SAP Labs Bulgaria is devoted to Open Source. The current trends related to digitalization of the company's business processes and cross-business interactions leads to a massive move to the Cloud. The building blocks of the Cloud infrastructure itself, are very much dominated by open source components such as Linux, Open Stack, Cloud Foundry, Apache Tomcat, Node.js and a huge variety of HTML5 frameworks.
Being "The Cloud Lab" - the culture and the mindset of our colleagues are inevitably influenced by open source way of doing things, which reflects in the technology we build. In such an environment innovations are arising very easily - by constantly questioning the status quo and redefining and improving the available concepts and architectures. An outcome of such findings of new approaches in the area of the developer productivity was the appearance of the Dirigible project.
Started as a RAP based toolkit for simplification and adaptation of SOAP based Web services, it grew up to a full fledged Cloud Development Platform with an own powerful WebIDE and an own integrated Application Server. After a few years of internal development, it was exposed in 2014 as open source project and a couple of months later was donated to Eclipse Foundation - becoming one of the founders of the Eclipse Cloud Development industry initiative (ECD).
There are a few key differentiators of the Eclipse Dirigible, which makes it unique:
- Strives to solve the end-to-end process of development and operation of the cloud applications from definition, modeling and implementation, to operation and monitoring – nowadays called "devops"
- Promotes the so called "In-System Development Model", which leads to de-facto zero development turn-around time and avoids any side effect of a local and emulated environment.
- Questions and redefines the programming models and architectures (e.g. SOA, Microservices, classic Java, Node.js, etc.) from the on-premise world to the Cloud.
- Targets the covering of all the development and operations activities with the proper tooling – code editors, data modelling, process definitions, etc.
- Establishing the "Enterprise JavaScript" API for unification of the most common business applications related needs - database access, services exposure and invocation, workflows, etc.
With a good internal adoption so far, Eclipse Dirigible became also the main learning tool for students who start their IT carier with SQL, JavaScript, REST, HTML5, Security concepts, life-cycle management, etc. All this run on SAP Labs Bulgaria sponsored account of HANA Cloud Platform.
References:
https://www.eclipse.org/org/press-release/20141027_cloud_initiative.php
http://www.dirigible.io/blogs/2016/02/26/blogs_understanding_dirigible.html
http://www.dirigible.io/blogs/2016/02/05/blogs_develop_from_mobile_for_mobile.html
http://www.dirigible.io/blogs/2014/03/21/blogs_start_of_journey.html
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