DJ Adams

reCAP 2026 talk resources

Resources related to our talk at reCAP 2026.

At reCAP this year, I am honoured to share a talk slot with Patrice Bender, a good friend and adjacent colleague from the CAP Compiler team, and cohost / copresenter on the Hands-on SAP Dev mini-series on the core expression language in CDS.

The talk is titled Expressions and Abstractions - Two Developer Superpowers in CAP, with the following overview:

Today we need to be more efficient and concise than ever, stop writing code we don't need to, and avoid tasks that slow down our development loops, letting the framework do the heavy lifting for us. In this session we'll demonstrate two different affordances that enable that. First, we'll show the power of expressions, what they are, how and where they can be used, and why you should know about them. Then we'll show how mocking abstracts us from the tedium and ceremony, allowing us to iterate fast on data, auth, messaging and remote services during development.

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Here are some resources relating to the two parts.

Expressions

The demo resources used in this part of the talk are available in the repo cxl-bookshop that is an extended bookshop you can clone, open in cds repl, and use to try everything shown live.

The talk is based on the 7-part Hands-on SAP Dev mini-series Under the hood: CDS Expressions in CAP, with our written notes accompanying it, starting with Part 1. For the reference, including syntax diagrams that show what an expression can contain, see the CXL topic in Capire.

Abstractions

The demo resources used in this part of the talk are available in the repo cap-nodejs-local-first-development.

The Local-first dev with CAP Node.js series of blog posts covers mocking of data, auth, remote services and messaging.

In the content for the CodeJam A hands-on tour of CAP there are deep and detailed dive exercises on mocking auth and mocking messaging. At the end of each of these exercises are plenty of links to further information including resources in Capire.