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SAP Build was launched at SAP TechEd 2022 as a low-code suite on SAP Business Technology Platform, that allows developers and also those business users with less technical expertise to create enterprise applications, automate business processes and design business sites with drag-and-drop simplicity.
During the last two years, SAP Build has continuously evolved with a major milestone last year: SAP Build Code, announced at SAP TechEd 2023 and generally available since March this year, added pro-code capabilities to SAP Build. SAP Build Code is our turn-key development environment, optimized for Java and JavaScript application development and based on CAP development framework, that combines runtime and design time capabilities with built-in solutions for DevOps and Application Lifecycle Management.
Today marks another major milestone as we add ABAP environments to the SAP Build suite, allowing developers to work across their ABAP, Java/JavaScript and low-code projects from the same starting point, the SAP Build lobby, and delivering interoperability capabilities.
With SAP Build, customers can accelerate their ERP modernization, foster innovation and automate processes, all within a single comprehensive suite of tools for extension development which includes low-code- pro-code and generative AI capabilities. Read more with use cases by LoB in our e-book "Extend SAP S/4HANA with SAP Build". Deep dive into the clean core topic with our whitepaper: "Clean core extensibility for SAP S/4HANA Cloud".
ABAP Environments now part of SAP Build – What does it mean?
And there’s more: by including ABAP environments into SAP Build, we’ve made it easier for developers to seamlessly combine ABAP development artifacts with frontend artifacts for SAP Fiori and the SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP). For instance, you can now use a BAPI that is available in your on-premise ERP or S/4HANA private cloud, making developing CAP applications easier to develop with this new capability.
Let me walk you through a few concrete examples of fusion development projects showing different types of extensions: use cases 1 and 2 are side-by-side extensions created fully on SAP BTP, and use cases 3 and 4 and on-stack extensions relying partially or totally on S/4HANA:
In use case 1, the back end of the extension is created as a CAP service by a pro-developer using SAP Build Code, while the front end with the UI and some business logic is created by a key user with SAP Build Apps.
In use case 2, the extension is a custom process, created by a business user with SAP Build Process Automation. At some point, the workflow of this process is calling a specific ABAP Cloud service on SAP BTP, created by an ABAP Developer using ABAP ADT for Eclipse.
In use case 3, a specific ABAP event is created by an ABAP developer with ABAP ADT for Eclipse. When it occurs, this event triggers a process including automations, created by a business user with SAP Build Process Automation.
In use case 4, the back end of the extension is made by an ABAP Developer using ABAP ADT for Eclipse. As this tool does not handle UI technologies, the custom UI for the extension is created by a UI developer using SAP Build Code.
These examples are demonstrating that we are at the beginning of a journey to bring the ABAP- and non-ABAP worlds together, making SAP Build the go-to offering for ERP extensibility in the market. The next quarters, we’ll be releasing more functionalities to make the tools more and more interoperable.
By providing ABAP development capabilities in SAP Build, SAP allows customers and partners to accelerate ERP extension development and modernization, foster innovation, and automate, all within a single suite of AI driven tools for ABAP, CAP and low-code based development.
Blurring the lines between S/4HANA and SAP Build: the Extensibility Wizard
The ABAP- and non-ABAP world also converge directly within the ERP: The Extensibility Wizard is an embedded experience in SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud allowing key users to extend business applications – both on stack and side by side on SAP BTP – directly out of the ERP without losing context.
Today, customers can extend custom fields and custom logic on S/4 HANA, and processes in SAP Build. Soon, the option of creating Custom Fiori Apps and UI5 Adaptation from SAP Build Code will also be available.
This wizard can be accessed from any extensible SAP S/4HANA app by clicking the "Create Extension" option available in the User menu, on top right of the screen. Clicking this “Create Extension” option, the Extensibility Wizard opens up, displaying the various extension options:
For more details on how to set up the Extensibility Wizard and what extensions options are available, please read this blog post: “SAP Build Extensibility Wizard for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition”.
SAP Build powered by Joule’s generative AI capabilities
SAP Joule is available at hand to take action and optimize your ABAP and Build Code and Build low-code development, leveraging Generative AI capabilities across the SAP Build suite. We’re excited to announce lots of new Joule capabilities across SAP Build.
To discover the power of Joule in SAP Build to accelerate your development process and the AI features in SAP Build that improve user productivity, watch SAP TechEd session AD110 | Accelerate development with the latest AI capabilities in SAP Build with Marc Huber and Rupam Bhattacharya.
