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SCN Design Studio SDK Development Community

mike_howles4
Active Contributor
‎2014 Dec 10 9:06 PM
107,328

3.0 Information (new for Design Studio 1.6)


 

SCN Design Studio 1.6 SDK Components (ver 3.0)

 


Summary of Components


 

Component List - SCN Design Studio Community

 

Component Documentation


 

SDK Development Community Git Repository (list & documentation)

 

Component List (A must see!)


Component List - SCN Design Studio Community


 

History


 

Just over one year ago, SAP released an SDK to us beginning with Design Studio 1.2.  Time flies, and we've had two releases since then and currently are now up to 1.4 with many new features available.

 

As many know I've publicly shared many of my components to SCN via blog posts referencing open source code on GitHub.  It began mostly with blogs on how the components were written, and then my approach shifted to more of a use case followed by a ready-to-install version (with source code available for fellow coders.)  karol.kalisz from SAP also began actively contributing over this past year along with a few from jeroenvandera, leandro.cardoso3, n.stein, and davelr.

 

There's probably little debate that karol.kalisz and myself have been the most active and at times have even overlapped on contributions to the community.  (Example: SDK components - development direction & concepts)  dirk.mayrock also stepped up to try to help curate a list of these components from various open source (and commercial) contributors.

 

With the many different (and sometimes similar) components we've made available , Karol and I thought there was room to improve and organize.  We've had good discussions over a number of threads recently where Karol and I decided to explore the option of creating a unified community package that we could both contribute and collaborate on together instead of working in isolation.

 

Today


 

Karol and I are joining efforts for Design Studio SDK development for open source community-based components.  SCN is the logical place to announce this and continue to share new contributions.

 

As of today, our voluntary members are:

 









































mike.howles4

 

  • BI Solution Architect at International Paper, an SAP Customer.

  • SAP Mentor
karol.kalisz

  • SAP Employee

  • Active SCN participant and open source contributor


franckblaisbeyond

 


manfred.schwarz

 

  • Experienced in Design Studio SDK and Lumira vizPacker


martin.pankraz

 

  • BI and software architect at ConVista Consulting


james.rapp

 

  • SAP Employee (SAP Labs)

  • Solution Adoption Specialist


mbensan

 


jeroenvandera

 

  • New SCN SDK Community contributor, but long-time Design Studio SDKer

  • Works at Blog - Interdobs


donnie.burhan

 

  • Our newest contributor!

 

Why are we doing this?


 

  • We see potential in sharing development techniques and common code together.

  • We want to have a set of components and source code that are not competing or overlapping with one another.

  • Provide more consistency to our (at times brave) community of designers who are using our SDK components.


 

Our Main Goals


 

  • Continue to share SDK Source Code examples (and their ready-to-install versions) with the SCN Community.

  • Engage additional SDK developers (new and "old") to contribute.

  • Engage people who may not be SDK developers, but have great ideas and use case requirements.

  • Improve and standardize delivery and communication of new components and a way to track issues and new ideas.


 

What will change for SDK Developers who are interested in participating?


 

  • All SDK extensions will be made available in a common repository which is owned by the community.

  • With a common, centralized repository, better support (always on a voluntary basis, mind you) will be possible.

  • Basic but limited support approach for isolating 1.4 extensions from 1.3 extensions where feasible, so to not cut off those who cannot immediately move to 1.4 but would like to start moving to this new repository.


 

What will change for Design Studio Designers who have used existing SDK Extension Releases?


 

Karol and I have no plans to remove our old repositories as long as GitHub and webhosts used are available.  These primarily are:

 

 

While you can choose to use these existing packages as-is, we have no plans to fix any issues or enhance them further and we highly recommend you begin shifting over to the newer centralized repository that will receive all future enhancements and fixes.

 

What is this new approach?


 

We will provide one centralized repository, but with two different states of development you can choose to work with:

 

  • preview
    Preview builds are similar to what other development communities may call nightly or experimental builds.  In our case, probably not nightly, but whenever we have something we'd like to share in a usable however not fully-baked form.

  • stable
    Stable builds are created when we (SDK developer community) are happy enough with the content and feel it could survive in the wild (Design Studio Designers)


 

Where can I see the Source Code?


 

The SDK code can be viewed, forked, and downloaded as a .ZIP of Eclipse projects from GitHub at this URL:

 

org-scn-design-studio-community/sdkpackage · GitHub

 

I am not a coder, how can I just install the Ready-to-Use version?


 

As some know, there are two approaches to installing SDK Extensions.  The approach that works for you is based on your workplace environment and design approaches.

 

  • "Offline" .ZIP Archive Method
    You can choose to download a .ZIP archive version.  The advantage is that once you obtain the software in archive form, you can then distribute to a broader designer team at your workplace and you do not have to worry with corporate firewall issues once you have it downloaded once.  The disadvantage is that you now must manually pull down future versions and distribute ongoing.

  • "Online" Repository Method
    You choose can install the SDK Extension via URL as well.  The advantage is that pulling down new updates is very streamlined and can be done within the Design Studio tool itself.  The drawback is that if you have an aggressive corporate firewall this may not be an option, and if you want stricter controls on which last version of the SDK Extension you are using, the online method may not be the best fit.


With that definition, here are the links to the "Offline" Archives and "Online" Repositories.

 

 

 

Once you have followed one of the 2 method's paths above, the remaining steps are the same.  You will be presented with a dialog box asking you which SDK Extension Features you'd like to install.  As mentioned earlier, we've made an effort to isolate 1.4 extensions from 1.3 extensions for the time being.  That's not to say that some components packaged in 1.3 may not behave differently in Design Studio 1.4, so proceed with this in mind, but the 1.3 option will install in DS 1.3 and both can and should be installed in DS 1.4.

 



Check mark the relevant Extension features and continue.  (DS 1.3 users should only select the 1.3 option)

 

After finishing the installation wizard, you will be prompted to restart Design Studio at which point you can then begin to use our components!

 

What all is Included?


 

Karol's intent is to port over most if not all of his existing components.  I've opted to let some of my experimental/exotic components die off and will not be porting them all over since the intent in this repository are mostly usable components and I'd like to avoid cluttering it with my lab experiments.  Perhaps Karol and/or I will isolate these as their own check box feature in the future for those brave enough to be guinea pigs.

 

Support Expectations


Developer participation is purely voluntary and there's no support obligation from participants to provide maintenance, even from SAP.

 

I'd Like to Join the Effort!


 

Great!  Put a comment below and Karol or I will respond with more detail, if not a separate more technical discussion post/document with more information.

 

Update: Technical details now provided: SDK Development Community Git Repository (sdkpackage)

 

Questions, Comments, Problems?


 

Please comment below and we will try to help where we can and this post will be kept up-to-date with the latest information as things progress.

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