On Thursday, August 28 we as INNOV8iON gave a webinar regarding the unboxing of SAP Business Application Studio.  During the webinar, we revealed some key features of Business Application Studio. In this blog post, we will briefly touch them all, so you will get a good overview of the key possibilities for you as a developer. Rather read the Dutch version? De 5 voornaamste voordelen van de SAP Business Application Studio

1. Guided development

The Guided Development for Fiori Elements is a great feature in the new SAP Business Application Studio. Annotations have always been something tricky and there never was a good way of looking them up. The Guided Development is like a software development kit (SDK) for Fiori Elements integrated inside Business Application Studio (BAS). So not only do we have a great way of looking annotations up now, the Guided Development will also generate useable code for us and provide some input help as well. The Guided Development also makes searching for annotation guides very easy. And if you can’t find the annotation you are looking for, you will have the option to request a guide directly from SAP. So hopefully we can expect a huge number of guides in the future. And who knows…. Maybe the guide you requested will be ready for you next time you login.

2. Command Line Interface access

Yeah, you read that right, in the SAP Business Application Studio you have access to the command-line interface. This gives you the freedom of a local development environment with the pros of a cloud-based develop environment. Whilst getting full control over the dev space you can also imagine the possibilities this gives you since you can use almost every tool it offers.

3. Split screen: Code editor combined with the layout editor

SAP Business Application Studio has the ability to use a split-screen mode during the development of a UI5 application. This gives you the possibility to open a visual layout editor at the same time as the code editor. This way, you can drag and drop elements in the view of your application and see the corresponding code being generated in real-time. The fact that this split-screen is possible makes using the layout editor a much smoother experience. You can use the layout editor to really quickly and easily design your view. And seeing exactly where the code is being generated can really help give you a good understanding of how your view is built. Especially for people who are new to SAPUI5 and XML views, this is a really nice feature.

4. Dev spaces

A dev space in BAS is a separate development environment that feels like a container. This concept has some hidden treasures in it. When you want to develop an application, you have to create a dev space. In the process of creating one, you will be asked some questions to determine the best suitable dev space for your project. After selecting the right dev space, it will create a fully isolated development environment with command-line access, pre-installed tools, capabilities and resources which might be useful for your project. This saves you a lot of time since you do not have to set up the development environment yourself and allows you to efficiently develop, run, build and test your application within no-time. Since dev spaces are fully isolated, they give you the freedom to do whatever you like with your project without effecting any other project. Last but not least, dev spaces are easy to transport given they can be exported and imported. Copying them for similar projects is an easy job.

5. Extensions

To enhance the existing functionality of your dev space, you can add some additional extensions to your project to suit all your development needs. If you want, you can create a serverless extension and use that in your project. This is a pretty cool concept and you read more about it in this blog.

Bonus: The sunset of Neo based trial accounts

A few weeks ago we got this message in a trial account of the WebIDE:

Since SAP is focusing on Cloud Foundry, the neo based WebIDE trial will see its end-of-life in November 2020. We recommend not to wait until that time, but jump aboard BAS now, experience its capabilities and growth in the upcoming months. Keep in mind: BAS is a relatively new product and will probably evolve a lot. We are excited about it and cannot wait to see what is to come!

This is what we think about the SAP Business Application Studio

In our opinion the SAP Business Application Studio is definitely ready to use productively. Even though there are still some important features missing, like extending a standard SAP Fiori application in an easy way. We hope to see BAS evolve in upcoming months into a full-fledged IDE including the possibility to easily extend standard Fiori apps. BAS is a great IDE for the (Cloud mainly) hardcore developer who want full control. If SAP also adds the ability to do ABAP and CDS development in BAS, it will become the go-to IDE for Full Stack Developers as well.

The webinar: Unboxing SAP Business Application Studio

Did you miss the webinar? No worries, we have recorded the session.

Interested in the separate demos we gave during the webinar? Keep an eye out on our socials and website! And to my colleague Tyler Fincham: Special thanks to you, for co-writing with me on this post.