We have introduced many new generative AI powered capabilities to support low-code and pro-code application development and automations:
SAP Build and AI
- In SAP Build Apps, Joule allows to auto-generate pages to handle data entities, and also to generate formulas and translations. SAP Build Apps also brings now a feature for automatic sample data generation.
- Process Automation is also greatly improved by GenAI-based generation and editing of process automations. You are able to describe your process in natural language, to interact and iterate to finalize desired process flow and finally generate the process with automations, forms, and decisions (business policies) that fits your requirement. Joule can also create a short comprehensive description of complex historical or newly generated complex artifacts, for instance the summary of a complex decision table. And gen-AI powered Intelligent Document Processing allows to simplify the creation of document-based business processes.
- Intelligent assistance is empowering business sites, with seamless Joule access within SAP Build Work Zone. AI responses grounded in Work Zone content allow AI-driven content creation and summarization, and intelligent decision recommendation in Task Center.
SAP Build Code and AI
Writing code is hard and requires upfront learning. Even experienced developers regularly need to consult the documentation which slows down the development process. And test data creation is tedious: one must always ensure that data fits the model and is up to date.
New capabilities include code explanation, search results from SAP documentation, and enhancements to develop SAP Fiori and mobile applications. To cater to developers who prefer to use Visual Studio Code, SAP has released a Visual Studio Code extension for Joule, giving them access to SAP Joule directly from their preferred development environment.
Joule-powered Generative AI capabilities in SAP Build Code allow to
- Create all necessary CDS files which define the entities, relations and service projections according to a prompt
- Generate business logic and SAP Fiori UIs, with also sample data
- Generate unit tests for business in services, with automated unit test coverage
Even existing models can be changed, just by providing descriptions.
Generative AI for ABAP development
With new ABAP capabilities, Joule can now help ABAP developers be more efficient with their development tasks. Joule leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) for ABAP code generation that SAP has trained with more than 150 million lines of code. These LLMs generate high-quality ABAP code and code explanations. With this model, Joule reduces development time for both new and experienced ABAP developers and helps customers better understand their old ABAP extensions, accelerating their migration to a clean core.
Furthermore, ABAP developers can now access the Generative AI Hub, utilizing leading open-source and proprietary AI models, including LLMs, to infuse custom AI capabilities into their ABAP-based extensions.
In a few words, with Joule in ABAP development tools, developers can
- streamline the development process of creating Business objects with Joule copilot
- Increase efficiency by decoding legacy ABAP code and accelerating migration to a cloud compliant code.
- use Joule copilot for ABAP to generate application logic, create data models, sample data and unit test cases from natural language descriptions.
- improve understanding and maintainability by using Joule copilot to develop ABAP documentation.
- maintain quality and minimize risk using Joule copilot to do code review for transports.
Joule Studio in SAP Build
Finally, I’m also very excited to announce Joule studio, that allows developers to enhance Joule’s out-of-the-box capabilities to support organization-specific workflows. Developers will be able to navigate to Joule studio directly from the SAP Build lobby and create, deploy, monitor and manage their own Joule skills with drag-and-drop simplicity, and integrate with all SAP and any third-party system for an entirely integrated conversational user experience. To learn more about Joule studio in SAP Build, watch SAP TechEd session AD200 | Extend Joule with SAP Build and develop custom enterprise skills with Maria Kondratyeva and Miguel Angel Meza Martinez.
With these new capabilities we just announced, developers can now unlock new levels of efficiency with the latest Joule-powered AI capabilities for SAP Build. Uniquely trained on SAP data and processes, Joule helps developers write code and design workflows for SAP-based development across ABAP, CAP, and low-code tools.
And SAP Build is also the solution to extend Joule with custom skills, using the Joule studio in SAP Build.
Key Takeaways
To summarize what we announced at SAP TechEd 2024:
- Increase the pace of creating applications with Joule copilot capabilities: You will generate high quality ABAP code and help developers understand and analyze ABAP extensions using Large Language Model trained by SAP.
- Streamline cloud migration with the ABAP Cloud Development Model: You will seamlessly extend SAP environments to create scalable, secure, and stable extensions which are cloud ready.
- Create future-proof, clean core extensions with smooth interoperability between on stack and side by side extensions: you will foster collaboration between developers to quickly create critical extensions, easily navigating between the ABAP Environments and other SAP Build solutions with complete context.
More than ever, SAP Build is THE extensibility solution in an SAP context: with SAP Build including ABAP Cloud, you can now accelerate your ERP extension development and modernization, foster innovation, and automate processes, all in a single, comprehensive suite of AI-driven tools for extension development.
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The future is yours!
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