The Value of SAP Business Application Studio

In Q1 2020, we released SAP Business Application Studio, the new cloud-based development environment for SAP’s Multi-cloud environment (an evolution of SAP Web IDE).

It takes the developer experience to a whole new level, offers more value, better time to market with many new capabilities, more control over the environment, an improved extensibility framework and a lot more content. To learn more, we have created a central blog with links, useful information and hands-ons.

In this blog, I would like to share with you more details about the value offered by SAP Business Application Studio. This will allow you to learn what you can benefit from.

SAP Business Application Studio supports customers and partners in developing and extending SAP solutions, seamlessly integrating SAP services, technologies, and solutions.

It provides turn-key solutions based on dev-spaces  ,which are like isolated virtual machines in the cloud containing tailored tools and pre-installed runtimes per SAP’s major business scenario, such as: SAP Fiori, SAP S/4HANA extensions with SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP), SAP Workflow and Mobile. This simplifies and saves time in setting up your development environment and allows you to efficiently develop, test, build, and run your solution locally or in the cloud.

SAP Business Application Studio is based on an open source IDE – “Eclipse Theia”, which embraces Microsoft Visual Studio Code experience.  With that, you can enjoy a desktop like experience in the cloud  with terminal (CLI) access, optimized code editors, debugger, Git and local test run, providing more control over the environment.

To accelerate time-to-market and reduce the learning curve, each dev space is optimized for the development of a specific business scenario. This means that :

1. The IDE is pre-loaded with the recommended set of extensions required for that specific scenario.
2. The dev space is equipped with high-productivity development tools for the relevant business scenario e.g. wizards and templates, graphical editors, and more.
3. Additional generic tools required for developing, testing running the solution are also included in the dev space – e.g. mock servers, run-time environments

SAP Business Application Studio dev spaces are accessible via the browser – available anywhere, anytime. This means that it’s a hassle-free environment, no need to install or update any software or extension.

In this example, for SAP Fiori development, the dev-space has:

1. File system where the code is stored, we recommend as best practice to connect to a git source code repository.
2. The development environment, which is an IDE based on an open source.
3. Extensions for SAP Fiori development, such as: Layout Editor, Language services for SAPUI5 (code completion, intellisense, etc.).
4. If additional tools are needed, there is an option to customize the dev space and add additional extensions e.g. SAPUI5 Adaptation Project or SAP Workflow.

During development, and later when testing in the actual runtime environment, the app can consume data and services coming from various sources: on-premise ABAP, SAP Cloud Platform, as well as non-SAP sources.

Once you are done developing, you can either test your code locally on a simulated runtime or easily deploy your app to the cloud and test it in the actual runtime environment on Cloud Foundry or on-premise ABAP.

SAP Business Application Studio takes the experience of developing solutions for SAP Intelligent Enterprise to the next level. As it evolves, additional scenarios, capabilities, content and know-how will be added. Although Web IDE continues to be available, I recommend to try out SAP Business Application Studio and keep track of its progress.