App Development on HCP: Setting up the Eclipse IDE: Blog

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App Development on HCP: Setting up the Eclipse IDE: Blog

Aims

This tutorial provided by the SAP HANA Academy tells you everything you need to set up your local developer environment using Eclipse.  You will need a free SAP developer account.  See this  tutorial in this series for explicit instructions on how to create one.

Getting Started

If you don't already have Eclipse on your computer, install the Kelper release. This is the version required by SAP HANA STUDIO which allows you to develop applications that take full advantage of the leverage of SAP HANA.

The tutorial directs you to the Eclipse download site shows you what to download i.e.  the Java IDE for Developers

After picking the version for your Operating System, download and extract the archive to a local folder.

Installation

The tutorial now guides you through setting up a local Eclipse IDE. You need to install the plug-ins for developing on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform. 

From the Eclipse menu, choose Help and then Install New Software and then enter the appropriate URL for your version.

Select SAP cloud platform tool

Follow the steps of the installation wizard.

Proxy Settings

Check that you have maintained the correct proxy settings within Eclipse especially if you are within a corporate network.  This is explained in the Development Tools for Eclipse section of the official online documentation.

SDK

Download and install the SAP HANA Cloud Platform SDK.  This contains all the required artefacts to set up a local development environment as well as the console client which is used to interact with your cloud account.

The SDK comes in two versions.

The number 1 branch provides a light weight runtime supporting Java Enterprise Edition APIs.

The number 2 branch provides support for the whole Java Enterprise Edition Web Profile APIs.

Download one of the versions and extract to a local folder.  Make sure you familiarise yourself with the content of the SDK.  Note the location of the console client within the tools directory and the provided samples.

Setting up the runtime environment

The last thing you need to do is configure the SDK within Eclipse so that the SAP HANA Cloud Platform runtime is properly set up and is registered as a server adapter in the Eclipse web tools platform.

   Go to Window, Preferences and navigate to runtime.

  Choose server runtime environment then  click on Add. 

   Select the SAP mode and then SAP HANA cloud and then click Next.

   Click Browse to the find the local directory of your SDK installation. Then press OK and Finish. 

You have now set up your local runtime environment and are ready to start building your first app which by tradition is Hello World. After that you may wish to update the Eclipse Tools and SDK.

Impressions

I thought this was going to be interesting.  Following the HANA Academy’s simple tutorial on installing the Eclipse IDE I could not help but recall my previous life as an IT teacher.  The curriculum was changing to include more programming.  I was writing schemes of work (Learning Plans) for this when I hit a number of problems which I had to solve with the IT staff before we could even start training teachers.  It would have been so much easier if we had known that we did not have spend hours installing software, fiddling with network permissions and agonising over whether students should have access to the command prompt or the local hard drive. I remember clearly the Network Manger (who had no idea about programming) telling me that we were teaching the students too much and that they could cause untold havoc! Well, knowledge does empower and with that comes responsibility.  A few minutes with this video tutorial and associated transcript would have saved us a lot of time and meant that we stuck with Java rather than deciding it would be just easier to each them Python in an emulator.