Get Started with Low-Code/No-Code Application Development on SAP BTP

UPDATED FEBRUARY 2022

The global pandemic has for sure amplified the importance of Citizen Developers who can quickly build apps to meet emerging needs for business units.  Citizen Developers are generally business users who understand the business processes and have some degree of technical affinity. They use some of the available Low Code/No Code (LCNC) tools provided by their organization to build apps in just days.

Over the last few months, SAP has significantly enhanced the LCNC portfolio on SAP BTP which comprises of many services including AppGyver, Business Application Studio, Intelligent RPA, Workflow Management etc.

SAP AppGyver is a no-code tool which has been made available on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). SAP Business Application Studio which has been primarily used by professional developers to create full stack applications has now been enhanced to also offer a low-code development capability.

I would like to point you to the blog post “Accelerate Application Development with SAP AppGyver and SAP Business Application Studio” where Bhagat Nainani summarizes the importance of LCNC tools for Citizen Developers as well as the need for development tools for Professional developers within the IT team.

In this blog post, I would like to introduce you to the new Application Development Lobby on SAP BTP which will be the entry point to create LCNC apps using AppGyver & Business Application Studio.

There are new Developer Tutorials along with Tech Byte Videos which will help you onboard and get started with using these tools.

Setting up Application Development Lobby

The Developer Tutorials and this blog post is based on a productive account on SAP BTP. Hence, if you have an existing Pay-as-You-Go or CPEA, you can enable and use this service.

As of today, you can only enable the Application Development Lobby via a booster in the Global Account of SAP BTP. The boosters are only available for subaccounts in Europe region (EU10) and will always create a new subaccount. I am hoping these will be resolved soon.

For those who don’t have CPEA/Pay-As-You-Go, you can try out AppGyver directly at https://www.appgyver.com/

Follow the instructions in the tutorial and start the booster “Prepare an account for Low-Code/No-Code App Development”.

Accessing the Application Development Lobby

Once the booster has successfully completed, you can access the new subaccount. The new role collections LCNC_Administrator & LCNC_Developer would be assigned to your user. You can assign these role collections to other users within your organization.

The boosters would have created a subscription to SAP AppGyver as well as SAP Business Application Studio.

Click on “SAP AppGyver” to launch the Application Development Lobby. From this lobby, you can either create an AppGyver project or Business Application Studio project for Low-code Development. There are also quick start sample apps which you can use to understand how apps are being developed.

You can view and access all your AppGyver & Business Application Studio projects in the Lobby. You will notice that both AppGyver as well as Business Application Studio will launch within the Application Development Shell as shown below.

I would like to clarify that the Business Application Studio is the same service you might have used earlier. The Application Development Lobby provides access to launch Business Application Studio in special dev space which is optimized for low-code development. You will find new templates and visual editors to build apps quickly leveraging CDS/Annotations.

As you can see above, Business Application Studio will still generates all the required files and is available for any developer to inspect and enhance it further.

To see LCNC in action, check out the SAP Low-Code/No-Code Learning Journey – designed to increase low-code/no-code skills and teach citizen developers the basic concepts of software development and learn how to build mobile apps for free. Check out LCNC and Discover BTP plus much more free learning at SAP Learning site.