XS Advanced Development

[kgaurav2k14]

Hi Friends,

As I understand, SAP is going to focus on XS Advanced for all types of Native HANA developments and all the innovations and features are going to be part of XSA. However, I have seen still many companies are opting to continue with their Native HANA development with XS Classic approach with HANA Studio.

My whole intent of writing this question here is to understand if there are any knows issues/bugs with XSA when we migrate from XS Classic which is stopping the customer to move into XSA. I have spoken with lots of colleagues from different customer space and they have no plans as of now to migrate to XSA. Is there any plan from SAP which tells us that from any version or timelines, XS classic support will be stopped and all the customers have to take their development to XS Advanced?

Also, if any customer is doing a green field SAP HANA Implementation, Is there a thumb rule or recommendation from SAP to directly start with XS Advanced for such scenarios? Please help me to understand this.

Thanks,

GK

[lbreddemann]

jhodel18's view is certainly a possible view to take here.

Another possible view is to see that while XSc has been deprecated it is also included in the longterm support for HANA 2 SPS 05. That means, there is no rush at all to try and migrate existing working XSc solutions.

XSA in itself is probably not going to be the base for developments involving the HANA platform.
For a more complete discussion of this topic check wdaehn's posts https://blogs.sap.com/2019/12/25/hana-development-where-are-you-going/ , https://blogs.sap.com/2020/02/23/next-generation-hana-development-model/ and https://blogs.sap.com/2020/05/24/how-to-build-and-deploy-a-new-hana-application-in-five-minutes/.

The "CAP" approach is currently in development stage and not primarily focussed around SAP HANA but cloud native applications where the persistency may be HANA.

Given that by now there are client libraries for most development environments available, it is important to check whether the HANA specific development objects (especially the graphical views) are important enough for your project to decide the whole development stack. Most data processing features are meanwhile available through plain SQL or SQLScript which allows for other tools and other development environments.

[jhodel18]

Hi Gaurav,

SAP has been focusing on XSA and Cloud Foundry for half a decade now! Just a quick comparison, Cloud Foundry is the open standard for building applications in the cloud while XSA is the on-premise version of Cloud Foundry. While it's true that a lot of SAP customers are still stuck with XSC, SAP has already announced XSA and provided migration tools since 2016. Also, SAP has made it official through below SAP Note about the deprecation of XSC.

https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/2465027

It is now the year 2020, and to answer your question, XSA is no longer a new kid on the block, hence, it is pretty much sitting on a solid foundation. And quite frankly going through an evolution in the form of SAP Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP). A much easier way for the development of native HANA applications. Refer to the openSAP course below to know more about what CAP can do.

https://open.sap.com/courses/cp7

Knowing that XSC is already officially deprecated since 2018, it is just right to start with XSA for any fresh project using HANA Native development.

[rahuljain257]

Hey... Thanks for your comments can you please help with the articles to start with XSA development.

I belive there should be separate course on XSA.

[kgaurav2k14]

Thanks Jhodel for this clarification and I have one more question.. Also, since with the arrival of XSA, there is also a new development paradigm introduced in the form of Node JS and Angular JS. Does this mean that we can now build our Native HANA application in advanced UI capabilites such as Angular JS and Node JS instead of relying on SAP UI5 only.

If any open code developer wants to develop in Native HANA with XSA, is this possible now?

Thanks,

GK

[werner_daehn]

jhodel18 I would have a couple of questions in order to quantify your response:

1. Have you completed a mid to large project with XSA and what are the learnings?
2. What are new features XSA got over the last 24 months?
3. Have you migrated a mid to large project from XSC to XSA and how simple has that been?
4. Can you explain why newer SAP projects, e.g. SAP DWH Cloud, do not utilize XSA/CF development as foundation?
5. Comparing CAP with XSC, what functionalities are you excited about that makes development "much easier"?
6. What functionalities are exclusive to XSA/CF/CAP that cannot be achieved else?
7. Which vendors actively support CF in addition to SAP, given you call it an "open standard for building applications"?
8. Why does SAP use containers (inside CF) when CF itself has its own modularization concepts (mtar)?
9. Why does SAP promote Kyma recently in addition to CF?

Don't get me wrong, your answer is correct in the sense of a correct recitation of SAP's statements. The question however was about experiences and pitfalls.

[kgaurav2k14]

Hi Friends,

I would appreciate if someone can throw some light on these questions.

Thanks,

Gaurav