Building SAS apps rapidly with SASjs
SAS is an analytics platform widely used by data scientists. It provides means to store, query and analyse large datasets. Up until now, building apps that use data from SAS to provide value-added services such as dashboards, workflows and interfaces required a good amount of knowledge of how the SAS platform operates. This causes some major pain points that prevent more widespread app development on the platform.
- The variety is huge — there are many SAS platforms(Analytics Pro, SAS 9, Viya) and server types(Workspace, Stored Process, Compute) with different request/response formats and behaviour.
- The languages are different — SAS is procedural and “table-based”, compared to the functional, object/array paradigm of JavaScript.
- Deployment is hard — the backend is always deployed into a shared corporate environment requiring elevated privilege and access to servers.
SASjs aims to change that — SASjs, as the name implies, is a set of JavaScript libraries that provides an entry point into the SAS ecosystem.
SASjs includes:
@sasjs/adapter— an isomorphic JavaScript library for interfacing with SAS servers from Node.js or the browser.@sasjs/cli— a command-line NPM tool that automates creation, building and deployment of SAS-based web apps.@sasjs/core— a library of reusable SAS macros (not a JS library, but interfaces with the adapter).@sasjs/test-framework— a React-based library that provides abstractions for testing SASjs services against a given server.
Additionally, we have also built the following seed projects that developers can use as the starting point for their app development journey.
In the upcoming articles, we will introduce each of these packages in detail and demonstrate how easy it is to build web apps on SAS. 🚀
