There are different containers and programming models for developing and hosting applications on SAP HANA Cloud Platform.
Since this week, there is a new Java based runtime container available on hanatrial.ondemand.com for development purposes. It is Java Web Tomcat 7.
As the name suggests, it is a Java Web type of container which basically means it features a typical for a web container subset of Java EE APIs such as Servlets , JSP etc, This type of runtime is suitable for application development where most of the application dependencies are provided with the application itself.
This edition brings simplification in the Java Web type of runtime containers. The Java Web Tomcat 7 is simpler and smaller than the current productive offering. As the name suggests, it is very close to the Apache Tomcat 7 web container and adds a few SAP HANA Cloud Platform specific APIs for use by the applications. Most of the applications running on Apache Tomcat 7 container which do not feature custom extensions should run unmodified on Java Web Tomcat 7, hence on SAP HANA Cloud Platform.
The development model of Java based applications on SAP HANA Cloud Platform is preserved. That means that there is an SDK for Java Web Tomcat 7 for download. In the same manner as the other SDKs, it features the APIs available for the applications, a set of command line tools for cloud operations and, of course, the local standalone version of the runtime. In addition to the SDK, the same support can be found in Eclipse tools with the presence of runtime server adapter.
Java Web Tomcat 7 is in beta mode for now offering just a subset of SAP HANA Cloud Platform Service APIs. The complete list can be found in the documentation. As such, it cannot be used for productive scenarios, which of course will come later.
We encourage you to try it - so take it for a spin.
