Technical Articles
Build and Run Cloud Applications on the SAP BTP
The SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) provides an environment to build and run full-stack applications on a trusted enterprise-grade platform.
Running such applications side-by-side to SAP solutions such as S/4HANA Cloud, SAP Business ByDesign and SAP Business One requires in particular that these apps fit to the SAP standard and deliver a seamless user experience across solutions and applications.
For this goal we benefit from technology alignments supported by BTP services and programming models, such as for example:
- a consistent concept of openness based on OData APIs and standardized business events,
- secure and harmonized approaches for process integration, API-led integration, event-based integration and data integration,
- a central identity and access management based on the SAP Identity Authentication Service,
- a consistent business object design supported by a model-driven development approach and reuse components,
- a harmonized look & feel with UI floorplan patterns based on Fiori Elements, UI5 and the SAP Launchpad,
- and consistent implementations of SAP product standards.
The GitHub repository “SME Partner Reference Application” provides a sample application that is based on these BTP qualities and showcases a seamless frontend and back-channel integration with SAP Business ByDesign.
The repository provides two approaches to get started and to explore BTP capabilities:
- Deploy and run the sample application as provided and explore the features and the code
- Re-build the application from scratch following detailed step-by-step tutorials and an incremental development approach
SME Partner Reference Application on GitHub
The SME Partner Reference Application is a tool for your kick-start for application development on the BTP. If you want to go beyond this BTP use case and explore all other capabilities of the BTP, then the following resources are excellent entry points:
- “Capire“, the home of the SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP) provides you all details of the programming model that we used in our sample application.
- The SAP Discovery Center is your one-stop shop for all SAP BTP resources. Access the mission catalog to find use cases and tutorials, and check out the service catalog if you are interested in specific BTP services.
- Explore the learning journey Discover SAP Business Technology Platform and many more on the SAP Learning site to get familiar with the BTP and all its 4 pillars Application Development, Integration, Data and Analytics, and AI and Automation.
We are looking forward to a vivid conversation with you about the SME Partner Reference Application on the SME Innovation Summits and here in our SAP Community 🙂
Update: Sample application and tutorials enhanced to support multi-tenancy.
The main branch now contains a second multi-tenancy enabled version of the sample application.
The tutorials
Enhance the BTP Application for Multi-Tenancy
Deploy the Multi-Tenant Application to a Provider Subaccount
Provision Tenants of the Multi-Tenant Application to Customers
explain how to transition from the single-tenant sample application to the multi-tenant application version.
Incremental development from one-off to multi-customer solutions
Hello, Knut and Thanks for the post.
I have tried going through the tutorials both building the application from scratch and also cloning and deploying it.
Neither of those ways works for me.
Because the tutorials are outdated. For example the Launchpad Service is no longer called like that, it is now SAP Build Work Zone.
The plans in the tutorial that we have to choose like default, standard etc. are not always available in a Trial account. This makes it impossible to follow through these tutorials.
I think the tutorials and documentation have to be updated and also adapted for people with Trial accounts. Also it would be very nice to have a video tutorial on YouTube for the whole process.
Regards,
Kostadin
Hi Kostadin,
first of all: thanks a lot for your efforts to explore our sample application and for your feedback 🙂
The announcement of SAP Build and related service naming changes created a task on my to-do-list already and I took your comment as trigger to tick-off this task (you find the changes in our work-in-process branch "s4hc-int").
Regarding the BTP trial account, I'm fully with you, that it would be beneficial to have a version of the sample application that can be built and deployed on a BTP trial account as well. However, currently we are focusing on the integration with S/4HANA Cloud to illustrate the possibility of multi-tenant and multi-backend partner applications. Nevertheless I took note of your ask for future planning discussions.
Hi Knut,
Thank you for your consideration.
Update: Sample application and tutorials enhanced to support multiple backends and S/4HANA Cloud.
The multi-tenant version of the sample application has been enhanced by an integration with S/4HANA Cloud. Now the sample application supports ByD project management and S/4HANA enterprise projects at the same time. In result the application owner (partner) can provision tenants to ByD and S/4 customers and connect the application tenant to the preferred project management system of the customer.
Furthermore, both the single-tenant version and the multi-tenant version of the sample application have been refactored to allow adding ERP backend types as compatible enhancements with little effort. The sample app demonstrates that approach by adding the integration with S/4HANA Cloud while having live application subscriptions with ByD integration.
The tutorials
explain how to transition from a multi-tenant application to a multi-backend application and how to provision an application tenant with S/4HANA Cloud integration.
Expand market reach by supporting multiple backend solutions
Update: BTP versions, 3rd-party integration and Cloud for Projects.
Today we published new version of the "SME Partner Reference Application" to the 'main'-branch of the GitHub-repository with significant changes: