The 5 Main Benefits of SAP Business Application Studio

During a previous webinar, “Unboxing Business Application Studio,” we highlighted several key aspects of SAP Business Application Studio. In this blog post, discover the five main reasons to start using SAP Business Application Studio (BAS).
Would you rather read this post in English? 5 Key Reasons to Use SAP Business Application Studio

1. Guided Development

SAP Business Application Studio (BAS) introduces a great tool called Guided Development for Fiori Elements. Annotations have always been tricky, and there was never a good way to look them up. Guided Development makes this a lot easier. It’s integrated into BAS as a Software Development Kit (SDK) for Fiori Elements. This not only provides a convenient way to look up annotations, but also generates the necessary code for us and even offers input assistance. Guided Development offers a clear and organized way to search for the right annotation guides. Can’t find the right guide? There’s an easy, built-in way to request the missing guide from SAP. We hope this will lead to a significant increase in the number of available guides in the near future. Maybe the missing guide you requested will be available the next time you log in!

2. Access to the Command Line Interface

SAP Business Application Studio gives you access to the command-line interface. This provides you with the freedom of a local development environment, combined with the benefits of a cloud-based development environment. In addition to giving you full control, it also offers a wide range of options for using the tools available in the terminal.

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

SAP Business Application Studio allows you to use both the layout editor and the code editor simultaneously while developing a UI5 application. This is made possible by a split screen. This way, you can simply drag elements into your application’s view and see real-time changes in the code generated for that element. The fact that this can be done in split-screen mode makes using the layout editor much more enjoyable. You can use the layout editor to quickly and easily create a view for your application. Because the code for your view is generated step by step in real time and you can see it happening, you get a clear picture of how your view is structured. This is particularly useful for developers who are new to the world of UI5 and XML.

4. Dev Spaces

A Dev Space in Business Application Studio (BAS) is a separate development environment similar to a container. The use of this concept in BAS offers a number of advantages. Before you can start developing applications in BAS, you must create a Dev Space. During the creation of a Dev Space, you’ll be asked a series of questions to determine which Dev Space is the best fit. After selecting the most suitable Dev Space and any additional tools, a fully isolated development environment is created with access to the command line, pre-installed tools, resources, and capabilities that may be useful for your project. This saves a lot of time because you don’t have to set up your entire development environment yourself, and you can quickly start developing, running, testing, and deploying your application. Since the Dev Space is a fully isolated environment, you have the freedom to do whatever you want without affecting your other projects. Dev Spaces are easy to transfer; you can export and import them. This allows you to replicate the same environment for a similar project, saving you even more time.

5. Extensions

Want to expand the features in a Dev Space? You can add extensions to your project to meet all your needs. This is easy to do when creating a Dev Space by selecting the extensions. You can even create your own serverless extension and use it in your project. This is a cool concept with a lot of potential. If you’d like to learn more about this, be sure to read this blog post.

Bonus: The End of Neo Trial Accounts

A few weeks ago, we received this warning in the WebIDE:

Since SAP is focusing on Cloud Foundry, the neo-based WebIDE trial will end in November 2020. We recommend that you don’t wait until then to make the switch to SAP Business Application Studio. We recommend getting started sooner rather than later so you can explore its capabilities now and experience the product’s evolution in the coming months. Keep in mind, however, that BAS is a relatively new product and is likely to undergo significant further development. We are very enthusiastic about the Business Application Studio and can’t wait to see what it will offer us in the future.

Conclusion: SAP Business Application Studio

We believe that SAP Business Application Studio (BAS) is ready for production use. This is despite the fact that it lacks a number of important features, such as the ability to easily extend an existing Fiori application in BAS. We hope that BAS will evolve in the coming months into a full-fledged IDE that includes the ability to easily extend existing Fiori applications. BAS is a good IDE for hardcore (cloud) developers who want full control. If SAP were to add support for ABAP and CDS development , this new platform would also become the perfect IDE for full-stack developers.