#59 CAP LLM, OData, ASCII Art, Pro Prompting
In this issue:
LLM Plugin - A Feather In Your CAP?
I haven’t personally seen a lot of CAP action. SAP Developer Survey 2024 suggests that for extensions CAP is in the neighborhood of 20% utilization. That’s probably going to keep moving up as implementations move cloudward. What better way to goose CAP adoption than hook it up to the hawtness infecting every platform? Go get yourself a dose of large language model goodies with the CAP LLM Plugin.
It puts a developer perspective on SAP’s evolving AI strategy. The plugin features, among other stuff:
Embedding generation with AI Core, probably to get your data into sweet RAG shape.
A similarity search hook into HANA Cloud Vector Engine. Take those embeddings and whip your prompts into shape.
Chat LLM access with SAP AI Core/Generative AI Hub. I…sort of feel like this is wrappers on top of wrappers on top of wrappers. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There’s also a set of anonymization features, tapping into HANA Cloud Anonymization. While those features aren’t powered by LLMs, they’re right in the management/orchestration perspective of this toolset.
Check out the plugin on npm, or read an obviously-ChatGPT-authored SAP Community post. Maybe the author used the plugin in a CAP app to create the post? PM
Nuve Platform
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ABAP Trial: Grand Re-opening
ABAP Developer Trial on Docker whose untimely demise we mourned in 2022, is back, baby! It has a new name (SAP got to feed the renaming dragon, c'est la vie) “ABAP Cloud Developer Trial” and got a much-needed upgrade to 2022 edition.
While getting 2022 version in 2024 may not sound like much of an achievement, it is a major, “YUUUUGE” difference compared to the previously available 1909 version. The main one is, of course, ABAP RAP, which is kind of a big deal in ABAP development.
If you are still in “what’s ABAP RAP?” camp, I recommend the good old openSAP course. It is a bit dated but remains unsurpassed in terms of educational value. Hurry up and download it before SAP shuts down openSAP for good in July! (I’ve heard some people actively downloading course content from openSAP in preparation for that and it seems like a wise move.)
This new trial version is also outfitted with SAP Fiori launchpad and SAP Cloud Connector, the latter being an important piece in connecting on-premise systems to SAP BTP goodness.
Now with “I don’t have access to a system to play with” argument removed, the last excuse for not learning would be time. We spoke about this before and I’ll reiterate: developers should be enabled to learn during work hours. You don’t even need to buy pizza or organize some cringy “hackathon”. Just give developers some work hours for learning how they prefer. JP
Prompt Like A Pro
Not everyone needs to become a professional prompter but creating well-crafted prompts for various AI tools is a super useful skill to have these days.
It does feel like prompt engineering is everywhere, so I was rather baffled when my Google Fu didn’t turn up much of good learning content specifically on that subject. There is no shortage of “cheat sheets”, mostly parroting the same stuff (here is just one random example) and “follow me for more” clout-farming posts. The courses I could easily find and preview looked like the longer versions of the cheat sheets padded with superficial content. (Authors, please, please stop adding 15 minutes of “introduction to the course” to what should be a 30-minute video total.)
As always, open source to the rescue: I really liked this collection of community-sourced prompt examples. And funny enough, in the ultimate “Siri, tell Alexa…” meta move, you can ask ChatGPT to create a prompt for you (see the video for an interesting use case).
Where many people stumble though is the general ability to ask good questions, I think. This is not a new challenge: developer communities like SCN or Stack Overflow have been dealing for decades with poorly written questions that should’ve been the beginning of a Google search. Well, AI cannot figure what do you want either. If you ask what is the answer to life, universe and everything, don’t be surprised if you just get 42. JP
OData Gonna OData, In A Good Way
This OData connector is an unvarnished good for the SAP on Power Platform folks. Connecting OData services sourced from various SAP places into Power Platform, in a managed way, is what tons of apps need for quick enablement. (There is even more you can do - may I suggest a supplementary tool?)
OData as a protocol has proved to be especially useful in enterprise-y scenarios. One of the first pieces I ever wrote for non-company-blog publication was in praise of OData’s multi-applicability. Microsoft publishing this connector lays another brick in the path of quickly making SAP functionality composable in (IMHO) the best low-code platform out there.
It’s available for three of Microsoft’s cloud services:
Power Automate - a very good application of this capability.
Power Apps - duh. No-brainer.
Azure Logic Apps, which exists in quantum superposition, simultaneously low-code and pro-code.
To developers: this should make you redouble your efforts to develop OData services with solid designs and tight adherence to OData standards. I’ve seen some cobbled-together terrifying Hydra OData services out there. PM
Ancient Art of ASCII
One of my vivid school years memories was a trip to a Computing Center, the building where mysterious computers occupied large climate-controlled rooms and the white-robe-clad technicians worshiped at their altar. On a wall there, was a printout of Mona Lisa ASCII art that I thought was the coolest s**t ever. Way cooler than original!
I still think ASCII art is very cool and it’s just amazing when people take it to the next level, like this website where you can type any text and get a variety of “fonts” for it. (The one you see in the illustration above is called “Doh”).
Now I dare y’all to grab some interesting stuff from this art collection and drop it into the codebase for a healthy doze of nerdy nostalgia. Your ABAPosaurus friends might get a good chuckle out of it. JP
Minimum Viable Something
Here’s a quick refresher on MVP and prototype terminology for developers (with a bonus prototype vs proof-of-concept diagram thrown in). It’s helpful to think in these terms as you scope the work in front of you. I think most projects carry a tacit understanding that the overall deliverable is meant for MVP/productive use, but some of the tasks inside a project might fall into a prototype or proof-of-concept nether-world.
Do I need to see how this platform handles a completely bananas authentication scheme before we plug it into our product? Is that new feature even possible? Would a customer care if we made this, and the only way to find out is to show them? Those things may represent non-MVP tasks. Figure out if it’s worthwhile to flag them as such.
Fellow nerds, if you don’t know whether you’re working on a prototype or an MVP: you’re working on an MVP. Take it to the bank that someone in management will want you to hit the publish button yesterday. PM
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Watch the Nerdletter Talk 59 video where we discuss the stories from this issue and some jimmies get rustled.
Photo for this issue was created by Pavel Danilyuk, check out his other work!
This Sunday, May 12th, Mother’s Day is celebrated in the US. (Hope my family reads this! JP)