SAP brings generative AI to developers with Build Code

With Build Code, generative AI assistant Joule comes to the low-code environment Build, to facilitate collaboration between pro-coders and citizen developers.

According to SAP CTO Juergen Mueller, current market conditions require every developer to have a Generative AI Developer is. He sees generative AI as a means to accelerate software development. If you describe a process or application part to a generative AI assistant and it generates a piece of code for you, you immediately have a basis for building the software. The assistant will not be able to generate all the code for professional software, but if there is a base of 10 to 40 percent of the code it can significantly reduce the workload of developers. The developers can review and optimize the AI-generated code and add what they deem necessary.

Build with Joule

SAP has started looking at ways in which generative AI can be implemented in its solutions to support developers. It has arrived at the combination of SAP Build with Joule and believes it is time to launch Build Code during its TechEd conference. SAP is actually building on two innovations from the past twelve months: SAP Build and Joule. SAP Build was unveiled a year ago, during the 2022 TechEd conference, to let the citizen developer get started building an application, a process automation or a portal. SAP Build offers building blocks for this, so that the citizen developer can build the software as much as possible by clicking on and moving the building blocks. This method of development requires less knowledge about code.

Joule is SAP’s newer asset and it comes to the development environment with Build Code. Joule offers companies smart insights based on data from the entire SAP portfolio. During Joule’s presentation, SAP announced that 25,000 customers have made their company data available to build the LLM. Joule is therefore an AI assistant with which you can have conversations in plain language and receive a comprehensive intelligent answer.

Tip: SAP presents the gen AI assistant Joule, based on data from 25,000 customers

New phase for software development SAP

So Build Code is an extension of Build, now making the platform more useful for Java and JavaScript developers. Starting a development project in Build remains the same: you choose whether you want to build an application, process automation or portal. After selecting one of the three options, SAP Build will now ask whether you want to develop visually with drag-and-drop (citizen development) or via code editors (pro-code). The pro-code option is the Build Code addition in this case.

This pro-code environment has Joule’s generative AI functions. When building a new application or extension for SAP solutions, developers can ask Joule to generate code and build data models. The AI ​​assistant can also support testing the data for applications. SAP also states in the presentation that the generative AI in Build Code makes developing unit test scripts and application testing a lot simpler.

With Build Code, SAP also wants to bring some simplicity to its development offering by bringing together various design and run-time services. This should allow developers to build user interfaces and mobile and full-stack applications faster, with Java and Node.js. The Build Code environment is optimized for Java and JavaScript developers and offers interoperability with the ABAP Cloud development model.

ABAP is popular in the SAP community for building extensions and applications. Given the popularity of ABAP, we also checked with SAP to see what the plans are for further support of the programming language in Build Code. Bhagat Nainani (Senior Vice President, Product Development, Business Technology Platform) assured us that this will be a high priority for future releases.

Possibilities with other solutions

Build Code offers the option to develop in a Visual Studio Code-based environment, which is useful for suggestions and recommendations during the development process. Visual Studio Code, in turn, can be used to access back-end runtime and governance capabilities of Build Code applications.

When building applications, process automations, and portals with Build Code, developers can connect to SAP solutions and third-party software. For this purpose, SAP uses the Business Accelerator Hub, in which pre-built integrations, APIs and templates are available.

SAP’s ambition is to simplify collaboration between professional developers, citizen developers and IT departments with Build Code. The new Build expansion is currently in limited availability, but should be generally available in the first quarter of 2024.

Techzine will be present at SAP TechEd this week and will post about the most important updates. Keep a close eye on the website.