Friday, February 7, 2014

SAP’s new programming language – RIVER

During last year SAP announced also one new programming language - SAP River. Let’s have a look what it is about. River is harvested partly on SAP acquisition of Coghead and Frictionless Commerce. Coghead contributed by foundation of web based platform to build and host custom online database applications. This mainly became part of "River" OnDemand platform. Frictionless Commerce contributed by its rapid application development platform.

Married by those two and years of development on top of that SAP came up with River. The River is rapid web based development platform based on the SAP HANA. From programming perspective it is programming model that allows end users to create light-weight applications using drag and drop tools. In connection to HANA; it generates all the HANA development artefacts for HANA.


On other hand there is RDL (River Definition Language). It is executable specification language that allows focus on what application does. It stays away from how the application’s requirement is realized on top of HANA.

To sum it up:

River (original or platform River) - cloud based platform for rapidly developing applications with Flex UI design time and default runtime. It offers REST API for exposing server functionality over it own UI can be built.

RDL - Started as a new language which embeds original River, as a design time paradigm. Later RDL changed embraced within HANA to enable HANA based applications.

Useful links:
sap-river.com – Try it live now!

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