Developer's Intro to Integrations and Extensions with the SAP Business Technology Platform

[josh_bentley]

As a follow up to SAP announcing the SAP Business Technology Platform, or SAP BTP, I wanted to focus on one part of the infographic below, the SAP Integration Suite and the SAP Extension Suite.  Well, that's kind of two parts. We will call it two sides of the same coin.

If we break the Business Technology Platform into it's four main categories then we can see that Integrations and Extensions are there to enable the developer to do just what the name says, integrate and extend.

 

As a Developer Advocate I am somewhat an educator, a teacher.  I am also constantly learning and re-learning.  For this blog post I put on some music from one of my favorite bands, Foo Fighters.  Listening to Time Like These I am struck by the lyrics:

“It's times like these you learn to live again

It's times like these you give and give again

It's times like these you learn to love again

It's times like these time and time again”

What really snapped things into place was how a lot of developers, but especially those who need to keep the value of SAP data front and center, have to learn a lot time and time again.  SAP changes and evolves.  Not just our product names!  We also evolve the codebase we use, the companies we partner with/acquire, and the way you as a developers can extend and integrate that SAP data to your users.

 

When I think of an integration I think of how there are differences in the way an app may need to run and use not just SAP data, but data from another source.  Maybe an internal source to SAP like S/4 HANA or SAP Concur, or maybe an external source. 

With the diagram below we can see that the Integrations in SAP Business Technology Platform have a single source of the truth as a pathway they can all share.  There are lots of details behind the scenes architecturally that make this possible but one of the main takeaways from this is that SAP has the foundation for multiple system integrations available for you as a developer in one place.

 

Moving on to extensions.  I like to think of an application adding some business logic.  We take something like a finance app and then we add some logic to have that app utilize more functionality that it could have done on its own. This is different than an API adding functions since the app itself needs to open a connection to something else, another app, and the end user benefits from a combined set of tools.

If we look at the screenshot below of the SAP Discovery Center we see several ways to extend with SAP in the Extension Suite filtered by Development. 

 

One extension may use code from Cloud Foundry or Kyma, but another may extend with Identity Authentication.  Simply put, some developers may not need to know micro-service architecture or runtimes for their app to do what it needs to do, but others may not enjoy coding security and authentication into the app even though it's required for deployment approval to their users.  Using SAP Extension Suite a finance app can utilize other extended features like: micro-services and authentication, but to run the app, it may not be a requirement to extend to one or both, and that’s ok depending on the situation.  The fictitions app can run stand alone, but coding in other extensions on your own over an over again will start to present lots of opportunity for issues and wasted time.

In preparation for more blog post on this subject I would like to ask that you go these three sites in the SAP Community:

SAP Community Integration Suite and Extension Suite

SAP Community Integration Suite

SAP Community Building Extensions with the SAP BTP

Take some notes, ask some questions here and we will be happy to provide guidance and feedback to you.

 

Time to learn live and give and love again...

Josh