SAPUI5: The power of HTML5 for SAP’s UI Development

SAPUI5 is the name of the latest user Interface Development Toolkit for SAP. This extremely powerful JavaScript framework has been developed to enhance the experience with SAP application user interfaces so that they become faster and platform independent. Furthermore, the traditional SAP layout has been enhanced by innovative and more modern user interface components. It comes with rich set of standard and extension controls and a lightweight programming model.

SAPUI5 is an interesting and modern framework that relies on standards and open source like  jQuery, HTML5, JavaScript, CSS, and others. It is expandable as a base frame and was developed to better support modern browsers like Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox, ect.

The SAPUI5 applications operate on large a wide range of equipment (Smartphone, tablet, desktop) and multiple server platforms.

SAPUI5 applications run on a wide range of devices

This modern UI Toolkitis optimized to consume different sources of data.ie XML,JSON, ODATA and provides a model for each previous format allowing easy data manipulation and integration with UI controls via the binding feature,for instance you can easily bind a Model to a DataTable:

var oTable = new sap.ui.table.DataTable();  

var oModel = new sap.ui.model.odata.ODataModel(« http://localhost:8080/…./SALESORDERS »);  

oTable.setModel(oModel);  

End-to-end sample application architecture

One of the most important features of SAPUI5, not less important than different data source connectivity, is the possibility to extend already existing controls or to invent new ones. The only limitation that you could face is the lack of imagination. SAP provides an Eclipse plugin that supports developers (project creation, custom control creation, code completion, ect.) in order to make the developing with SAPUI5 more exciting.

SAPUI5 is regarded as the future of SAP Web UI: whilst Web Dynpro is most suitable for transaction-heavy applications for the use of experts, SAPUI5 is designed to build consumer-grade UIs interfaces for minor occasional use and targets both SAP developers and customers with web development skills (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript).