Code Connect 2025
Over the last years I wrote a summary of UI5con and/or re>=CAP. Let’s continue this tradition. This year I participated by watching the keynotes and some online sessions.
The second edition of Code Connect occurred from July 8th to 10th 2025 at SAP in St. Leon-Rot. The website for the 2025 edition is still online, so you can get an overview of the events, agenda and session content. Code Connect is the umbrella name for re>=CAP, UI5con and HANA Tech Con. All events that are part of it are a hybrid event, giving you the chance to participate either on-site or online. In case you cannot participate at all: sessions are available as on-demand videos.
Adding HANA Tech Con as another SAP-led event makes sense. The SAP focus is visible in all agendas. Most content is about new features or how SAP thinks their software should be used. Sessions talking about project experience are on the red list at Code Connect. Think of the event more than a small, free TechEd or the SAP internal dcom event, just that at Code Connect non-SAP employees are welcome to participate. When you are happy with TechEd content, Code Connect is great.
Several sessions might be repeated at other events. At least for the SAP sessions, chances are good that you can attend a session at an event where the content or overall message is presented again. look out for an event like DSAG, ASUG, TechEd or online presentation.
Same procedure as last year
The 2025 edition is struggling with the same organizational problems as last year. The problems are rooted in the fact that while three conferences come together at a common name, they are still three independent events. Code Connect is just a bracket with one common home page and design. Each event has its own website, its own organization team and its own registration. This means for attendees: getting a ticket for all three conferences might be more work than you might expect. Maybe opening the registration for all events on different days might help? For instance, on a Tuesday you can try to get a ticket for UI5con, on Wednesday for reCAP and on Friday for the HANA Tech Con.
For online attendees, registration is not a problem. However, the live streaming experience shows again that Code Connect consists of independent events. For UI5con, you can watch the live stream on YouTube, for the main channel. At reCAP, you can watch the live stream from the Audimax via the SAP Broadcasting tool and the other track via Teams. And finally at HANA Tech Con it is only Teams for both tracks. Personally, I’d prefer streaming to YouTube. Teams is complicated as it raises the entry barrier as you cannot keep the live stream running in parallel as the stream is blocking your Teams. During the HANA Tech Con keynote there were around 60 to 70 people watching the live stream. I guess having it streamed on YouTube would have doubled the views. Another “problem” are the chat messages. They pop up all the time. But you can see not only how many people are currently watching the live session, but also how many joined over the day. The same level of transparency you get from YouTube and answering the question: am I the only one watching this?
Of all three alternatives, the SAP broadcasting tool is the worst. And Teams is on the list of competitors. The tool feels like: we must live stream somehow, but we do not want to. Please, next time, settle on one tool and thanks for choosing YouTube.
One common problem with live streams is that the slide and the speaker video overlap. An improvement discussed at ABAPConf is to hand out a sample slide to speakers where the video section of the live streamed is marked as a dead area: do not put any content there as it won’t be visible. Or you do as we (Sören) did e.g. at the Mannheim stream at ABAPConf 2025: move the speaker video to an area where it does not block content.
Across all three events, the impression is that it is a smaller TechEd. Mostly SAP employees presenting what they did over the last months, repeating the marketing message currently hyped (in case you wonder: in 2025 it is AI). The problem: for many customers AI is still cutting edge and out of reach. For the top % of customers that can use Joule the current focus is nice. For everyone else the usual problem of SAP events applies: some time will pass until they can start using it and then the content of the sessions is outdated. All Joule stuff needs to be bought/licensed, and when either the landscape isn’t ready or the purchasing and license department does not enable it, Joule is simply not accessible. Chances that developers are using another AI like Copilot are high, but this is off topic as a different AI does not fit SAP’s story telling.
SAP sessions were mostly of the sprint review type: I managed to deliver these features, please use them. Alternatively, they were focused more on searching for a use case (this is now/soon available, please use it). For anything that is presented at a public event, I simply assume that SAP is using it internally. That use cases for customers are known. In case SAP is trying to convince me to use a tool/framework, I assume it is used internally at SAP, that it is used by some module or product. Shortly before Code Connect there was SAP’s internal dcom event. Finding internal customers for a tool/framework: that’s what internal events like dcom are for. In case something new is presented, that is not yet available to the outside, it should be available next week or in two weeks. At max next month. Everything that takes longer: please use the next event like TechEd to present it.
The independent events, one umbrella term approach means: no topic arch. There was no common problem across all the events that was solved using all three technologies together. Nothing like: you want to create a cloud native web app. That’s how can do it UI wise, application layer, how to run and maintain it up to the database layer. Independent events, independent messages. To get all events aligned on one topic, org chances would be needed (e,g, registration) up to offering one, three day long event. I guess this will never happen, as this means everyone steps back a little bit and loses attention. Instead of showing what you did, your product, it would mean showing how a product is used as one piece in a larger solution. Very unlikely that this will happen.
