SAP Graph: API Sandbox on preview

zxienin | 92 points

I’ve worked with this and in the context of the SAP enterprise world and all of its ancient and weird stuff this is quite a step forward.

It is however unfortunate that they choose to use OData which is horrible to work with, and the API itself suffers from common REST inefficiencies such as chattiness.

Another thing that bugged me is that this is not just a reverse proxy towards other SAP SaaS api’s, but an actual abstraction layer on top of those. Which makes me believe this probably won’t scale very well into more complex cases.

The best way to look at this I think, is probably as an API for simple in-house apps at companies which use more than one SAP SaaS solution. At least you won’t be using SOAP anymore ;)

rvanmil | 4 years ago

> Zero SAP knowledge necessary

That’s a tall claim. If one has ever worked (or tried to) within SAP world, you know what I am talking about.

zxienin | 4 years ago

So ... You can integrate against compatible product using their GRAPH.

Should you become a powerful startup which SAP enterprises love to use, how much does it take for upstream SAP to change the API or remove API features, which will kill your company? (Rhetorical question)

unixhero | 4 years ago

I am a developer deeply ingrained in the SAP (abap) world, and it makes me happy to have a consolidated API. There is production level stuff here: https://api.sap.com/ with a high degree of complexity and diversity; and mostly for cloud systems.

_glass | 4 years ago

Thanks SAP for letting me feel like it's 2010, when everyone fell in love with REST (again).

throwaway8291 | 4 years ago

How relevant is SAP still? Is it still big? It's been years since I worked with any SAP system. Do big corps still use them or many of them have moved away to more "modern" systems?

sideproject | 4 years ago

SAP _Graph_ and then it's a REST API? Not GraphQL?

I mean, both types of API have their use cases but that's just an attempt at riding the latest hype.

jrudolph | 4 years ago

You know it‘s an SAP website when the term “programming model” is used...

brodo | 4 years ago

Quickly reading through, I thought these are GraphQL APIs. Missed opportunity?

hrpnk | 4 years ago