Hey Denise,
Thanks for pulling this discussion into SCN. Makes it much easier to discuss compared to Twitter. But I also have to apologize in the beginning that my answer now exceeds 140 characters by 50 times. ![]()
Let me share my thoughts and personal opinion as well. I will try to look at it from a strategic point of view, as you – as the technical UI5 expert - have already covered the technical perspective. ![]()
SAP recommends using SAPUI5 where it fits to customers’ requirements
Let me begin with a clear statement from my perspective: It makes no sense that SAP takes customer decisions.
Of course, customers expect SAP to help them with their strategies and decisions and of course we are helping. But at the end, the decisions have to be taken by the customer who needs to take the specific conditions of the company into account. The most important condition in the context of UX is the end user. But we shouldn't forget the business strategy as the most important influence factor. I’m not saying that technical decisions are completely unimportant, but I would like to point out that other things are more important for a company.
As a result, it wouldn't make a lot of sense if SAP would just want every customer to use SAPUI5. To me, customers need recommendations leading to solutions that satisfy their needs and requirements.
There is not that one UI technology that serves all needs
This headline might be a challenging statement and I can already imagine reactions to it. But in fact I can confirm this sentence easily. You always have to combine different technologies. Some of them are from SAP others not. The selection and combination of these technologies is different from customer to customer because the requirements are different. There are still reasons to use Web Dynpro ABAP and I’m still recommending SAP NetWeaver Business Client, POWL (Power Lists), WDA Chips, FPM based on the given environment of the customer. And obviously there are also reasons for UI5.
SAP already proves the usage of SAPUI5
In general, I see two different use cases here: Developing custom applications vs. adopting applications from SAP.
In the one case, customers want recommendations on development environments and UI technologies that consider their development requirements and existing conditions (e.g. existing skills, given implementations). SAPUI5 is a great UI technology and there are some special aspects that make the decision obviously easy. If I want to create simple business applications that can be connected with my SAP system easily, especially in combination under responsive conditions on multiple devices and targeted for casual and/or occasional users UI5 might be the right choice for many. Exactly this pattern is what many customers are searching for these days. So, the recommendation for UI5 comes quite often.
Whether or not SAP proves the usage of SAPUI5 in their own world is to me more connected to the use case where customers want to adopt SAP applications. And in deed, SAP is using SAPUI5. There are hundreds of SAP Fiori applications that have been built with SAPUI5 and there have been a lot of other applications developed using SAPUI5, too. And again, there is a huge need for applications for casual and/or occasional users, so that’s a big reason for SAP to create such applications.
Websites vs. Business Applications
This discussion was triggered by some statements in twitter, that SAP sites such as sap.com, SAP UX Explorer or the latest mobile conference app are not developed using UI5. Actually I see these to be websites but not business applications. I have never told a customer to build a website in UI5 and I would continue to do so.
Maybe we need to discuss the difference between a website and a business application. I guess it is not easy to find a common understanding here, as the borderlines between several worlds have disappeared in the last years.
Some years ago it was more or less easy to differ between:
- Native desktop applications running on a specific desktop OS
- Native mobile applications running on a specific mobile OS
- Browser-based applications running in specific browsers
- Websites, basically running on many browsers
In the first three categories we saw business applications. 1 and 2 were selected especially when specific functions of the device and OS where needed to be accessed (for example the camera of the mobile device, the fast rendering capability of the desktop). 3 was also used for business applications but in most cases on desktop browsers.
Today, one can develop browser-based applications that look like native applications and even can access the devices like native applications. Responsive design breaks the borderlines even more. Now, browser-based content can be rendered perfectly on a desktop browser as well as on a mobile phone and a user might even not be able to judge whether it was originally intended to be developed for the one or the other.
So maybe there is no big difference anymore between websites and browser-based applications. But there is still a difference between browser-based applications and browser-based business applications, where additional requirements such as integration into business systems are drivers. Here I see SAPUI5 as a very cool UI technology.
That’s just my 2 (personal) cents, ![]()
JJ