UI5con
Code Connect started with UI5con. The keynote is available on YouTube. Short version: Typescript is increasingly adopted. Accessibility is easy to achieve with Fiori and UI5. AI is added to Fiori development. Theming was mentioned as important. I take it seriously when there is an open-source theme editor available. Or a tool that allows customers to adjust the theme easily to fit some basic requirements: company logo and color. The main topics of the last years were part of the keynote, but more as sidekicks: UI 2.0 and Web Components.
There were also sessions about Web Components on the agenda, but rather about how to use it within UI5 apps. I am missing a more visionary approach here. Web Components allows us to make non-SAP apps adapt the Fiori UX. But this possibility seems not to be part of any strategy around Web Components. The current strategy why Web Components is pushed seems to be to adopt web standards in UI5. I still think that Web Components could be the trojan horse regarding the possibility of having customers adopt Fiori across their apps. All Apps and not just SAP apps. SAP makes their digital design available to everyone. Companies can learn here from SAP and adapt parts of it for their own corporate design. The implementation is then done using the UI5 Web Components.
The other main topic of the last years was UI5 2.0. This year there was no plan announced to release version 2.0. Or how to continue with the UI5 versions: 3.0, 4.0, etc. We are still in the phase of: please use UI5 best practices and your app will continue to work. It would be nice to have a release date, knowing when UI5 2.0 will be made available at each cloud or on-premise product. Maybe UI 2.0 is going to be the successor of the BTP security dashboard?
I still think the number of SAP employees presenting is too high. UI5 has been around for many years and is used by customers. So, where are they? It is nice to see SAP talk about Web Components, theming, best practices, but where are the customer sessions about: we switched to Web Components, we are using best practices in our UI5 apps, we are testing our apps like this, and these are our lessons learned. A workshop from a customer talking about their journey and lessons learned was from VINCI Energies about accessibility. That’s how it should be. Please: more of this. How about a challenge? Having in 2026 6 customer sessions, and 2 from UI5 users that are not SAP customers.
re>=CAP
The keynote started with an introduction and I have good news for everyone using CAP: the CAP team is not underpaid anymore! This might have been for the first time at a reCAP event that no one complained publicly about their salary. Maybe with the last round of layoffs at SAP people learned that having a badly paid job might be worth something, or the team got a raise, or someone reminded them that complaining at a public event is not appropriate. It got even better: internal org chances were announced, and there are now CAP teams in Berlin and Munich. We now know who is leading each location and to whom they report to. After this news, it is also good to see that a basic business requirement was picked up: hierarchy support is here! Next big announcement: CAP is now going to be the foundation for the main SAP LoB apps! Unfortunately, there was not much more information about this announcement. CAP is the recommended framework for non-ABAP apps on BTP. SAP wants customers to build solutions using CAP, so it is mandatory that SAP builds apps using CAP. Which LoBs are switching to CAP was not mentioned, but major LoB means: HR, FI, Sales, Manufacturing, Supply, Sourcing/Procurement, Supply Chain, Sustainability. As the core ERP from SAP is ABAP based, these LoB apps should be the satellite SaaS around the core ERP in the SAP Business Suite. Can’t wait to see in 2026 the LoBs – three LoB leaders from SAP sharing their journey should be enough – live on stage explaining how they are using CAP and in 2027 the first customer sessions on how they use those CAP apps. What is now missing is that SAP goes to non-SAP customers and convinces them to use CAP. This will bring new developers to learn CAP and make it easier for SAP customers to find CAP developers to hire. Can’t wait to see CAP being part of the major JavaScript / Java conferences.
For the rest of the keynote I have to say: it was too confusing to follow. Switching back and forth and starting in the middle of something else might be the style of an unconference event. But I am missing a little bit more structure: this is the problem, we solved it like this, and we hope you use it like this as this is the benefit you get. It is already used here and here and by customer / partner / project and. I am sure there was a lot of useful content presented, let’s wait for the slides to go through the keynote content.
As with UI5con, the agenda is much dominated by SAP employees and the usual suspects. I have the same wish as for UI5con: for a technology available for so long, please: more presentations from customers and projects. Yes, seeing some pre-alpha, super new and shiny technology fresh out of the lab is cool. Why not present this first at a roundtable, Devtoberfest session, SIT, etc. and then at a conference, present it together with someone that uses it? Especially in the SAP area there are so many events available for SAP employees to present news (internal & external), why not use them?
Another point that should be addressed by the CAP and UI5 teams: for both there are now a wide range of community projects available. The websites for best of UI5 and CAP list them prominently. You can somehow differentiate an official from a pure community project by looking at the namespace (e.g. @sap). This comes with risks for projects that are going to depend on plugins that might depend on only one person or that come with no support. For a crucial part of your app running in production you might want to know what kind of support you can expect in case you run into a problem. For instance, take the websocket plugin. It is listed in the CAP documentation. The GitHub repo looks good. Just look at the readme: wow. There are 4 contributors listed, but 2 are bots. And support? Via GitHub issues. Is something like this project now good enough to use it in production? I’d say yes. But if things go wrong and the users cannot work with the app, don’t blame me. A naming scheme – cc for community contribution or contrib – won’t help much. How to enforce this or rename existing plugins? Maybe a plugin checker can be provided. This tool might check all the plugin needed during runtime for their status: is the project fulfilling some minimum requirements like 10 contributors, 1 release per year, 100 stars/forks, is support offered, etc. Running the checker before deploying a new app would at least mean that the customer knows that the app depends on a community contribution that might put the project at risk. Indirectly you get this partially from the bestof website as they list the last time the project was updated and, in the detail view, you can see the number of downloads. At least this gives a rough overview if you are going to be the only one with questions. I started last year with a high level approach regarding this, maybe I should pick it up again.
