SAP Build Code blog series: 5 – My personal experi...

Using SAP Build Code from VS Code

Since SAP Build Code uses SAP Business Application Studio as a foundation it is possible to connect SAP Build Code to VS Code using the SAP Business Application Studio Toolkit plugin. I was very happy to see this was still working fine, including all the SAP Build Code plugins (which also includes SAP Joule).

If you’ve never tried this out with Business Application Studio, I suggest you read my previous blog post. (the instructions are identical for SAP Build Code)

My personal experience

It’s been fun to be able to play around with SAP Build Code during the pilot phase. I’m 100% convinced that SAP Build Code can make a difference in terms of development efficiency. The way of working through the lobby definitively feels like SAP is bridging the gap between pro-code developers and low-code / no-code developers, thus improving the so-called fusion development projects.

If you’ve used SAP Business Application Studio before, you’ll definitely find your way through the development flow of SAP Build Code. I didn’t need any specific documentation to get started with SAP Build Code, so in my opinion the way of working in SAP Build Code definitely feels intuitive.

Next to being intuitive and the fact that I was able to generate the application, test data, application logic & unit test using SAP Joule, it really felt like my focus was now more on the pure development process compared to using Business Application Studio. SAP Build Code guided me through generating the right development artifacts and took away the complexity of creating deployment descriptors, so that’s definitely a big plus for me.

My final thoughts

Generative AI has a huge potential and personally I think we’ve seen nothing yet, I’m very interested in seeing what the future holds for us as pro-code developers. However, even though generative AI is a great technology to assist us developers, a fair warning should be issued: never (ever!) blindly trust the results of generative AI! While the proposed solutions may look very promising, this is not always the case. It’s still up to us developers to:

Verify the generated logic

Check if the proposed logic is the most efficient implementation (if not, manually adapt!)

Ensure that the generated logic is not causing bugs with other existing logic

…

To put it in short: we as developers are still responsible for the final result!

When it comes to SAP Build Code, as an experienced developer, I personally hope to see some more advanced features in the future, like for example: TypeScript support, support for existing CAP projects not created with SAP Build Code and combining GitHub Co-pilot with SAP Build Code. As this is the first release of SAP Build Code, which already covers a lot, I’m not calling these a dealbreaker. I’m 100% convinced that we’ll see SAP Build Code’s feature set grow in the coming months and years.

Apart from those more advanced features, I think this definitely is a major game changer for developers setting their first steps into the world of SAP Cloud development or to developers who are not that experienced in SAP Cloud development yet.

All in all, I definitely recommend you to try out SAP Build Code yourself, regardless of the fact that you’re an experienced or a beginner in SAP Cloud Development! Happy (SAP Build) Coding!

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