SAP CodeJam Bratislava: let's jam the cloud

[Former Member]

As the SAP NetWeaver Cloud is getting momentum on big events like SAP TechEd, in parallel we continue with our SAP CodeJam tour where the motto is "developer meet developers". On November 14th, I and vladimir.pavlov had the pleasure to attend SAP CodeJam Bratislava and hack on the cloud together with the local Slovak geeks.

We took the plane from Sofia to Vienna one day earlier. After a short flight we immediately jumped on the bus to Bratislava and within an hour we were in the heart of Slovakia. We had a few hours for a short rest, to walk around the Old Town and to taste the great Slovak cuisine. We also had the chance to have a great view from the castle to the UFO:

   Photo by esquimo_2ooo

On the next day we arrived at the office of SAP Slovakia where the venue was perfectly prepared. Soon the cloud enthusiasts start arriving and we quickly gathered about 20 developers eager to put their fingers into the cloud.

Vlado started with the a 15 minutes overview of the platform. After a short Q & A session we jumped into the real work - coding.

What really impressed me was that almost all of the attendees came prepared - they had already requested their free perpetual trial accounts on SAP NetWeaver Cloud and installed the Eclipse Tools. So, literally in minutes we had the first step completed - running the Hello World application on the cloud. As a next step most of the participants started exploring the SAP UI5 framework and the Persistence service, other focused on uploading files to the Document service.

After a couple of hours of learning the various capabilities of the platform, I was asked a very natural question: "Could you give us some data to play with?". Fortunately, there was something that we could use right away - the SAP Gateway Demo System saved the day. It provides a free access on the Internet to a demo Gateway system that exposes several services of a standard SAP Business Suite installation. We were able to easily connect to it and display business data in web pages built with SAP UI5. However, it was a good lesson learned for us - in order to feed the hunger of the developers who try out SAP NetWeaver Cloud we must provide them with some example data sets that can be easily plugged in the Persistence and the Document services. This is really something we should look into.

Overall, this was an exciting event for me. I was impressed by the passion of our Slovak fellows and I am grateful for all the feedback we received. I would like to give my special thanks to ondrej.jaura for his hospitality and showing us the charm of Bratislava in the evening.

Next stop - SAP CodeJam Skopje, November 24th. Stay tuned!