Is SAPUI the big hit?
There were three milestones for me in this search. The Internet Transaction Server (ITS), which made it possible to display any SAP GUI transaction on the web. The usability was of course horrible, but even today it is the fastest and easiest way to make existing applications available on the web.
Fortunately, most customers only use it for rarely used applications. Business Server Pages (BSP). Originating as a hobby project of some developers in Walldorf, this technology laid the foundation for the Web Application Server as we know it today. And many other SAP web technologies use BSP to render their user interface.
For me, SAPUI5 is now the third major milestone. What makes me believe that? To justify this, we should first look at what SAP has learned from past user interfaces. With BSP, SAP had its finger on the pulse of the times.
They had a similar technology to Microsoft with ASP (Application Server Pages) and Java with JSP (Java Server Pages). The technologies and approaches that have developed from this include Webdynpro and WebUI.
These are not web rendering technologies, but concepts and frameworks that should make it easier for developers to program structured applications.
Unfortunately, SAP started to cook its own soup more and more at that time, so that it moved away from the major trends. Especially in the area of usability and usability in various browsers and on different end devices, the connection was missed.
Then came HTML5 and with it not only a new web technology (HTML5 has very little to do with HTML as we know it from the nineties) but also a new design paradigm on how best to develop for a wide variety of end devices.
There must have been a rethink within SAP, because now SAP has suddenly got it right. Instead of developing a similar technology, SAP is now relying precisely on HTML5.
This means that SAP immediately benefits from all further developments of the global HTML5 standard. And SAPUI5 is not an independent technology, but an additional API designed to simplify and improve the presentation of business processes and data on the web. SAP has even published an open source version of this (OpenUI5).
However, having the right UI strategy is not enough to determine whether it will prevail. This is because the best products were often not the ones that ultimately prevailed.
So what makes me think that SAPUI5 will now prevail here? It is the many new SAP products that already rely on this technology. SAP Fiori uses UI5 as a technology to make processes from existing systems simple and clearly web-enabled.
There are already over 400 different apps from SAP and there is no end in sight. SAP cloud systems. Whether it's the Hana Cloud Platform, on which developers can build new applications with SAPUI5, many of SAP's standard cloud solutions (e.g. Cloud for Customer) are already based on UI5 technology.
These are already many signs that suggest the importance of this UI strategy. But the biggest argument is yet to come. S/4 Hana, THE future of SAP, the system that is to replace the most successful and most widely used product in the SAP family, which is to follow in the footsteps of R/3 (sorry: SAP ERP). This product is based entirely on SAPUI5 as the interface technology.
And that makes it clear to me. This is not another additional interface that will be used in certain scenarios and some solutions, but will replace all other interfaces or relegate them to niche applications. And I think that's a good thing.
It's a great technology that can be wonderfully combined with non-SAP technologies. Regardless of whether you want it to be very fancy or whether certain technologies can be integrated into SAP processes (for example image recognition), as a developer you can choose from an infinite pool of solutions.