HANA Tech Con
First HANA Tech Con. Imagine having this event 10 or 13 years ago. Maybe it would have helped to ensure that HANA is not reduced to the database of SAP solutions. And enforcing its usage by making it the only database supported. Maybe the SAP world would be different. With this in mind, the HANA Tech Con keynote was the most marketing like of all three keynotes. The overall message: HANA is still alive. Yep, HANA is still alive is the new ABAP is not dead. HANA is alive in the cloud, as the database for your SAP cloud solutions. The good news is that SAP is investing in HANA. Bad news: HANA Cloud. Not necessarily also for your beloved HANA on premise, the database that is behind S/4HANA on premise or private cloud, or on-premise analytics solution. I did not watch much more than the keynote as in my daily life the database is mostly abstracted away. While HANA offers many features that can help businesses to excel, this potential is mostly not used. In the past, HANA licensing often meant that the cool features were out of reach. Currently SAP customers are busy migrating somehow to S/4HANA. This binds resources. CDS abstracts the underlying database away from the developer. The developer is working with CDS; not HANA. HANA is in the focus of administrators and the ones with the rare skill of optimizing performance. In case HANA Tech Con stays over the next 5+ years, it can have the potential to be more than relevant. After most SAP customers migrated to S/4HANA, the focus will shift to performance optimizations. Then an event like HANA Tech Con can be a life saver.
There is a wizard to migrate your XS apps to CAP. Why? Are there so many XS apps out there that need to be migrated to CAP apps? Is the demand so high that SAP provides a tool for this? I might be too disconnected from the XS development world. I confess that my last XS app is maybe from 2017. But looking at some SAP customers and other contacts: no one is developing XS apps. I’d assume that XS apps will be re-implemented in a new architecture or be left to die. Nevertheless, the wizard is available. Here is a challenge for SAP: use the wizard and migrate the Fiori Apps Library and Customer Influence site to CAP and present this next year.
Going through the agenda, one talk caught my attention. And brings me back to the overall question if everyone from SAP is aware that these events are public events. The session SAP HANA HotSpots. The session description contains a SAP Note that does not exist (at least outside SAP). It is an SAP internal tool as outlined in SAP Note 2899330.
The documentation link for more information in the session description is SAP internal too. So: why? Is this now going to be made available to customers? If not: why? Public event, internal content, this combination rarely works.
Conclusion
As always, the organization is top notch. Website, communication, event day, surrounding events, etc. Other conferences can learn from the code connect orga teams. Just maybe not from the streaming options. Looking at the content, it is complicated. These are events for SAP employees and SAP fans. But you do not have any alternative. You must take the selected content as-is. You can submit your own session, and please: do so. Yet, looking at the speakers and slots available outside the usual SAP + family & friends: it might be complicated to be selected. But: do not give up.
SAP is currently with the content of their events all about AI. About SAP’s AI: Joule. And years ahead of the reality of their customers. For event organizers, it is enticing to focus on bleeding edge topics. For speakers, of course, too. Currently the hype is AI. But why the focus on Joule? AI as a tool to assist developers is established. Microsoft pushed this trend by making Copilot available in VS Code. There are other IDEs like Cursor that are being used by developers. But: where are the sessions on how to develop UI5 or CAP apps using VS Code with Copilot? How to use some AI tools to generate a mockup of an app and implement it in Angular using the UI5 Web Components, again with the help of AI? UI5 and CAP are frameworks not limited to SAP customers. Where are these AI use cases? Are the (SAP) developers not using any AI outside Joule? Are they not using any AI? Was nothing in this regard submitted in the call for speakers?
That SAP focuses on Joule is understandable. Especially from a vendor perspective. The risk is to put too much focus on a topic that is out of reach for the general audience. It is a very thin line between too much focus on the future or on the past and outdated technologies. Yet, if people at SAP think that the world is waiting for them to release Joule to everyone in an accessible way: this won’t work. You can already use today AIs to help you code apps. To let it write unit tests for you. To explain code, go from sketch to code. There are services publicly available, not lab previews. This should not be ignored. Rather, embraced as another tool. Maybe we will use Microsoft AI to generate a requirement document out of Teams meetings, Gemini to create a mockup of an app and Joule for the SAP backend.
Let’s see how next Code Connect 2026 will be. I hope for all content streamed live to YouTube. I have mentioned in this post some challenges I’d love to see SAP deliver on. Some announcements from this year’s keynotes feel like Microsoft’s old FUD strategy.
Talking about the future: Regarding ABAPConf 2026: we have no date. We do not know if onsite or online only. Or if hybrid or at one location only. Or if there is going to be at all another “main” ABAPConf event in 2026.
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