If you are not sure how to answer this question – you are lucky: we are here to help!
Moving to new technology is always hard. You lack the knowledge, you are missing practice within your IT, your are not sure what is the right path for developing scalable solutions, and the worst of all – you have your in-house WebDynpro / ABAP developers that can deliver solutions fast and they are free to do it.
But what if you get it all wrong? What if your organization needs adaptive, mobile-friendly, fast and SAP-native solutions to outperform it’s competitors? What if your IT needs a transformation and your ABAP development skills are holding you back?
Here a conflict is born. A conflict we will need to solve together with your IT in-house ABAP developers and approve it on CIO level. So let’s start!
Convince your IT department
Your IT department manager / CIO / CTO would need to be 100% sure that betting on SAPUI5 is the right thing to do. There are tons of bootstrap JS frameworks that deliver pretty much the same results, but how do we make your organization choose SAPUI5 over other alternatives?
Here is a list of advantages that make the SAPUI5 game strong for organizations that run SAP. It’s a winner list, trust us!
- Natural integration with SAP back end (SEGW / SAP NetWeaver Gateway / ODATA)
- Standardization of design patterns and tools to implement custom design to all SAPUI5 applications at once (SAP UI Theme Builder)
- SAP Fiori Launchpad allowing orchestration of all apps into one single dashboard-like landing page, cross-app navigation, personalization, authorizations based on PFCG & more
- A wide range of ready-to-use SAP Fiori applications, that are built with SAPUI5 technology
- SAP Roadmap – all future versions of SAP will run only SAPUI5 apps on the front end
Determine your first customer
Not all business requirements fit SAPUI5 technology. Not all already-running solutions need a migration to SAPUI5. Not all customers need their next solution to be adaptive / responsive. So what would be the perfect case for first SAPUI5 project then?
- Lean application that serves simple needs
- Intent-based solution (for instance, it should be called “Approve …” or “Create…” or “Manage…”
- It should run on top of a tablet / phone and be adaptive to different devices
- It is planned to be used outside your organization (ideally – customer facing app).This list would be good enough to identify your first customer!
Kick off your first SAPUI5 project
Now here you will need two specialties:
- Front end knowledge – JavaScript / XML / HTML5 / CSS3. Depending on your IT resources you might grab an ABAP developer that has a basic understanding of how HTML5 / CSS3 / Bootstrap works, and challenge him \ her with a new technology.We suggest you pick someone familiar with WebDynpro ABAP / Java as it might make the learning curve a bit shorter.As for development tools – you can use either SAP Web IDE (a more WISWYG tool with standardization) or use old-school Eclipse with SAPUI5 development toolkit, but take into account – your code might be hard to maintain later.
- Back end knowledge – ABAP developers familiar with REST protocol / ODATA protocol
Here you will need a basic understanding of how REST / ODATA entities work, how you define dependencies, different types of CRUD (create / read / update / delete) requests and study the tools provided by SAP NetWeaver Gateway (for building / testing / monitoring your REST requests).
