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thomas_jung
Developer Advocate
Developer Advocate

This blog is part of the larger series on all new developer features in SAP HANA SPS 11: SAP HANA SPS 11: New Developer Features

In this blog series we have discussed a lot of new capabilities that are delivered with SAP HANA SPS 11. We have also seen how these capabilities will evolve over the next few releases of SAP HANA. In this blog we would like to summarize the availability of many of these features and some things to consider when first starting development with these new capabilities.

When?

First when will everyone receive the functionality described in this blog series.  The new XS Advanced runtimes - Java and Node.js based - and infrastructure is all delivered generally available in SAP HANA SPS 11. Also the HANA Deployment Infrastructure (HDI) and the new database development artifacts delivered with it are also generally available.

SAP HANA SPS 11 is delivered for on premise systems already (as of the end of November 2015).  Similar capabilities are planned to come as a part of SAP HANA Cloud Platform sometime in 2016.

As we have reinforced several times in this blog series, the original XS runtime (now named XS Classic) and HANA Repository remain a part of SAP HANA SPS11 and beyond to provide 100% backwards compatibility. Therefore customers can upgrade with confidence to SPS 11 without fear that the new innovations will somehow disrupt their existing applications. Customers can decide how and when they want to begin to move applications to the capabilities and only do so once they are comfortable with everything involved.  In the mean time everything they have continues to run exactly as it does today.

The new runtimes and HDI will NOT be feature compatible with the old XS and repository runtime at the first release of SPS 11.  There are missing features particularly in the area of Calculation Views as well a few lesser used aspects of XSODATA.  SAP fully intends to fill these gaps in future Revisions and/or Support Package Stacks.

The SAP Web IDE for SAP HANA will be technically implemented as an XS Advanced application and therefore can be delivered independent of the initial shipment of SPS 11.  We plan that the SAP Web IDE for SAP HANA will ship with one of the early revisions for SPS 11 in 2016. Even upon delivery, this first version of the new web-based development tools should be consider preview status and will not be feature complete.

That does mean that for the initial shipment that SAP doesn't deliver dedicated development tools for XS Advanced or HDI based development.  Customers wanting to start projects now will need to use external editors and the command line tools. This process was described in detail in this blog.

Migration tools are planned to be delivered after the initial shipment of SPS 11 to help move your applications from XS Classic and the HANA Repository to XS Advanced and HDI.  These tools will be preview status and will be made available as a download from SCN. We encourage customers to try these migration tools in pilot/proof of concept projects and provide SAP feedback on how well they supported the migration. It is through this early feedback that we can improve the migration tools for later when customers begin moving all their productive applications in mass.

Recommend Usage

SAP recommends that customers and partners begin to evaluate the new capabilities delivered with SPS 11.  Primarily you should consider running pilots and proof of concept projects to begin the learn the programming models and development processes.

If you are building a new application from scratch, you should consider doing so with the capabilities.  As the new capabilities are delivered generally available, you can take an application productive as long as it works within the described boundaries.

The planned scope of available technologies for development with XS Advanced as of the initial delivery of SPS 11 is as follows:

- Core Data Services (the new HDBCDS artifact)

- SQLScript procedures and UDFs

- DDL for the development of database artifacts using text-based editors.  See help for full list of supported database artifacts.

- XSJS via the compatibility module of Node.js

- XSODATA via the compatibility module of Node.js or the new implementation in Java

- Node.js based development

- SAPUI5 for application development (using 3rd party text based editors)

SAP recommends that customers/partners do NOT immediately begin migrating existing applications to the new capabilities. Instead we recommend a pilot project to explore the new capabilities for existing applications.  We would advise that most customers should wait to productively convert existing applications until SPS 12 or later when more features and tools are delivered and more migration tooling is provided.

Once again, the SAP Web IDE for SAP HANA will not initially be delivered with SPS 11 and even once delivered will be pilot status, feature incomplete and not productively supported yet.

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