SAP has thrown its code open to the open source community.

This initiative called SAP River, which was announced at the company’s annual conference TechEd, aims to help developers to simplify code writing, give them a single licence to write software code across different systems and devices.

This process in technical parlance is called opening up of Application Programming Interface (APIs), which allows a software coder to write a code once and run it on any other system or device that reduces duplication efforts.

HANA platform This opening up is for SAP’s HANA platform, which is a database software that runs differently from traditional databases of companies like Oracle, would help in widening its coder base, thereby increasing revenues, industry watchers opine.

“We are rethinking the developer experience and this initiative is a major step towards that direction,” said Vishal Sikka, member of the executive Board, SAP AG, Products & Innovation.

In line with this, SAP is contributing key portions of its SAPUI5 framework as open source code on the GitHub site under an Apache Version (an open source community) 2.0 licence.

As part of the effort, SAP has developed different themes, framework features and control libraries to help provide a consistent end-to-end experience and foster reuse and efficiency, for example, via responsive layouts, the company said.

Real-time environment In a bid to make coding easy, SAP is test driving its new open development environment for SAP HANA that intends to provide a real-time development environment.

SAP is following the steps of Microsoft, which in 2008, opened up its APIs to developers in a bid to get more developers onto its ecosystem.

>venkatesh.ganesh@thehindu.co.in

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