Day: March 3, 2018

I originally posted this content on my own blog* over here: Thoughts on what’s next for the SAP community. I’ve since been encouraged, not least by folks managing this community like Jerry Janda, to post that content here too.

Too much? Never! As you wrote: “[W]ithout content, there is no community.” I’d love to see this blog on #SAPCommunity too. Your perspective on the video is a great read.

— Jerry Janda (Work) (@workjerryjanda) February 4, 2018

I don’t usually cross-post, but this is perhaps important enough to make an exception. So here is the post, in its brief entirety.

Thoughts on what’s next for the SAP Community

This evening I watched a short video, What’s Next for SAP Community?, with Björn Goerke, Chief Technology Officer and President of SAP Cloud Platform, and Thomas Grassl, Head of Developer Relations, laying out the vision for the SAP Community. Here are some brief Friday night thoughts.

I have been involved in building and helping the SAP community (small ‘c’) grow for a long time, from mailing lists in the 1990’s, through co-creating the original SAP Developer Network and seeing the changes through the SAP Community Network to become simply the SAP Community (see The SAP developer community 10 years ago, a post from 2005).

It’s been great to see Developer Relations and the SAP Community moving under the wing of the office of the CTO, and with the backing of CEO Bill McDermott, there’s certainly more than enough torque and momentum upon which to build.

The chassis has undergone some significant welding in recent years, but the current remodelling, while still needing some love and attention, is so much better for content creators. And without content, there is no community. I’m hopeful that the chassis and bodywork will go from strength to strength, especially with the recently announced 2018 redesigns, and we see the rebirth of interconnectivity.

What struck me most about listening to Björn and Thomas on the video just now was my perception of the sense of community being the strong, implicit anchor for the message and the vision. So I decided to transcribe the video, to perform a simple text analysis.

The transcription is here, and we can see from some simple textalyser analysis that the perception wasn’t too far off – the top five places for word frequencies in the entire piece are (with occurrences in brackets):

1: “our” (12)
2: “community” (10)
3: “sap” (6)
4: “how”, “new”, “customers” (5)
5: “need”, “think”, “help”, “content” (4)

Now it’s a short dialogue so perhaps this analysis needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, but it certainly occurs to me that the core message, and the core task, is getting people and knowledge connected.

We can do that, can’t we?

* yes, blog. Short for weblog. Often an entire website section (like this one), with a multitude of articles. Not an individual article or post. A blog is a collection of posts. Not a single post. Got that, community? http://bit.ly/2F8TdS2 #SAP #SAPCloud #AI

This is an end-to-end introduction, how to run a swift application on Cloud Foundry stack within SAP Cloud Platform.

Steps

* Prerequisites
* Clone Sample App
* Push Application to SCP – CloudFroundry
* Modify iOS app to connect to CF instance

Prerequisites – Cloud Foundry CLI: https://docs.cloudfoundry.org/cf-cli/install-go-cli.html – CocoaPods: https://guides.cocoapods.org/using/getting-started.html (I recommend to install it in user directory via following bash command: gem install cocoapods –user-install echo ‘export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.gem/ruby/2.3.0/bin’ – Login to your CF account cf api https://api.cf.sap.hana.ondemand.com cf login Clone Sample App IBM has provided a backend sample app for the popular iOS App “FoodTracker” by Apple. git clone https://github.com/IBM/FoodTrackerBackend.git You can now walk through of the tutorial or directly check out the branch “CompletedFoodTracker”.

Push Application to SCP – CloudFroundry  Once the server application successfully runs locally you can push it to you Cloud Foundry instance. Unfortunately, the swift-buildpack in the `manifest.yml` file points to a service, which doesn’t exist in SCP Cloud Foundry environment, yet. Therefor we have to change the buildpack: buildpack: https://github.com/IBM-Swift/swift-buildpack#2.0.10 Which buildpacks are available, can be found out with following command: cf marketplace Modify file .swift-version of the FoodTracker server to meet the version in the buildpack: 4.0.3 Create the file Procfile in Foodserver folder, with following content, that CF knows what should be started after an successful upload: web: FoodServer Now the server application can be pushed to cf push foodserver​ In the output you’ll see for the routes output, under which URL your app is deployed and reachable. It’s something like: https://foodserversql-xxxxxx-yyyyyy.cfapps.eu10.hana.ondemand.com The route name is created dynamically, see manifest.yml file… Modify iOS app to connect to CF instance To communicate with FoodTracker-server via iOS app just replace the baseURL, used for creation the KituraKit class: guard let client = KituraKit(baseURL: “https://foodserver-xxxxxxx-yyyyyyy.cfapps.eu10.hana.ondemand.com”) see sample code line here In a next blog I’ll show you how to extend this server side Swift app with a real database. http://bit.ly/2CWuDhc #SAP #SAPCloud #AI