Almost a State Visit
They were here. In Hannover. Right there in situ. The long-sought-for visitors from overseas. No, not Obama and his staff, they are due only Saturday. I’m talking about the two Rock Stars from the U.S.: Thomas Jung and Rich Heilman. Accompanied by Craig Cmehil, who had a slightly shorter trip coming from Bielefeld, together they formed a forceful SAP Team to present HANA XSA (Extended Application Services Advanced Model) on the new Web-IDE.
HANA XSA European Tour
We were privileged to host the kick-off event of the European HANA-XSA-CJ-Tour in the newly renovated premises of Inwerken AG, where everybody was feeling visibly comfortable. This was essential, as soon all brains were shifted into overdrive due to the complex subject. Thomas Jung, Product Owner HANA at SAP, helped the participants getting familiar with the environment of HANA XSA with his competence and great attention to detail. Soon it became obvious: The product specification „XS“ doesn’t correspond to „Extra Small“, rather to the contrary…
When designing XSA, SAP placed a lot of emphasis on ensuring that the HANA services run independently, which requires a lot of server power and storage capacity. Accordingly, the trio was very curious to see how the three servers with HANA XSA SPS 11 provided for the demo would behave under the weight of about 35 interested programmers. Several times Thomas emphasized SAP’s idea of deliberately integrating well-proven open-source tools like node.js, GIT, Tomcat etc. into the architecture.
Code Word: HanaRocks2016
The workshop consisted of extensive exercises, that we could work through step by step assisted by written instructions. Literally everybody had to learn the hard way that despite „copy & paste“ multiple errors occurred. But Thomas, Rich und Craig were there to provide help and advice in every situation. Personally, I considered the subject a little too complex for me. Node.js, OData, Container, Services, HTML5, MTA, Artifacts und .yaml were the last straw for my ABAP Brain Limited Edition. Nevertheless, the workshop provided a good insight into the current efforts of SAP to push HANA. I quickly realized that there is a big difference between the development of HANA applications and the classic ABAP programming. You need much more competences in web topics. HANA itself is only a small part.
Success all along the line
The SAP CodeJam in Hannover was a great success. Between the sessions everybody took the opportunity to share experience and exchange ideas. Via Twitter the hashtags #SAPcodeJam and #SAPcjhan were extensively used for information about current exercise progress, knowledge levels and states of mind. In the end, I cannot finish without a picture of the food provided. Not only the buffet but many details have contributed to the success of #SAPcjhan, and it will certainly not be the last event of its kind at Inwerken AG.
Enno Wulff