SAP lures developers with Eclipse Che IDE

SAP continues to demonstrate its commitment to open source with the announcement at EclipseCon that SAP Web IDE for SAP HANA is based on Eclipse Che. Eclipse Che is an open source developer workspace server and cloud IDE.

This next edition complements the existing SAP Web IDE. It will allow developers familiar with the workspace to develop applications, database models and user interfaces on SAP HANA software, including the development of SAP Fiori apps. SAP along with Codenvy are two of the first companies to offer the new workspace to developers. For those developers and companies looking to develop their own environment the open source is available on Github.

Björn Goerke, executive vice president and corporate officer, SAP Product & Innovation Technology, SAP SE commented: “SAP is committed to the Eclipse Foundation and is continuing to invest in it by building products on top of Eclipse Che as well as by ongoing contributions to open source.

“With the new SAP Web IDE for SAP HANA, developers can design, build and deploy Web applications based on the UI development toolkit for HTML5 (SAPUI5) and Node.js. It also reaffirms our successful use of open source projects such as Eclipse Che in building a productive IDE for use in creating applications from the UI down to the database.”

SAP has been pushing its open source credentials as it seeks to lure developers to want to work with SAP, ending years of proprietary software. It’s commitment to Cloud Foundry certification late last year being another example.

So what is Eclipse Che?

The project lead for Eclipse Che, Tyler Jewell, CEO of Codenvy explains in their recent press release: “Eclipse Che is moving development forward with a universal workspace.

“By making workspaces portable, they can relocate anywhere, giving development teams on-demand environments that can be part of an agile process.”

Eclipse Che workspaces are composed of projects and Docker-powered runtimes. These workspaces can be accessed by browsers, CLI and API’s at any time. As they are portable support development from any location including desktop, cloud and mobile. Other features include:

• Collaborative Workspace Server. Host Eclipse Che as a workspace server, providing shared access to programming services to workspaces and teams. Workspace environments are given a hostname and accessible by remote clients.
• Cloud IDE. A no-installation browser IDE and IOE accessible from any local or remote device.
• Plug-In Framework. Che is extensible, by customizing built-in plug-ins or authoring your own extensions.
• Stacks. Build projects for any programming language and framework. Create runtimes from Che’s image and stack library, pull from DockerHub, or author custom images with Dockerfiles.

Eclipse Che provides a docker powered workspace from a single web page that can be used by single developers on their desktop or when hosted in the cloud as Codenvy and  SAP have done, a collaborative workspace for a development team.

Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation commented: “Eclipse Che is rethinking the way IDEs are built and used by developers. It uses Docker, Java and JavaScript to create a more flexible and dynamic developer work experience.”

“The initial feedback on Eclipse Che has been outstanding. The number of downloads and external contributions all point to Che being an incredibly successful open source project.”

Conclusion

SAP clearly want to be seen at the forefront of the open source debate, and with this announcement, days after the release of Eclipse Che they are putting their necks out slightly. Many companies will want to carry out testing and add additional functionality on top once an open source tool has been released and tested. This is a brave move but shows their willingness to really engage with developers. It will be interesting to see what Microsoft announces for Azure and Microsoft Dynamics.