SAP is holding the U.S. leg of its TechEd 2012 customer and developer conference and exhibition in Las Vegas this week. The firm used its opening keynote address sessions to detail a set of extended developer services inside HANA, the company's in-memory computing platform.
As a high-performance analytical appliance with a supporting software and a hardware consideration to match, HANA has k been augmented with the introduction of the SAP HANA One platform, a deployment of SAP HANA certified for production use on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.
Additionally, and of specific interest to readers of Dr. Dobb's, the company has also embedded application server capabilities in SAP HANA for developers and launched the SAP HANA Academy to enable self-learning at scale.
Application Servers-as-a-Service
New extended application services in SAP HANA are planned to deliver "application server capabilities as services" to programmers. Although the firm could be accused of merely paying lip service to the programming community with its "we are really focused on developers" assurances, this latest development will see these new functionalities embedded into HANA with the aim of streamlining application and data processing in one in-memory platform supporting HTML5 and JavaScript.
The extended application services in HANA aim to reduce application layers by selectively consolidating application server and real-time data server technologies. This, says the firm, is intended to streamline data processing and application development efforts for the creation of real-time applications.
According to SAP's official news statement, "New enhancements to SAP HANA studio are intended to enable developers to build from an integrated development environment application by using SQLScript for data processing, JavaScript for logic control, and HTML5 for the user interface (UI) representation in the same tooling. The additions to SAP HANA studio are planned to include an improved modelling and debugging experience and collaborative support with a new team development environment. Planned additions also include a repository browser, project explorer capabilities, and source code repository natively within SAP HANA."
The extended application services in SAP HANA developments are to be exposed as services via newly enabled data access services, such as ODATA, ATOM, JSON, XML, or XMLA. These exposed services could subsequently be consumed by any business-critical or consumer-facing applications.
