Hosting a BusinessOne webclient extension with a PHP backend in BTP

[adrien_lochon]

Hello all,

We have developed a vertical add-on for SAP BusinessOne that has a Fiori UI5 frontend and a PHP backend (using Laravel) and we're looking into adapting it to run as a Webclient Extension hosted on the BTP.

We have been reviewing documentation, courses, tutorials, and sample projects and while we mostly understand the process and the steps outlined, we’ve noticed that they largely assume the use of SAP Business Application Studio (or SAP Build Code) and/or a Node.js backend, often incorporating the SAP CAP programming model.

However, we have invested countless hours into developing several vertical add-ons in PHP, so a full conversion from PHP to Node.js is not a feasible option for us. Ideally, we’d like to keep most of our existing PHP backend.

Our main question is whether keeping our existing PHP services is a realistic approach. If so, we would greatly appreciate any relevant documentation - whether in the form of a course, sample project, tutorial, or any other resource - that could guide us in the right direction.

A couple of examples of our known challenges right now are:

1. Running our php service in the Cloud Foundry environment, as the php build pack doesn't include some extensions that are required by the laravel framework (such as OpenSSL).

2. Implementing SSO (or even principal propagation). We have sucessfully made requests to the ServiceLayer straight from the frontend because the webclient provides a SESSION cookie, but we need to be able to perform these requests in our backend, reusing the Service Layer session from the webclient so that the requests are done with the same user that logged on to the webclient.

Thanks in advance!