SAP Build Code blog series: 1 - Welcome to the lobby

[geert-janklaps]

As announced during SAP TechEd in November 2023: SAP has been working on SAP Build Code, a new developer experience to ease pro-code development efforts on SAP Business Technology Platform. Enriching existing solutions and adding a touch of Generative AI, SAP Build Code streamlines development and promotes fusion development (combining low-code / no-code developments with pro-code development).

During the pilot phase, I was one of the lucky ones to be able to test-drive this new developer experience. In this blog series, I’ll give you some insights based on my experience.

(Re)-introducing The Lobby

If you’re familiar with SAP Build Process Automation, SAP Build Apps or SAP Build Work Zone, you’ll already know “The Lobby”. As a pro-code developer using SAP Business Application Studio might have missed this central development experience.

Up until now, “The Lobby” was a central library of all your existing low-code / no-code development projects and allowed you to start new developments based on SAP Build Apps & SAP Build Process Automation. With SAP Build Code, pro-code developments now are also stored and started from within that same user experience.

Let’s have a look at how starting a new project with SAP Build Code looks like! (We’ll use this development project throughout the rest of the blog series, to give you a clear view on the end-to-end development process using SAP Build Code)

Start by clicking the "Create" button on the central right corner of the screen:

You’ll immediately be greeted by a popup to guide through the rest of the process. Based on the enabled services in the subaccount, you’ll see more functionality enabled in this guided experience.

Since we’re here to explore pro-code development using SAP Build Code, this is obviously going to be our choice for today. But as you can see if you have SAP Build Apps enabled, you’ll be able to start your low-code / no-code app development journey from here as well.

Next step is to choose the right type of application you’d like to start. Since I’ll be showing a full end to end development, building both backend & frontend applications, we’ll choose for Full-Stack application here.

As a last step, we’ll need to enter some data to identify our project. As a pro-code developer these settings are already common knowledge. By entering these details here already, SAP Build Code will generate the project with the right project name, namespace and default service name.

SAP Build Code will generate the project and corresponding dev space. Once generation is finished, you can open the dev space by clicking the project name.

To end this part of the blog series, let’s open the dev space. You’ll see the storyboard of the new project with all the necessary elements in place as defined through the guided experience.

This concludes the first part in the blog series, you’ve now learned about the lobby and have setup your first project with SAP Build Code. In the next blog posts we’ll enrich the generated application by using SAP Joule and configure deployment.

Blog series navigation

• SAP Build Code blog series: 1 - Welcome to the lobby
• SAP Build Code blog series: 2 – Kickstarting your project with SAP Joule
• SAP Build Code blog series: 3 – Adding application logic and unit tests with SAP Joule
• SAP Build Code blog series: 4 – Adding a SAPUI5 application and deploying to SAP BTP
• SAP Build Code blog series: 5 – My personal experience and final thoughts