Overview

SAS is a fantastic platform for enterprise app development, due to a number of features that SAS delivers “out of the box”:

  • Web Server (Apache on Viya)
  • App Server (STP or Compute)
  • Integrated Authentication (eg LDAP)
  • Enterprise grade security

In summary - to build an app on a default SAS installation, you can just start coding. There is nothing more to provision!

The caveat - there are a few things to consider if you’d like to build something that’s automated, maintainable, and scalable. For instance:

  • How will you deploy your services?
  • How can you avoid a file system dependency?
  • Is there a code injection risk?
  • Avoiding “spaghetti code” and put statements
  • Numerical Precision and Special Characters
  • What if you don’t have access to the web server?

To address these points, and many more, we built SASjs.

SASjs

Background

Launched in early 2020, the SASjs framework provides a set of tools that can be used either individually (for particular use cases) or together - for maximum scale and performance when it comes to building & deploying SAS-Powered Web Applications.

All the code is MIT open-source (free for commercial use), and is actively maintained by the SAS Apps Team. It powers commercial apps such as Data Controller for SAS and hence - heavily tested in real-world, production environments.

Framework

There are three major parts to the framework:

  1. @sasjs/core - a SAS Macro library for backend SAS Application Developers
  2. @sasjs/adapter - a JavaScript library aimed at frontend web developers
  3. @sasjs/cli - a command line interface providing build and deployment tooling as well as consistent project setup

Another great thing about the SASjs approach is that anything you build with it on SAS 9 can be easily ported to SAS Viya. It’s also very FAST. Here’s a demo of building and deploying an app on SAS Viya in just one minute!

Workshop

We would like to support the SAS community and help more SAS Users build awesome web applications on SAS 9 and Viya. For this reason we are running regular workshops during the rest of 2020.

The duration is 1 hour, and will cover:

  • 5 mins - get to know attendee objectives
  • 15 mins - slides with generic advice for building apps on SAS
  • 15 mins - Demo of building / deploying web apps using the framework
  • 15 mins - Deep dive into SASjs CLI functionality
  • 10 mins - Questions and discussion

To reserve your spot, visit the SASjs page on linkedin, and select an event from the bottom right hand side of the page.

https://www.linkedin.com/company/sasjs

Workshops are open to SAS Partners and Consultants as well as Customers and End Users. Contact Allan Bowe directly if you would like a dedicated internal session (4 or more people).