SAP HANA XS provides a complete development environment for building so-called ’native’ applications. The term ’native’ is chosen as these kind of applications will run directly on top of the SAP HANA XS engine as opposed to applications running on eg. an ABAP stack that would interact with SAP HANA. The benefits for such applications are enormous …
Writing such an application will require a skill set which might not be too familiar for the average ABAP programmer. For years now we have seen a shift within SAP from the traditional ABAP (dynpro) application development into ‘web technology’ development — a trend mostly driven by the fact that the internet has taken over the business world and lately the consumers world via mobile devices.
SAP HANA XS seems to be the latest step in that direction as it only offers ‘web driven front-end’ and ‘connectivity’ technologies as the cornerstone of its development. SAPUI5 is solely used as the client technology — a technology which is 100% Javascript and built on top of the popular open source framework ‘jQuery’ and ‘jQuery Mobile’. Data connectivity is obtained via HTTP(S) requests provided as either standard ODATA services and/or custom-built services using ‘server-side Javascript’.
By now it should be clear that understanding Javascript and web technologies will be a fundamental requirement for developing SAP HANA XS native applications. ABAP is however far from gone — the language is extended so that it supports interaction with the SAP HANA database objects. ‘Hybrid’ SAP developers which can leverage their knowledge of both skill sets will have a great future ahead.
