SAP Business Application Studio is the next generation of SAP's multi-cloud-based IDE, bringing many new concepts and offerings which you can read about in the following
Blog.One of the key principles that SAP Business Application Studio brings, is the
openness and adoption of industry standards.
SAP Business Application Studio is powered by the open source
'Microsoft Code-OSS' which is the open source used to build Microsoft VS Code, and one of the most loved IDE’s in the market.
This gives us the opportunity to better address the professional developer needs with a built in terminal access, local-like developer experience, extensible language support, industry standard IDE and other capabilities described on the product walkthrough
blog. Additionally, SAP Business Application Studio VSCode APIs compatibility, allows the release of specific development tools to SAP Business Application Studio and at the same time, also release a subset of them to the VS Code developer community (via the VS Code marketplace).
As SAP's goal is to offer a freedom of choice for the developer, with different set of tools and experience according to their skillset and preferences, it is important to clarify the benefits of using SAP Business Application Studio, Microsoft VSCode and other IDEs.
In this blog, I’ll try to provide all the relevant points to consider, so you will be able decide which tool suits your needs best.
SAP Business Application Studio – for the SAP developer community
SAP Business Application Studio goal and mission is to provide developers an environment that maximize time-to-value for
building Business Applications for SAP’s Intelligent Enterprise. The Business Application Studio offers:
- an IDE tailored for developing SAP’s solutions by the (developers focusing on addressing a business problem and less on the underlying technology)
- Hosted, Cloud-based Turnkey solutions providing a pre-installed and pre-configured Dev Environment that is available on SAP’s multi cloud environments (public, private, operated)
- Development scenario focused – offers developers a set of development environments, each tailored for a specific SAP Business scenario (i.e. Frontend development, Mobile development, Extensions development etc.)
- Productivity tools for guiding developers on how to easily execute complex development tasks i.e: wizards, graphical editors, seamless consumption of SAP data and run configurations to quickly run the app locally or in the cloud
- A larger set of SAP application development scenarios (SAP Fiori, SAP Mobile, SAP HANA*, SAP Cloud Platform Workflow, SAP Cloud Application Programming Model and more)
- An official SAP product complying to SAP standards and qualities, including SAP support. (SAP extensions for VSCode provide community support)
- Simple and efficient integration to SAP systems – tools allowing seamless consumption, testing and deployment of development artifacts to the various SAP solutions
Your tool of choice e.g. Eclipse, IntelliJ – for the open developer community
With the release of many SAP standard development tools to the
open repositories, you can now keep using your
tool of choice, and install SAP tools according to your scenario needs.
You can find a growing list of SAP development tools on the
GitHub repository and the
samples repository ,with the examples of the cloud MTA build tool, the newly released XML tools, and the SAP HANA development CLI. Additionally you can find tools on the NPM.js repository such as the recent SAP UI5 yeoman project generators.
Microsoft Visual Studio Code – for the VSCode developer community
Microsoft Visual Studio Code is one of the most popular source code editors and a part of a fast-growing open source community.
If you like to keep your full control of the development environment lifecycle (IDE and tools), and feel comfortable with frequent usage of CLIs, command palette, VS Code launchers and tasks, you can now keep using your VS Code environment and install the offered
SAP application development tools (VS Code extensions) from the VS Code extensions marketplace, like the recently released SAP Fiori tools, the SAPUI5 Language assistance tool, and the SAP Cloud Platform core data services plug-in, all in addition to the SAP tools offered on the GitHub and NPM.js repositories.
To summarize
With the release of SAP Business Application Studio,
SAP significantly improves the experience and time-to-market it offers to its business application developers. At the same time, many of the specific SAP development tools will now be offered to the
open development community, opening the option for developers to keep using their IDE of choice. Each of these IDEs has its pros and cons and developers should feel free to use the one that best fits their needs and skillset.
It's time to try out SAP Business Application Studio!
this Blog should help you with getting started
You can read all about SAP Business Application Studio in
this Blog post.
* This is the current state of planning and may be changed by SAP at any time.
