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koehntopp
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert

I'm one of these guys who started coding at the age of 14. Unfortunately that was the time of BASIC, we then went to UCSD Pascal in school, and in university it was CLIPPER ( a dBASE compiler) that ruled the decade. A bit later work life started and the eager developer turned into the grumpy security dude who - instead of creating stuff - now focusses on breaking stuff (or rather teaching developers creating stuff that other grumpy security dudes can't break so easily).

The HANA Cloud platform and SAPUI5 got me really excited about coding again. #saptd to me sounded like a call to arms - very inspiring keynotes! (read SAP HANA Cloud Platform in the limelight at SAP TechEd && d-code by matthias.steiner). I had a few coffee meetings with dj.adams and I'm following his YouTube Channel, and man can he get you excited about how easy it is to create beautiful simple applications with SAP UI5!

Unfortunately I'm still trapped in my old development models and I still find it hard to get a start again. I love all the tutorials and examples, but they mostly replicate what others have done. I have a dream of making HCP + UI5 as simple as Visual Basic used to be in the 90s. As I'm too inept to do it myself I'll just dump my ideas here hoping someone will lend me a hand.

These are the two things that I think may drive developer adoption:

Make it easier to get into Cloud Development with HANA and SAPUI5

Most of the tutorials I read started with "Download Eclipse" - I don't know about you, but that already put me off. Then along came SAP Web IDE - Overview which was more along the lines of what I was expecting.

Here's the general process that I would like to see simplified:

  1. Design & create a database
  2. publish the database as OData services
  3. create the UI in SAPUI5

(Optional step 4: add some HANA XS code to do server side stuff)

I would like to see that completely within SAP Web IDE, and specifically steps 1 and 2 should be made A LOT easier (wizards?). Then add a service repository to share your services for other developers to pick (I'm kinda sick of Northwind by now) and we should see some action.

Provide a local development environment that includes a database service

The basic concepts of SAPUI5 or OpenUI5 are so astonishingly simple and worth spreading that we should not stop aspiring coders by having to register in all kinds of places before they can start building.

To me, the beauty of UI5 is in the ease of data binding to controls, so it would be nice for developers to be able to play with that easily (see above) and locally.

When I read about SQL Anywhere on RaspberryPi I immediately thought about adding a Node.js server with SAPUI5, a local Web IDE - the only thing I haven't been able to figure out so far is where to get the OData connection from - can anyone fill this void?

That would be a neat package to start with, maybe even in schools.

SAP Development Smplicity that will fit into your pocket.

So, how far away are we from my dream setup?

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