openSAP: Next Steps in Software Development on SAP HANA – my thoughts after week 1

[jeroenvandera]

This week the course started and I hopped on board on Wednesday. As someone who also took the first course and didn’t do too much in between I was curious how I would be able to pick things up and how many has changed since then.

Now I did the exam of the first week and have some initial thoughts.

One of the pleasant surprises was to see that there are a lot of things that are easier. Last time we spent a lot of time creating text files in all sort of places. The .xsaccess, the .xsapp and the .xsodata files were all created manually (yes you could copy them if you wanted).

Now in the first run there are a lot of wizards that take away a lot of the burden of creating those files. The risk is off course that you won’t pass the ‘wizard developer’ stage, but after a couple of files created the experience got stale fast. So I am happy with that. You can do a lot of stuff now using the Web-based Workbench. Seems like something that will be expanded in the future. Is it going to replace HANA studio entirely? The example of the airport came up (working some fast changes on your tablet on the airport), but I think one airport session could set you up with weeks’ worth of bugs as you had to do it so hastily. Just wondering how you would hold off the stewardess ho insists that you close the tablet immediately while you’re waiting for the last object to activate 😉

That particular problem  seems to be addressed nicely with the change manager. Comparing all versions. Seeing what was changed, going back to previous versions. Where used with items on the server. All things that will help nicely to keep the quality in your system up.

In the architectural files it was clear that either there are a lot of new services, or I forgot some since the course. It is good to see how SAPUI5 is taken a big place in the development. As someone who did already quite some things in SDK’s this is familiar territory.

I am curious to see how to work with the XSJS outbound HTTP service. I cannot remember doing anything with that in the previous course.

Finally I am looking forward to the exercises in the last week. One of the best ways of learning is trying some challenging things to learn while you’re trying to create something. Last time I ‘invented’ some scenario’s just to be able to take the HANA developer edition ‘car’ for a ride.

By the way, was anyone impressed with the patience of both guys while they looked silently in the camera while the other was presenting the entire segment?