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Would it be better from an application developer point of view to use native XS engine which is tightly coupled with SAP-HANA database, rather than using ADO.NET for connectivity and using ASP.NET/C# for application development ? Which would give me more options for leveraging SAP-HANA DB and better performance.

Sandra Rossi
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Shubha Lakshmi
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The HANA XS engine is natively integrated with SAP HANA, therefore it can only provide you with benefits when interacting with HANA.

For example, the data access will be easier and faster as you won't need to pull the data out via the ODBC/ADO layer but rather consume it "locally".

With SAP HANA, you can run it all in one place which will free you from the network latency for example.

It's also comes down to an architectural discussion, where you can/want decouple your data (model), your logic (controller) and your ui (view) and use use an heterogeneous stack or not.

The XS engine provide you all 3 in one place.

The XS syntax is really similar to JavaScript and inherits a lot from it (if not all).

Then also comes the reason why you would use JavaScript compared to .Net/C# which reflect the client-side vs server-side execution dilemma.

JavaScript can do both (and even more with the rise of Node.js), but I'm not sure you can achieve that with ASP.NET/C#.

Anyway, as I work with/for SAP, my opinion might be biased (just a little sometime) but I hope it will give you some food for thought.

Abdel Dadouche
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  • Thanks, Would it be possible to build DAL and move some of the business logic to XS engine part (using node.js etc. ) and consuming them from ASP project as REST based web services ? What would be the learning curve involved to begin write complex logic in xsjs/node.js? Do you have references for any good tutorials on the same. – Shubha Lakshmi Apr 27 '17 at 10:00
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    The learning curve is not huge (I got started in a few days, but I had previous experience in JavaScript and Java which helped). Here is the link to the SAP Developer Center and the tutorial section: https://www.sap.com/developer/tutorial-navigator.html You will find the following groups interesting: - [Build your first application in SAP HANA](https://www.sap.com/developer/groups/hana-xsc-get-started.html) - [Build a basic SAP HANA XS Advanced application](https://www.sap.com/developer/groups/hana-xsa-get-started.html) Have fun (I hope I'm not breaking any rules here) – Abdel Dadouche Apr 28 '17 at 11:03
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    You have ODBC or JDBC to connect to HANA. And you nailed it with the service approach using REST API, this is totally the right direction from my perspective. Regarding content, I highly encourage you to check blogs from Thomas Jung (https://people.sap.com/thomas.jung) where you will find tons of interesting information around HANA development capabilities. For Node.js development, you can follow this tutorial: https://www.sap.com/developer/tutorials/xsa-xsjs-xsodata.html I'd be happy to collect your feedback on this content so that we can enhance it – Abdel Dadouche May 04 '17 at 21:19
  • Thanks @AbdelDadouche would be glad if you could look into this query too: [StackOverflowQuery](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/43780710/hana-server-side-execution-time-from-c-sharp) – Shubha Lakshmi May 05 '17 at 03:45