specific additional functionality provided by the SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory on top of the existing components on SAP Cloud Platform like e.g. the Cloud Connector and the Connectivity Services.

The connection process supports and separates the responsibilities and concerns of the Admin of an SAP LoB solution and the Admin of an SAP Cloud Platform global account. This allows the separation of concerns and lets the developers focus on their main task: developing extensions.

Build efficiently & effectively

Once SAP LoB solutions are connected to SAP Cloud Platform, they are assigned to the relevant SAP Cloud Platform sub accounts and expose the available APIs and events so developers can easily discover and consume them.

To develop an extension application for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, for example, developers create a service instance (via Open Service Broker API) of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Extensibility service within the development space of their sub account and can bind this service instance to their extension or application.

Developers can decide whether they want to build the extension in the cloud or in a local development setup.

For development in the cloud, developers can use SAP Web IDE. SAP Web IDE is an extensible web-based integrated development tool that simplifies end-to-end SAP Fiori and full-stack application development.

For local development, developers can use an IDE of their choice.

Developers then use SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP) or the ABAP RESTful Application Programming Model (RAP) to develop the actual code in various steps.

How do developers decide whether to use CAP or RAP?

Developers who want to benefit from additional guidance and best practices, so they can focus on domain knowledge, can use CAP. Developers who want to code in ABAP can use RAP.

Build your extension with CAP & the SAP Cloud SDK

Extensions built with SAP Cloud Application Programming model

• Are multi-tenant aware extensions that can be customized by customer
• Share their APIs & events automatically within SAP CP accounts

In addition, SaaS applications built with CAP can easily be customized by their customers (field extensibility).

You can also build event-triggered extensions by making use of SAP Cloud Platform Enterprise Messaging.

Once the events are made available inside the SAP LoB solutions, those events can be published in the SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory via SAP Cloud Platform Enterprise Messaging (see also blog post around new service plan) and the developer can subscribe the extension to such an event.

This means the developer gets an event bus to access all published events from the connected SAP LoB solutions.

For accessing the APIs of the connected systems the SAP Cloud SDK is used, allowing developers to use pre-defined classes of the APIs in their code in a very efficient way.

Build your extension with RAP

Extensions built with the ABAP RESTful Application Programming model are

• Side-by-side extensions that extend SAP S/4HANA Cloud that go beyond the scope of the built-in In-App extensibility
• Innovative apps in ABAP that benefit from the newest ABAP and SAP HANA capabilities
• Decouple ABAP implementations from the core business systems (clean core initiative)
• Hub-like scenarios that link existing business systems with SAP Cloud Platform and external services

The extension can be developed in the following way:

• Define a semantic data model based on core data sevices with views and associations between them
• Add transactional behavior to the model implementing validation, determinations and actions in addition to the standard CRUD operations
• Define a business service which exposes the model and its behaviour through the oData protocol
• Develop a Fiori elements-based user interface that consumes the exposed business service

Deploy rapidly & easily

For ABAP extensions the runtime of choice is the ABAP environment on SAP Cloud Platform.

For other extensions it will depend whether you are using the SAP Cloud Application Programming Model or developing on your own set of frameworks and technologies.

As of today, the following runtimes are available:

• Application runtime (based on the Cloud Foundry environment)
• ABAP environment

Moving forward the following additional runtimes will be available for extensions as planned innovations:

• SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory, Kyma runtime
• Serverless runtime (as part of the SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory)

The SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory, Kyma runtime will provide developers with the open source project Kyma on SAP Cloud Platform. This is a fully managed offering complementing the BYOL model available since SAPPHIRENOW 2019 for the C/4HANA Foundation.

BOM FOR BUILDING EXTENSIONS

Customers and partners can use SAP’s CPEA (Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement) contract to make use of all services from the SAP Cloud Platform. This also includes the components needed to develop extensions for LoB solutions.

Available today:

• SAP Cloud Platform, Application runtime
• SAP Cloud Platform, ABAP environment
• SAP Cloud Platform Enterprise Messaging
• SAP Web IDE
• SAP Cloud Platform Connectivity (includes Cloud Connector for on-premise connectivity)
• SAP Cloud SDK
• SAP Cloud Platform API Management
• SAP API Business Hub

The Road Ahead

As outlined above SAP is already planning various additional improvements to improve the capabilities to build extensions.

This goes along the support of additional SAP cloud as well as SAP on-premise solutions and even the support or partners and customer solutions.

SAP will update the roadmap moving forward and you can get the most up-to-date roadmap at https://roadmaps.sap.com .

Summary

SAP is making it easier for developers to do what they are most interested in: developing code and focus on their business domain

For developing extensions the SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory is combining various existing components to provide developers with a great experience. So it’s more than the sum of those components. It’s the way how those components can leverage each other’s capabilities and work together in a way, that helps developers reducing the efforts to build extensions.

Therefore, I’d like to finish with one tweet from a great developer – Robin Van Het Hof – who attended the SAP TechEd 2019 keynote in Las Vegas. He summarized what he saw during the keynote demo around the Extension Factory like this and I think he is SPOT ON:

Thanks a lot.

See you at TechEd Barcelona and Bangalore. Stay tuned for additional features to make it easier for you to develop extensions on SAP Cloud Platform.

Checkout interview with SAP Mentors

After TechEd Barcelona I’ve met with the SAP Mentors Gregor Wolf NS Martin Fischer to talk more in detail about the SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory.

We’ve recorded that talk and made it available via a podcast episode from the “Coffee Corner Radio” podcast. This podcast episode explains more in detail what the Extension Factory is.